In our Impact Extra section we recently reprinted an extensive three-part interview with Vic Armstrong. That original conversation took place over twenty years ago, but it’s a credit to the man whose name has become synonymous with superior stunt-work, blockbuster outings and the practical needs of evolving action cinema that there is just as much to talk about in 2013 as there was back in 1993.
This year saw Armstrong not just working behind the camera but actually sitting in the director’s chair. It’s a placement that won’t seem too new to him because even though Left Behind is undeniably his biggest directorial project to date, this is someone who’s proven a deft hand when it comes to overseeing second-unit details on a variety of legendary cinema outings. And after all, if you’ve already doubled Indiana Jones and encountered the Ark of the Covenant in your career then dealing with Judgement Day itself should be a walk in the Elysium-like park.
Left Behind deals with the Rapture, the event in which devout Christians believe that God will whisk away the chosen to Heaven and leave those less-deserving souls on Earth. Think of it like Ryan-Air, but in reverse. But at the moment this postscript world looks more like Baton Rouge than any kind of traditional Purgatory.
“I get offered various films to direct but they tend to be a bit crash-and-burn… and I’d rather do a $200million movie with a big unit than a small crash-and-burn, straight to video. But I read this script and it’s a really good ‘thinking’ script, it has good characters in it. It’s based on a series of books of the same name by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins and they’d sold over 65 million copies. They made a DVD of it about ten years ago and with virtually no publicity it went to number one and held a spot above Toy Story (which was released on the same day) for several weeks… so it obviously had a huge following,” Vic explains during a break from editing the film in Los Angeles. “ I was intrigued. I had three scripts to read via David, my agent, and quite honestly, when I read them I didn’t like the other two but I loved ‘Left Behind’ and thought it sounded like a good story…”
The book and the original tv/DVD movie definitely placed the religious underpinnings of the story at the forefront of the production and it was marketed accordingly – and very successfully – to that demographic. I asked Vic if that was something that influenced his decision not only in shaping the new version but in taking the project on at all.
“My agent asked me if I minded the religious undertones and I said I hadn’t honestly noted them because I just read it as a script. I’m used to reading scripts like Superman (where a man with a cape can fly) or Starship Troopers (with bugs trying to take over the world), so people suddenly disappearing didn’t affect me in the same way as it might some,” Armstrong shrugs. “ I just found it a fascinating story and the consequences of what happens when other people have disappeared… what happens to the world?”
Onboard the project is Nicolas Cage, playing the part of Rayford Steele, a pilot who, unfortunately, doesn’t find himself whisked away with the masses and must help keep a group of fellow ‘survivors’ safe. It’s perhaps not the kind of role or film that one might immediately expect from Cage, but in modern times it’s always been a little difficult to know what films the actor will appear in and… to some extent ‘which’ version of the eclectic Cage will turn up…
"I’d worked on Captain Corelli’s Mandolin with him, doing the battle scene on that… and he was in a rarified atmosphere in those days. Then a couple of years ago, I got called in to do some trailer moments and a whole new sequence for a film called Season of the Witch. I got on well with him then and he’s a lovely sweet gentle person. Then we thought of him for this part and he’s absolutely perfect for it. He starts off with this ‘cavalier’ guy and there’s a tremendous emotional arc for him to where he ends up at the end of the movie. My editor Mike Duthie - whom I’ve worked with for years since Superman, Universal Soldier and Johnny Mnemonic - said that he thought this was the best he’d seen Nic Cage in in ages…” Armstrong acknowledges. “I was a guest-speaker at Equity in LA with fifty or sixty people there and one of the agents there said to me the question you just asked: ‘Which Nic Cage showed up on YOUR set, then?’ I just said ‘The REAL one and he was absolutely fabulous!’.”
Though some of the film’s action supposedly takes place in the likes of JFK Airport and on a plane in flight, the project was filmed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with a massive amount of exterior work. Such projects can be demanding and difficult, but it appears that whether one believes in divine intervention or not, the weather proved exceptionally good for all concerned.
“There weren’t ANY weather hold-ups. I shot twenty-eight days for ten hours a day, no overtime needed. The crews were saying that next time they worked with me they’d want a better deal (laughs). We worked hard for those ten hours, five days a week and then went home and relaxed. It was non-stressful. At my time of life in the business, it’s great to be able to do that!” he admits. “But I’ve always been lucky with the weather. When I did that ice-chase for Bond with the Aston Martin and the Jaguar (for Die Another Day). I went up to Iceland… my driver took me out there and the day I arrived the sun was out so I said we should start shooting immediately. You sometimes only get one or two days of sunshine. We got THIRTEEN consecutive days! One of the guys there said to me: ‘I don’t know what church you go to… but I’ve been here for sixty-five years and I’ve NEVER seen more than three consecutive days of sun!’ On the fourteenth day I went up to the glacier to shoot and the clouds came in below over the lake… I came down after two days and went to say goodbye to the special-effects boys who were packing up and you couldn’t even walk on the lake by then. Maybe there WAS some religious aspect to Left Behind playing in my favour! (laughs)…”
I also asked Vic about the evolving nature of the film industry itself. Given that Impact had first spoken to him two decades ago and reprinted them here recently, does he think the industry has fundamentally changed over that time-frame or is it merely shinier bells and whistles with Computer Graphics?
“I saw those articles, they were cool! (laughs). I suppose you could say that it’s stayed fundamentally the same. You still point cameras and build sets, but to me, it has changed MASSIVELY over the years with all the modern technology. Things come and go much quicker. People are superstars instantly because they appear in a few newspapers, whilst in the olden days people had to work their way up, through a kind of apprenticeship. But technology is the biggest change, not necessarily the CG - there are pros and cons with that. I think CG is like morphine… it’s the most incredible drug used in the right quantities for the right ailment, but abuse it and it becomes a killer. It’s exactly the same with CG: people who don’t know how to make movies just end up doing the WHOLE thing on a computer almost as a cartoon and that’s dreadful. But if you talk about stunt-people and if you look back to Superman flying on small strands of piano-wires when you had to paint them blue if it was a sky and red if it was a wall… now they are barely as thick as your finger but can be erased later. That’s a massive thing…”
Though now based in Los Angeles, where he'll be editing the film for the next few months, Vic still maintains home in both LA and England. He still considers himself an englishman abroad but knows that, pragmatically, anyone who works in the film industry is something of a 'noble vagabond'...
"I still have a farm with stables and an indoor riding arena in the UK I have a nice house here above the Chateau Marmont, but the truth is that despite having the two lovely houses, I often end up in hotels because of work," he shrugs. "This project is quite fun because I asked to do post-production on Left Behind back here in LA, so I get to live in my own house and play a bit of golf. Normally I’m somewhere else in the world… and if you buy a place it’s a guarantee you’ll never get work there (laughs). The old saying is that if you’re out of work, the best thing you can do is book a holiday because you’ll be guaranteed to get a job that week!"
Left Behind is currently in post-production and will most likely come to screens in the Spring of 2014. Before that Armstrong’s handiwork can be seen in Kenneth Branagh’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit which opens in January. We’ll be covering both those projects in more detail in the months to come.
You can find out more about the project and follow its path to the screen at: www.facebook.com/leftbehindreboot
(Thanks to Vic Armstrong, Jessica Parker and Michelle Michelle Czernin Von Chudenitz-Morzin)
