"It was all in the script, and that is why Joan did the movie."

By Alison Willmore on 08/21/2008

The world in quotes:

"It was all in the script, and that is why Joan did the movie. She loved it. It's Death Race, right? And Joan Allen, three-time Oscar nominee, The Notebook, The Upside of Anger: she is always seen as the moral center of films...And I thought how interesting to take someone who is usually the moral center of movies and make her the exact opposite. But I knew that if I am going to get Joan Allen in the movie I am going to have to write a fucking good role, because she is stepping outside of her comfort zone a little bit and doing something she has never done before. So I did a ton of research on prisons, prison governors, women in prison, and then we sent her the script. She really liked the script. I went and had a cup of tea with her in New York, and by the time we had finished, she had signed on to do the movie."
         --Paul W.S. Anderson solves the mystery of how he got Joan Allen to star in "Death Race," at Premiere.

"[L]et's just say that, by the end, it was cleared out two-thirds. This is like an eighty-seat theater. It's a small theater. And everybody in there is, as far as I can see, is the wealthy-wealthy Utah. You know, like, jade and leather, that cowboy wealthy. And so there's a third left, and no applause, like absolutely no applause, and I go up there, and the first question is, 'Why would you ever shoot in a place like that?' "
         --Azazel Jacobs on one of the earliest screenings of his film "Momma's Man," shot in his childhood home, at Hammer to Nail.

"I love horses. I've learned from them. Just watch how a horse walks. It does it without self-consciousness. I've seen so much, so much human self-consciousness, since an early age, in this business of acting. In truth, actors are possibly the most self-conscious people on Earth."
         --Christian Bale, equestrian, at the Japan Times.

"I had told Jeff Ayeroff at Warner Bros that I wanted the time on some project or another to do a big animated piece. He showed me Michael Patterson's animation from a short film and gave me the a-ha track. I went away and, inspired by a comic book from my youth, wrote the idea about a girl entering the comic dimension. The image of the animated hand reaching out from the page was the first thought. It gave me goose bumps, which I knew at the time was a good sign."
         --"Choking Man" director Steve Barron on the inspiration behind his revolutionary rotoscoped 1985 video for a-ha's "Take on Me," at the Hollywood Bitchslap.

"One of the things I like about the Judas Goat sequence was that I had the feeling--which might have been completely anthropomorphic--that when the Judas Goat turned left, and the lambs turned right [into the slaughterhouse], he looked very happy."
         --Frederick Wiseman on "Meat," Moving Image Source.

[Photo: Joan Allen in "Death Race," Universal Pictures, 2008]