Turistas
Interview: Stockwell on Turistas
"My next movie I think is going to be in the snow," said Stockwell. "It’s either going to be in the snow or it’s going to be with pot smugglers in Vancouver. I love the water and I love working in it because for me it’s really peaceful and it removes a certain kind of crew or collection of people around monitors and in your ear. We were in some caves in the water, way deep, a mile in. No one could get in, so it was just me and the DP, and the actors, I felt very free."
Shot in Brazil, Stockwell is also racking up an envious passport full of exotic stamps. "I have never turned anything down because it wasn’t set [in an exotic locale]. I did Cheaters in Toronto, that’s not that exotic. Crazy/Beautiful was LA, that’s not that interesting. Blue Crush, Hawaii, not bad. Into the Blue, the Bahamas, now Brazil. I don’t think there has been a movie where, even in the Bahamas the actors by the end of it were like, 'Get me the f*** out of here, I can’t wait to leave.' Hawaii even, people were like, 'It’s okay, but I want to go home.' Brazil, I think people would have stayed. They loved it. They were so seduced by the country and the people, the culture, the food, the whole experience, that I never got a single person going, 'Okay, I’m done. I want to go home.'"
In the film, a group of tourists takes a bit too much advantage of the locals and gets stalked by a gang of organ harvesters. Stockwell and his crew were careful to work with the Brazilians.
"I think making the decision to go to Brazil filled a lot of people with a bit of dread and fear, especially the financiers. I guess Brazil in people’s consciousness you’re going to go down there and get kidnapped, you’re going to get robbed, you’re going to get raped. And given that is kind of the set-up, everything went pretty darn well. We had a largely Brazilian crew. They operated in such an efficient way. If you needed to get equipment a mile and a half up a jungle trail they hired local kids to get it up. If you needed a kid to jump off the waterfall you hired a local kid to do it. You don’t bring in an American stunt guy. It was a kind of more expedient, guerrilla, by any means necessary style of filmmaking, which I liked."
That didn't mean he Stockwell didn't long for a big American crew for some of the elaborate stunt sequences. "When that bus went over, it was done. We almost went over with it because we were shooting inside and there was this whole rig and it has the thing shaking and then one of the cables snapped and my DP and I was like, 'Holy sh*t!' This was like Brazil filmmaking for you. Thankfully they had a safety cable, so we didn’t go over. In fact, there were some houses, typical third world filmmaking. There were some houses over on the side and we almost flipped over the house. So yeah, there was no CG in that."
Turistas is out in theatres now.
For the review, trailers, stills, posters and more movie info, go to the Turistas Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
|
Add to Heffee!
