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3 - Production of the Movie/Scenario (Part 1)
(1508 total words in this text)
(686 reads) 
Scenario
In a dark future where corporations have replaced countries, a sport named 'Rollerball' has become the world's greatest contest. It's the only surviving sport on the planet, with the teams trying to place a metallic ball in a scoring zone inside a circular arena. There's only two objectives for the Rollerball players: get as many points as you can and stay alive - because killing your opponents is an option.
Jonathon E., a ten-year veteran of the Houston team, is the most successful Rollerball player who's ever lived. Loved and idolized by the world's populace, Jonathon has now become a threat to the faceless corporations who control the planet. In this world where individuality has been carefully eliminated by the corporations, Jonothon's popularity threatens their grip on the minds of the masses and that cannot be allowed.
Original article: Corona
Starting the game
Jonathan Cross (Chris Klein) is an all-American hotshot, the most popular player in the fastest and most extreme sport of all time: Rollerball. Along with teammates Marcus Ridley (LL Cool J) and Aurora (Rebecca Romijn), Jonathan is living the high life - fame, money, incredible cars - all for giving viewers what they want: a dangerous game packed with visceral thrills, breakneck speed, and head-slamming action. Things go wrong when Rollerball's creater, Petrovich (Jean Reno), realizes that serious on-court accidents bring higher viewer ratings. Soon Jonathan and his friends are playing for their lives. The teammates find themselves trapped in intrigue, pawns in an new game without rules.
McTiernan's Rollerball is an update of the classic 1975 film directed by Norman Jewison. It isn't the first time McTiernan has remade a Jewison film; the recent The Thomas Crown Affair was also based on an earlier Jewison incarnation.
But although he acknowledges there are similarities between his Rollerball and the original, there are some crucial differences: the original film was set far in the future, but McTiernan's is just about to happen; the teams in McTiernan's film are co-ed; and McTiernan's game is not set in the United States, as the original one was.
"Anything that happens in North America or Western Europe soon happens in the rest of the world," says McTiernan. "How that entrepreneurial capitalism spreads around the world interested me. What's happened in Rollerball is that this aggressive capitalism has been spreading around the world.
"The premise of this movie," he continues, "is that a dangerous new sport is created, and somebody says, 'Gee, we can up our take by 10 percent if we get some blood on the track.' What happens if you move an extreme sport to a place where there are no limits, the kind we take for granted? What happens if a couple of normal American guys get swept up and caught in this thing?"
Up-and-coming star Chris Klein agrees. "In football, when somebody makes an amazing play, they replay it over and over. They do the same thing when someone is hurt," says Klein, who portrays Rollerball's young hero, Jonathan Cross. "They get a close-up of it, they get the microphones in there to hear what's being done. Then, once they show the close-up of the injury and everything around it - boom, they go to commercial, because that's when everyone is sitting around the television watching."
"I mean, look at the success of Survivor," he continues. "Audiences are enthralled by people behaving like savages. This movie examines those questions. What happens when sports become tainted?"
Training Camp
Before filming, Rollerball's stars had to undergo intense and extensive training in preparation for the difficult physical feats they'd be required to perform. For the fast-paced, round-the-track Rollerball games, Romijn and LL Cool J had to become proficient motorcyclists.
"Yeah, I'm a bitch on wheels," Romijn laughs. "I had no idea how to ride a motorcycle, but on my fourth day of shooting I had to do a stunt, so I had to learn fast. I spent about 10 hours straight on the motorcycle." Stunt motorcycling is very dangerous and often left solely up to the pros, but she didn't let fear get the best of her. She threw herself into her training. "It was fun," she says. "I didn't have any apprehension at all."
In fact, she enjoyed the motorcycle so much that in-between takes she and Chris Klein would take off, riding tandem, until wary producers asked them to save the cycling for the camera.
LL Cool J had also never ridden a motorcycle. "I took lessons from an incredible teacher," he says. He also prepared for his required on-bike athleticism in numerous ways. "I did trail biking in my backyard," he says, "up hills, all kinds of stuff. I also went to upstate New York in the mountains and rode on the trails. I did everything I could do and trained intensely for about a month. Plus, I changed my regular workout. I started running more, about three miles a day, so I could be lighter on the bike.
"The idea was not just to be good on the motorcycle," he continues, "but also to be comfortable on it. It's one thing to get on a bike and ride around. It's another thing for them to call 'Action!' and immediately look like an experienced motorcycle driver, to be able to maneuver and drag Chris around behind me on the bike. I needed to be confident enough to know I wasn't going to leave myself or Chris in traction."
Klein endured the most extensive preparation of all the principal actors. To learn the art of inline skating, he went to the Olympic speed skating training facility in Calgary, Alberta, prior to principal photography. "I trained for this movie harder than any other," he says. "I had to learn how to inline skate, which I had only done in junior high school. I trained with a man named Andrew Baron, who set up the program at the Olympic center. The plan was designed to correct my body so that I could be an inline skater."
Sounds easy enough, but Klein soon learned how much skill was involved. "It was a horribly humbling experience," Klein says, "because I consider myself to be somewhat athletic. I like mountain biking and hiking and love lifting weights and swimming. Then I started training, and people would ask me do something that I was initially just physically incapable of doing."
Klein suffered plenty of "down-time" as well. "At first, I was really positive," he says. "I would fall and it would be okay. But as we went on, I just didn't have the muscle memory to accomplish what they were asking me to do. It was very frustrating. I was there for a month, getting my body ready to go, learning how to skate."
Klein's training continued when he arrived in Montreal prior to filming. The production began assembling the Rollerball team players, among them a handful of local extreme skaters, most between 18 and 19 years old.
"I began working with these extreme skaters," Klein says, "guys who were all younger than me. I trained with them for another month on a practice track and they taught me how to do a half-pipe, how to skate up the wall - that kind of stuff. I really watched those guys and the way they interacted with each other, their fearlessness and enthusiasm." It was studying their mindset, style, and fearless radical stunts that helped Klein complete work on his character and get ready to play Rollerball.
Playing the Game
The movie features four Rollerball games, filmed in order, beginning with the Horsemen's home game against the Horde. Klein, LL Cool J, and Romijn's characters all play for the Horsemen. To staff the rival teams, McTiernan recycled the players, disguising their faces with elaborate costumes and helmets. "We re-used the actors for each away game," McTiernan says, "because, as filming continued, we hoped there would be a learning curve in terms of their ability as skaters and motorcyclists. With each new game they improved and worked better as teams. By Game 4, the final, pivotal game, they were amazing."
As mentioned, the stunts required of the actors were extensive, though Chris Klein wryly points out that "acting on skates itself should be considered a stunt." LL Cool J routinely towed Klein around the track with his motorcycle to give him enough momentum to leap over the series of bumps and ramps that dotted the track. Klein also dangled from wires, leapt from all heights onto pads, and became an adept and graceful skater by Game 4. LL Cool J accomplished a complicated manuever in which he was tethered to a motorcycle that was yanked back as he crashed into it from above, pushing the stuntwoman riding it off the seat. To complicate things, her motorcycle was on fire.
The actors attempted these stunts out of necessity, not vanity. McTiernan and his cinematographer, Steve Mason, wanted to put the camera on the track with the teams so the audience would feel the adrenaline and danger of the game firsthand. The actors had to do many of their own stunts because the camera was right in their faces.
Original article: Rollerball press kit |
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