We spoke with KandaharMovie director Ric Roman Waugh about reuniting with Gerard Butler and filming in Saudi Arabia.
Director Ric Roman Waugh returns to the big screen this Memorial Day weekend with Kandahar, starring Gerard Butler. If you missed out on Collider’s early screening and Q&A with the filmmaker, fear not. Collider’s Steve Weintraub spoke with Waugh exclusively about the making of the action thriller, what he calls the “Sicario of the Middle East,” filming on location, and his collaboration with Butler.
WAUGH: He plays human characters. I think that when you go to see a big superhero movie, then go take a ride with a superhero, but when we're making a movie of this ilk, I think, unfortunately, a lot of his peers still try to be 10 feet tall and bulletproof, impervious to pain, no flaws. When we started Angel Has Fallen together, he was kind of bored, where Mike Banning had gotten to where he would just kill 50 people and nothing would ever happen to him.
There is real technology called Fusion, which embraces night vision with also thermal imaging technology together, they're overlaid together, and you can change the color pattern. So I wanted to be Ansel Adams, so we created a black and white image at night to show you the desert at night under the stars, but also allow you to see those glimpses of the thermal energy of a helicopter, or the human beings that are around you, and how you would be hunted or hunt them down.
But look, I mean, Jordan has been shot to death and so has Morocco, and even Abu Dhabi at this point. It was Basil who had been talking to the Saudis, who started Vision 2030 bringing culture to the kingdom, and one of them was cinema, not only tourism, and they really wanted to bring a modern day movie there. So we became the first Hollywood picture to shoot in Saudi Arabia since Lawrence of Arabia.
In Saudi Arabia, it's no different. The one scene that really struck a chord when I read Mitch's script was where you had this Pakistan ISI operator who's meeting with the Taliban, and he's in the Turban and all the traditional garb, and then he walks out of the Taliban leadership smoking a vape pen, Gucci sunglasses, getting in a Range Rover listening to hip hop, and you realize that's not a caricature, that is real, what is happening there today.
At first, it felt like a lot of times, you go to places like this where they look like they're aliens because you just don't understand them, and then within a week they feel like they’re your best friend and you're suddenly completely relatable to them.
I was really– hard is a tough word, but I was very strict on my crew to say, “Help them understand, build them up because the more that we build them up and their prowess as movie technicians, it's only gonna make our movie better.” And you know, I think you and I have talked about it before, but we've come into a land now where everywhere we go is for a tax incentive.
Yeah, it's a long flight to get there. I've done the flight. But if there's a reason, because of the movie, to film there, if they have the infrastructure, I could see it really taking off for future films filming there.I went to Abu Dhabi, and I also went on a little bit of a thing all around, but I haven't seen what you saw.
Totally. So, I think the movie is around two hours, and you're saying you had a cut that you were happy with at three? Were there a lot of different plot lines or characters that you ultimately just had to pull out?
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