Baltasar Kormákur struck the United States with the surprise 2012 crime thriller hit Contraband. Not for nothing, but that’s where he first worked with Mark Wahlberg, who went on to offer Kormákur the job of directing his next crime comedy, 2 Guns, based on the Boom! comic book series by Steven Grant.
The film, which opens this weekend, co-stars Wahlberg and Denzel Washington as grizzled but quippy criminals whose latest heist goes horribly awry, forcing them to go on the run from the police, the Navy, a Mexican drug cartel and a mysterious fourth organization that is revealed over the course of the film. Making things worse, Wahlberg and Washington were both undercover cops, unbeknownst to each other, and that creates some serious trust issues.
I talked to Baltasar Kormákur about his latest film, developing the script into the dark, dark comedy it became, Paula Patton’s unusual nude scene and why the film’s big car chase is essentially a big sex scene between Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington. Enjoy!
CraveOnline: Tell me about the state of 2 Guns when you came on board. Was the script ready, was the cast in place, or did you have a lot of work to do?
Baltasar Kormákur: Well, it’s always the same. Mark [Wahlberg] approached me about the project when we were doing post on our last movie [Contraband]. He hadn’t even decided which part he was going to play at that point. When I read it, I thought “This actually has an interesting tone.” I wanted to be able to do something more playful, put a little bit of my own style into it, have fun with it. So I moved to get… Or “tried” to get… You can’t just “get” Denzel, but I tried to get Denzel, you know? But we did a lot of work on the script. I went back to comic books, which I didn’t know when I read the script, and used a couple of things from there, and a couple of things we took out again. Then we took it on a journey with the writer for a couple of months, and there were things I wanted to pitch in the script, but it was really an interesting project. […] I work on any script until the last day of shooting, changing and finding other ways of doing things.
How far had the script moved away from the comic book?
Some things are very different and other things are quite similar. I think the tone, some of the twists come out of it. When they go into the police station, [before] they are headed to the bank, and arrest the police? I’d never seen this. That’s great. That came out of the comic books. The comics really had the twists and tone. But the plot, some of the plot didn’t quite work for me, so we had to work on that. And Paula [Patton]’s character was less developed, way less developed in the comic books. It’s always hard with a character like that. All her reasons… You realize she is who she is, right? So you can’t do too much with it either, because the exposition on that is money. So we tried to find the balance of that, and not make her too much of a femme fatale, and give her a real reason for which she did in the film, even though I don’t agree with it.
She has a nude scene in this film that’s very interestingly shot. You keep the camera very close, and then pan up.
Yeah.
Tell me about the idea behind that shot. I wasn’t expecting the nude scene, and I certainly wasn’t expecting it shot in that way.
You mean at the beginning, when we kind of slide up her body? Are you talking about that?
Yeah, it’s a close on her breasts, and then it moves up to her face and her hair flips in front of her…
Yeah. I just wanted the movie to have a sexy feel to it. I mean something that I like is when you see something, and then it’s gone. You don’t lay on it, you don’t hang on it too much. It’s just an extraordinarily beautiful body, and it’s sensuality. The way I see things, it’s hard to explain why. I just like it, you know? [Laughs] What’s not to like?
It feels like 2 Guns is a movie that could, theoretically, have been a PG-13. You could have toned down the violence, you could have left out the nudity. You really went or the R-rating. Was everyone on board with that, or was there any talk about making it more “marketable?”
I think at some point [people] were looking at it and going, “Maybe we it can become PG-13,” but I was really clear that I didn’t want that. I wanted it to have a little darker, more twisted tone, and I think I also had it in my contract that it would be R-rated, so I could insist on that. Once I finished the movie we didn’t have any conversation about, you know, “Let’s cut it down and make it a PG-13.” There was never that conversation. It was more when we were starting to make it. […] I don’t like to dwell and roll in violence, but…
What interests me in this movie, and what made me very fond of it, was the way it handled certain scenes or ideas that we’ve seen in other movies before, that are being done in a different way. You have a different take on Russian roulette, for example. I think my favorite little detail in the movie was the garage light they have to keep turning on by waving their arms while they’re in the middle of an interrogation.
Yes! Yes, that was something we threw in. That’s what I love doing, when you have opportunities. That’s so not in the scene [normally]. That was never there, you know? It’s just a little thing like that that makes the scene, for me, more playful and interesting.
You have a fun car chase in this movie between Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington where it’s almost like good-natured brawling, but they’re ramming their cars into each other. Could you tell me about filming that?
We wanted to make it, a little bit, a kind of western, like a standoff between the two guys. […] We kind of felt that we hadn’t had the one moment of them getting at each other. It’s almost like a love story, and at some point you have to get into bed, you know? So this is a little bit of that. This is the sex scene in the movie, if you can put it that way. [Laughs]
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
