"Shoot 'Em Up" screenwriter and director Michael Davis had nearly given it all up.
Sure, he'd discovered mild success with "Eight Days A Week," the 1999 romantic comedy in which a young boy camps outside a girl's house in order to profess his love for her. But along with that small fortune came a more cumbersome misfortune: he had been pegged as the teen romantic comedy guy.
"I won't say I was stuck in [the genre] because I loved all the John Hughes movies," Davis said during an interview in his Ritz Carlton hotel room in Georgetown. "I loved the teen romantic comedy, but that's the only thing I could get. And, even when I was doing that [genre], I was hardly making a living. Every time I made a movie, I'd go further and further into debt because they would never pay me enough."
After floundering for several years, Davis had prepared himself for a departure. He had everything together - his transcripts, his letters of recommendation. He was looking for something steady, a teaching job, because - as Davis so frankly put it - he "wasn't qualified to do anything else."
He had one last hope, though: a script he wrote seven years ago. He submitted it to New Line Cinema. The production company loved it. And the company loved it even more after he showed it a short animation he put together, which detailed Clive Owen's character bungee jumping through the middle of a stairwell, shooting all the bad guys on the way down.
Preproduction for "Shoot 'Em Up" moved along quickly after New Line approved the script. The production company then gave Davis permission to direct the film. He got his top picks for all three leads - Owen as the hero, Paul Giamatti as the villain and Monica Bellucci as the love interest.
But one question still lingered in the minds of many industry observers: how'd the teen romantic comedy guy get to be the balls-to-the-wall action guy?
"The misconception is that, 'Oh, Michael chose to do teen romantic comedy," Davis said. "Now he's changing course, and he wants to do action. I had [actually] written a couple of other action scripts that I tried to sell as a screenwriter. I loved the genre, [but] you also don't go from nowhere to then getting a $40 million budget."
Now that Davis had his $40-million budget, he can pause for a moment and smile. He had been preparing to shoot this kind of film ever since he was in junior high school, writing his own 100-page James Bond novels and digesting a mish-mash of adventure media, including Indiana Jones movies and Johnny Quest cartoons.
"I do think there's sort of some cleverness about the Bond movies and in the Indiana Jones movies of the characters getting into a tough situation, and [the directors] figuring out a clever way for him to get out of it," Davis said. "He [might have to] create a stack of bodies that fall on each other so that he uses them as a step to go over a barrier."
Owen's character does that and plenty more in "Shoot 'Em Up." While the scenes are riddled with gunfire, they also contain the same sense of flair and adventure that one might find in a Bond or Indiana Jones flick.
In one scene, for instance, Owen is trapped in a munitions warehouse, surrounded by bad guys. He rigs different guns around the maze-like space, attaching them to pull-strings. While watching the security cameras, Owen triggers the guns and surprises his enemies.
"I also kind of wanted to emphasize ... the interesting things I could [do] between the gun fights," Davis said. "Here's [Owen], this character whose life is fractured, and he kind of becomes whole again by [caring for] this child and hooking up with Monica Bellucci. They become this makeshift family, and by contrast, Paul Giamatti, the family man, is always calling home after trying to kill the baby. And it's so funny, but I think that even anybody who's a monster in real life, they're not a monster 24 hours a day."
Davis conceived "Shoot 'Em Up" as a sinister but alluring action/comedy thrill ride. It's as though he took all these extremities - the gratuitous killings, the absurd and violent situations, the quasi-crazy characters and their contrasting traits - tinkered with them a little bit and finally shot them off into the most outlandish territory possible.
"I like the fact that [Owen and Bellucci's] first home together as a couple is inside a tank," Davis said. "'Shoot 'Em Up' is kind of absurd and funny [like that]. And it's not funny ha-ha, but when you think about it, it kind of tickles you. And I think the whole movie has ... what Clive calls 'wicked humor.'"
But for Davis, the most exciting part about "Shoot 'Em Up" doesn't seem to be that he's still in the game. It seems that he's most thrilled by the idea that he's finally making something truly unique, something totally unlike any action movie most Americans have ever seen.
"You can say I've made six films, but really to most of the world, I've only made one," Davis said. "If I can make, like, two more cool action movies so that one day ... they have a footnote that Michael Davis made these weird, funny, out-there action movies, I'd be so stoked"
