I always love it when you sit down for an interview. It’s in those twenty or so minutes that you learn a lot about your subject. Sometimes they impress you with their almost encyclopedic knowledge of film, and other times you realize there is nothing but air between those ears. Since I want to be invited again to future interviews, I am not going to say who might have nothing upstairs…

But John Stockwell was a really refreshing roundtable after two straight weeks of daily interviews. Not only was he really honest about making Turistas, but he spoke about everything with such refreshing candor that I was almost unprepared. Almost every interviewee has a publicist or two sitting in the back, making sure their client doesn’t get into any trouble or feel uncomfortable during the sit-down. John came in alone and willing to talk. If you read or listen to the interview, you’ll see what I mean.

Some highlights are - he talks about the safety of Sacha Baron Cohen while filming, about Kate Bosworth and all the controversy of her weight (remember he directed her in Blue Crush), about how he loved The Departed but didn’t feel the same about Babel, and my favorite part of the interview – how he explains that all these unrated DVDs are nothing more than a marketing scam. Of course he covers the making of Turistas and what we can expect on the DVD, I just figured you might want to know some of the other things...

This interview was done about a week ago and with about six or seven people in the room. If you want to listen to the interview you can click here to download the audio, otherwise the full transcript is below.

I'm really going to try and provide the transcripts as well as the audio for future interviews. While it is not always going to be the case, I'm promising now to make more of an effort to get it done.

I hope you enjoy this interview, and over the next few days I will be posting interviews with Josh Duhamel, Olivia Wilde and Beau Garrett. Josh talks a bit about Transformers, and Beau talks about Fantastic Four 2.

Question: This was a long day for you?

John: Not for me. I took a break. I watched the football game.

Question: What was the final score?

John: 42-39, three points. It was a pretty good game. Michigan kind of blew it, I think.

How was the jungle experience for you? Before you left you must have had an idea of how it was going to go and how did it actually go?

Probably, 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. When we first got to Brazil, our first scout we were five minutes outside the airport and we look over and rush hour traffic and there is a guy robbing a woman in a car at gunpoint so, okay, this place is pretty... what’s next if that happened in the first five minutes? But, for the most part, we were treated really well. The jungle was… you know what I loved about working there? 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.

Are you going to be the king of the water films now?

My next movie I think is going to be in the snow. Honestly, its like, I’m doing another movie I think for… 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.

So when you are looking at scripts, do you just at the ones that are set in awesome places to travel to?

You know what, I have never turned anything down because it wasn’t set there. Let me think, that is an interesting question. I did a movie, 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 have never had a better, 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 fuck 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.”

Olivia was saying that in Brazil, compared to the United States, everyone was the same except for the director, that you are the top and everyone else was the same.

Yeah.

Did you kind of feel that and did you see that happen?

Yeah, there is a reverence for the director that’s a little unsettling in some ways. They really put you up on a thrown. They were very weirded out by the fact that I socialized with them and I went out to clubs and to parties with them.  That’s not the norm I guess. It’s not a producer driven culture, or even an actor driven culture. ‘Cause in America, you know, it’s the actors, basically, who drive that train. Not in Brazil.  It’s definitely the director.

Could you talk a little bit about the casting process?

The casting process… Josh we cast first. One of our producers, Scott Steindorf, who produces Las Vegas, brought me there to the set, met him, he was such a… I was looking for a guy who was centered, and solid, American in a classic sense of the word. He was from North Dakota and going to dental school or something before he decided to be an actor. There was something completely… he felt to me like a guy who could go to Brazil and order a coke. I asked him if he had been anywhere and he said he had been to Cancun. In a good way. Then we brought in other actors and we did huge big mix and matches and we kind of paired up girls and guys in a room and see who worked together and who felt right together, who liked each other and who didn’t like each other. It was a big kind of free for all. I would do a lot of improvisation and sort of see how people handled that. You could kind of tell who liked each other and who didn’t like each other. I had all the girls come in and tell me, “Oh, there is this girl here, and she does the movie we’re not doing it.” I was like, all right. I almost wanted to cast her… (laughter in room) just to see. I’m a provocateur. I’ve done it before, on Blue Crush and Crazy/Beautiful. I’ve done a lot of that. I’ve thankfully had movies where I haven’t had to get Matt Damon or Brad Pitt to get it made. And this is one of those cases where they were like, we don’t need to find a star to make it. Blue Crush the same way. Into the Blue was a little weird because it wasn’t supposed to be a Paul Walker movie and all of a sudden it was a Paul Walker movie.

Is that a liberating thing to not have a major star on set, like a Brad Pitt or a Matt Damon… to not have those demands that might go with them?

Well, it’s liberating to not have to necessarily to get one in order to get the movie made, because most movies are stalled. You hear that story with Darren Aronofsky and The Fountain and just go, uh, if that happened to me I don’t know if I could survive. I mean, he barely survived. You’ve got Brad Pitt and you’re making the movie and you’re building the sets and all of a sudden, and Brad’s like all of a sudden. You know, I don’t want to do it. It’s not like I don’t want to do it. I’ve experienced it a little bit now and I’m going and doing the dance with an actor and you’re like, do I like you, do you like me… it’s a little bit of a seduction process. I’m glad that I haven’t had to do it, but it would be interesting to go through it. I don’t know, I have never really experienced it. I’ve never had a primadonna, anyway.

How excited are you to see Kate Bosworth become a superstar?

I love Kate. All anyone ever asks me about is her weight now. I’m like, I don’t know. I guess she is thin. Like, what can I say? She was thin when she came in and read for me first and I was like, you’re never going to be a surfer. Like, you’re way too, you don’t look like, and she was like, “Don’t worry. I’m going to bulk up. I’m going to train.” And I was like, go out and train for a couple of weeks and let me see you.  And she came back and she had put on ten pounds. I think she is naturally thin. She’s probably, for whatever reason, thinner than she normally is. But it must be so painful to pickup US Magazine and hear them talking about how anorexic and terrible you look.

But she is the female lead in Superman.

Yeah. She can do better than that. I didn’t really like her in that. I liked her, but I was like, I don’t know… I think, first of all, she’s a really smart girl. Got into Princeton and differed. She kept saying, “Oh, I’m going to go back to college.” I was like, uh-huh, uh-huh, sure Kate. Never.  Never did, probably never will. But she is such a smart girl and I think, everyone as actors are, they can only do what can be done with the opportunities that are presented to them. I hope she gets many more really interesting acting opportunities. And she is smart. She did a really small role in Rules of Engagement… and what else did she do? That Johnny Holmes movie. What was that Val Kilmer movie?

Wonderland.

Wonderland. Yeah. I think that’s really smart. I think that would be a really smart thing for that Superman dude to do… Brandon Routh… to go off and do some weird small role in a fringe movie.  Otherwise, he’s always going to be Superman.

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