Before he ever took the reins for Angel Has Fallen or his most recent action thriller Kandahar, director Ric Roman Waugh had his sights fixated on a biopic about legendary stunt performer Evel Knievel. As a stuntman himself with a family history in the business, he was eager to take a crack at the life of one of the best to ever do it with Evel which pulled from the Leigh Montville biography The High-Flying Life of Evel Knievel: American Showman, Daredevil, and Legend. Unfortunately, such a film never came to be. Things turned out well enough for Waugh who's now a regular in the action thriller genre, but during an interview with Collider's Steve Weintraub, he said he'd still love to return to Knievel one day.
Knievel, born Robert Craig Knievel, was renowned throughout the 60s and 70s for his death-defying motorcycle stunts. He completed over 75 ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps in his career, constantly escalating the grandeur of his performances and enduring quite a lot of bodily harm with each failed jump. Although he was a larger-than-life figure and a worthy subject of a biopic, Waugh was more interested in telling the story of the man under the helmet. Invoking James Mangold's Oscar-winning Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line which looked into the life of the Man in Black, Waugh explained what his plans were for the project and how the complicated rights to Knievel's story ultimately prevented him from making the film:
"There was another competing project at the same time. I think that a lot of people were trying to do the glorified version of Evel Knievel, I wanted to show the real one. My version would have been Walk the Line, it would have shown you everything about Johnny Cash, and in this moment, it would have shown you everything about the man, Evel Knievel. And it came about casting, and so forth. I know Sony has a lot of rights, still, within the Knievel library of IPs, they’re trying to figure it out. I would still love to figure out how to do that one day."
Waugh Believes There Are Plenty of Young Actors Who'd Be Great as Knievel
When Waugh was initially working on Evel, he set his goals high for his leading man. Where Walk the Line may have landed Joaquin Phoenix as Cash, he was shooting for Tom Hardy, Chris Hemsworth, or Joel Edgerton to be his Knievel. If he could return to the project today, though, he's just as excited by the crop of young talent that he thinks could play the stuntman in his early performing days. "I think there’s some new young bucks out there – because, you know, remember Evel Knievel was in his early 20s when a lot of this happened, he was a younger guy, but there’s a lot of young bucks now that can play him that I think could be fantastic," he said. "And it’s kind of time to hopefully resurrect it, so help me out. But, it’s one where the rights are a little bit of an issue."
Waugh Values His Work With Gerard Butler
Until the day comes when the rights work out and Waugh is called back to make Evel though, he'll keep making crowd-pleasing action fare. Following Kandahar, he's expected to reunite with Gerard Butler on a sequel to his disaster hit Greenland. He and Butler have made quite the team in recent years going from political action thrillers to world-ending catastrophes, and now hostile territory in Afghanistan. Waugh trusts Butler enough to deeply involve him in the creative process, asking for his thoughts and developing the concept with his input early on:
"We’re probably most involved together in the early stages of really getting the script right and what we want the voice to say in the movie, and so forth. And then when we’re executing on set, there might be some ideas that come up, and so forth. But we’re polishing that rock that we already know that we really constructed, and then I usually go away with the director cut, and get the movie to where I want it, but it’s also been built in a way that it’s the same movie that we’ve talked about from the inception, so that by the time we get to the first test screening and we’re looking at stuff together, then he can bring his objectivity of, 'Have you thought about this? What about that? I don’t think this is playing this way.' And so he becomes a partner in a way where you get deep into the weeds of these things"
Waugh highly values Butler's objectivity, especially after spending thousands of hours on the films he's working on. "Like I said, I did an advanced of Kandahar the other night, and it was sold out, and so I gave up my seat and everybody was like, “No, no, no, no, you have to see it!” I’m like, 'I’ve seen it 1000 times,'" he told Weintraub. "'I promise you, I know every single nuance of this movie,' and you lose your objectivity at a point, as you know, and so it’s good to have sounding boards that were in from the inception point with you, of seeing what happens on the other side of it." He'll once again give his input with Waugh as both a star and producer on Greenland: Migration which could get underway soon.
Kandahar releases in theaters on May 26, though Collider is also holding a special early screening in Beverly Hills in partnership with Open Road Films on May 22 which viewers in the area can win tickets to. Check out the trailer below.