Original subtitles

I think the first thing to talk about when a director starts his narration

is the source material, the things that draw you to a project.

I have been a longtime fan of Donald Westlake.

I think he's one of America's greatest crime novelists,

and belongs in the company of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

So I had read some of his Parker books.

There was a series of novels where he created the character named Parker.

Now this character, Parker, is somewhat unique in literature

in that he can't be considered a hero.

He's a professional criminal,

he wants to steal as much money as he possibly can,

and he doesn't feel any remorse for it.

However, I think the genius of Westlake was that

he gave Parker a set of rules that he follows, and he believes in

and he'll never cheat on.

And in his own way, he's got his own integrity,

that you might abhor what he does,

but you also respect him

for absolutely carrying out the things as he says he will.

He is a man of his word.

And so, that's the dichotomy here. It's morally ambiguous,

but you read the novels, and in spite of yourself, you like Parker.

What was important to me is that I cast someone who could embody that.

And Jason Statham, I found out, had read the script.

And the script was by John McLaughlin.

And John had done a wonderful adaptation of a book called Flashfire.

I had not read the book, I only read it after I read the script.

But I heard that Jason Statham was interested in this,

and I thought, "Wait a minute,

"he's English, Parker's American. But who cares about an accent?"

A lot of what Jason Statham carries with him,

this kind of strong, silent man with a certain integrity

is what Parker embodies in the books.

So I met with Jason, we talked about this character and what I wanted.

I wanted something very real from Parker, I didn't want Superman.

I loved that Westlake could create a character,

a criminal who, in spite of what is smart,

he'll sometimes, if he's crossed...

It might be the better part of valor to walk away and live for another day,

Parker can't do that.

If you don't follow the rules, he will go to the ends of the Earth to get even.

And I said to Jason, "I know you're a great action hero,

"but I don't want that. I want somebody who's real and human."

And like Westlake in his books, Parker gets hurt.

In a way, it's mind over body.

And he heals himself and then goes after the culprits always in his novels.

And Flashfire's no different.

So what we're looking at right now is the Ohio State Fair,

and it is the largest fair in the United States.

Westlake had put the Missouri State Fair in his novel, which is also big,

but the granddaddy of them all is the Ohio State Fair.

And I chose it, talked to the people there.

They were lovely, the people at the Ohio State Fair,

and let us come and shoot.

At first, I was gonna shoot second unit,

just send my second unit director and a cameraperson there

to grab the crowds and the big rides, etcetera.

And we were gonna shoot a fun fair, a small fun fair in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,

because we were shooting a majority of the film in Louisiana

to take advantage of the tax incentive there.

And I didn't think that it was gonna be a...

It was gonna be a mismatch, it was gonna be very difficult,

because a little fun fair compared to the Ohio State Fair

where they can get, 40, 50, 60, 70,000 people a day is huge.

And I couldn't afford more than...

With this budget, I could have afforded maybe 250 extras, if we were lucky.

So there was a problem there, but what can you do,

you have to go ahead with the film as planned.

Well, carnies will be carnies.

What happened was that

three or four days before we were supposed to shoot in Baton Rouge,

we got a call and the people at this fun fair said,

"We've decided to change things. We negotiated a certain price,

"we want three or four times as much."

In other words, they were holding us up.

And what I said to the financiers who were worried about our budget anyway,

"Listen, you wanna spend four times as much

"and get no real production value on the screen,

"or what about stripping down our crew and going to Ohio

"and really shooting this on the fly? Guerrilla filmmaking."

And they agreed, and with no time, I called the Ohio State people,

the Ohio State Fair people,

and said, "Listen, can we not just send our second unit?

"Can we come with our actors and really shoot?"

And they said yes, but the one caveat is that we couldn't stop things.

They, obviously, are in business to have as many people as possible come to the fair.

So we kind of went into this really precipitously.

I took five actors,

Jason and Michael Chiklis and Clifton Collins

and Wendell Pierce and Micah Hauptman,

and we went to Ohio.

We shot all this sequence in two days.

And we got huge production value.

Now, the lighting is not the best,

because you don't get to wait and make everything perfect.

We literally had to run and gun.

However, you know, you've got the bad guys dressed as clowns,

they fit right into the parade,

the people that were watching the parade thought

they were really part of the whole fair.

And you have this unbelievably wonderful production value.

Now, part of it is in Ohio,

this sequence right here is actually in Louisiana.

I had to match, I had to shoot my big shots in Ohio.

But you're gonna see that there's a big heist that happens here

and a fire has to be set.

And a fire has to be set.

Well, you can't do that on the fly with 70,000 people.

So what we were able to do is grab our big shots in Ohio,

take our five actors and grab all that stuff,

and then inside... This sequence right here, for instance,

the exterior of this is in Ohio. It's a portable building.

You saw that state trooper car pull up and pull inside,

that's in Ohio.

This sequence is in Louisiana.

When we saw Micah Hauptman, the Hardwicke character,

walking by that square dance and the horses in the background, that's in Louisiana.

So in this shot right here, the exterior where Jason is, that's Ohio.

The interior where they are is in Louisiana.

I think it's sometimes interesting to watch filmmaking, professional filmmaking,

and I don't think anyone ever knows if you have a mismatch if you shoot it right.

And my cinematographer, Jimmy Muro,

and production designer, Missy Stewart, did a fantastic job here.

Missy and Maria Nay, her set decorator,

were able to create a very interesting interior here.

Obviously, Ohio State Fair is never gonna

let us see where they actually count their money.

And the reality is, 70,000 people a day,

each of them paying between $20, $30, $40

in tickets and concessions, and maybe $50...

You can see that there can be millions of dollars at the gate.

And what Westlake did was say, "This is a heist of a state fair."

And that's what we had to depict here.

That's Louisiana.

And where Micah Hauptman was just standing

with the choir behind him was Ohio.

This is Louisiana.

So over the course of things, it's not important for an audience to really know,

although when you're having a narration, you should know.

What I wanted to do was show how precise Parker is,

and when you see Jason here,

you know that he is very, very adept

at what he does.

He delivers his credo right here.

"If you listen to me, you won't get hurt. If you don't, you'll regret you didn't."

This sequence right here is in Louisiana.

Obviously, we're starting the fire,

and we had to have total control of that

and that's why we shot in Louisiana.

I couldn't do that at the fair,

thatjust wouldn't have been safe for all those extra people.

This is what goes into making film.

Now, this character right here, the guard, is Billy Slaughter.

He's a wonderful character actor who lives in New Orleans, where we shot.

In this sequence, he's playing a character

who is a low-level security guard.

He's not used to something like this.

He certainly is not used to being confronted by professionals

with weapons like this.

And he is terrified and has a seizure.

He has a panic attack.

And in this moment, you have a wonderful moment

where you can feel both Parker's professionalism,

and at the same time, you see that he understands,

he's afraid that the Clifton Collins character,

the green clown, is gonna blow this guy's head off.

He talks the guy down.

He is able to continue his business.

You see Parker's professionalism

and you understand that what he does, he's not Robin Hood at all.

What he wants to do is get the job done, and he understands if you hurt people,

in the long run, the law will come after you much stronger.

And in this moment, I was reading Billy Slaughter for the role.

And there's a great line coming up right now.

Thank... Thank you, Father.

Where he says, "Thank you, Father."

When I was reading him, it was his line, he brought it up himself.

I mean, John McLaughlin can't take any credit.

Nor does he want to, he's a great, wonderful writer and did a great adaptation.

But in this instance, Billy Slaughter said that line,

I incorporated it into the film,

and it gets a huge laugh when an audience sees the film the first time.

Because here's a guy who's dressed like a priest

and has a certain kind of confidence, the way he talks them down.

And of course, this security guard just looks at him and says,

"He must be a priest robber."

Instead of just a professional robber, and it always gets a big laugh.

Now this sequence is a flashback.

And Emma Booth, who plays Claire in the film,

which is Parker's girlfriend and Nick Nolte's daughter.

Nick Nolte plays Hurley, which is a famous character in the Westlake books,

always is the person who probably mentored Parker coming up, they were partners.

And now, you see them, and I love this line right here,

"it's so good to see you, man."

You feel Nick Nolte has missed him, that they used to be close.

When you hire an actor like Nick Nolte, who's so wonderful

and carries with him all that experience,

we see that he's past it, right?

But he still recalls those days when the two of them were together,

and one line, "it's so good to see you, man,"

I think, just tells you that they've got a relationship.

And in this instance, Parker doesn't trust anyone.

But when Hurley tells him that he is planning a big job,

and Hurley is the one that's laid out this Ohio State Fair gig,

and he shows these guys in the background.

I think in the long run, that's the credibility that Parker needs.

And the look of this flashback sequence, I just want to say,

I wanted to do something that you knew looked like it was in the past.

The regular part of the film has a hard edge to it.

This is blown out and has a certain treatment of the color.

When you see it, you know you're in another medium.

You don't have to say anything, you flash out of that blowtorch,

into the past twice.

And the color's been deviated for a specific reason.

All of this stuff is... It's hyper-color real, that fire and the red.

But that's really what it's like in the Ohio State Fair.

And I wanted to be able to do that.

This sequence, by the way, as I said, was all done in Louisiana.

- Let's go. -What the fuck was that?

You needed to have control of the fire.

A lot of these people in the foreground are stunt people,

then I had some wonderful extras further back, away from the fire.

And you were able to do it. Now this is Ohio.

Again, you cut it in and out.

And hopefully, the audience never knows that you've mixed the two.

You go from Ohio to Louisiana to Ohio.

Here you see Wendell Pierce driving in, that's Ohio.

So, in each of these instances... That's Louisiana.

You do all of this stuff

and you hope that the audiences are never quite gonna know,

and I don't think they will.

This, again, is Ohio.

That's the actual...

What shall we call it, the temporary building, you can call it a mobile home building

that exists at Ohio State Fair.

And Parker walks out here with all these extras that we had,

and we put smoke at the fair, and then that's Louisiana right there.

So, I don't know, I think you can get a sense of the fun

So, I don't know, I think you can get a sense of the fun

and sometimes the skill of filmmaking.

This is a great location in New Orleans.

We shot it in New Orleans. I know a lot about New Orleans.

I used to live there, I have property there still,

and I was involved in Louisiana getting its tax incentive.

Louisiana is now a big center for feature filmmaking and television.

And Brandon Tartikoff and I had a lot to do with that,

because we both lived in New Orleans at the time

and we were the only people around from Hollywood.

And I'm pleased that Louisiana has become such a production state, it's great.

But it's filled with wonderful places like this.

This is a warehouse that was hurt during Katrina.

There's vestiges of that everywhere.

And I just loved the setting

as a place where the criminals drop the stolen fire truck that they took

and jump into another vehicle.

And here they are, coming down a road

in the country, this was supposed to be in Columbus, Ohio.

So let's say that this is heading across Ohio towards Cincinnati,

and in the next sequence, you'll see we go across the border

and the river into Covington, Kentucky, where the next sequence happens.

We shot the whole bit of this in Louisiana and in New Orleans,

and I didn't want any of the locations to be clearly Louisiana.

You know, that whole Mississippi River basin is similar in terms of foliage.

And you can do a lot in Louisiana.

I shot my film Ray almost totally in Louisiana,

and I was using it for every place in the country,

Seattle, New York City, everything.

Of course, I used a lot of stock footage in that film, too.

But when you have a limited budget,

you have to make do with the location where you go.

And in this particular piece, what Westlake had done in his novel

is have Parker work his way down the Mississippi

as he chases the criminals.

He went to Texas, he went to New Orleans, and then he goes to Florida.

That's what we kind of symbolized here,

while all of our locations are in Louisiana.

Now, this sequence was written wonderfully by John McLaughlin.

It was adapted from the book and John was wonderful in his adaptation.

He was true to the spirit, but he also created some wonderful things.

And I read this in the script,

where you have five men in a very close space with huge tension.

And you build it over a period of time,

and you wonder how this Parker's gonna get out of a situation

where you've got all these guys armed, and they're double-crossing him right here.

Now, in this moment,

this is, I think, something that John McLaughlin did

that's better than what was in the book.

And you see that Westlake would always maim his characters.

In the book, he maims them much later.

We've started early, so you understand.

I think this is really true to Parker, but it's an adaptation.

And it's a stunt sequence that clearly, I wanted to make very, very real.

All of this intensity close-up,

how Parker takes the situation, he knows if he stops, he's a dead man.

So he tries to unseat the security of everybody inside.

He attacks them all, yes, he gets shot here twice by Michael Chiklis,

but he gets out.

And I think the important thing there, and if you go back and look at this sequence,

you'll see this is the joy of having Jason Statham in a movie.

He does his own stunts.

Now, in that instance, we're going along,

when you're shooting across, perpendicular, it doubles your speed,

but when you're shooting straight back, it slows it down.

So we had to be going about 50 miles an hour in that sequence to see him jump.

And Jason insisted on jumping out of the car himself.

Now, did hejump out and land on the ground? No.

There was a platform, a 4-by-8 platform attached to this vehicle.

By the way, this is...

Children of Men devised a vehicle where you drive it from up above,

you can get the camera down, and we used a similar situation.

And in this instance, we bolted a platform,

which is about, as I said, six inches off the ground,

we're going 50 miles an hour, and Jason Statham jumped out of the window,

down on that platform.

He could've fallen off, I could've lost my star,

but he insisted,

and when he goes out that window, you see it's him

and you know we're traveling fast.

- Come on! -Good. Let's go, let's go!

You see that Jason's bloody here,

and you see Wendell Pierce's ear is blown off.

When you get shot in the head, it's where the most blood comes out,

and we tried to be realistic on the makeup side of this.

I think it's important to be realistic.

Now, in this sequence right here, you have Billy Slaughter again,

he's now being interviewed by the State Highway Patrol of Ohio,

as you would as a victim of a crime.

But because he was treated well,

you see that he just doesn't tell exactly what happened.

You see that he just doesn't tell exactly what happened.

He has a sense of debt to Parker.

And I think that's one of the elements that is wonderful in the picture.

You see that Parker, what he does, he's smart,

and in the long run, it accrues to his benefit.

Now, in this sequence, you have a farmer, Earl Maddox,

and his wife and family. Earl Maddox is the actor

who comes along, he's a Louisiana actor again.

And you see him come along here and this family finds Parker.

They are Good Samaritans.

They grab him, he's got his boys, pick him up, and out of that,

Parker, we think he may be dead, you flashback as Parker at a certain point,

where he's incoherent.

I hope you would think that he would think back to the best parts of his life.

And we understand the relationship with Claire.

Claire, who is Hurley's daughter, his mentor's daughter,

but at the same time, his lover.

And in this moment, you see that she was an ER nurse.

She knows what he does.

She's versed in the fact that

if her father was a criminal and he's a criminal, she comes from that world.

Which, with very little information, hopefully you get that

and how important she is to him.

And in this moment, you end up by seeing the farmer and his family

taking him to the hospital.

And he now realizes that he's not the 100% man

that he was at the beginning of the film.

He wakes up in the hospital and, of course, in this moment,

he is really, really hurt.

I think that in this instance, when you are making a film like this,

nobody acts alone.

And what you end up needing are character actors.

Now this is Mr. Quinn.

He is a man who is the roommate in the hospital of Parker.

Again, a flashback. I've changed, I've turned the flashback up here,

made it a little darker.

It's not as blossomy as before. It's a dark moment.

Again, it's entirely different than the look of the film.

You have something different,

so when you're flashing back, you know it's the past.

And in this instance, Mr. Quinn, who's played by James Carraway,

is somebody you wanna look at as terminal.

He's sitting there, he's been warehoused until he dies.

He's a very normal little man sitting there who is not used to this,

and he's terrified. He sees this, he doesn't know quite what to figure.

He's had a tracheotomy.

He's gotta speak with one of those devices.

And you hear the amplification of that device.

We got a real device and matched the sound.

I thought James was fantastic here as Mr. Quinn.

You just see that he's so distressed.

And now he can't believe it, he's terrified. He tries to call for the nurse.

He's not heard very much with this little device.

And he's literally stunned, he's in shock

watching this guy, he thinks, die in front of his eyes.

Parker, of course, is smart enough to put the right amount of pressure on

to make him pass out.

Mr. Quinn thinks he's dead, but he says no.

He puts the heart monitor on. You look and you know he's still breathing.

And of course, Mr. Quinn is, "Praise the Lord."

He has no idea, he's totally confused.

You know, you put Parker in a situation like this and you see

how industrious, how brilliant he is at getting himself out of situations.

It isn't that he's brilliant and comes up with a plan, he just acts. Parker acts.

He has to, because he sees the Ohio State Troopers have come to Kentucky,

they've heard that there is a guy that was found,

he matches, maybe, a description.

Whatever it is, Parker's got to get out of this hospital.

And he takes the intern's clothes, he takes Mr. Quinn out,

he forms a relationship, and then you see...

There's a little laugh when he takes it away at the nurses' station,

but he gives him back his microphone.

He's basically saying, as he did before,

"If you just help me out of here, nothing will happen, you'll be fine."

He is a man of his word.

And in the end, in this little exchange,

I was going for something here.

Parker does the whole thing.

He looks at this man and says, "We shared this moment."

And looking at Mr. Quinn, he's there saying,

"I'm gonna go back in there. Nobody's gonna care about me.

"I've just had this moment of excitement in my life."

Parker has touched him, in a way.

Again, Parker knows enough, you know, there's an EMS vehicle, they just pulled up...

The emergency guys took the stretcher inside,

Parker goes in, the keys are there.

If you look, he has now gone out into the forest.

These are sequences that I added to the film that you need to see,

you need to see how Parker takes care of himself.

He goes in, he finds the kit of drugs,

he finds this small caliber gun, a .22 caliber gun.

By the way, many, many EMS vehicle drivers have guns in the car,

because they go into the worst neighborhoods.

This is not like a convenience, it is in fact the truth.

Again, final sequence, it's blown out.

It's a flashback, and you know it's a flashback.

But now you see Parker laying down to heal himself,

and now you see him with about a two and a half week old beard,

maybe a three week old beard.

Jason had been fairly clean-shaven before, now look at that beard.

That tells you, if you're watching,

that time has passed, that he has healed himself.

He's not 100%,

but he is definitely able to get back into...

You see he is still wearing his bandages.

He's able to get himself back into

what his purpose is, which is to go after these guys.

And he's taking care of getting himself new clothes,

he finds another gun, a .45.

He shaves. He's got himself now down, so he's clean-shaven mostly,

and he has a mustache.

He's changed his look. He's put on the hunter's outfits that he just found.

This was a downpour that was happening in Louisiana we took advantage of.

He walks out until he finds a car that's open.

He knows how to hotwire a car.

And this starts a sequence that he goes through.

And I wanna talk about the music,

because David Buckley is a young composer.

He had worked with some very good people,

Harry Gregson-Williams before, as his mentor.

But you start a guitar theme right here.

This score has themes throughout.

This score has themes throughout.

At the very beginning of the film when Parker first walks in as the priest and we see him,

you hear an electronic trumpet, that's Parker's sound.

This guitar, this funk guitar that you hear,

which has a certain groove when he steals a car, is important.

This sequence right here is important.

You saw him find two guns, the small gun in the EMS vehicle when he got it,

and the .45 he sees at the hunter's.

Right now, he needs money and there's a check-cashing place.

He chooses the gun specifically.

Why would he chose the little gun instead of the big gun?

It doesn't make any sense until you see this.

He knows this guy's wearing a bulletproof vest.

And he's right in the middle of the street, a parking lot.

There's a coffee shop right inside there.

He takes the small caliber gun because,

number one, he knows how to disarm this guy.

This actor's named John Eyes. He's a New Orleans actor. Very, very good.

But you see he's much bigger than Jason Statham.

And at the same time, he's carrying a Glock.

He outweighs him. He's outgunned him.

But Parker knows how to use it.

And as he says, "The first one is in your thigh,"

and he shoots him in the fleshy part of the thigh

so he's not gonna make him bleed out.

He knows he's just trying to get control.

He says that, "The next one will be in your eye."

And Jack understands that he's dealing with a professional,

he's dealing with somebody real.

Now, in this instance, this actor right here is my son,

who is an actor in New Orleans and bar owner,

and I gave him a role.

And in this particular instance, he's the partner.

He plays Oliver, the partner who listens to Jack,

and, of course, Parker's got the drop on both of them.

And in this instance, Jack is as much an accomplice here

'cause he realizes, "Don't mess around, Oliver, this guy's for real."

And you also see Parker's picking up...

Of course, I had fun with this, my son gets his mouth taped here.

But in reality, you see that what they've got is Parker's picking up money

and he's picking up more guns.

Every place he goes, he's totally efficient.

He's driving that old car, he looks across,

"That's the car I came in. It's time for me to change cars."

And if you listen to the score, all of a sudden,

you're gonna start to hear that guitar again.

And again, here he is. This is his car-stealing theme that David Buckley did so wonderfully.

And he's off, and now he's in Texas. He's in Houston, Texas.

Hey! Come on in, sefior.

We shot this in New Orleans,

but I shot it down in a canal, an industrial area canal

that exists on the Westbank.

The Westbank of New Orleans is not what you know

from the French Quarter and all that beautiful architecture.

The Westbank is where the industrial section is.

And look at this location,

this is a real binding company, a book binding company.

It's fantastic.

And again, my location scout, he's a guy named Jimmy Trotter.

Jimmy is a fantastic scout for New Orleans.

He found a lot of locations for me in Ray and I came back to him on this film.

And then I have a different location manager, Dana Hanby.

Again, you use the people from your past.

This is Carlos Carrasco,

who's playing Norte in this film.

And I'll explain later when I go back who Carlos Carrasco is from my past.

You're jumping around here, you're seeing Parker take care of business.

He needs an ID. He needs to get a new driver's license.

He needs a new identity.

He steals the money, he finds the clothes,

he then gets the money he steals, he now goes and gets a license.

And now he makes contact with Nick Nolte.

Again, the Westbank. You see that motel in the background?

We didn't paint that motel, it's what exists.

You've got that yellow and blue, and that really bright safety yellow in the foreground.

There is production design in this picture.

The first part is very harsh, criminal, austere,

and I used the Westbank much more than I used New Orleans. You don't see it.

That looks like Houston. Believe me, that looks just like Houston

because there's a lot of oil business in Louisiana also.

You establish in this sequence what is really going on.

You hear the name Danzinger.

Nick Nolte says, "Danzinger and Hardwicke."

Now, when you first go to the Ohio State Fair and when you're first at the barbecue,

you see three guys who are older,

Michael Chiklis, Wendell Pierce and Clifton Collins.

They're pros, they work together.

There's this young punk with them,

who is Hardwicke, who's played by Micah Hauptman.

Micah's a wonderful actor. He got a nice break in this film.

But he doesn't belong. He's there because his uncle is in the mafia.

They, if they're gonna do their big score, need a fence.

They need somebody to fence a bunch of jewelry, which is gonna be coming up here.

And ultimately, what Hardwicke is is a connective,

And ultimately, what Hardwicke is is a connective,

and he is gonna fence and get them 20 cents on the dollar instead of 10 cents.

You see it in the early scene

when he says, "Jewels," and he says, "That's 10 cents on the dollar."

"it's not worth it," and he says, "No, I'm getting 20."

Well, if you're doing a big score, that's it.

Now we're in New Orleans

because we've just heard that Hardwicke's brother runs a club.

This is my son's club in New Orleans.

It's called One Eyed Jacks. It's one of the best music clubs in New Orleans.

I wanted to get a feel for what New Orleans is really like.

If this was on Bourbon Street, and it's tradition on Bourbon Street,

all those clubs are owned by the mafia.

Usually the Bourbon Street clubs have been owned by the Sicilian mafia

since the inception of...

Well, not the inception of New Orleans, but for the last 50 years.

So the idea of coming here, using a bar and saying that it's run by the mob

is not that far from reality.

What this is about is how Parker goes about getting his information.

He doesn't know where they went, he needs to find out where they went.

And he goes to see the brother, Bobby Hardwicke, played by Kirk Baltz.

Out. Private.

Now, Kirk's a fabulous actor. He's an acting teacher.

He's been in a lot of movies. But he just was fantastic in this.

He's in an instance here where you realize he's a real scumbag,

but he's the real deal.

His brother is really not a made man, but you can bet Kirk is.

And Bobby Hardwicke, underneath this chair, you get a real sense of Parker.

...connected I am, chief?

They took money that belongs to me.

In this instance, Bobby Hardwicke can't believe that this guy is walking into his club,

a made mafia man, and what's gonna happen.

And I think Kirk was great being able to do this.

Also, Jason's fantastic here, because you take a moment and you take a bar stool,

and you realize how he can, in fact, work through

to get the information he needs. He could kill this guy.

In fact, by the end of the scene, he might kill him,

because he knows that if he gets the information he needs,

he can't leave him alive because they'll know he's around.

And that's why, at the end of the scene,

one, he waits and gets the information. "Florida."

And now we bring somebody up. He sees the first guy who got hit.

He comes into the scene.

And Parker wants to find out where, and he finds out it's Palm Beach.

So now he's got his information,

and just before he probably was gonna kill Bobby Hardwicke,

a guy comes in and interrupts his plan.

This is important, because by doing it...

See, I think it's important, Parker is capable of killing somebody,

and certainly a bad guy like this.

But in this instance, his plan is foiled by circumstance.

He gets out and he gets away.

And you see how smart he is.

By the way, this rock and roll band right here is called Dax Riggs.

They're from Austin, they were originally from Louisiana,

and I think they're terrific and I put them in the sequence.

And you go from all that cacophony and that music playing through that sequence

to dead silence here.

Because Claire is alone, she's vulnerable, she's sleeping,

and she's got her phone turned off.

And right when Parker knows, "I left this guy alive,

"the word's gonna go out, there's danger here.

"I need to let my loved ones know

"that things are gonna be a little bit testy now, they're gonna be difficult.

"They may be really dangerous."

He calls Claire, leaves the message, and he calls Hurley,

'cause he's letting Hurley know, "Hey, things have not gone according to plan."

But what does he say?

He doesn't know if the phone is going to be tapped or what,

so he's giving a piece of information.

I love Nick Nolte. He lays there, he's sleeping, he listens,

his eyes open. If you look at that sequence again, look at his eyes open.

And as Parker walks away, he's walking away in New Orleans.

And that is back at the Cabildo,

where there is a statue of Jesus. They call him "Touchdown Jesus"

because his arms are raised and they have a light that goes,

and he's reflected on the back of the cathedral.

And I know New Orleans very well, and I wanted to have Touchdown Jesus in the film.

Anybody from New Orleans that sees it, knows.

Now we jump to Palm Beach.

And we're going into a completely different color scheme in the film.

As you notice, that austere, kind of harsh, criminal reality

is now changed to the green of Palm Beach,

the blue of the water

and the interior of Ascension Cienfuegos' condo.

This is a Cuban woman and her Cuban daughter,

Patti Lupone and Jennifer Lopez.

And if you spend any time in Florida,

you know that Miami's the capital of South America.

There's all the Cubans, and now there's Colombians,

and there's people from all parts of South America.

And it's worked its way up the coast.

Palm Beach has a huge population of Latinos.

Everybody working in all the hotels are Latino.

And I wanted to change the nature of what was in the book.

Leslie and her mother were wonderful characters,

these characters are just like them, but they weren't Cuban.

And I made them Cuban because I thought that was more realistic

and also got fabulous actors to play the role.

Simultaneous in West Palm Beach, they live,

across the bridges is this enclave of Palm Beach

which is very unique, and we're going to discover it in this.

Donald Westlake understood it.

And across in Palm Beach, you find the criminals.

The guys that screwed over Parker.

Double-crossed him, took all the score, and what they did

was they came to Palm Beach and they bought a house.

Their heist is gonna be in Palm Beach.

And this was Donald Westlake's conceit in the Flashfire book.

These guys know that Palm Beach is one of the most impregnable places,

there's more billionaires per square foot

than any place else in the United States, they like to say.

And nobody stands a chance of ever ripping them off,

because they've got seven or eight policemen for every resident,

they've got drawbridges, they've got... It's impossible.

These guys come up with a plan to buy a house,

not rent a house, because... Buy a house, they're gonna...

And they need to get the low-end of Palm Beach,

but I was able to find a place that exactly matched this place.

My problem was that Palm Beach

would not let people shoot there, they have an ordinance against it.

They don't want Hollywood there.

So I'll tell you later how we worked through that.

But you see in this instance,

you see this house in Palm Beach and you see they're holed up.

They say they're gonna renovate, they're just hiding inside.

Now we're back in southern New Jersey where Hurley lived and where Parker lives.

That brick house is synonymous with the architecture of the Northeast,

except there's a section in New Orleans where you have houses like this.

So I was able to try to make it work for New Jersey.

And hopefully it works.

Hurley has been informed, he's gone to his daughter,

he's telling her to get packed, we're gonna go up to the mountains,

we're gonna lay low because Parker has warned us.

And Claire is concerned and she's concerned about him.

And think about the shock in their lives, I don't think this has ever happened.

But you've got the father going for his second wife,

his... Claire's stepmom.

He's coming back in a moment,

he thinks they've got about 24 hours before the word gets out.

Unfortunately, that's not the case.

And what I'm doing is setting up the sequence here

where, number one, we introduce the assassin, Kroll.

He has been hired by Danzinger in Chicago to get to the bottom of this and find Parker.

Parker has come in and tried to kill Bobby Hardwicke.

He knows that Parker is now going to go after the guys

and maybe blow the whole thing that's gonna happen in Palm Beach,

and he sent an assassin, a hit man, to take Parker out.

This man, you got to figure that the mafia's pretty smart.

And Parker thinks he's hidden from everybody,

well, everybody's willing to give somebody up.

And ultimately, they found out where Hurley and Parker live in Southern New Jersey,

and ultimately, they send him.

And in this instance, you see a home invasion.

You see this guy, his MO is that he's an assassin and he uses that knife.

I thought instead of just having everybody with a gun,

he works quietly, he works efficiently

and he works in an incredibly deadly way.

The actor who I cast in this instance is Daniel Bernhardt.

He's originally from Switzerland, lives in the United States a long time,

and he is an action star.

He has made a number of movies he starred in, in Asia.

He's an incredibly good fighter,

martial arts fighter.

And in this instance, you see him come in very efficiently.

There's one little creak that you hear of a door,

and he's now looking for her.

She's coming... The important part of this sequence is,

Parker has drilled Claire in what to do.

He has a ladder in case there's a home invasion, a rope ladder.

She's gone out the window.

She knows what to do, you see her get a knife

and you think, "What the hell can she do against this guy?"

Well, she's not gonna fight him, she's gonna stab his tire,

make it so he can't follow her, and she gets away.

Now you understand that Claire and Parker, they've worked things out.

But Claire is clearly freaked.

And Emma Booth, who is from Australia,

and a wonderful girl and a wonderful actress,

but didn't drive. So we were in a situation where she didn't have her driver's license.

We're in this sequence, and she's driving this car and I've got it mounted.

And I want her to be hysterical in the car and drive around.

So in this instance, what can you do? She did a wonderful job.

But she's free-driving and acting, too.

It was very difficult when she was not versed in...

I'm in the backseat, on the floor, talking to her, with a monitor, watching.

Jason is at this verge of the 10...

That wonderful moment in Louisiana

where those two freeways go overtop, and they converge in the background.

Where those two freeways go overtop, and they converge in the background.

I tried to give this film style,

but again, we're going from that austere, almost monochromatic look,

to back to Florida, and you can see the water's aqua blue,

the sky is blue, all the architecture is pastel.

You're walking... Now, again, this absolutely fits Palm Beach,

but believe it or not, it's on the Westbank of New Orleans.

There was a guy who had a house in Florida, loved it,

and put a shopping center complete with palm trees.

And look at the painting.

Absolutely in the colors of Palm Beach.

We needed to shoot as much as we possibly could in New Orleans,

and people like Jimmy Trotter who really know the place said,

"I can make Palm Beach work." And he did.

He gave me this sequence and this shopping center,

everything around it looks like industrial New Orleans.

But it looks like...

See, this is the canal I talked about.

This is Houston.

Although it's in the Westbank of New Orleans.

It looks like Houston.

And you saw that we've jumped from

a little flashback of Florida, he was trying to tell Leslie's story

and bring them together.

And in this instance, we're going back to Houston, he wants his ID,

and he knows that he's blown it with Bobby Hardwicke, that the word is out.

So he's driving up, he sees all the employees leaving,

somebody has just invaded their place and the guy waves him off.

He comes in the back way.

I mentioned earlier Carlos Carrasco who plays Norte.

I have a history with Carlos

because he was one of the actors in Blood In, Blood Out,

which is a chicane gangster picture.

It was also called Bound by Honor, but it's Blood In, Blood Out to me.

A Chicano gangster picture I made

which takes place in San Quentin and East Los Angeles.

I made this film in the '90s.

And Carlos played a character named Popeye,

part of a prison gang,

and he was wonderful, and anybody who's ever seen Blood In, Blood Out,

most chavalitos, most chicanes

in the barrios of the United States, actually, have seen it.

And so I brought him back here to play Norte,

this Texas documents expert.

And it is a wonderful sequence here between Carlos Carrasco and Jason Statham

because you really believe he's a gangster.

And at the same time, he's smart.

And at the same time, there's a sequence here which is very Parker-esque.

There's a little humor in it. "I'm like Sweden."

And Parker says,

"You mean, 'Like Switzerland."' The audience laughs at this.

The wonderful thing about Westlake is that he would

have Parker be a man of very few words.

But there's moments within it where you have to laugh.

Hopefully, the humor is behavioral, not one-liners.

But in this instance, you see what Parker's capable of

and what Jason Statham's capable of.

You see him outside put his gun backwards, he has an extra gun,

he puts it backwards, he walks in,

bodyguard checks him for one gun, doesn't check him for everything.

And he's thought of it in advance.

He's going in the end, they're going to get the drop on him,

he knows how to get out of a situation.

And in that moment, there's a syncopation to the action.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, as you go back and look at it.

You can almost hear the syncopation of him knocking the gun out,

you know, moving around, hitting him, and that's all Statham.

He's fantastic, it's a ballet.

And I tried to make the percussion like the music to a ballet.

In this instance, you also see the pragmatism of Parker.

He is having Norte kill these guys from Chicago,

who we know were there to kill him.

Because you hear them outside saying, "You're gonna be dead like Parker."

These are bad guys.

And in this instance, Parker has Norte kill them.

He now ultimately takes the gun, and he's letting Norte know

that if he doesn't get rid of these bodies,

he's implicated, he's already implicated.

And this is how he uses a situation.

Parker is very efficient, and I think Jason's wonderful in this scene.

You may like it, you may not like it.

This is a crime drama, and it's a literary figure.

This comes right out of Donald Westlake.

He looks at a situation, you don't know what he's gonna do.

When he acts, you're not even aware of why.

Why did he put that gun in his belt?

These are all things I visually tried to do that I think were inherent in Westlake's book.

Now we're back on the Westbank of New Orleans.

And this is the Mississippi River in the background.

There is a gigantic grain silo.

It's a place that huge ships pull up to, and they put grain across.

Those things that crisscross up above

go out and deliver grain from the silo right onto the ship.

They fill huge tankers up and ship it all over the world.

This was a fantastic industrial site.

And I wanted to say that when Hurley and Parker get together,

they choose someplace where they can't be bugged.

No one's gonna be around, but also, there's a visual splendor to it.

It's industrial, yes.

But it's big and it's interesting.

And it's an intimate scene between two men, but look at the backgrounds.

In this instance, you watch Parker walk away, look at that silo behind.

I mean, I love this sequence, and again,

it's part of what the design of Parker is.

This is a real sequence shot in a real location.

I've got two actors out there, look at the Mississippi in the background.

I've got five cameras going long.

We didn't have a lot of time to shoot this, we just went for it.

But you get, in every frame, some interesting backdrop.

And I think when you make a crime movie, you want to have a design.

My design is, this part of the film is criminal. Look at that. I love that.

And those birds just coming through. This is all real.

And I think that in this instance,

you go from this, you're going to Florida.

And you see the criminal, downscale,

rusted environment that has gone all the way through the first part of the picture,

and then you see where we're going in the second half of the picture.

You're going to Florida, which has a very, very different look.

This moment, this is where Parker lays out his credo.

And he's angry. He's angry because his mentor is trying to buy him off.

He won't be bought off.

And when it comes down to it, when Nolte realizes,

"This is what I taught him. Yeah, nobody likes chaos."

And then, they've been through their moment of anger, and now...

What if you bought a house?

He realizes, "I taught this guy well."

What if they bought a house, he's finally figured it out.

In the car, Wendell Pierce says, "And that's just for the house. All right?"

He's heard from Bobby Hardwicke, "Palm Beach,"

and now he realizes what's going on.

All right, I said we'd jump to Florida,

and the color scheme would change, and you can see.

You go from that austere, rusted look,

and now you're in Florida,

and you're saturated and everything is pastels,

even the folders in the background.

You're in a different environment,

and if you've been to Palm Beach, you know that this is real.

Now this location, by the way, is still back in... It's another place.

You see the palm trees out the window?

This interior is in New Orleans. I had to use it as much as possible.

But it's still in that place that had that Florida decor and theme.

But the exteriors we're gonna see now are all Florida.

And what you do is you make your art and your design match.

Everything from this point on is gonna be Florida.

And what we're talking about here is the ingenuity of Leslie and her desperation.

You see where she's living,

you see her mother say, "I'm not gonna loan you any more money."

This is the ultimate indignity of a woman pushing 40 who's got such a financial...

She's so strapped financially.

She's had the ultimate indignity, she's got to move back in with her mother.

And she's a junior, junior salesperson.

And here, Amber, who is the go-getter, the shark of the place,

no way she's gonna get...

Look at Amber. She can smell...

I love that.

Amber can smell that this woman is ambitious,

and no way she's gonna let her near one of her prospects.

But Leslie is larcenous.

And I think you want to see her desperation.

You wanna see why she is, in fact,

going to be a really good partner for Parker.

But we don't know that yet.

At this moment, all we see is that she is needy,

she doesn't have any money.

She says, "If I don't make a sale soon, I'm screwed."

You get all these little hints.

And now she steals Amber's prospect,

this guy from Texas that we've heard about.

We saw the name written and we hear it, Mr. Parmitt.

And now we're gonna meet Mr. Parmitt.

This is, by the way, the Boca Resort, which is in Boca Raton,

a very famous hotel.

And she comes in. "Mr. Parmitt?" That's the interior of the Boca.

And now we see that Parker has taken on a disguise

as the rich Texas oilman,

Daniel Parmitt.

Now, that's Palm Beach we're looking at.

My second unit director, Ray Prado,

who shot a lot of the rides at the beginning of the Ohio State Fair

and here, did a lot of the big aerial shots we had.

You work with people that you really trust and use.

I have two second unit directors here. I'll talk about Dave Leitch later.

But Ray Prado is my colleague. I've worked with him on many films.

When you need extra shots, and you do need it in the editing room,

you are so pressured budget-wise... We were here.

I had him shoot some things while we're going along.

This is Worth Avenue.

Worth Avenue is like Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue, New York.

It is the ultimate shopping street.

Every major exclusive retailer has a place on Worth Avenue.

And we did shoot in Palm Beach.

I told you, and I'm gonna tell you a little bit later about how difficult it was.

They don't allow shooting.

I was able to get around those things, and I'll explain why.

Now we're back, and we're going to Lake Okeechobee.

He says, "I'm going to Lake Okeechobee,"

which is about 80 miles, 60 to 80 miles from Palm Beach in the interior of Florida.

Well, I couldn't go to Lake Okeechobee, I could only shoot in Florida briefly.

So where did we go? We went to Louisiana back there.

The look is exactly like Lake Okeechobee.

You see the moss hanging from the trees.

This is a fabulous fish camp, again, that Jimmy Trotter found for me

and Dana Hanby managed for me.

Missy Stewart was helped immeasurably

by these location scouts that work into our design.

And then inside, Missy and Maria dressed this

to be the place that Parker and Claire have, their fish shack.

There's important moments here, these little scenes.

You want to be able to see and understand what their relationship is.

You know, he's got these hideaways and...

Actually, this place is very romantic, you can see.

He shows up, they've made love,

and now they really have to talk about the seriousness of what's going on.

And she's freaked.

She's grown up with thieves, but not with murderers,

and what's gonna happen?

I think Emma was very, very good here.

She's showing her love by her concern.

And he loves her. He's basically saying, "You can leave."

I think Jason was also very good here.

And she looks at him like, "How could you ask me to leave?"

Look at her.

But you don't know, maybe she will.

Maybe the smart thing to do is to get out now.

Maybe the smart thing to do is to get out now.

A cut back and now we're in Florida.

This house is not in Palm Beach, it's down the coast a little ways.

But I was shown it by a Palm Beach realtor.

And it's unbelievable. This is an ltalianate villa

that just knocks your eyes out.

It was recently built,

but extraordinary, extraordinary grandeur.

And I use it as a house in Palm Beach.

It certainly fits.

But you can see. Look at Parker's suit. Look at her colors. Look at the blue water.

This is Florida. Look at the green of it all.

This is Florida.

And you now see the lushness of Palm Beach

in comparison with the places we were before.

Parker is, in fact, in a different world, he's impersonating this Texan.

And, of course, Leslie's looking at him.

You're hearing a little bit about her back story.

She's been strapped.

She's driving him around, looking at him and saying, "This guy is...

"You know, he's single? It's too good to be true."

And as she's going with him and he's saying, "These houses are too pricey,"

she takes him to a more downscale neighborhood of Palm Beach.

There are more downscale neighborhoods

where the houses are only a million and a half.

And, by the way, this house right here,

I did find a house in Palm Beach that was very similar to this.

Looked very similar.

And there are...

The problem is that people would buy a house like that,

rip it down and build a $10 million house on the lot,

because that's what's happened in Palm Beach.

But in this instance, I can say that I'm accurate.

What we're doing here is setting up where the crooks have bought.

And you see that Leslie is with him.

He's got this wonderful Bentley, he's got this convertible,

she's trying to find out something about him.

And you can tell that she's starting to say, "Something smells here.

"This guy looks too good to be true."

He's got this strange story,

and at the same time, she doesn't quite know what it is yet,

but she is starting to think. You can see the look...

And Jennifer is so wonderful.

I know Jennifer. We had developed a film together.

We had not worked together, however.

I called her and asked her to be in this film.

She's a major diva, a huge star.

And in reality, I know what a real person she is.

And I discovered what a great actress she is. She's really good.

I just think she's so real and delightful.

She has the desperation of Leslie,

and at the same time, what Leslie and Jennifer share in common,

they never give up.

I don't care where, the lumps they take, they're never about to give up.

The secret to Jennifer is that she was a dancer,

and dancers, they just work, work, work.

I have a huge amount of respect for her,

and I had a lot of fun working with her on this film.

Now, Parker is upstairs at the Boca Resort.

You see that Leslie was a means to an end.

He found the house where the crooks are, or he thinks he does,

and now he is gonna think about what to do.

The Boca is in a fantastic location there.

It was built by Mizner, who was an incredibly important architect in Palm Beach.

And you see here, this fantastic view, that's Florida, that's the inland waterway.

The color, it just pops.

And you now see... Look at that, that's an insert. That's Parker looking at...

Everything is real there, that's not special effects.

Again, Leslie, who has been kind of dumped by him...

You're back. Look at the color here. Look at Ascension's apartment.

Maria Nay and Missy Stewart

ended up making this place really feel like this Cuban environment.

Now, Leslie is not somebody to give up.

She realizes she's been shut down,

she says, "Wait a minute, this guy is strange. Let me check in to him.

"He says he owns all these houses.

"Wait a minute, he doesn't have any mortgages. What's going on?"

Now she checks to see what his employment is.

She's checking who is this guy, Daniel Parmitt.

There it is, Parmitt Petroleum, that makes sense, in Ecuador.

All right, he's gonna have credit cards, right?

This is Leslie, she's really industrious.

No activity. That means he doesn't have credit cards? What's going on?

And in the process of her checking,

she ends up by seeing... Oh, my God.

You wanna say that she's up against it, she's strapped.

Her Mazda is being repossessed.

She is in debt to buy her clothes, she has to lease her car,

everything is to try to sell this place. She can't get a commission.

And she's gonna be doomed forever to live with her mother.

You wanna show her desperation here.

In this instance, you've got this little dog that she hates,

and she's gonna stay home and babysit.

And then she says, "Well, maybe we won't do that.

"You can come play cards with the girls, all the retired girls."

Look at Jennifer. It's like, "Please, my life is a complete dead end."

And I love this relationship between Ascension and Leslie,

between Patti Lupone and Jennifer Lopez.

They're two very strong women, they're having a horrible time living together.

But you know there's love there.

This is an overbearing Cuban mother.

But at the same time, you can feel it.

And then a moment like that, which is non-verbal,

you get it, with that hand on the shoulder.

You get it, with that hand on the shoulder.

Again, we're shooting in Florida, those skies...

Only in Florida do you get skies like that with water like that.

We shot at dusk. I don't have a lot of time here,

and what we're doing is, we're jumping from there to Louisiana.

That was Florida to Louisiana.

And here, we're coming up, and we're in Louisiana.

You know, the fact is that, as I told you,

I have the look of the house, I matched to make sure that it's accurate.

They have a house like that in Palm Beach.

But I had to shoot in Louisiana,

because we had to spend as much time there as possible

to get the tax incentive so that we could actually make our budget.

And I think that in this instance, you are seeing Parker in his ingenuity.

He's come in the back,

he's come up the inland waterway.

He's come around and he sees them in there, and they are going stir-crazy.

They've been eating beans every night,

with Michael Chiklis cooking.

And they said, "Enough is enough, we want some pizza."

And Parker happens to be there at the right time.

Now, that's Jason Statham.

He just went under that door.

You see he went under it just in the right amount of time.

He's like a ballet dancer.

He really knows what he's doing, and it's a joy to work with him.

What he's able to portray here is Parker's efficiency.

He's coming in, he knows the crooks are gone.

The clock is ticking, they're gonna go down there.

But he's got to find what they're up to, where they're going.

He sees some blueprints, but he doesn't know where that is.

He realizes that there's gonna be a heist

and they're gonna use this house. Now he knows that they bought the house.

When Wendell Pierce in the car says, "And that's just for the house."

The million dollars. Now everything makes sense.

You see how Parker's put it together.

And in this instance, he's thinking,

"I'm gonna be in this house. I'm coming back here.

"Who knows if they're going to get the drop on me?"

You saw what he did with Norte. Here, he plants a couple of guns.

This comes right out of Donald Westlake.

This is how he had Parker think.

You got the guys here, they're talking about the fact

that Danzinger is already going to take care of finding Parker.

And we see that Kroll has caught up with Norte.

And he caught up with him, and what you wanna be able to see

is how vicious Kroll is.

In that little sequence, you see what he's capable of.

You saw that what... If he found Claire, as Parker says,

"They wouldn't have killed you, they would have waited."

And then when he found them both, he would have killed them both.

But you know what Kroll's capable of, I wanted to be able to see that.

Now Parker goes out to the garage,

he's looking around and he finds a box. He finds their arsenal.

They would ship their guns in the back of the car.

He finds it, he doesn't go in the top, he doesn't break the lock off.

He finds the tool, he comes in the bottom, he pulls it up.

And he looks and he finds their guns.

And you see him doing something here, you don't quite know what.

But while he's doing it and while he's in the middle of all this,

you see the crooks coming back from the pizza parlor with the pizzas.

They're going to eat it at home.

And Parker is trying to put everything back,

and of course, you get a nice little film sequence here,

where he is caught.

They've opened the door in advance, as you can with those remotes.

The garage door's going up, you hear it, you see the guys coming.

He's trying to get the lid on and get out of there in time, and here comes the car.

And of course, now he's getting down to the point at the end,

and the car's coming up the driveway.

He's gonna get caught, absolutely, there it is.

Boom! The lights hit and he's not there.

Hopefully, you've created a sequence

that the audience gets their heart going a little bit.

It's fun, it's cinematic, it is what it is.

But in this instance, Parker is smart.

He's waited, he sees that.

The great thing about Parker is, that he's able to literally

ballet dance through these situations.

Look at the door close.

And just as the door closes, Jason rolls under it.

And he's back out to go to the car, which we saw him drive up in before.

And again, that's New Orleans.

And we come around, that's Florida.

He comes out and what does he see? Someone's in his car.

And the idea is, what's going on here, and who could that possibly be?

If you're free, maybe we can go for that drink now.

Leslie's on to him, she's learned that he's not who he says he is,

and she's decided to confront him,

which isn't very smart, honestly.

If you see somebody like this, you know he's dangerous, and this proves it.

You know, Mr. Crenshaw usually keeps a nice bottle...

When I ask you a question, you need to answer.

You're hurting my neck!

Who knows you're here, Leslie?

No one, okay? No one!

What I wanted to do was see Parker in this instance, what he's doing.

He is fully capable of killing.

He is fully capable of killing.

And in this instance, if she's a plant from the police, whoever she is,

he may want to take her back and get rid of her.

That's Parker. We can't always say he's a hero.

In this instance, he knows he's in trouble.

If she blows the whistle on him, he's finished.

But now Leslie is going for broke.

She is telling him that she knows, that she's uncovered who he is.

She knows that he is a phony.

And she is stepping out, I think she realizes, maybe not totally,

but she realizes she's playing with fire and she doesn't care.

Now, we're going to find out in a minute why she doesn't care.

But I think Jennifer's absolutely fantastic here.

And Jason keeps his Texas accent.

He lost it for a moment, if you notice, when he grabbed her hair.

And I believe that that's normal, he's affecting it.

When you do something like that, you might lose it.

But in this instance, he's trying to say... He keeps his Texas accent,

and why would it be...

And she's saying to him, "Wait a minute, why are we parking away from the building?"

That's Florida. See that banyan tree behind us? That's Florida.

That's Louisiana.

But it looks absolutely like Palm Beach. That's that shopping center I told you,

the guy from Florida built his homage to Florida on the Westbank.

And in this instance, you have this moment coming up again

between Parker and Leslie that I think is one of the keys to their relationship.

In this instance, we see that she is taking this huge risk.

She's confronting this guy, she doesn't know anything about him

except that he is a crook.

He's a liar, at least.

And in this instance, I want you to believe that Parker's looking around,

he's taken her back here, he may have to kill her.

And so you've got a moment where she's kind of just going to have to reveal herself.

She's gonna tell the truth about herself.

And ultimately, it's gonna lead to the fact that she doesn't care.

What's her life?

Her life is this. And you see Jennifer going for it.

And you see Parker evaluating her.

I'm sick of chauffeuring these fucking entitled

wannabe playboys who have never worked a day in their life.

Showing them houses that I could never afford.

That's a beautiful woman.

Jimmy Muro used real light here.

Just to give it to her.

You want the darkness and the feeling, but the drama of it.

But I think her monologue here was fantastic.

John McLaughlin wrote it, he wanted to have her kind of go for broke.

It was the second take. She just was fantastic.

So here it is right now.

"If you're going to kill me, go ahead, 'cause I've seen a snapshot of my future,"

and she doesn't like it. And in this instance, it's called,

she has to convince this guy that she is serious.

And Parker can't believe it. "Help me," and now she makes good on it.

She is basically saying that the people here are smart.

They didn't get to be billionaires for nothing.

And in this instance, if I can find you out, they'll easily find you out.

So you need me. And you can see him evaluate her.

So this is a sequence coming up that is a striptease.

It is what it is. Jennifer Lopez is a beautiful woman.

She has an incredible body.

And inevitably, it's not so bad to look at it.

However, there is a reason.

Again, this isn't something we created for the film,

this is what Donald Westlake wrote in the book,

although he had Parker have her take all of her clothes off.

In this instance, listen to David Buckley's score.

He's scoring every little moment in this and the tension of the moment.

And she's talking a mile a minute to survive.

And I like this sequence because there's a lot of things going on.

It's not just her body.

It's her survival instinct.

And it's Parker evaluating her.

And what you want to be able to say

is that he's a businessman. He wants to look for the wire.

Is she wearing a wire or not?

But you know, meanwhile, not a bad view.

And Jennifer, of course... It's tough for an actress,

especially an actress who's been around for a while, to play this scene.

She's fantastic and she has the courage to do it,

and she acted her ass off in this scene.

Now, Parker's still business, "Lift your hair."

Is she hiding a mike under her hair? She doesn't know.

But the thing that's underlying all this is the sexual tension.

You know, he's looking down,

and who wouldn't be a little attracted to Jennifer Lopez?

So what is he gonna do? And what is she saying?

"Oh, my God. What is this?"

And again, if you read Westlake's book, Leslie goes for it.

She says, "Hey, I have a body. I'm not ashamed of it."

In this instance, Parker doesn't come on to her.

He's listened to what she's said,

and at the end of the sequence, he's gonna think about it.

Now, I love Jennifer's thing here.

It was her choice to drink all the wine.

And at the same time, this smile at the end, she was...

That was exciting, she liked it.

That was exciting, she liked it.

She's intrigued.

This is Palm Beach. This is one of the main drags.

That's Boca Raton over there, but that's Palm Beach.

And in this instance, I put Jason Statham here with a look from Giant.

The cowboy looking over the paper and the close look in the step frame there,

just to say that he's watching. He's aware of what's going on.

Again, the colors.

Jennifer dressed in Florida colors, the yellow of Palm Beach.

That's done in Louisiana,

in the Westbank of New Orleans.

But look at all the palm trees, everything fits, all the colors fit.

It's a way of making things work when you've got to split locations for a budget.

Bobby Cannavale here.

Bobby Cannavale, who you met earlier. He's a fabulous actor.

A really wonderful actor.

I offered him this small role, and thank God he decided to do it,

because you usually expect to see him in bigger roles.

But he's a fantastic actor. He knew Jennifer, and he was just terrific, terrific to work with.

He is Cuban, and there was an opportunity for him to go back to Florida.

He knows what this is all about.

You see him play Italians, you see him play various things, but he is Cuban.

This is One Ocean Avenue,

which is also owned by the people who own the Boca Resort.

And Jamie, who is the manager there, the developer there,

was really great to us,

as were the people of the Boca, to let us have these locations.

You see the power, the money,

the incredible elan of that area of Southern Florida.

Again, in this instance right now,

you see Leslie thinking, "Hey, that was lovely last night.

"You wanna check me for a wire again? You can if you want."

She's coming on to him.

And Jennifer did come on to him, and what's important here,

Parker does kind of go for it for a moment and then he pulls away.

"Let's stick to business. Strictly business."

And I think this is a key, again, to Parker.

One of the things that's interesting about this, and I'll talk about it later,

he is a one-woman man. You can trust Parker.

And I think women that see this movie like it.

There's Jennifer Lopez, ready for the taking.

And he's not about to take it.

I think women think that all men are dogs,

and they'll go for it if they're given the chance.

Parker doesn't. And I think that accrues to his benefit here.

Again, we're shooting for real.

We're out there, we're on that balcony.

Jennifer and Jason are doing their dialogue.

Jimmy Muro, my DP, who is, again, fantastic.

You would know him from Crash. That film won the Academy Award.

It was one of his first DP jobs, and now he works a lot.

In this film, every shot is handheld.

Almost, it's never...

The camera is never, never planted.

I wanted a sense that

since the very beginning, things are a little bit uneasy.

But it isn't waved all over the place so you know it.

There's style that hopefully you don't see but you feel.

We're out on this balcony, we're trying to grab things as quickly as we can.

I think both Jennifer and Jason are terrific.

Jason's being his Parker.

He's being clear, he's revealing to her they have a plan.

And when he finally reveals the truth of it, watch Jennifer's reaction.

Fifty to seventy-five million.

Mrs. Clendon's jewels?

Are you fucking kidding me? Forget it!

Now she's...

You see the recognition.

We don't know what it is, but she lets us know this is big.

And then Parker...

He basically says, "You can't leave, you're in."

He's basically looking at her, she's looking at him,

and in that moment, they form the partnership.

This is South County Road in Palm Beach.

I'm gonna explain to you now how it worked.

They said no, they wouldn't allow people to shoot in Palm Beach.

I went, I met every council member, I met the mayor, they wouldn't relent.

But Chuck Elderd, who is the Palm Beach County Film Commission,

and Bill and Ann Metzger, Bill is the head of the Palm Beach Film Institute,

they live on Palm Beach. Chuck doesn't, but Bill and Ann do.

They basically helped us.

This is the entrance right here to the Phipps Estate.

It's a brilliant, old-line place.

We were able to shoot because on the regular roads, they had to let us shoot.

Now, they wouldn't let me shoot an interior.

Donald Trump was gonna give me Mar-a-Iago,

the most famous big mansion, Margaret Merriweather Post's mansion.

The people of Palm Beach wouldn't let him.

So I went across Florida to Sarasota

where the John Ringling mansion is.

This is the interior of the John Ringling mansion, you'll see it.

Now it happens to match perfectly with

the era and the terracotta quality of Mar-a-Iago.

And this is what you have to do, you gotta try to make things work.

Even the people in Palm Beach,

they can see Palm Beach, they saw the exterior,

and now they see an interior, and it's not unlike a lot of great houses in Palm Beach.

So I believe, even though I had to stretch,

I made it all accurate, I made it work.

This again is Palm Beach. Look at that.

You've never seen so much clipped ficus in your life as in Palm Beach.

Jennifer and Jason are driving along.

They're driving along in Palm Beach. Again, we were able to use the roads there.

The Palm Beach Police Department were fantastically helpful

once they turned us down.

In a way, they had to turn us down.

And then, in a funny way, they helped.

You try to be polite, you try...

Ineverhed. I told them exactly what we were doing.

And, of course, I had all the cooperation I needed from Chuck Elderd

in West Palm Beach and across the bridge.

But you're on Palm Beach.

See, this is the back of the Phipps Estate.

This is in Palm Beach.

You see all that over there? You see this gate here?

This is all real.

Now, when I cut back,

that's Sarasota, that's the John Ringling mansion.

Look at it, it's perfect Palm Beach, and it's on the water.

But it's across Florida on the other coast.

He sees his guys there, he knows this is it.

Now this is The Breakers Hotel. This is the most famous hotel in Palm Beach.

Again, The Breakers refused to let us shoot there,

even though, in the book, Donald Westlake had The Breakers being the hotel.

So I used the Boca Resort.

It's a beautiful resort. It was also built by Mizner, the same architect.

I made it work. But I did get The Breakers in.

We're on a public road, I can shoot down and see The Breakers.

Now we're back at the Boca.

So you see, I am using Florida, I am using all the pastels,

I'm using the grandeur, the greenery is the same.

But you broker this into a look for the film

that may not be totally accurate, but ultimately, I think is.

Again, we are shooting in a suite at the Boca Resort,

28 floors high,

and Jason Statham is coming into the sequence.

I have a pan that starts, you see that the apartment is empty.

You see this shot of the watch. I have two of them in the film.

This was a product placement,

gave me enough money to afford to do my special effects,

'cause I had no budget. Sometimes you put things in like that.

Parker walks out here. That is the bay at the Boca Resort you're looking down at.

He walks in, everything is calm, there's no music,

boom, he's attacked.

And Kroll is there.

Now, what happens in this sequence, which I consider, again, a character sequence,

it's a fight. And it's, I think, a really good fight.

And I want to call attention in this instance,

I started a fight, I did a lot of stuff,

and then Dave Leitch, my second unit director on action,

did a great deal of the fight also. Give him credit.

And Mike Massa, the stunt coordinator, also.

But in this instance, you've got Jason Statham and you've got Daniel Bernhardt,

both of them are doing the fight.

These aren't stuntmen, these are the real guys.

Look. That's...

The great thing about this is,

I'm sick and tired of seeing 14 cuts in one second.

You cut to an actor's face going...

That's Jason Statham in there.

That's Jason Statham and this is Daniel Bernhardt, and they're both doing it.

Look. That's Jason's face.

So as they're doing all this... It's a horribly brutal fight.

I know it is and I want it to be.

I don't think violence should be fun and easy.

I think it should be real and...

And like I said, there's more blood from the head than any place else,

and you see it here.

However, you use a surprise.

That instance of Parker, ingenuity. He's getting beat, he's really been hit,

and he takes the top of the toilet, and he bashes this guy and he's gone,

and he wins the fight.

Again, Jason was fantastic in this instance.

I storyboarded this entire sequence.

It is what John wrote, you're gonna see some things that he did write.

But I have to visualize that and make it work, and that knife was very important.

You see Jason and how bloody he is? That's what happens.

If he was in that fight, that's how much you have.

And then surprising, coming from nowhere... You think he was dead, he's not.

Now this is a cinematic conceit, I realize.

But Kroll is one of those people you wanna believe.

And Parker, he's gonna lose.

And you see it happening, but Parker will do whatever he has to, to survive.

In this instance, he impales himself on a knife,

and gets the jump on Kroll and throws him over.

But Kroll, being an incredibly fit guy, grabs a hold.

And now we're into the last part.

I look at this fight in three acts.

The first fight, the knife through the hand part,

and now the part on the balcony.

And again, Dave Leitch did a lot of great work here.

I storyboarded the sequence, but I was moving around

and he ended up doing that fall with Mike Massa.

They did some terrific work here.

And again, Jason's fantastic. You see him...

Was he on wires hanging there? Yes.

But he was hanging 28 feet off the ground.

What Hollywood actor would do that?

All that stuff is incredibly difficult.

Again, now, here's Ray Prado.

Ray Prado goes out and shoots these shots day and night,

and I can use them for transition.

You don't have the time in your schedule.

It's how you use your second unit directors to be able to finish a sequence.

Even though, again, I've designed them, I've drawn them, this is what happens.

Sometimes, and I think it's important to say, you use many people on a crew.

And I want to give them credit.

Now you've got a situation where we're back in Ascension's condo,

and Leslie wakes up and Bobby Cannavale comes.

And in this instance, he's coming,

she's awakened in the morning, she has no idea what's going on,

but she hears that Parker, who she certainly knows

and has had a relationship with

and is now partners with, something happened, he was attacked.

And I want, again, a sequence here.

All the way through this, there's moments, visually, where something's happening

simultaneously with something else happening.

And Jake is sitting there, taking all the information down,

she looks at the torn screen,

she looks in the sink and sees there's blood,

and now she knows that Parker's been there.

He's asking about Parker and she realizes, "Oh, my God, where is he?"

Leslie is thinking.

She is completely trying to dance as fast as she can to see what's happening,

wondering what's going on, and then she sees Pipsy.

She can't stand...

And there's Pipsy putting bloody footprints on the floor.

And in that instance, she has to come up with some subterfuge.

She knocks the filters off, makes him bend down, wipes it up,

he looks at her very famous ass, Jennifer's ass, as she bends over.

He's caught up with that.

And she sees that Parker's inside.

She turns around and Jake here gets a little embarrassed,

'cause maybe she saw him looking at her ass.

And now you see Leslie.

I love this sequence, I love the fact that Leslie's thinking is...

She's panicked, but she's trying to keep it under,

and she is, again, dancing as fast as she can.

See that green wall in the background? That's Maria Nay, that's that Cuban look.

Everything... The parrot over her shoulder.

This is Palm Beach, the colors and all of that.

You see the design in ways.

And again, you see Parker back here, you see that pink wall and that green,

that's Palm Beach.

The colors are there for a reason, even the painting on the wall.

It's Latin colors, it's Palm Beach colors,

and it's very different than the beginning of this film.

So in this instance, you're taking Jake and really having him evaluate her.

What is he gonna say? Does he know she's lying?

No. He's a guy who cannot forget his dick.

And here she is, thinking she's gonna be caught,

and in reality, he wants to invite her out.

And she shakes her head going, "God, men. They just won't ever get over it."

So in this instance, she throws him out.

I love his look back there. "Thanks for nothing."

And now look at her face. Boom, she's gone.

And in this instance, you can get David Buckley's score,

it's bringing it up, and again, it's panic, she's totally hysterical.

And at the same time, when the audience sees this movie,

they see Pipsy sitting on his lap.

And what's important to understand is, for Parker, he says, "Yes, dogs like me."

When you're working with dogs, and this little dog, Pipsy, was actually Wilson.

When you're working with dogs, it's really important...

Nobody could do anything with Wilson, Pipsy could do whatever...

But in a funny way, Wilson sat on Jason's lap.

In a funny way, that dog loved Jason.

And in this moment, I wanted a big character thing.

Here's Ascension, difficult woman.

She's sitting there, looking at this guy, knows her daughter is up to her ears.

And what does she say?

So, Pipsy, you like this one?

The whole thing is,

she's a lone woman with a soap opera and her dog, that's it.

Now when she sees... Her dog doesn't like anyone.

When she sees her dog like a guy,

effectively, if you're a dog lover, you know this guy can't be all bad.

You know, there's something there.

Whether you buy it or not, to me,

I love the fact that you take characters,

you don't know why they act the way they act.

And in fact, they change. I'll talk more about Patti Lupone in a minute,

why she makes her shift.

But here, we're back in the real estate office, and Amber, of course,

now Leslie got herjust comeuppance.

She stole her client and, "Look what happened, Leslie."

And you get that sense of Amberjust loving it.

"I win again."

And Leslie, of course, is here, wondering what's happening.

She can't stay there, she has to go.

I'm going out.

If anyone from the police comes, just give 'em the list

of places I showed Mr. Parmitt, okay?

- What's the matter? -Nothing. I just... I just need some air.

Again, Bonnie, New Orleans actress, wonderful.

In this instance, now we're going back, and again,

this condo sequence looks very much like Palm Beach.

It's in another part of the Westbank of New Orleans.

She goes in,

and there's her mother with the frying pan and, "I thought you were the cops."

Now people go, "I can't believe that this woman has made this shift."

I can believe it, it's what Donald Westlake wrote

and what John McLaughlin wrote.

The reality is, here's Claire sewing up Parker.

Leslie made the call, Claire showed up.

And Ascension is part of the gang.

And this is a funny thing.

When she says, "I named her after Leslie on The Young and the Restless,

"and I named her sister Jennifer after Jennifer in Valley of the Dolls, ”

that's true.

Jennifer's mother, Jennifer Lopez's mother did name her two...

Leslie is Jennifer's sister.

And they were named after those two soap operas.

So in this instance, Jennifer let me use that in the film.

It's a little conceit that I love, that people don't really understand.

But you see Ascension back there, she's part of the gang.

He's a real man.

You know, in a way, it's like Mr. Quinn, "I've got excitement in my life."

Parker comes into people's lives and he is who he is.

He asks her if she can make soup. He doesn't lie. He is in need.

She also is not going to call the cops because that would implicate her daughter.

And most importantly, her dog likes him.

So in this instance right now, Leslie's there.

And she sees the relationship that really is there.

That Claire is... There's a bond here.

And he asks her, he didn't think she'd stay. She says, "I know."

"Would you go to the fish camp and wait for me?"

And she says, "You know I will."

And the way they kiss, you know that's it.

Leslie has been harboring these delusions.

There's the truth.

And I think Jennifer was fabulous playing this part.

People say, "That's Jennifer Lopez. There we go with her."

She's a fabulous actress.

And so much of what's going on in her face is what acting's all about.

It's in the eyes, not in just what she says.

And she's also, in an instance, there's the interloper.

She doesn't have a place.

And second of all, look down, her mother is now part of the thing.

She's odd man out.

And I love the dynamic between Ascension and Leslie and Parker.

In a way, he's enlivened both of their lives.

Where they were both... They were nowhere.

And he's come in and he's brought excitement.

And I think that's one of the joys of Parker.

So after that, now we're going into the last sequence in the film,

which is the jewel heist.

Why are they there, what have they been waiting for?

We know it's coming, we've seen the mansion.

We know it's coming, we've seen the mansion.

Now this is the moment.

And again, that aerial shot of Ray Prado in the helicopter,

getting me shots, going across there.

And then all these shots, this is Louisiana,

and itjumps to Palm Beach.

This is on the Palm Beach side.

Leslie gets out, she's walking around,

she's wondering what the hell she's going to do and where she should go.

That's Palm Beach.

No one's gonna believe you're a fireman.

Even volunteers cut their fucking hair.

And here, they've gone to a firehouse closed for renovation.

They're stealing a fire engine.

But actually, I have a better definition of what they did.

I had to cut it for time.

I'm sorry, because I think that's a little loose end.

But you have to accept the fact that they're capable,

because Carlson was a fireman,

they're capable of knowing how to steal a fire truck.

Here's Leslie back at Palm Beach,

she looks across, that's the central bridge,

and that's West Palm Beach on the other side.

And you go from day to night.

And this sequence I love, because it's really a good transition.

From day to dusk to night.

And this is the Northern Bridge

which goes from, again, West Palm to Palm,

that's Palm Beach over on the other side.

They lean across, and that right there

is actually a view of Mar-a-Iago I took,

and I put in the tower of Ca' d'Zan, which is the John Ringling mansion.

This is Ca' d'Zan interior, that exterior.

And when you see the exterior that we just saw, that's Ca' d'Zan.

But the actual view of the tower was from Palm Beach, we just matted in that.

These jewels are the jewels that we've been talking about.

We want to believe there's $50 to $70 million worth of diamonds here.

And believe me, these would amount to that much money.

And there is that kind of money in Palm Beach.

Again, this pan down in Ca' d'Zan,

it's beautiful, it has the opulence of Palm Beach.

And in this instance, the guy that we saw earlier, Lionel,

that Michael Chiklis met in that central big drive in Palm Beach.

He met him, he got the information from him, we then saw him show him the basement.

And he is the celebrity auctioneer, he's the man on the inside that he mentions.

And what they did is that they...

You saw Clifton Collins doing all the speakers.

And they put explosives in the speakers, basically fireworks.

Again, these are wonderful extras from Sarasota that came in.

We didn't have any of these fireworks,

I'm just trying to get them to act, and they acted brilliantly.

That's Ca' d'Zan from the water.

And this is Micah Hauptman on a boat that he's driving.

These are all things... I had no time for this, there was no money.

But again, this is the fire truck, that's West Palm in the background.

This is the interior of Ca' d'Zan,

and you're going back and forth, trying to make this thing work.

This is the exterior of Ca' d'Zan in Sarasota.

And you got the West Palm Beach Fire Department,

see West Palm Beach on that?

Their fire engines are white.

And I got these West Palm Beach fire trucks,

and we brought one of them to Sarasota so it would work.

And you see the conceit of this is they're going in as firemen.

They are going in and created what is a phony fire,

because by the time they get inside, those fireworks have gone out.

They were as scary as can be.

They're inside now, there's still some smoke,

but they're going in, they are going after the jewels

and they are working on the clock.

These guys are good thieves.

They're smart, professional thieves, this is the score of a lifetime.

They worked their entire career for it.

I want them to... If it wasn't for Micah here,

who is the guy that screwed it all up, Parker might have partnered with them.

Nick Nolte early on says, "These guys are pros," and so forth.

He meant it, and they're good.

So in this instance, what are they going to do, how are they going to get out of here?

And what the conceit... And this was Donald Westlake,

and he had gone to Palm Beach, I'm sure, stayed at The Breakers and figured out,

"Hey, what if they bought a house and escaped underwater?"

This is right out of the novel.

So again, I did this as a diversion.

They had Hardwicke out on the water in his yacht,

saying that his aunt was inside, what's going on and...

That is a real county water sheriff from Sarasota.

He did a wonderful job.

You take somebody real and put them in, and they know what they're doing.

Again, this is the Palm Beach Fire Department showing up.

Did you notice the red fire engines?

West Palm Beach is the white, and the Palm Beach are red.

So, why would the West Palm Beach be able to get to Palm Beach faster?

Because they were already there.

And while all these security guards...

'Cause they have security guards everywhere

and they have patrol boats out in the water.

While they're out there looking, you have these guys sneak down,

get in the water, get underwater,

and all of a sudden, the firemen come in, they're looking at this guy out here,

and right below them, the guys are already underwater and they're underneath.

You can see that marble. I love that marble down there.

That's Ca' d'Zan. So beautiful.

This was when America was really rich at the turn of the century.

So, you can find in here that there's West Palm Beach helmets.

They now say it's a theft.

And this guy who is the assistant to

the woman who's having the auction knows.

Now, this sequence right here. This is Palm Beach we're looking at.

This is Chuck Elderd,

the county film commissioner making all these things available.

Here's a shot right here where you've got three bridges lifted.

This is the area connecting the inland waterway, where they call it "the lake."

It's three bridges that connect and they're all drawbridges that can come up.

Chuck Elderd, the film commissioner, got all these up for me.

And those shots from the air, that's Ray Prado in a helicopter.

I'm down on the ground with Jennifer and with Jason here.

And we're all shooting simultaneously.

We've got literally 45 minutes to get all those fantastic master shots.

Again, Ray is up there following a police helicopter.

That is Palm Beach we're looking at.

This is Jason kind of coming along in Florida.

Pardon me. He's actually in New Orleans. I take it back. That's Florida.

These guys are in Florida.

And you see the police boat flash on the water.

Now, we're back in New Orleans, as though he's coming around to the back of the house.

It's building a sequence that I hope is seamless.

That's really Palm Beach.

We have the bridge up.

These are officers checking that,

that's traffic backed up because we opened the bridge.

Those are real people backed up all that way.

And she's saying, "It's really happening." And now she starts to realize,

"He's injured. I'm not going to let you fuck this up."

"He's injured. I'm not going to let you fuck this up."

She's gonna come and try to get involved.

Stupid. But of course, she now realizes she's got no romantic interest in Parker.

She just wants the money. This is really important to her.

And again, this is what Donald Westlake had written.

There is a sequence where Leslie comes in

and what happens is very similar to what happens in the book.

People can say they believe it, they don't believe it.

This is a literary piece. You have to follow along.

Parker's inside. But the important part of this with Parker, and as I said earlier,

Parker's injured. He's just had his hand ripped open. He's got four broken ribs.

I want the audience to feel...

You understand why Leslie is going on.

He's not going to be able to deal with four guys,

armed and really together.

How is he going to be able to make this work?

And I think, his left hand, we know is immobile, because of that knife wound.

I like the idea that Parker's hurt.

You saw him limping when he was coming around,

and when he went to pull himself up on that gate, he groans.

Look at him limp here. He's not 100%.

You gotta believe that there's a possibility he's not gonna do it.

He's not gonna make it.

And of course, the crooks are elated.

We used a house in New Orleans on Bayou St. John,

which is not a very wide bayou,

but I was able to intercut it with shots of Florida

and the lntracoastal Waterway, and it really matches.

And again, this house matches very much this low-end house I found on Palm Beach.

So, you come down to this climactic sequence.

And again, in Donald Westlake's book,

you have Leslie coming up, peeking through the window,

looking for things. Just, she shouldn't be there.

She's taken it upon herself to do so.

And just exactly as in Westlake's book, she's discovered.

Hardwicke, who's coming back from the boat, finds her and brings her inside.

And of course, after this brilliant robbery

and everything came off the way they wanted,

there is pandemonium here.

How the fuck? And Parker, look at his face. Oh, shit.

Parker was gonna come in and pick them off one at a time.

By her being here, it's going to completely screw up the deal.

And in this instance,

he now has to rethink it.

This is all part of the...

The essence of having Parker think through how he's gonna overcome impossible odds.

And in this instance, Chiklis, the character Melander,

is smart enough to know this didn't happen by accident.

And what you have to see

is this is now going to come down between Melander and Parker.

It's been edging that way all the way through.

Melander knows that in the long run that it was Hardwicke, and what can he do?

Parker is like him, a professional.

And he now knows that if there's anything that could get screwed up,

this guy is going to do it. So he's got to survive.

And there's panic happening here. I was trying to make panic happen.

And Hardwicke slaps Leslie, she's down on the ground.

She happens to look up and what does she find?

She sees the gun taped under. It was by accident.

In the book, she sees the gun by accident.

These are things you either buy or you don't, but it's Donald Westlake who created it.

And to me, I love the fact that she's down on the ground, she looks up.

I like the fact that Leslie's always thinking.

She's going to playact here.

Of course, she was slapped and she looks hysterical.

She could be really... But watch her.

And again, Chiklis is great.

His interchange with her is fabulous.

He's trying to be nice. Good cop, bad cop.

And when she won't give it to him,

he'd just as soon slap her across the face with that.

These guys are serious guys.

Now in this instance, she's looking, she sees the jewels.

He sees what she's really come for.

And he knows that she and Parker are in cahoots.

Yeah, you do.

Clifton Collins plays Ross.

He's the weapons expert. He's the real killer.

He's the guy you see when he gets a gun, he's an expert.

And he's come out to look for Parker.

You got to believe that he's capable.

He's an ex-military guy. He knows what he's doing.

Hardwicke here doesn't really know what he's doing.

Wendell Pierce who plays Carlson does.

So you got Carlson and you got Ross who are real pros,

and you got Hardwicke who is an amateur, but they still all have guns.

What's Parker gonna do? He's hurt.

And in this instance, you bring him out. You see the boat.

He's checking it out. And what Parker's gonna do

is each one of them, he's gonna pick off.

And in that instance, you can see, he's hurt.

He does kill him with a knife. He puts it in his neck. You see what he does.

But he also, when he pushes off,

he's notjumping off like he's Superman.

He is hurting. And this is what the joy of Parker is.

It's the mind over.

And you see Melander and Leslie getting into it.

Again, Parker's moving around. He's going on outside.

And they think they've covered it. He's waiting. He's waiting his moment.

Hardwicke is not exactly what you call a pro.

He goes back inside and Parker's creeping in.

Hey, it's clear on this side.

And they've looked at all the sides,

and now they're waiting for Ross. Where's Ross?

Ross?

Ross?

Again, you got to talk about the fact that Jimmy Muro is lighting this place

like it's an empty place.

Maria Nay is hanging those sheets on the wall.

And in this instance, I love the actors.

In this instance, Micah Hauptman is fantastic. He's just not up to it.

And of course, Melander is forcing the weakest link over there.

You believe it, and meanwhile, Parker is just creeping around.

If she moves, shoot her!

So, Wendell, who is basically in my acting company, he's a fabulous actor,

in this instance, I thought, these guys are scumbags, they're crooks.

And of course, they're not above having a little bit of sexuality to it.

So here they are. He's going to come on to her.

And I love this moment of what we did here.

You see Jennifer's fire. She spits in his face and is really on top of it.

And then she sees in the mirror, Parker. And Parker's right there.

But what you see is Melander sees that she's looking over there,

and he susses out that, in fact, Parker is right there in the dining room.

He's that close.

And now she kind of guesses things are going to come to a head.

And as he goes around to confront Parker, and she's looking for the gun,

he knows he's got Parker right here, she's pulling it up,

Carlson is looking, and he's got him dead to rights. Dead.

A click. What you find is that Parker

cut the firing pins, and Jennifer, at this point, and again from the book,

picks up the gun and kills one of them.

That's what Westlake wrote. That's what Jennifer did.

She did it all in one take. She's absolutely fantastic.

Really doesn't look like she's ever done it before,

but she had to do what had to be done.

Now this fight between Parker and Melander is mano-a-mano to the death.

And the idea of, again, pulling a clip out of a gun

and using it as a knife was come up with by Brad Martin,

another stunt coordinator that I work with who's fantastic.

And in this instance, Jason and Michael Chiklis really do it,

they really go hand-to-hand here. Really wonderful.

And believe it or not, that clip if put back in,

and it's got cartilage or blood on it, will work.

Whoever says, "That's not happening," it does.

So now you got the final confrontation between Hardwicke and Parker.

And Jennifer, watch her in this instance,

she is totally hysterical, as you would be.

I will shoot her!

Parker says, "Go ahead and shoot her."

And look at Jennifer.

Go ahead.

Parker has to have known that he filed that gun earlier.

But this is right from the very beginning and that final line,

"You were supposed to torch the hay bales behind the livestock pavilion,"

is what he said at the beginning. This is Parker.

"That's what you should've done. Everything would've been cool.

"'Cause you didn't, we had to go through all this and you're a dead man."

That's Parker, and he's a man of consistency.

Now this last sequence here, again outside, they've got the jewels.

Leslie, he's saying, "You screwed up, you've come here."

She saying, "You needed help."

And now he said, "I filed them on most of the weapons."

inevitably, for an audience, they laugh.

But again, it's really real and behavioral,

and it's like it was an accident all this stuff happened.

But Parker gets out from under it.

This last sequence is wonderful, I think, between the two actors.

I'm just talking about simple acting.

They've been through it. They've been through horrible exhaustion.

They both look like they've been through horrible exhaustion.

This is shot in Florida.

We had been shooting all night. This is about 3:00 in the morning.

And Jennifer and Jason are out there doing this scene.

It's really nothing going on but the two of them.

And they both look like they've been through hell.

But Parker is laying it out, and she's trying to fathom it.

You can't put that money in a bank, Leslie.

I think Jason was great in this.

He really is Parker.

And he's articulate and he looks like he's spent. And Jennifer is...

You can just see, down deep, this is so important.

Is she going to be able to get out of this mess she's in, economically?

And when he says... Again, it is Parker. He's taking his original share.

He's giving the original share to Hurley,

and then they're going to split everything else.

And when she hears that he's not going to screw her,

of course, she doesn't know that.

Although, listen, he's told her to take the jewels.

He's told her to take the jewels and hide them in a vent.

It's not Parker walking out. Why shouldn't he?

And again, I love that moment where she kisses him on the cheek

and hugs him and it hurts him.

But I think, again, you put two actors together,

they've now done it and they now know what this is about.

And I think everybody that sees the movie, and sees that it stars

Jason Statham and Jennifer Lopez, think, "Romantic, this is it."

Well, there is a little bit of romance there.

There's certainly sexually-charged energy.

But ultimately, it's what could've been.

And in this sequence, I wanted it to be what could've been.

Again, David Buckley, the composer,

you hear this really subtle bit that happens here.

And what you want to evoke is what could've been,

this is romantic, but it's not.

This is a knight. Watch him shake... Look it.

He gives her a nod of respect.

And she looks at him, "It ain't gonna happen."

But you want to have... There is something that really happened between them.

And this last close-up of Jason where he's remembering what it is,

what she was, what could've been,

and then he goes back to, "You know what? I got stuff to do."

That's pure Parker.

And we jump to six months later, Chicago, frozen.

And there's Danzinger, who we've heard about all the time.

And here he is, he's a corporate guy. Not who you would normally think.

He has his corporate office. He's checking his stocks.

He's got a picture of he and Reagan on the desk.

And ultimately, he's a businessman.

"All right. I'm gonna give you 40 cents on the dollar. This is all about money."

No, it's not. It's not about money with Parker.

And again, we're back to Florida. You know the color.

You know what you're seeing. That's Palm Beach. That's Ray Prado's shot.

And we're back to Leslie.

I want to talk about David Buckley. He had a theme for Leslie.

The Fender Rhodes piano.

He had the guitar and the electric trumpet for Parker

and all that great percussion and strings for the heist.

He did a fantastic score. I think there's 97 minutes of score in this picture, a lot.

But I don't believe he's overdone it.

You can feel here, there's a moment here.

These last two scenes that are in the film, you hear Parker's theme there?

Parker is in these scenes, but he's not.

Parker has sent the money. He is a man of his word.

Leslie can't believe it. "Nothing but bills."

Again, John won't let me have this. That's my line.

But the fact is that it's, again, her mother's still upstairs.

Leslie's there, and here's the farmer.

The farmer and his wife. They got a new house.

And I've got this kind of American Gothic image here of the two of them.

You feel in both instances, with Leslie and here, Parker's there,

even though he's not really.

And it was my desire to put "In memory of Donald Westlake"

as the first credit up at the end,

because that's what we were all trying to do.

We were trying to pay homage to Donald Westlake

who was the inspiration and, I think, incredible talent.

Lisa Dennis, mentioned on the screen there, is my head of post-production

and my collaborator on every film since Ray.

She's my right hand in post-production and I want to mention her.

And again, Mark Warner, who cut this film, out it beautifully.

And again, I worked with on Dolores Claiborne

and on Proof of Life.

I've worked with Mark on a number of films, and he moved to Australia.

He came back from Australia to help me on this.

Jimmy Muro.

Right now we're talking about Meagan Lewis who is my New Orleans casting.

Nancy Klopper is my normal casting director, but Meagan did a fantastic: job

of coming up with the actors in Louisiana that I think were wonderful.

Rankin Hickman, who was our production supervisor.

Brian Netto was my assistant.

Michael Stumpf is the B-camera operator.

Jimmy Muro operated for himself.

Again, he's DP-ing and operating in a style that I thought was just fantastic.

He was a great collaborator.

And you see all the people along here. Dayton, who is our gaffer.

Gilly, who was our grip.

All these people who you see on this screen. No filmmaker does it alone.

David Hopkins is my on-set dresser.

He's been with me on more films than almost anybody.

And nobody really knows what David does, he does a little of everything.

But he is indispensable.

No director is out there alone, working.

And all of these people, as their names come up at the end here,

I know them all, they were all instrumental in the making of this film,

and I'm incredibly grateful to them.

So that's a lot of talk, two hours straight.

I'm the one thatjust says I'm gonna give you a stream of consciousness,

instead of being...

You know, you're probably sick and tired of listening to me by now.

But inevitably, there's some people that were responsible for me being on this film.

Les Alexander, who was very good friends with Donald Westlake

and who got the rights.

Nick Meyer, who is the head of Sierra Affinity,

who is the foreign sales agent and who basically owns the film.

Matthew Rowland, who heads up the financier part of this.

And I think when you come down to it,

Peter Schlessel and all of his team at Film District, which was the U.S. distributor.

These are all people that collaborated.

Sometimes you fight with them because everybody has a certain passion.

We didn't have the biggest budget in the world on this.

Steve Chasman, who is a co-producer. There are a lot of producers on this film.

But the fact is that we all ultimately came together,

and made a film that I'm proud of

and I hope does justice to Donald Westlake's source material.

Again, John McLaughlin, who wrote a wonderful adaptation of this.

And I'm sure that I've left some people out. I'm sorry if I have.

But I can tell you now that

every film is a journey, every film is a war,

and you try to come out,

and the relationships you make are lifelong, they last.

So, you haven't seen people in a long time,

but people like Chuck Elderd, the people at the Ohio State Fair,

the people in New Orleans,

these are all the people of all the places, and they're unsung,

but they are responsible for you getting the film made.

It was important to me to make the film

in the places, in the style that Donald Westlake wrote, and I think we did.

So, anyway, thanks for listening, I hope you enjoyed the film,

and I hope this commentary helps you understand a little bit more.

I'm sure there's lots that I didn't talk about.

But, God, I did do a lot of talking.

So excuse that, and thanks for watching.

Here we are.

We've got Warner Sound Services and our mixers.

And the special effects at the end

are really fantastic.

Modus in Canada did those.

You know, there's great people, again, across the board.

As long as these credits are rolling and I see things, I'm gonna mention them to you.

And again, you listen to David's score.

Imaginary Forces who work with me all the time

and Grant Lau who designed the titles.

And I think that David Buckley... Again, I want to talk about the fact that

he just did a wonderful, wonderful score.

Dax Riggs and his group, Dax Riggs.

They're great.

So you see the people from the Ohio State Fair there at the end,

and you see the people from the Boca Resort,

and you see the people from the Palm Beach Film Commission,

those are the real unsung heroes of this film

and I really appreciate it.

So, anyway, thank you very much for listening,

and we really are at the end now. Thanks.