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Ebiri Anderson

By Ray Pride

January 12, 2021

Paul W. S. Anderson: “The movies I gravitated toward tended to be movies that were very visual and sparse on dialogue: Walter Hill’s The Driver, which is a beautiful movie with very, very little dialogue, and also the works of Jean-Pierre Melville, who heavily influenced Walter Hill. Melville was taking American archetypes, gangsters, and then putting them in Europe and making these very cool existential European gangster movies with very little dialogue and lots of looks and glances. Even in life, you read all these studies where it says 80 percent of communication is visual rather than verbal. So even if you’re standing in front of somebody, you know whether they’re angry or sad; you can tell what they’re trying to say to you just through the visual cues that they’re giving you. So it’s more of a challenge, but it’s perfectly possible to build character through action. And action is always dictated by space and by location, so that tied the whole thing together for me. In terms of this movie, specifically, I was influenced by a John Boorman movie called Hell in the Pacific, with Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin. At its heart, it’s a story of two characters who just hate one another, but they’re trapped in this isolated place. They try and kill one another at the start, but if they are to escape from that island, they have to learn how to work together. Obviously, we’re a totally different movie from Hell in the Pacific, but the relationship between Milla and Tony builds in a similar way. I like these quiet moments where people don’t speak, and I like working with actors where you can just stare at them and imagine what they’re thinking, project yourself into their head. Because once you start doing that, then you start empathizing with that person, and you’re doing it visually rather than through telling backstory.”

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