The new film from Antoine Fuqua is opening this Friday and its called Shooter. The film stars Mark Wahlberg as a Marine Corps Sniper who leaves the military after a mission goes bad. After he is asked back to help stop an assassination he gets double-crossed again and he is forced to figure out who set him up and how to clear his name.

While it sounds a lot like a bad Steven Seagal movie from the early 90’s… I have to say I really dug it and found Shooter surprisingly entertaining. One of the reasons I dug it more than I expected was probably due to the amount of politics the film weaves into the storyline. Slimy politicians in Washington are always a safe bet, especially ones that have good actors playing the roles like Ned Beatty and Danny Glover. I should also mention that Mark Wahlberg is one of those actors I buy into. He just connects with me as an everyman – someone who can play almost any role and keep the character grounded.

But now for the reason you are here.

A few weeks ago I got to sit down with Antoine Fuqua (in roundtable form like the rest of the Shooter interviews) and he talked about bringing this film to the screen and all the challenges that went with it. He also discussed what he hopes to do next:

Fuqua: I have a project called 'Without a Badge' that I've had for years and it looks like I just got the money for that independently which would be nice for me. It's about a guy who infiltrated the Cali Cartel to help bring them down in the late '80's and he got so deep in it he started to believe that he was one of them and they had to kind of pull him out and get him some help psychologically because he believed that his name was Geraldo Bartone. He literally started living that life and behaving that way. I've had it for about six years, and I really want to do it because it's a great character study of that world that goes way beyond walking the line. He's on the other side completely. I mean, the guy basically became Scar Face.

Question: Is it similar in any way to 'Deep Cover?'

Fuqua: Not really. It's deeper than that and much more exotic as well because it's all in like Brazil. Al Pacino would be in that one as well and hopefully Mark would playing Jerry. So we'll see what happens with that.

If you want to listen to the Antoine Fuqua interview click here, otherwise the complete transcript is below.

And due to the amount of people we got for this movie I couldn’t transcribe everyone. So if you would like to listen to Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura talk about this film as well as Stardust, Transformers and a few other projects click here. This is the one I wish I had time to transcribe as he had a lot of great things to say… if you want to listen to the good stuff listen to the last 4 or 5 minutes.

And if you want to see a trailer for Shooter before reading the interview click here.

Shooter opens this Friday.

Some spoilers are discussed - you are warned

Question: When was the last time you saw Mark [Wahlberg]? When did you finish the movie up?

Fuqua: Well, me? I finished the movie on Thursday night [Laughs]. I've been in a dark room. I saw Mark a few times, doing some ADR stuff here and there, but I haven't seen them all in a few months.

Question: If you just finished the movie on Thursday night what was the thinking behind keeping the Anna Nicole joke in there?

Fuqua: I just think that it's dangerous for us to cut it out because it was done before her passing and I think that when movies starts to do that every time the world changes we'd never finish. We'd been in the editing bay because the world is always changing, and then I hope that I'm not speaking out of turn, but she seemed to have a really light sense of humor when I saw her. I didn't know her personally, but I think she would probably laugh at it herself. I would hope so. I don't think that it's anything that degrading that no one has ever said before about her. It's just some kooky in Tennessee who says. Levon Helm, he can get away with anything. So I hope it doesn't offend anyone.

Question: This movie seemed to have a lot of challenges especially with the glacier. Did everyone stay up there for the four days?

Fuqua: No. I was up there for three or four days, but they weren't. The glacier, it's just shooting on ice. You're up on top of the world and you're exhausted because the air is thin and there is nothing up there. Everything had to take a helicopter up there and it can go from minus five degrees because I had to be there before the sun came up to be ready. You can't walk in the same place twice because of footprints. There are no porta-potties for the actors. There is nowhere to really sit. We had to bring up these folding things for them to sit on. There's no cover so you have to be really prepared with every shot and every lens that you want because if you don't have it there going back to get a lens takes about forty five minutes of your day and they have to take the helicopter back to base camp to get it. You have to keep everyone focused on the work at the same time and you're freezing up there.

Question: How high is it above the ski resort?

Fuqua: The ski resort was about a half hour helicopter ride below us.

Question: So you were right on the top?

Fuqua: I was right on the top. I scouted it and it was so beautiful. When I was up there location scouting the snow was up to my waste when I first got up there. I wasn't sure that I was going to be able to shoot there because of the difficulties and we couldn't tell where the helicopters would land because there was so much snow at that time, before I started shooting it. So I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to film there, but it was so beautiful that when I scouted other locations I just couldn't get it out of my head and I kept thinking, 'Then I have to do it.' So eventually what happened was that the studio said, 'Well, you can shoot it, but you only have a certain amount of time because to shoot there you need more choppers. You need more support. You can only have, as opposed to a two hundred man crew, thirty to forty people at a time on the glacier.' So everything sort of got cut in half, but it was worth it for me, visually for me, to have a little less time and deal with the elements not knowing – the last day we got evacuated because a storm came in. We canceled the day.

Question: What time of year was it?

Fuqua: What time of the year was it? This was at the end of spring, about there.

Question: How many people on the set there fell right on their ass?

Fuqua: Oh, all of us including me. You step out of the helicopter and its all ice there and if you're not prepared it's just one of those things that's going to happen. It's going to happen. We had a crane up there that got stuck and when we got evacuated we had to leave that up there for a week. Everyone fell. Ned Beatty fell. Danny [Glover] fell. Mark fell. There is a shot where the guy stands up after shooting way over at the other end of the hill and they look up at the guy coming down the thing, and the thing that's dangerous about that place is that the perspective is an illusion. I mean, we took a guy in a helicopter and put him up there, but walking down took forever. This guy was a mountain guy because that had to be a double, and I was rolling film on him going, 'Oh, my God, we have to go get this guy.' We were sitting there waiting and waiting and then he would just disappear completely and I was like, 'Oh, my God. Be careful what you wish for.'

Question: Was there ever any thought of doing the book as it was and not updating it? It seems though that if you were going to make it contemporary that you had to do the things that you did.

Fuqua: Yeah, you did. No one unfortunately seemed to care about Vietnam anymore, at the moment, except the comparison to Iraq and also Abu Ghraib and shadow governments that were all now becoming familiar with, a little bit more by name, the Haliburton and Black Water and the fact that their oil pipelines in Africa – all of that stuff brings it up to date. The script went through a lot of different – when I got involved, the script that you saw on the screen roughly is the script that I saw. Once I got involved there were maybe eight or nine other scripts because the script has been around Hollywood for a while and for some reason it just couldn't get made. It was one of those things where I didn't want to go back and read all of those scripts or get back into the book too much because I knew that I would find things that I'd want and then it would sort of unravel. I would read the book and find things and go, 'This would be great.' I mean, the Memphis character is completely different. So some of that character stuff that I really liked would've unraveled.

Question: What was the movie originally that you and Mark were going to do?

Fuqua: That I was going to do with Mark? 'By Any Means Necessary.' Me and Mark and were going to do that. It's a really great story. It's not the Lucky Luciano story, but it was similar. It was about terrorists in New York and how the government goes to a prisoner, sort of a Lucky Luciano type Godfather to get the help because they believed that they were to come into the ports and explode them. It was a really interesting idea, but at the time they were making 'World Trade Center' and we were still working on that script and we wound up both reading this and thought it was good.

Question: Is that project still in play at all?

Fuqua: The script is still being worked on and so we'll see what happens.

Question: And now that you finished this on Thursday are you thinking about what you're going to do next?

Fuqua: I am thinking about that, but I have no idea though. I have a project called 'Without a Badge' that I've had for years and it looks like I just got the money for that independently which would be nice for me. It's about a guy who infiltrated the Cali Cartel to help bring them down in the late '80's and he got so deep in it he started to believe that he was one of them and they had to kind of pull him out and get him some help psychologically because he believed that his name was Geraldo Bartone. He literally started living that life and behaving that way. I've had it for about six years, and I really want to do it because it's a great character study of that world that goes way beyond walking the line. He's on the other side completely. I mean, the guy basically became Scar Face.

Question: Is it similar in any way to 'Deep Cover?'

Fuqua: Not really. It's deeper than that and much more exotic as well because it's all in like Brazil. Al Pacino would be in that one as well and hopefully Mark would playing Jerry. So we'll see what happens with that.

Question: Would you do a sequel to this movie? I don't think you've ever done a sequel have you?

Fuqua: Yeah. I don't know. It depends on where my life. There are a lot of other things that I want to go do right now that I haven't been able to do.

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