I’m sitting in a Chinese restaurant outside the press theater at Sundance as I write these words. Why am I doing this? Because they have free wi-fi and mediocre Chinese food. Clearly this is the place I want to be updating Collider from....

Anyway. Arriving this Friday is a crazy action ride and it’s called Smokin' Aces. It’s the first film from Joe Carnahan in almost five years and it’s a welcome departure from all the Oscar fare and award bullshit going on right now. Smokin' Aces is pure and simple a roller coaster of action and entertainment.

The premise is pretty simple. Jeremy Piven plays Buddy 'Aces' Israel who is the target of a mob hit. The film is about all the people who have heard of this great payday to whack him and are racing to do it first. At the same time you have the federal government who are desperate to get him into protective custody so he can testify about what he knows. The race is on.

What Joe Carnahan does differently and what will either make you love or hate this film is have the movie take on the personality of who is on screen while you are watching their character. When you have a someone serious on screen the film acts like a typical movie, but when you have some of the crazy hit men racing around, the film takes on their personality. He accomplishes this by altering the camera work and editing to reflect their personalities. For me it works, but I’ll admit it was a bit jarring at times.

If you want to see a fun action flick I suggest checking out Smokin' Aces. Solid performances and a hell of a cast will keep you entertained and amused. Also it has one of the funniest bit parts I’ve seen in a long time, you’ll know it when you see it….

Now for that interview…

Most of the studios do roundtables, but Universal is famous for their press conferences. What that means is instead of eight or so people asking questions we have twenty or thirty trying to get their voice heard. And each person usually has an agenda. That’s why when you read a transcript of a press conference the questions can be extremely varied. Thankfully with Mr. Carnahan they gave us a lot of time so everyone was able to get at least a question in.

He talks about all the important stuff – like how he was attached to MI3 for awhile and how that went, how his brother is now an up and coming screenwriter, how he put this crazy cast together, what he’s doing next, all the usual stuff.

You can either read the interview/press conference or you can listen to it by clicking here. The file is an MP3 so it will be easy to put on your iPod or portable player.

And before reading or listening to this interview please know that spoilers are discussed.

Joe Carnahan: Gees, I feel like I’m at the Watergate hearings. Yes, I was one of the original five! Do I do anything?

No, you’re all set.

Joe Carnahan: Okay, all right man.

It’s good to see you again.

Joe Carnahan: Good to see you too man.

Almost more interesting than this project are all the ones that almost happened [along the way].

Joe Carnahan: That didn’t happen? Ha ha! What are you talking about? I don’t know—

Just tell us about why it’s been so hard for you to connect with something and what came together for this?

Joe Carnahan: Well, people in this town don’t like me. That’s one—no I’m kidding there! No, that’s going to go on, somebody’s going to take that literally and be like, “This asshole actually said no one likes him.” No, you know what? It was, you know, I had the fifteen months on Mission Impossible 3, which was a blast really, it was. No, I had—no, I did that and then before that I had kind of this abortive process. You know, irony doesn’t translate into print. That’s what I realized. Jeremy Piven said that. It’s the truth man. You know, it was, you know, when I came off of Mission, which is obviously a real incredible, kind of learning experience, you know, the things that you pick up—things to do and then more importantly the things you don’t do. You know. I went out of that, I adapted immediately to Mark Bowden’s book, Killing Pablo, which I was obsessed with and remain obsessed with. And it was a series of kind of, you know, it was going through the—I mean, listen, when I left Mission Impossible I thought, that’s it, man. I’ll be directing like, straight to video, you know what I mean, with like, the guy who played Potsy. You know what I mean? So, which there’s nothing wrong with that. Potsy if you’re out there? We’re down. So I think there was kind of a period of just re-ramping and you feel like, you know, when you’re in a situation like that, that long, it feels like this kind of straight jacket. And I think the first thing you want to do when you get out of a straight jacket is just stretch and move, and that, Smoking Aces is kind of my response to kind of being in a cellar without—not being able to move for a long period of time. But it’s great because now it feels like things are really rolling and I’m actually glad to be working. And I’m sure my children are glad that I’m working as they have a roof over their head.

It won’t be another five years.

Joe Carnahan: It won’t be another five years, I promise you. In fact, I’m doing—if things go well, I’m going to do something almost immediately with Reese Witherspoon, which will be a lot of fun. And then I do White Jazz at the end of next year with George Clooney, which is again, my brother adapted it, I got to work with him on it. So, no, if this business will have me, I will continue to make films and not wait so long in between them. So, it’s a long-ass answer. That was really long, I’m sorry guys.

Joe, when you were writing the script, did you have the editing in mind?  And then after—or while you were directing, was there something in the editing process that you saw?

Joe Carnahan: Yeah, I mean, Rob Frazen who cut Smoking Aces had come off of Nicole Holofcener, who I love, who, you know, like he had cut Lovely and Amazing and Friends With Money, so Rob is like a behavioralist, which is what I love, because I’m not. So I knew, you know, a lot of sequences were designed—they had to be because we shot that film in forty days. So if you go in there, and kind of go, “Ah, I’m not sure—put a camera up there in the corner,” you’re dead. So I was really—I had a real strong sense of what I wanted to do, because necessity kind of makes you. I’m by nature, kind of lazy. I mean, you know, I’ll sit around for a long time if I can.  So, I’m going right back to this question over here, but no, I really did approach it with kind of knowing the way I was going to put it together. And also, which is what makes the movie either good or bad, or interesting or not interesting, I was really going for shooting characters and editing sequences according to the persona of those particular characters. You know, you look at the Tremor brothers,  those guys watched The Matrix fifty times. So when I shot them—and they watched [Sir Guillioni] movies. So when I shot them I made them like this kind of like slow motion, and kind of overwrought, and you know, they want to shoot guys who are on fire. It’s this cartoonish—but you’re going from that back to Ryan Reynolds trying to resuscitate [Ray] and Taraji Henson in this tearful kind of—so it was a conscious decision knowing that it was going to require an audience to go from first gear to fifth gear without necessarily feeling this big speed change, you know. But at the same time it’s like, well, I’d rather do that than like go right down the middle and play it safe and say, “Well, you know, I’m worried because people may not connect.” So there was a lot of those decisions made. And certainly that fell into—I knew how I was going to cut it, you know, that some stuff that I would hold on because of the character, and other things I wouldn’t. Good sir?

So let’s talk about how did you go about assembling this incredible ensemble of actors? And can you follow up telling us what you’re doing with Reese?

Joe Carnahan: You know, the actors—I mean, listen, you know, this is the other thing I learned really, from Mission Impossible, because I don’t think we had a good experience in the scripting stage. I thought we had a great script that Dan Gilroy, who’s the brother of Tony Gilroy, he and I had written. But I realized, what that really taught me is like, you know, that’s the first brick in the building, you know, that really is. And it’s so important and so kind of tantamount to, you know, making this thing—making it doable. So for me, you know, and I also write for a reader. You know, I write so that you’re enjoying it while you’re reading it, and it’s engaging and it’s—you know. You know, like you should, I guess. I think screenplays too often are just this kind of bastard form of literature and you just toss it off and who gives a damn, and you know. But I didn’t approach it that way, and that’s what ultimately hooked a lot of the actors, you know, who didn’t do it for a lot of money. I think that they were doing it at some point for like, a case of beer. That was what they were being paid, and Doritos. No, I mean, it was like they were not—they came to this thing because of the script, and also the ability, you know, I mean, I told Jeremy, “this is like a shot for you to really go deep and to completely do a 180 on Ari Gold and the stuff that you’ve done in the past.” And I told Ryan, who is a brilliantly funny guy, both of them are, but, I’m going to strip you of your ability to be that guy, to be the comic relief and really hinge it on him dramatically, and I think he’s a fantastic dramatic actor. And both he and Jeremy’s funny. I have this theory about guys who are really funny understand drama and anger and violence in this really unique way and I think that both of them are certainly like that. And then you get somebody like come, you know, [and Alicia] who just come in and just kill it. And you know. But that was—everybody responded to the script, and that was how we pulled people in. Because you know, the movie was made for under $25 million, that’s like almost nothing. And I think that’s what got them and the thing about Reese Witherspoon.  There’s a film, an old Otto Preminger film called Bunny Lake is Missing, that I like quite a bit, and it just sounds almost, you know, sacrilege to say that I thought it could have been done a lot better, because there’s certain things about it that didn’t—logically you look at this film in this day and age, it just doesn’t—there’s certain things that didn’t add up. So Doug Wright, who wrote Quills, who I adore and loved that, and won a Pulitzer, wrote a script and I’m thinking, “Ah, what the hell am I doing, I’m sitting around, you know, I’d like to get into it.” And it also, what I love about the possibilities of it, is it’s like, coming out of Smoking Aces, it’s like getting sent to war with like, you know, the bazookas and the grenades, and you know, the full compliment—the flamethrower, and then going into a movie like this, it’s like somebody hands you a paperclip and says, you know, fight your way out, man. So I love that. I mean, artistically it’s a great challenge, you know, to try to do something like that. Whether or not I blow it remains to be seen, you know.

Joe, you grew up, or lived a lot around Tahoe.

Joe Carnahan: Yeah.

You chose that on purpose. I wondered, you scared some hotel patrons with “The windows are going to blow out,” in the memo.  Did you have to deal with any locals that you grew up with on this movie? And could you just talk a little bit about shooting it up there where you [were familiar with it].

Joe Carnahan: Yeah, I mean, listen, like I say—it’s funny, I’ve always—I love Tahoe, but when someone asks me, like, describe Tahoe, I say, well, you know, the south shore there it’s like, you know, if the gaming industry took a dump in god’s country, that’s that section of Tahoe! It is a unbelievably, majestically, beautiful piece of real estate. And against it you have this array of kind of gawdy glass towers and high rises and stuff. But I thought it was such a uniquely—it hadn’t been filmed in a way that I think is, you know. It’s like, and it’s funny because for being a place that’s so you know, exquisitely beautiful, it’s like, considered the last stop in an entertainer’s career. You know what I mean? Like if you wind up in Tahoe, man, it’s over. You know what I mean? That means Reno wouldn’t have you, and that’s a bad place to be. So it was really, just that [neat] and kind of might not. You know, David Mamet made a film years ago called Things Change, with Don Amiche and Joe Mantegna and I always loved that they shot in Tahoe and they called it The Galaxy. And I wanted to call The Nomad the Galaxy, so it was a little not to him. And then the Deep End, which, you look at that, and I consciously kind of tried to avoid the beauty necessarily of Tahoe and more the kind of—there’s just this great grime, you know, under all these, this kind of canopy of conifers and beautiful deep blue lake, is this kind of grime and grit that I thought was interesting. And did I get—was I accosted by people from my past? Just the ones that I owe money to, that are out in Tahoe. No, it was funny, I was able to put some guys, you know, the TV station I worked for, they got their trucks up there to do some stuff for me. And an old friend of mine, Ken Rudolph who was in my very first movie—plays an FBI character, like he played in my very first movie and Smoking Aces. So it was great and it was nice to give a lot of nods and a lot of love to that area because, you know, it’s my home town and I’m very proud of it and I’m very proud of kind of being brought up there.

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