Empire’s Chris Hewitt spent his birthday in LA last week, on the set of Richard Kelly’s new mindfuck-classic-in-waiting, Southland Tales, just your average slightly futuristic sci-fi comedy (with musical elements) about the end of the world.
Sadly, Chris’ birthday wasn’t made complete by having star, Sarah Michelle Gellar, jump out of a massive cake. But he did get to speak to the movie’s other main stars, Seann William Scott (who plays twins Ronald and Roland Taverner) and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, who plays Boxer Santoros, a paranoid schizophrenic amnesiac action movie star in 2008 LA who finds out that he is able to predict (an increasingly bleak, WW3-tinged) future.
In other words, it’s a far cry from anything The Rock has done before. “That’s safe to say, yeah,” he laughs. “That’s why I took the role. Number one was to work with Richard Kelly. I think that the best thing I can do is bring my own interpretation to Boxer and his other alter-egos, and then make sure that that meshed well with Richard’s interpretation.
“So as neurotic as Boxer is, I’ve come across a few neurotic movie stars just working in Hollywood,” he continued. “I’ve spoken to a few, too. So I based a lot of his neuroses on some of them.”
The Rock also took time to fill us in on a couple of his upcoming projects, including the long-in-gestation computer game adaptation, Spy Hunter. “Fingers crossed, that will happen,” he said. “It’s one of those movies that is conceptually really, really cool. I’m the hunter of spies, and I’ve got this amazing car. But writer after writer after writer just didn’t get the tone right. So finally Stuart Beattie, who’s an amazing writer who wrote Collateral, really turned in an amazing 80 pages. So we’re like, ‘OK, about a hundred more!’ So we’ll see…”
One project that won’t be happening for The Rock, though, is mooted action-comedy Blowback, in which he and Ryan Reynolds would have played San Francisco cops. “I can tell you honestly right now that that will not happen,” he said. “Unfortunately. I love Ryan, and I can’t wait to work with him, but there’s other projects. There’s one at New Line that is very, very funny in the vein of Wedding Crashers – not that we’re crashing weddings, but just in the vein of being an edgy, ballsy, rated R comedy. All the way.”