In an interview with Black Film John Singleton talks about his latest film ‘Abduction’ and Taylor Lautner.
It’s Taylor’s first lead role (outside of the ‘Twilight’ films) and a chance to show some range.
JS: It’s Taylor’s chance to really flex. The excitement about this is everyone loves this kid! But they don’t really know what he’s totally capable of doing. They don’t know he was a martial arts champion at the age of eleven. And that he’s physical. And that he’s actually funny. And that he’s charismatic and I was thinking they could see the potential in the ‘Twilight’ pictures then this is just like just letting it loose.
What did you do differently that would make him grow as an actor.
JS: What I did was really just brought him into my circle and have him really relax. We just watched movies together and talked about acting and I wanted him to see how there are people in the past that have been in the position that he’s like James Dean and Tom Cruise and young actors who evolved into young adulthood and the decisions that they make. And then we start just talking about the character. And he relaxed enough to improv for the first time. No one ever asked him to do these things. What’s amazing is that everyone doesn’t see how brilliant he is at his age at just picking up stuff. He’ll come and say, ‘I want to try something.’ And he never had a chance to do that. People just wanted him to look good. They didn’t want him to flex and do different stuff.
Lionsgate has filmed a few films set in Pittsburgh like ‘My Bloody Valentine 3-D,’ ‘Next Three Days’ and the upcoming ‘Warrior.’ How was shooting there for this movie?
JS: It was great. It was awesome. I got a chance to go to the Steelers and Pirates games. That’s all I did. I went to the Steelers’ openers and a lot of Pirates games and stuff. We shot a huge sequence during the baseball game. That was the first time I ever done that, with almost 30,000 spectators there. So I had six, seven cameras, three units, and jumping from one side of the fence into the next with Taylor doing the action while trying to make sure people weren’t taking pictures of us. Every day on the set there’s at least five, six hundred girls way off that were trying to hide out of the shot. And Taylor goes, ‘Shh, no. Be quiet, we’re trying to do this.’ The cool thing about him is pretty much every day or every other day when we shot new scenes he’d go out after work, after working all those hours. And he’d go shake everybody’s hand and take pictures and everything. I told him one time, ‘That’s what it takes.’ I also said to him, ‘You probably don’t even know who Jackie Wilson but you know who Michael Jackson was. My parents looked up to Jackie Wilson because Jackie Wilson had a theory. He would go and shake hands with everybody, take pictures with everybody regardless of who they were. And that’s what he became famous and sustained as long as he did.’ And Taylor did that.
In looking at the trailer there’s a little bit of ‘Bourne’ in this movie. With ‘Salt,’ ‘Unknown,’ and ‘Hanna,’ we’re getting a trend of that type of film. How much or little of ‘Bourne’ is in this movie.
JS: The only thing that’s in this film and in ‘Bourne’ is an espionage element. This is more like, maybe kind of like dangerous. He’s in high school not really knowing who he is. He’s forced into a life and death situation. In the ‘Bourne’ pictures that guy was a trained killer. This guy is just a high school kid who has had a little bit of physical training. But he’s up against people who are trained killers. So there’s a lot of jeopardy there.
What kept you from saying yes to the other films that you may have been offered before taking on this project?
JS: Because a lot of stuff was really corny. And then at the moment I may have thought, ‘Yeah’. I was working on ‘the A-Team’ at one time. And I decided not to do that picture because they were trying to make a foreign movie. So there was a lot of different big movies that I was a part of that went down.
Read the full interview HERE!
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