After “The Mask,” director Chuck Russell could do anything. Well, almost anything.
“The Mask,” released by New Line Cinema in the summer of 1994, was a huge blockbuster. Catapulted by Jim Carrey’s ascendant star power and some dazzling visual effects from Industrial Light & Magic, the movie, based on the comic book of the same name, made $352 million on a budget somewhere in the $20 million range. And it afforded Russell, who had “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” (long considered the best sequel in the franchise) and “The Blob” (one of the greatest horror remakes ever), new cachet. He could do anything he wanted. And what he wanted, he said, was “to do a big action movie.”
Stunt work was in Russell’s blood. He started out with Stunts Unlimited, a company formed by Hal Needham, a stuntman-turned-director who was behind “Smokey and the Bandit,” “The Cannonball Run” and “Hooper,” all of which he made with Burt Reynolds, who Needham doubled earlier in his career. (Needham’s relationship with Reynolds inspired the Cliff Booth/Rick Dalton dynamic in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”) While at Stunts Unlimited, Russell said he was basically getting people coffee, although the team tried to recruit him as a stuntman.
“I was fascinated by stunt craft,” Russell said.
Alan Gibbs, a legendary stunt man who worked with Stunts Unlimited, became Russell’s mentor for a year, teaching him about stunt craft. It inspired something inside of him. He wanted to do a big, stunt-heavy action movie and after “The Mask” became a phenomenon, he finally got his chance.
The movie was “Eraser,” which just celebrated its 30th anniversary and is now available in a gorgeous, deluxe 4K UHD Blu-ray.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, at the time the biggest action star in the world (this was right after James Cameron’s “True Lies” and the awkward comedy “Junior”), was already attached. The project, Russell said, was a “passion project” for Schwarzenegger. And Schwarzenegger wanted Russell.
“Even when you’re at your height, studio development can really slow a career down. It can take years at a time for a movie you love, and I had one or two I love that were in development,” Russell explained. “Suddenly, I had an overnight green light with Arnold Schwarzenegger and a large scale studio action picture. I thought, Okay, this is going to be hard to say no to.”
Russell was “taking a minute to make up my mind,” when he picked up the trades the next morning (back when such things were printed) and saw, in black-and-white, that he was directing “Eraser.” “I don’t know for sure that it was Arnold, but it was either Arnold or my agent, being very sneaky,” Russell said. “That was another reason I did it. Like, Okay, I can’t say no, let’s rock and roll.”
When he was brought onto the project, he told Schwarzenegger that they needed to lock down the script (more on that in a minute) and make Vanessa Williams’ character a little smarter and more independent (“She was unique and a really good counterpoint to Arnold in that picture”). Russell also added in heavyweights like James Caan and James Coburn, who could easily face off against Schwarzenegger. “I was dealing with a lot of macho guys on that picture,” Russell said.
We asked if Caan was a pain in the ass on set. Russell said that he had heard that Caan was a handful, so he invited him to a private meeting.
“I just sat with him, and I said, ‘I’m your biggest fan, you’re a brilliant actor but I don’t know why people are warning me about you, tell me now.’ And he broke up laughing and complimented me on being willing to say so, and I said, ‘Look, I want you to help me up Arnold’s game.’ He hadn’t been in an over-the-top action movie prior to that and we bonded over the honesty of that,” Russell explained. “I think it was refreshing to him. And whenever things got even a little bit dicey, I just give him a look, I go, ‘Come on, Jimmy.’ I had a wonderful time with Jimmy Caan, and I’m sad for the loss of him, but he’s wonderful in this film.” (He really is.)
The script for “Eraser” was deceptively simple. Schwarzenegger plays a marshal for the Witness Protection Program, whose job it is to forge new identities for people who have testified for the government. Williams plays an employee at a technology company who is selling next-generation arms (a “rail gun” that has been so thoroughly adopted by popular culture that it shows up in Steven Spielberg’s video game fantasia “Ready Player One”) to the enemy. Of course, given that it’s Schwarzenegger, the action frequently erupts into death-defying, I-can’t-believe-they’re-doing-this set pieces (aided, in part, by Russell’s collaborators at Industrial Light & Magic).
Of course, even a movie with a premise as straightforward as “Eraser,” needed a little help. At the time that the movie was released, there was a blind item in Entertainment Weekly about how the script had gone through so many revisions that they had essentially run out of colors – with Russell’s old pal Frank Darabont, “Terminator 2” writer William Wisher and even John Milius, who had directed Schwarzenegger in “Conan the Barbarian” – contributing to the shooting draft.
Russell asserts that this wasn’t all his fault and that there weren’t that many rewrites (sorry, 30-year-old Entertainment Weekly article). As Russell notes, the movie had been in development before he signed on and once he was on board, he worked closely with “The Wild Bunch” writer Walon Green on a finalized version of the script (Green is one of two credited screenwriters on the final film). “Let’s just say we were always elevating,” Russell said.
While Warner Bros.’ mandate was to make a new Schwarzenegger action movie and not, in Russell’s words, “break the bank,” the filmmaker knew he had to do things differently. “He has a gun. There’s fistfights. When I came into it, I said I can’t do this after ‘True Lies.’ I need to do some things I’ve never seen in an action film with you that only you can do,” Russell said. With Schwarzenegger, they plotted several new sequences. “As we were upscaling the film the budget got a little bigger,” Russell said, much to the chagrin of the studio.
Things that Russell and Schwarzenegger added to give “Eraser” a little more oomph include the rail gun (a smart move given how iconic it has become), an airplane escape sequence and a sequence set at the Central Park Zoo, where Schwarzenegger shoots out a tank of crocodiles, who proceed to rip some of the bad guys’ arms off. The sequence ends with Schwarzenegger shooting one of the crocodiles and saying the immortal line, “You’re luggage.”
“It was not an unlimited budget but it was a big healthy studio budget and we got all the bells and whistles,” said Russell. “I didn’t want to make a lesser Arnold movie if I was going to do one at all. And everyone ended up very happy. The studio was concerned, but very happy with the results.”
Russell couldn’t confirm that Alan Silvestri’s terrific “Eraser” score was actually his unused score for Brian De Palma’s “Mission: Impossible,” which also opened that summer. (Silvestri’s “Mission: Impossible” score was rejected at the last minute and replaced with a new score by Danny Elfman.) “I was too busy putting the movie together,” Russell said.
There was another connection between “Mission: Impossible” and “Eraser” – that Schwarzenegger and Cruise both give an unflagging amount of energy and attention to whatever they’re doing.
“They will work harder than anybody on the set. You have got to keep them safe, but they’re willing to do it,” Russell said. When Schwarzenegger made “Eraser,” he was “a little more mature at that point in his career about it,” but still did insane stunts like the airplane sequence. He was on what Russell called a “descender rig,” getting dropped from “the tallest stage in Warner Bros.” for five takes. Another shot in the sequence sees him hanging onto the side of a plane, which was accomplished by hanging the fuselage from the ceiling and shooting as Schwarzenegger is hanging on for dear life, then having the image flipped to make it look like he’s falling sideways instead of down. The whole sequence, of course, was made even more thrilling thanks to the wizards at ILM.
Rewatching “Eraser” in this new, absolutely gorgeous 4K presentation, is enough to make you wish they had made more. The ending is particularly open-ended. Schwarzenegger’s character is definitely going on to more adventures, he’s definitely going to “erase” more people and set them up with new identities.
“I was happy to have done my Arnold movie. In the ‘90s. I probably should have been more focused on, Here’s my idea for the next one, a little more financially minded, I guess, you know, but I was already like, I could do ‘Scorpion King’ with Dwayne Johnson. I was running around looking for the next adventure. I wanted to do an ancient world adventure next,” Russell said. “I was entertaining myself to some extent, and that keeps me passionate in my filmmaking.”
Russell said that, a few years ago, there was a direct-to-video “Eraser” sequel (2022’s “Eraser: Reborn”) but that he didn’t have anything to do with it. “It has echoes of the original ‘Eraser’ – there was a crocodile, there were reminiscent moments but it didn’t quite capture the spirit of it,” Russell said. He was used to it. There were also cheaply produced direct-to-video spinoffs to “The Scorpion King” without Johnson that he also wasn’t involved with.
For this new home video edition of “Eraser,” Russell said, “I was hands on.”
Russell continued: “I’ve seen what happens when I don’t, and these become the master for the future of the film. It doesn’t take too many days. I was there for about a week, maybe a little more than a week, between picture and sound, but these are real remixes. It’s completely new colorization. And the problem is I’m mixing all my films, I’m mixing practical effects with some CGI or whatever the form of visual effects I’m doing, and that is a very narrow window of success with literally things like contrast, let alone the colors, so I can keep things muted and a little distressed looking, so they go together, frankly.”
The problem with most of these new transfers, Russell said, is that technicians try to make things “as bright as possible.”
Because, as Schwarzenegger would agree, the power of “Eraser” lies in the shadows.
“Eraser” is available on 4K digitally and on 4K Ultra-HD Blu-ray.
