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IF you
get in a car with Dennis Quaid, beware. “If you’re in
the passenger seat, I can curl your toes!” the charming
Texan star brags of his stunt-driving skills clearly in
evidence in his latest thriller ‘Vantage Point.’
In the
film directed by Pete Travis (Omagh), he plays Secret
Service agent Thomas Barnes, a man who took a bullet for
the President a year earlier and now finds himself in
the middle of another assassination plot on his first
day back in the job. Quaid first learned to drive a car
in reverse at 40 miles an hour for his breakthrough
movie ‘Breaking Away’ in 1979 and got to do most of his
own stunts in this film, which includes
edge-of-your-seat car-chase scenes that will leave you
breathless.
“I’ve
always loved driving,” Quaid says, sprawled across the
couch in a Los Angeles hotel room. The 53-year-old actor
is wearing jeans and a blue collared T-shirt and looks
happy and relaxed. He’s eager to talk about his love of
stunt driving and leans forward conspiratorially as he
adds: “Maybe I shouldn’t say this in print, but I’ve
been known to go out to a parking lot in a rental car
and have some fun with it doing reverse 180s! Anyone can
do that,” he adds with a dramatic pause, “but the hard
part is doing it and knowing how to control it.”
To
perfect his technique for this film, the Golden
Globe-nominated actor trained with stunt drivers. “We
would go out to a large parking lot and they’d set up
boxes that would represent people and cars and you had
to come up at 40 miles per hour, hit the parking brake,
slide the car, control the spin and come in sideways to
park without hitting the boxes,” he elaborates. “At
first I knocked down quite a few,” he adds with a laugh,
“but once I got used to it, I got really good at it!”
In
Columbia Pictures’ action-packed thriller ‘Vantage
Point’, eight strangers with eight different points of
view try to unlock the one truth behind an assassination
attempt on the president of the United States. Thomas
Barnes (Quaid) and Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox) are two
Secret Service agents assigned to protect President
Ashton (William Hurt) at a landmark summit on the global
war on terror. When President Ashton is shot moments
after his arrival in Spain, chaos ensues and disparate
lives collide in the hunt for the assassin. In the crowd
is Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker), an American tourist
who thinks he’s captured the shooter on his camcorder
while videotaping the event for his kids back home. Also
there relaying the event to millions of TV viewers
across the globe is American TV news producer Rex Brooks
(Sigourney Weaver). As they and others reveal their
stories, the pieces of the puzzle will fall into
place—and it will become apparent that shocking
motivations lurk just beneath the surface.
“I was
on the edge of my seat just reading this script,” Dennis
recalls when he first heard about the project. “I always
loved the movie ‘Rashomon’ and the idea of telling the
same story from different points of views to show how
each point of view has a different truth to it. So what
is the truth, the movie really asks?”
Quaid
immersed himself in documentary footage of Secret
Service agents on duty and read books written by former
agents. “We also had an ex-Secret Service guy who had
been on a presidential detail, and he trained us for
three weeks before we started,” he continues. “We ran
through a lot of simulations and crowd stuff you would
do, like how to protect the President in various
scenarios, and being able to throw yourself in front of
him if you see something is going to happen. It’s like a
football team and everybody has to know their play, even
when the play changes,” he adds.
Dennis
Quaid, younger brother of actor Randy Quaid, began
acting in high school at the University of Houston,
Texas. His career was launched with the role of an
ex-football player in ‘Breaking Away’ and he went on to
star in ‘The Long Riders’, ‘Crazy Mama’, ‘Dreamscape’,
‘All Night Long’ and ‘Enemy Mine’. Since then he’s
played a diverse range of characters in films ranging
from ‘The Right Stuff’ (1983) and ‘The Big Easy’ (1987)
to ‘Great Balls of Fire’ (1989) and ‘The Day After
Tomorrow’ (2004). Some of his best-known roles include
the title role as a high-school basketball coach in ‘The
Rookie’ and his portrayal of a high-powered attorney in
the acclaimed drama ‘Traffic’. His other films credits
include ‘Yours, Mine and Ours’, ‘The Alamo’, ‘Parent
Trap’ and ‘Any Given Sunday’.
The
veteran star described his character in ‘Vantage Point’
as “a tortured soul.”
“The
whole key to him is that he took a bullet for the
President a year before the story started, and at the
beginning of the movie he doesn’t know if he’s up to it,
being back on the job,” he says. “He’s a loyal,
dedicated person to his President and his organization,
and has a very high standard for himself, and he’s
wondering if he can go out there again with a different
point of view. After you’ve been bucked off a horse,” he
adds, “getting on a horse the next time is a very
different experience.”
While
researching his role, Quaid gained a new appreciation
for what Secret Service agents do in the line of duty.
“It’s a very stressful job—and a job I don’t think I’d
ever want to have,” he says. “It sounds very adventurous
and glamorous at first, but most of your job is spent
sitting in a hallway for 12 hours at a time and you
can’t even take a bathroom break. So you go from that to
immediate jeopardy situations and never knowing when the
boogeyman is going to jump out at you.”
“And
these men are also trained to go against their natural
instinct and when everyone else ducks, they are trained
to stand up in those dangerous situations,” he marvels.
“If you watch the tape of
Hinckley shooting President Reagan, in an instant his men
reacted, putting him in the car and one guy backing up
and making himself as big as he could be so he could
take the bullet instead. You also see five police
officers and everyone else around them ducking for
cover, because that is the natural reaction of us all.”
While
Quaid was the first star to sign on for the film, he was
thrilled when he heard Hurt was playing his boss, the
leader of the free world. “We’ve known each other off
and on for many years and we’re both pilots so we have a
lot in common,” he says. “When we weren’t working, we
would go play golf together every chance we got!”
* Now in Philippine theaters, Vantage Point is
distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony
Pictures Releasing International. |
