Hobo With a Shotgun the Animated Series Rabbit
The new, NSFW activity movie Hobo With a Shotgun is so extreme fifty-fifty star Rutger Hauer thinks it goes as well far. How did a fake trailer made for just $150 become the yr's maddest motion picture?
Canadian managing director Jason Eisener originally wanted to make his debut feature moving-picture show Hobo With a Shotgun a couple of years ago. And he would take gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for those pesky kids. The (fictional) children in question played a small but crucial part in the script for Hobo that Eisener, his producer Rob Cotterill, and his writer John Davies had cooked upwards in homage to violent, depression budget, '80s action movies — retrieve Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher; or Rutger Hauer in The Claret of Heroes; or Rutger Hauer in… actually, if yous're thinking Rutger Hauer, then you're probably in the correct ballpark. Their tale centered on a railroad-riding homeless man who dreams of buying a lawn mower and then he can ready a gardening business, just instead becomes embroiled in a blood-drenched feud with a crime family unit comprising evil patriarch "the Drake," and his two similarly diabolical sons, Slick and Ivan. The Hobo squad were determined to portray the brothers as out-and-out psychopaths and decided to have them set burn down to a busload of kids with a flamethrower. The problem? For some reason, potential investors didn't think the cinemagoing public was dying to run into ablaze ankle-biters. "We would have made the film two years ago if that scene was not in the script," says Eisener, 28. "People backed out because of that scene. Nosotros never wanted to lose it. So we fought for it."
And, somewhen, they won. The unrated result of that victory, which stars a sure Rutger Hauer as the nameless "Hobo" splatters its manner onto selected movie house screens from this Fri (the movie is currently available on VOD). The sight of a burning busload of kids is barely the most deranged attribute of a film, which also boasts a pedophile Santa Claus, an unexplained appearance from a tentacled monster who seems to have wandered in from a different movie altogether, and the line, "When life gives y'all razor blades, you lot brand a baseball bat covered in razor blades." Even Hauer believes Eisener may accept crossed a line with his first proper pic. "Aye, he went too far," says the Dutch actor, before breaking into a wolfish grinning. "And so?"
Eisener and Davies first came upwardly with the thought for Hobo With a Shotgun at a joint called Barney's Pizza in their hometown of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. "It'southward where me and John go to pitch ideas back and forth," says the director. "My buddy Mojo had merely bought this Airsoft shotgun that shoots plastic pellets and he had really long hair and this shirt with a bunch of stains. We were pitching ideas and Mojo says, 'Why don't you guys make a film about me?' John looked him up and downward and says, 'What, a hobo with a shotgun?' We were like, 'Whoah, that sounds so cool!'"
Although yet in their mid-20s, the pair were old easily at the exploitation genre, having spent their teenage years making short films inspired by such movies as The Hitcher, The Warriors , and the shlock-tastic output of British filmmaker Brian Trenchard-Smith whose credits include BMX Bandits and 1986's Expressionless-Stop Drive In . "There's this drive-in that constantly shows exploitation films," Eisener says, explaining the plot of the latter. "It'due south where social club puts all the scum and at that place's this child trying to become out. I never understood why he would want to leave that place. I would desire to live there!" In time, Eisener and Davies graduated to making longer films: 2003's hour-long zombie activeness movie Fist of Death and another horror movie, the $350-budgeted The Teeth Beneath, well-nigh a skateboard shop that has a killer bunny in the basement.
In the spring of 2007, Eisener heard about a false trailer contest director Robert Rodriguez had ready to promote the release of his and Quentin Tarantino's film Grindhouse , which itself featured faux clips by Rodriguez, Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, and Shaun of the Dead film-maker Edgar Wright. The competition seemed similar the perfect vehicle for the Hobo concept. To play the lead role, Eisener recruited an acquaintance named Dave Brunt who he had met while working at a comic book and video game store. "He was this guy who would come in and hang out," says the director. "He's non homeless, just he's not well off. He lives off disability because he got hitting by a boozer driver, so he had to have a hip replacement. He heard I was interested in making films and his dream was to play a cop in a picture. Whenever in that location was no one in the shop, me and him would act out lilliputian cops and robbers scenes."
Eisener shot the trailer in minus thirty caste temperatures — "Nosotros were freezing our asses off!" — and in a guerrilla style that virtually resulted in the project being terminated when one rookie cop discovered a blood-covered Brunt sitting in the passenger seat of a car. "He got on his microphone and started screaming that he's plant a man hurt and that he needed redundancy," says Eisener. "All of a sudden this team automobile blocks us off and these two older cops are like, 'What's going on?'" The state of affairs was resolved when producer Cotterill showed the law the fake blood tubes. According to Eisener, "The cops look at the rookie like, 'That's some pretty skillful investigative piece of work you're doing there, bud!' and but drove off." The total budget for the trailer was $150, a expert deal of which went on buying pizza and cigarettes for Brunt.
In May 2007, Eisener attended the SXSW picture festival in Austin to hear Rodriguez denote that his trailer had won the contest. The clip became a YouTube awareness and the Canadian distributors of Grindhouse included the trailer in prints of the motion-picture show when the film was released n of the border. Given the fizz around Hobo, Eisener, Cotterill, and Davies decided to try and brand a characteristic-length version. To assistance secure finance they approached Niv Fichtman, a Canadian producer more accustomed to shepherding such arty projects as Guy Maddin'southward The Saddest Music in the Globe rather than movies which involve razor blade-covered baseball bats. Eisener admits he thought the chances of getting Fichtman involved were slim: "I looked upwards his IMDb page, and I was like, 'Oh my god, he's never dabbled in the genre at all. How the hell are we going to convince this guy to get behind this crazy moving-picture show?' But we hitting information technology off. I think he was merely looking for something different." Fichtman'southward gung-ho attitude towards the film can exist seen in a imitation backside-the-scenes YouTube clip during which the producer's rumination on tax credits is interrupted when "Slick" (Gregory Smith) and "Ivan" (Nick Bateman) shoot him in the chest.
By the spring of 2010, Eisener had a $iii 1000000 budget. What he didn't have was a hobo. The director originally planned to accept Dave Brunt reprise the function, but ultimately realized his hip problem made that impractical. Instead, Eisener sent the script to the agent of Rutger Hauer, whose films had done so much to inspire the project in the first identify. "His amanuensis read the script and said, 'Rutger, this isn't for you, you're not going to like it,'" explains Eisener. "But Rutger, he gets actually interested when people tell him he's not going to like something. So he took information technology upon himself to read the script. He was similar, 'What the f— is this?'" In fact, the histrion was not overly impressed by the Hobo screenplay and, in particular, the role he was existence asked to play. "The centre was missing," recalls Hauer. "It was non a character still. He didn't have assurance or meat." The actor, who was making a movie in South Africa, did hold to have a Skype meeting with Eisener, but merely and so he could permit him downwardly-confront to Net confront. "It was crazy," says Eisener, "because it was like a calendar week before production. If he had said no, the whole film would have fallen apart. We talked about the pic for maybe ten minutes and then nosotros bonded over our own inspirations in life. He's an ocean conservationist and before being a filmmaker, I wanted to be a marine biologist and we connected over those things. We got a call back in a couple of hours [saying] he's totally downward."
Prior to the start of the film's Halifax shoot, Eisener put together a reel of clips from such films as Deathwish 3 , the one-act-horror movie Street Trash , and The Hitcher to "get my crew upward to speed every bit to the world they were going to be jumping into." Anyone still unclear nigh that globe was thoroughly clued-in on the offset solar day of shooting, when Eisener filmed the contentious bus scene. "Information technology was in the tin can earlier anyone could say anything," chuckles the director.
The preparation-obsessed Hauer seems to accept taken equally much care over his performance as "Hobo" as he did playing iconic android Roy Derailed in Ridley Scott'due south much more than lavishly budgeted Bract Runner . The actor believes the corporeality of mayhem in Hobo made information technology doubly important that his performance annals emotionally with audiences. "You've got to be dead serious," he says. "Shooting heads and tearing the limbs autonomously, that's merely going to work and so far." Hauer was assisted by the on-set presence of Dave Brunt, whose cinematic dreams had been finally fulfilled when Eisener cast him as a muddied cop. "He was a great inspiration," says Hauer. "He was on the set almost every twenty-four hours. I took every bit much as I could from him."
Certainly, Hauer's functioning is vanity-costless. In person, the 67-year-old still has the other-worldly handsomeness he displayed in his Blade Runner and Hitcher days. In Hobo, he cuts a far more wretched and aged effigy while, on the motion-picture show's illustrated poster, he looks positively zombie-fied. "There was no time for a pretty hobo," says Hauer. The actor suggests Eisener's shlock tribute is actually a film with a message. "There's grit in this motion-picture show that says, 'Wake the f— up," he says. "The American West has shrunk to s—, and people with the smallest amount of hope are losing the f—ing game. They terminate upward very encarmine. Information technology'due south a metaphor for me. It'southward not the [whole] film, simply information technology'due south there."
In Dec 2010, independent distributors Magnet Releasing ( Monsters , George A. Romero'southward Survival of the Dead ) appear they had picked up the U.S. rights for Hobo, which Magner senior vice president Tom Quinn described, somewhat un-vice presidentially, as "Pure blood-drunk, bat-southward—-crazy fun." The film debuted at this year'due south Sundance Festival, where Hauer appeared at one postal service-screening Q&A toting an actual shotgun. Prior to the festival, Eisener was concerned that his film failed up to live up to the promise of the title — that he might take fabricated another Snakes On a Plane — but was reassured past the enthusiastic welcome shown to it by Sundance attendees. "I was worried near that," he admits. "Merely then I saw the reaction from audiences. I'grand non worried about it anymore."
One possible reason for that reaction is that Eisener does not wink at audiences in the way Rodriguez and Tarantino did with Grindhouse. "I similar the Grindhouse movies," he says. "Our problem is they kind of spoof the genre [with] missing reels and stuff. Nosotros simply wanted to play it direct. We wanted to make a movie that yous experience you could have pulled off a VHS shelf in the '80s." Eisener says he has deliberately not played up the Grindhouse connection: "I met Quentin at the Inglourious Basterds premiere in Toronto and told him we were making the movie. He said he couldn't expect to run across it. Only we never really reached out to those guys. I didn't want to piggy dorsum off them. I wanted to do our own affair and if they see information technology and they dig it that volition exist awesome."
The presence of Rutger Hauer in Hobo does provide a connection to Rodriguez. The actor appeared in the director'south Sin City , albeit in a cameo office. Cameo roles are pretty much all Hauer has played, at least in major U.S. productions, over the last couple of decades. "Absolutely, information technology'south a improvement," the actor says of Hobo. "Let's say a improvement to no one! Because the audience that likes this has never seen me before, or hardly. I haven't been on film in a long time," he says, earlier correcting himself: "I've made a ton of films, very interesting films, only Americans tend to get, well, f— that s—."
Eisner and Davies are currently writing a high schoolhouse-set martial arts flick, just the director is hopeful Hobo volition bear witness successful plenty to warrant a sequel (or ii). "Rutger calls Hobo a 'Graffiti Western,' which I think is very fitting, and I'd love to make my Western trilogy out of it," says the director. "Nosotros wrote, like, 27 drafts of the script. We have so many dissimilar stories that I'd love to tell." The director reveals that one of the discarded Hobo sequences was a scene that might accept been more disturbing than the flamethrower sequence, at least to true cat lovers. "The original opening of the moving picture was merely insane," he says. "It was Slick and Ivan waiting for a train to pull in. Slick had a handbag full of cats and he covers it in gasoline and lights it up. Ivan opens up the train doors and there are all these hobos and he throws this burning purse of cats inside. We apace realized we couldn't take up a railroad for a twenty-four hour period, for budgetary reasons. But that would have been awesome."
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Hobo With a Shotgun the Animated Series Rabbit
Source: https://ew.com/article/2011/05/03/hobo-with-a-shotgun-rutger/
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