To celebrate 30 years of The Fugitive, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has released the iconic action film on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray and 4K Digital HD for the first time ever and to commemorate the occasion, we were able to catch up with director Andrew Davis (Holes; The Guardian; Collateral Damage) to revisit the 1993 classic and break down some of the key moments.
He explains to me how he, Harrison Ford and writer Jeb Stuard actually rewrote a decent portion of the film on the fly during filming, including many of the most famous lines, and also gets into the process behind filming the big dam sequence and capturing the huge train crash in a single take!
Plus, he tells me what it was like working with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, whether we could see the return of more mid-budget actioners like The Fugitive, and a whole lot more!
Watch our full interview with Andrew Davis below and/or keep scrolling to read the full transcript! Plus, please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more exclusive content!
ROHAN: I love this movie, and I know that a lot of it was rewritten on the fly during filming. How much were you and Harrison Ford and Jeb Stuart rewriting from the original script?
ANDREW: Well, there were several parts to that. First of all, the original script I got had to be rewritten quite a bit, because it didn't quite make sense to me, and so, we came up with this drug protocol, as the reason that Harrison was going to be in trouble with Nichols, why they wanted to shut him up. So, once we accomplished that, it was a question of how to take the certain elements that were already there, like the train crash, and the jump off the dam and a few of the action pieces that David Twohy put in there, but the day-to-day, word-to-word things, you know, Jeb Stuart did a great job of trying to navigate between what the realities were that we were shooting and what was happening on the set. But, Tommy Lee and I had done a lot of improvisation on Under Siege, so Tommy Lee and Harrison and I, and all of the marshalls, all the different actors, I gave them an opportunity to contribute to what was going on as we go to the set, we try to talk through the scene, took what was on the page and then embellished it every day. So, some of the great lines in the movie are things that were made up on the spot, you know, get me a chocolate donut with the sprinkles on top, if you want to think up something, you know, that kind of stuff.
ROHAN: I did see that some of the film was shot in North Carolina before moving to Chicago. Was the initial plan to shoot more in North Carolina or was it always Chicago?
ANDREW: No, Chicago was definitely the first location, the main location, the story is set in Chicago, and the only reason we went to North Carolina was because Peter MacGregor-Scott, my partner and producer, found this train track that we could control. It had a dam nearby that we could use, so the train crash and the dam and the chase from the hospital, those are the sequences that were shot in North Carolina, and everything else was done in Illinois. The train is still sitting there on the side of that track.
ROHAN: You were able to work with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones at the absolute sort of peak of their powers. As the director on such a cool film like this, what’s your process working with these two very unique stars who are playing these now-iconic parts? What notes do you give them? What kind of input do they give you? What’s the general back and forth?
ANDREW: You try to create an environment where they can do their best work, keep it real, to have a setting, have an honesty, you know, Harrison, was introduced and hung out with some real doctors from the University of Chicago. He met another doctor, who he modeled his whole apartment after this doctor that we met one night in a restaurant, who was friends with a friend of ours. And, Tommy Lee, you know, hung out with these young marshals and understood what his role was going to be as a kind of mentor to them. So, I didn't have to give a lot of direction other than make the scene real and accomplish what the story had to be told every day. I didn't tell somebody how to hold the apple a certain way, you know, it was more how to stage things with cameras moving all the time. The Steadicam was being used all the way through the hospital, through Harrison's journey in the woods and everything. So, it was a question of how to make it visual, and I shoot a lot of footage, and I had a lot of coverage, so the editors had the ability to to make the pace really move and to really not be static and stayed, to keep the flow of the movie going. You're on the move. You're in the chase.
ROHAN: There is a real timeless feel to the movie and it’s the sort of blockbuster we don’t really see often anymore. With the ever-evolving landscape of Hollywood, could you see studios maybe pivoting back toward making more mid-budget films like The Fugitive instead of the $200 million blockbusters we’ve become so accustomed to? Or, is that era over?
ANDREW: I don't know. I think if this movie came out tomorrow, if they re-released this movie to audiences, who never saw it before, it would be a hit today. It works, it still keeps people enthralled. They care about the characters, the pace and the style of the movie does not feel dated at all, and so, there's no reason - I was reading an interview I did and talked about how Bob Daly and Terry Semel, who were the heads of Warner Brothers at the time, said, we don't need to hit home runs every time, we're happy with doubles. Well, this is a double that became a home run.
ROHAN: I absolutely love the “I didn’t kill my wife” confrontation sequence, could you break down filming that moment?
ANDREW: Well, the dam was actually a real dam, we built a set piece, which is the end of the tunnel, so that they could be standing over that huge drop and make it real. Everybody was wired in when we were doing that, but the the actual dam itself - the tunnels, we built on an old steel fabricating plant in Chicago, and had all the water running through it so we were piecing things together, and we knew from what we had shot in North Carolina, what we had to do in Chicago.
ROHAN: I believe I read that the train scene was one shot, which I’m sure took a lot of meticulous planning. What was the whole process like? How much prep or what kind of prep were you doing leading up to the day that you shot that scene?
ANDREW: Well, we only could crash the train once, we didn't have a second train. It would’ve taken months to pull all that stuff apart and find another train, so it was a one shot deal. We placed 13-20 cameras everywhere, so we had all kinds of coverage, and it was engineered - we actually pushed the train from behind. There was no engine in the locomotive and Roy Arbogast and Peter MacGregor-Scott worked out how to have it fall off exactly the tracks where it needed to fall off and crash into a house that would blow up and things like that. So, having a real train laying there the next day as a memory of what happened the night before, I thought was fantastic because, you know, if we would have had to do all that digitally, it would not look as good and not be as real. So, it took a lot of planning and yet it came off exactly as we planned it.
Harrison Ford and Oscar-winner Tommy Lee Jones race through this breathless manhunt movie based on the classic television series of the Sixties. Ford is prison escapee Dr. Richard Kimble, a Chicago surgeon falsely convicted of killing his wife and determined to prove his innocence by leading his pursuers to the one-armed man who actually committed the crime.
Jones, who also picked up the Golden Globe, is Sam Gerard, an unrelenting bloodhound of a U.S. Marshal. They are hunted and hunter. And as directed by Andrew Davis, their nonstop chase has one exhilarating speed: all-out.
So catch him if you can. And catch an 11-on-a-scale-of-10 train wreck (yes, the train is real), a plunge down a waterfall, a cat-and-mouse jaunt through a Chicago St. Patrick's Day parade and much more.
Better hurry. Dr. Richard Kimble doesn't stay in one place very long!
The Fugitive is now available on 4K Ultra HD!