Kurt Russell discusses his favourite movie
Kurt Russell has performed as a wide range of iconic characters, yet perhaps the most iconic of all is Snake Plissken from Escape from New York and Escape from L.A. Both movies were directed by the inimitable director John Carpenter and are stalwarts in the realm of action features.
Russell admitted that he had a tremendous amount of fun working on Escape from New York with Carpenter, “creating a character that I think is probably, certainly, the most iconic character I’ve ever played.” Together Russell and Carpenter crafted an ultra-masculine anti-hero that set the tone for a number of 1980s action films.
With that, he acknowledged that creating a “cool wardrobe” was imperative. “I put motorcycle boots on, and I had four golf cleats coming out of the toes,” he said. “You know, he was a guy who lived in that time and lived that way, and then we put the tattoo where it should be.”
Indeed, Plissken had a rather comical (by today’s standards) snake tattoo across his midriff that, in 1981, oozed cool. “If you’re gonna wear a cobra, wear it there,” Russell noted. “It was an opportunity to do stuff like that and create a character that really didn’t have any socially redeeming values.”
Discussing the impressive supporting cast of the film, Russell remembered trying (and failing) to work out with Isaac Hayes: “I used to call up Isaac in the morning to go work out, because at night he would go, ‘Hey, hey, we’ll go tomorrow morning, give me a call and we’ll go work out together.’ So I ring his phone and ‘ring, ring, ring’… Finally, he’d pick up and groan. ‘You want me to call you back in five minutes?’ ‘No’.”
Escape from New York was actually filmed in St Louis, despite being set in the Big Apple. However, there was a good reason for this. “[It was] because there was nothing there at night, it was completely empty,” Russell said. “We didn’t have the ability to have a lot of crowd control or anything. There was no need to because there was nobody there.”
However, being in a deserted smaller city at night meant that there were more than a few unsavoury characters around. Interestingly, though, this gave Russell ample room to test out Plissken’s character (even if it was inadvertently). He said: “There are those moments when you know a character is going to work, and one night I had to go down about three blocks, and we didn’t have anyone to go down there with, so I just went down there geared up with all my guns and everything. It was a scene where Snake is coming in to wreak some havoc.”
“I came around the corner, and there are these four guys, and none of my guys can see me,” Russell continues. “I just looked at these guys, and they looked at me – this is how different this was at the time – when you see a guy with a serious machine gun and a knife and a bunch of stuff that you don’t even know what is… I just flashed a light a little bit on the gun, and these guys just looked at me, and they were pretty rough characters, and they went, ‘Hey, man, easy, easy’. They just kind of turned and very quietly walked away. I couldn’t wait to get down to tell John, ‘Hey, I think this guy’s gonna work’.”
