The movie Kurt Russell called the best thing he’d ever done: “It was a bitch and a half”
Kurt Russell has always had a strange relationship with acting. He’s long been open and honest about how he doesn’t consider it to be an art, instead believing acting is simply a job where you say your lines and hit your marks. In truth, he gets much more passionate when he talks about the other pursuits that have defined his life: flying, hunting, and, above all else, baseball. It has led some observers to theorise that Russell has always felt slightly embarrassed that he makes his living in a profession he considers wimpy – but there was one movie that challenged this notion. This thing pushed him to his physical limits, and even though it was the most challenging film he’d ever made, he also emerged thinking it was his best work.
Russell first heard about the movie that would finally satisfy his primal demands when he was flying to Catalina Island in the cockpit of a twin-engine Cessna aeroplane. Russell was the pilot, and his passenger was a fellow Hollywood heartthrob, Tom Cruise. The young star was trying to convince Russell to come on board his NASCAR action flick Days of Thunder, but Russell wasn’t particularly interested. Then Cruise mentioned another script he’d been considering, about two firefighter brothers battling infernos set by a serial arsonist in Chicago, and Russell’s ears finally pricked up. When they landed, Russell got his agent on the horn and told him to find out more about Backdraft.
Ultimately, Cruise couldn’t play the younger brother in the film, but Russell eagerly signed up to play the older one. William Baldwin was cast in the prospective Cruise role, and director Ron Howard filled out the supporting cast with heavyweights like Robert De Niro, Donald Sutherland, Scott Glenn, and Rebecca De Mornay. Filming was set to begin in July 1990 in Chicago, and the actors were sent to a firefighting boot camp of sorts. They accompanied real firefighters on calls and attended the Chicago Fire Academy to learn how to perfectly replicate the movements and tactics of these real heroes.
To Russell, getting up close and personal with the flames was the true appeal of Backdraft. Howard was determined that the actors would do as many of their own stunts as possible, and Russell was hellbent on testing himself in that fiery crucible. “All of us were getting burned every day,” a grinning Russell told Entertainment Weekly. “Your hair would burn. You’d put this gel on to keep your skin from burning, but it also attracted these little bits of ash, which stuck to your face. Billy got set on fire twice. I got set on fire three times. Scott got fried once.”
If Russell sounds a bit gung-ho in his assessment of dealing with real fire, that’s because he was. His character was written with an almost rootin’ tootin’ cowboy-esque approach to fighting fires, which was perfect for someone like Russell, who finally felt he had something truly dangerous and exciting to sink his teeth into. In the end, the real firefighters involved in the production were impressed by Russell’s dedication and bravery, with Howard admitting, “What Kurt did during those fires scared the crap out of me. All the firefighters really admired Kurt.”
When asked what it was like to shoot in a burning building, with hot flames licking up the walls and visibility reducing almost to zero, Russell confirmed that he often forgot he was acting. “It was a bitch and a half,” confessed the Escape From New York star. “Snot was running out of my nose; I could barely breathe, and my eyes felt like they were going to burst. I felt a rising panic. I really wanted out of there bad.”
At one point, he uttered his line and then turned around, only to find Baldwin and the camera operator were nowhere to be seen. He smiled, “It was sort of a great moment. I said to myself, ‘Nobody could ever accuse me of not being totally there.’ It was like my fire. I had forgotten that we were making a movie.”
In the end, Russell loved the terrifying, exhilarating experience of working on Backdraft so much that he declared, “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I worked my ass off on this.” He also said it was the first film he’d made in a long time that he was truly proud of, which speaks to his conflicted opinion on acting versus the real good that firefighters do in the world. As he put it, “These guys are heroes. They get people out of the fire. They die doing it.”
Perhaps pretending to do the work they do, even for a short time, made Russell feel he was finally doing something worthwhile with his career, although he still reckoned, “When these guys live their lives, they have done something. They have saved countless human lives. What I do is intangible.”
