STORYBOARDS: ALEX HILLKURTZ
more sympathetic, changing him from a random
thug to a virtuous Army Ranger, while it was
Cage himself who decided that Poe would have
a plush toy bunny to gift his daughter, to be
protected at all costs.
Bruckheimer liked to recruit directors who’d
worked in commercials, for their big ideas and
visual chops, such as Top Gun’s Tony Scott and
Flashdance’s Adrian Lyne — Bruckheimer
himself had begun his career producing ads.There was a meeting with Britain’s Tony Kaye,
who would go on to make American History X,
but, at the time, was still to make a feature. By
his own admission in a 2012 interview, he was
idiotic. “We should go to prisons and get real
convicts to make the movie. It’s the only way,”
he told Bruckheimer executives. “What about
actors?” they asked. “No, that’s stupid,” he said.
He didn’t get the job.
Meanwhile, Simon West landed on
Bruckheimer’s radar. Another Brit, West was
directing music videos — including Rick Astley’s
Never Gonna Give You Up — and commercials,
because he wanted to make films and had seen
others graduate the same way. It worked.
Impressed with his output, Bruckheimer called
West in for a meeting and gave him Con Air;
West loved it. He took the job and then, at
Bruckheimer’s request, immediately set about
working with Rosenberg on making it more
bananas. The plane shrunk — instead of the
Boeing the real Con Air used, West wanted
a small jet that looked like an old prison bus
— but the action got bigger.“Scott called me ‘the enlarger’,” says West.
“He would write a line and I would turn it into
a five-page cacophony of mayhem. It went from
this small, character-driven thing to this giant
overblown spectacle.”
Rosenberg admits that, at its core, Con Air
is “a pretty ridiculous movie. We weren’t
really quite sure if we were making a Jerry
Bruckheimer movie or taking the piss out of
a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. We weren’t sure what
Jerry thought.”
But Bruckheimer knew he wanted it funny.
He was the one who kept pushing the absurdity,
and at one point hired J.J. Abrams, then known
as a comedic screenwriter for films such as
Gone Fishin’, to contribute jokes. Abrams was
also writing on Armageddon; “He was our go-to
guy,” says Bruckheimer. Abrams gave them a few
lines for Con Air, including Poe deadpanning
as the DEA Duncan Malloy’s Corvette, tied
to the back of the plane, trails behind in the
sky, “On any other day, that might seem strange.”
And on the production itself, things only
got stranger.�Sally Can’t Dance (Renoly Santiago) leads the charge.
Below left: Lawmen Vince Larkin (John Cusack), Duncan
Malloy (Colm Meaney) and Skip Devers (John Roselius).
Below: Steve Buscemi’s killer Garland Greene makes a friend.From storyboard to screen:
Fighting the National Guard
at Lerner Airfield.