GUTTER CREDIT
“You can imagine, it got pretty macho out
there in the desert,” says West. “Everyone went
a little crazy. They built a dojo so at lunch they
could all fight and wrestle each other, and it
did become a bit like a prison. Everybody was
stripped to the waist all the time because it was
so hot, everyone was showing off their muscles.
There was competition over who could do the
most pull-ups and push-ups.” In a podcast
interview last year, Ty Granderson Jones, who
played the convict Blade, said there were often
fights brewing, and he punched a few guys who
wanted to cause trouble with him. Danny Trejo,
who played Johnny 23 and spent years in the
penitentiary system himself, has said it was the
biggest test of testosterone he’d ever seen.
Cage, Trejo claimed, was the baddest
baddass of them all, while West describes him
as “ripped” and says, “He could beat everybody,
hands down. He did 70 one-arm push-ups,
or something ridiculous,” though he mostly
kept to himself. “Nic was in the craziest shape
of his life,” Rosenberg tells us: sober, eating
macrobiotic food, working out constantly in his
mobile gym, behaving “like a monk”. The other
big leads also kept away from the off-screen
debauchery, of which there was much. “In
Wendover there was one Pizza Hut, one
Blockbuster video and one little casino,” says
West. “And a strip club. Which was called The
American Bush. I would be shooting all day and
was exhausted at night, going back to my hotel
room and preparing for the next day, but 400
guys would descend en masse on this little town
and basically take it over.”They spent many hours at The American
Bush, Rosenberg recalls. “At any one time, you
could look up and one of the cons was in the
DJ booth putting on some AC/DC. I joked that
15 years later, you’d see an article in a newspaper
about how the Wendover football team is the
greatest in the country, because all these big giant
guys [from the film] impregnated these strippers,
who went off to have big giant babies that would
eventually make the Wendover football team.”
Chaos continued when the production
moved to Las Vegas to film the climax. “It was
crazy,” says Rosenberg. “These guys were cooped
up in that little town then all of a sudden they’re
unleashed in Vegas. It was like the Vikings
attacking, looting and sacking.” Oftentimes,
when people were needed on set, they were
nowhere to be found. “I’d be shooting and I’d
say, ‘Where’s so and so?’” says West. “And
someone would say they were in a casino. We’d
have to send people out to track them down.”
West’s original idea for the climax was to have
the plane crash into The Mirage casino’s fake
volcano, which would then erupt on cue, the plane
sinking into the lake, leading to an underwater
fight between Poe and Cyrus. But that went
kaput when Mirage owner Steve Wynn read the
script. Wynn wanted to move The Mirage away
from Vegas’ Sin City reputation and attract
families, and didn’t want the association with an
R-rated film. So West was without his location.
But the director had recently read in the Los
Angeles Times that the Sands casino was closing
down, scheduled to be demolished. He asked
them to delay the demolition until they got there, �Poe mid-ordinary
day at the office.