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Jonathan Cross (Chris Klein) is a gifted athlete blessed with inordinate skill and speed,
Mercury on skates. Stubborn, daring and youthful bravado propel him. All he wants to do
is play hockey. Unfortunately, the NHL fails to appreciate his talent. His friend Marcus
Ridley (LL Cool J) appreciates Jonathan’s talent and takes him a world away, to Kazakhstan
and a new game called Rollerball. A notorious renegade sport, Rollerball packs arenas all
over the world. A global viewership bets and roots for the star players. Jonathan
becomes one of them. There his extraordinary ability is celebrated. With the equally
amazing Ridley and his feisty new teammate Aurora (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) beside him on
motorcycles, he defies gravity and expectations, swooshing up the sides of the glass that
rings the garish track, eluding his menacing opponents with preternatural aplomb. Fame,
fortune and, most of all, the game. It couldn’t be better than this. Or could it?
There is an insidious undercurrent and it always seems to lead to the team owner,
Petrovich (Jean Reno). There is something sinister about his effusive bonhomie, his slick
tailored suits. A powerful man with a nefarious past, money and ratings seem more
important to him than the final score, than the game itself. An infection of corruption
seeps into the sport, slowly, stealthily. The boy who just wanted to play a game suddenly
must become a man. In a heroic move, Jonathan and his teammates attempt to expose the
duplicity and treachery. It is a risky play and the penalty is lethal.
Director John McTiernan has helmed some of the biggest and most exciting box office hits
of the past decade, including Die Hard, the phenomenal success of which spawned enough
imitators to create an entire sub-genre of action-adventure films. “The studio had been
working on this project for ages. They had a lot of scripts and they were all filled with
a lot of science fiction and ‘after 400 years,’ every writer that the studio hired put the
thing further in the future and they had more bizarre circumstances to try to explain the
plot. An executive at MGM was brainstorming about the project – I wasn’t connected to it
at the time, he just wanted my opinion. I said, ‘Wait a minute. You’re doing a story about
some people regularly being hurt so other people can make money. And you figure you’ve
got to put that as science fiction in the future?’ And I just said that it wasn’t
necessary – people do it right now. One thing led to another…” Mr. McTiernan says.
McTiernan’s Rollerball, starring LL Cool J, Chris Klein, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and Andrew
Bryniarski, is an update of the 1975 film directed by Norman Jewison. It is not the first
time McTiernan gravitated towards a Norman Jewison film, as The Thomas Crown Affair was
based on an earlier Jewison incarnation. “Well, you see, I’m actually his illegitimate
son and I’m doing this to get his attention,” McTiernan jokes. “Seriously, I like Norman;
I like his work. He always made honest movies. So, I find myself attracted to them.”
Although he acknowledges that there are similarities between his Rollerball and the
original, there are some crucial differences. Jewison set his film far in the future;
McTiernan’s is just about to happen. The Rollerball teams in McTiernan’s film are co-ed.
Perhaps the most important difference is that the game is not set in the United States, as
the original one was.
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos was the last principal character to be cast. While all the
characters evolved as the film progressed, perhaps hers underwent the most radical
transformation. “My character is so different from what she was on the page when I got
cast. John McTiernan has really added so many levels to my character that weren’t there
originally. The original Aurora was written as a Russian girl but John didn’t really care
where I was from as long as I was European and had an accent. I have a lot of family in
Holland, so I was familiar with that. Also, I’m not the sunny California blonde in this
movie. John wanted to take every ounce of California out of me. He wanted to toughen her
up, so we decided that she would have black hair,” she says.
The character also bears a ragged scar, etched into the side of her face, near her eye.
The wound, Ms. Romijn-Stamos explains, is not just an affectation. “She sees the ugly
side of life and the scar is a representation of it. She’s had it for years and she’s
very ashamed of it. In fact, we didn’t decide on the scar until fairly late into the
production and it really was a result of the way the character was changing. John would
get very emotional when he talked about Aurora and her scar. He said, ‘She was this
beautiful woman, living in this horrible world where she got cut up by somebody and there
was no doctor to stitch her up.’ I love the scar, actually, and playing someone who is so
self-conscious about it. It really has a profound effect on people when they see a scar on
somebody’s face. And people know what I look like, I don’t need to shove the tall blonde
down people’s throats anymore. It’s fun to play somebody with a completely different
look, as I did in X-Men. At least I’m not blue in this movie.”
LL Cool J didn’t turn blue when he accomplished a complicated maneuver astride a
motorcycle in which he was tethered to another bike, which was yanked back as he crashed
into the motorcycle from above, pushing the stunt woman riding it off the seat. Oh, and
by the way, her motorcycle was on fire.
The actors attempted these stunts out of necessity, not vanity. McTiernan and his
cinematographer, Steve Mason, endeavored to put the camera in the track with the teams, so
that the audience would feel the adrenaline and danger of the game first hand. This meant
that, after a certain point, the actors had to do their own stunts because the camera was
so close to the action.
Andrew Bryniarski plays Halloran, “a fiercely competitive athlete competing in an arena
where ethics in sport have become optional.” Mr. Bryniarski can personally attest to the
adrenaline that pumped through his body when LL Cool J “nearly ran a motorcycle right up
my butt. He was overtaking me from behind and couldn’t find room to pass,” Mr. Bryniarski
recalls, “I looked over my right/left shoulders and couldn’t line up the hit, he gunned it
and the front wheel went right between my legs. For a moment I really thought he might
mow me down and run over my spine. Got lucky though. We had a huge laugh and I still
expect to have children one day.” Whew!
In one scene, Mr. Bryniarski was “hanging by a rope tied to my ankle while I was dragged
through the air upside down. Before that, they brought in an engineer to design a rig
that would flip me upside down while flying through the air by one ankle into a terrible
impact with something hard. Piece of cake. (professionally this is true, personally, that
stuff is always eye-openingly scary, and I'm amazed to still be alive when it’s through).
Additionally, I should say that the entire game as displayed in the film is an incredibly
demanding, dangerous environment to perform in. Add motorcycles and 20 odd skaters and
it's just a crazy environment ripe with danger. In the end, I nearly broke my femur and
hip!”
Mr. Bryniarski has an incredible recollection of the track. “The track in the original
was like a big wooden basketball court. Ours is a solid concrete figure eight with graded
corners and tall plexi-glass, like hockey.” Working with an anamorphic lens, combined
with varying angles and sizes, Mason’s cinematography transformed the undulating track
into a massive, looming, brutal course. He notes that the original film relied mostly on
camera pans, while he and McTiernan wanted something different, something grittier and
certainly much closer to the players. To achieve this took some experimentation. Mason
buried lipstick cameras into skates and placed cranes bearing camera remotes in the
bleachers, their arms jutting over the field and into the stands. Primarily, he and
McTiernan wanted the feel of a hand-held camera but it was a challenge to get it onto the
track and into the game. At first, they fastened a Steadicam to camera operator Mike
O’Shea and strapped him onto the back of a motorcycle as it spun around the track, chasing
skaters and motorcycles.
“John likes to move the camera all the time, he wanted to create a world, its own
environment, which was exciting. What we didn’t account for initially was the G-forces
that happened as the motorcycle gathered speed,” Mason says. “It was too unstable. We
tried a few things after that, but we eventually settled on this ATV we rigged. We added
a vibration oscillator, which removed the vibration but still allowed the camera to move.
And we used the Aaton camera quite a bit, which is lighter than the Panavision but has
more control than the Steadicam.”
Mason adds that he worked closely with gaffer Mo Flam on the lighting of the track.
Essentially, the track didn’t change; the art department painted it different hues to
reflect new games and the lighting underscored various aspects of the games.
“We lit the track for three different states, using low lights, spot lights and flickering
lights for the pre-game atmosphere and to emphasize the players’ state of tension. We
generally lit the track very brightly and the audience fell away to black, like a rock and
roll show,” Mason says.
In fact, Flam adds, the immense lighting rig his crew eventually erected was modeled on
rock and roll shows. “It was very theatrical, extravagant lighting with various color
schemes, to give them options for the various games. We used lighting instruments that
are fairly atypical for movies and a lot of them. We had 700 par cans on 600 dimmers,
with moving lights and follow spots, as well as a circle of lights around the perimeter to
help flare the light into the lens when that was needed,” Flam says.
The track was built on the grounds of a former cement factory, which was a boon for Flam,
in terms of power. “Because it was an old cement factory, we could use the existing
power. We had 14 lighting transformers and 16,000 amps of power, which is more than any
other Hollywood production I’ve ever worked on and it would have required 14 generators to
sustain that kind of energy.”
The sprawling erstwhile cement factory also became home to team lockers, tunnels teaming
with eager fans and a decadent, Dionysian haunt known as Club Galore. This complex was
located in Blainville, Quebec, a bleak stretch of strip malls and car dealerships about a
half-hour’s drive outside of Montreal. Transforming this compound into this strange new
world fell, in part, to production designer Norman Garwood. While the veteran designer
has many film credits, he says that one in particular reminded him of
Rollerball.
Wheels obviously play a big part in this film -- from skates to motorcycles to fast cars.
“Because it was in the near future, we wanted the vehicles to be familiar but just a
little ahead of our time,” says picture car coordinator Gino Lucci, “So we took ordinary
vehicles and exaggerated them. We took a two-door Jeep Cherokee and added two additional
doors to the rear and stretched it to accept four rear wheels, so it was a six-wheeled
vehicle. To stretch a car, you basically cut it in half and add pieces. The integrity has
to be consistent with what the vehicle is made out of so that you could drive this
anywhere. In fact, on The Thomas Crown Affair, I built a convertible Jeep in the same
fashion, with six wheels. We built it in nine days and shipped it to Martinique, we ran
it for six days up and down mountains with craters for a road and the performance and
stability of the vehicle was 100 percent. It never let us down. Then, of course, we
purchased two Porsches. We had to buy them because of all the modifications that we made
to them. John McTiernan thought that for the scenes in San Francisco, which are the
beginning of the movie, that Ridley should have a little sophistication in his vehicle.
It’s a 911 C-2 Porsche built into a turbo-look; very wide tires, the body-work was
contoured to the wheels. That car was built from start to finish in four days. When all
the components are together, we can basically work miracles. We also took a Pontiac
transport minivan and enlarged the wheelbase and the tires. The idea was so it would have
exhaust coming out of the hood like a hot-rod. We took, interestingly enough, an
Oldsmobile called the Aurora, and we magnified the wheel arches, giving it bigger wheels.”
Lucci’s team also built the motorcycles, a conglomeration of so many different pieces that
Romijn-Stamos affectionately called hers “Frankenbike.” Lucci continues, “It was John
McTiernan’s idea to start with a very light-weight motor bike, about 150 pounds, which,
interestingly enough, he found in Spain. We contacted the company and procured a total of
12 bikes. Our first concern was safety, because of the close proximity of the track and
motorcycles and people. They were very agile, made out of a chromemoly, which is a very,
very strong but light material used in racing. We took these motorcycles and then we
basically altered them in every possible way to be what they are not. That way, we
designed a core body for the team bikes, which were basically the same, except for the
different team colors. Because of the speed of the original bikes, which were very, very
powerful, we experimented for approximately two months with a much smaller engine to slow
down the vehicle so it wouldn’t become a projectile on the track. With the combination of
a smaller motor and special body work strong enough to form the shape but weak enough to
collapse in the case of an accident, we created motorcycles that were lightweight but
looked menacing.
“Of course,” Lucci adds, “you’ll notice that some of the motorcycles were individualized
to the characters. LL Cool J drives a Harley look alike. We made a copy of that bike,
which did all jumps and stunts; it was a little more reinforced than the first bike. We
created a very radical design for Rebecca. The basic configuration of that bike was
unbelievable. It had a very small wheel in the front and an awful, exaggerated wheel in
the back. It was amazing.”
“If you liked the original,” Mr. Bryniarski says, “then you'll surely love our homage to
this future sport of violence in the absence of morality and ethics. P.S. Wrestling fans
should enjoy the cameo of Shane McMahon as himself.”
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"Rollerball"
