Roger Avary

My very first morning filming Detention in LA, which was supposed to be an $800k shoot, Iatse showed up with a ballot box and said the crew was going to "vote" to turn it union or I get shut down. I had no choice but to flip it and spent the rest of the shoot scrambling to find money every three days. After it was done, my own DGA union kept sending me bills to pay for fines on a movie I spent my own money on. Of course all this expanded my budget which then put me in another tier of SAG which then increased the budget again. It was an endless union squeeze that kept pushing the budget up, with me holding the bill. As they say in Goodfellas, Fuck You Pay Me.

"When I was twelve, I helped my daddy build a bomb shelter in our basement because some fool parked a dozen warheads 90 miles off the coast of Florida. This thing could park a couple hundred warheads off Washington and New York and no one would know anything about it until it was all over." This film doesn't just hold up, it stands strong. Less an action movie (which the latter films increasingly became), and more a thriller, it remains the best adaptation of a Clancy novel. Don't get me wrong, the Harrison Ford films are good, but this one maintains the spirit of its source from start to finish, and Alec Baldwin is still the best onscreen iteration of Jack Ryan. The cast is absolutely stacked, with everyone turning in solid work. James Earl Jones, Courtney Vance, Stellan Skarsgard, Tim Curry, Joss Ackland, Fred Thompson... don't even get me started on Sam Neill's endearing, heart rending performance. Then you've got Scott Glenn (in his best role) going toe to toe with the titanic Sean Connery, who sells the deepest emotion and calmest control with only a twist of his mouth or the gleam in his eye. The script is a master class in tension, every scene tightening until the conclusion. John McTiernan (director of 'Die Hard') never loses his way with this film, never calls for more than a scene needs, despite the global crisscrossing and spiraling ensemble, and his editing team never wastes a frame. It's a film of massive scale mostly caught in camera, including submarine miniatures and real life warship and aerial maneuvers (CGI had yet to turn its sparkle on everything in sight). You feel the cold and the wind when Ryan has to jump from a helicopter into the ocean alongside a sub. Basil Poledouris delivers a fittingly grand, yet claustrophobic score, capturing the stakes of a war fought within these steel cans. The rousing Russian pride, the soaring American grit, the subtle loss, the tendentious peace... it all coalesces like something from another time, from a world built on nerves we were already forgetting. 36 years later, and you still want to believe this could have happened in the shadowed halls of power, in the dark depths of the sea... where some good men kept the whole powder keg from blowing. "Welcome to the New World, Sir." The Hunt For Ref October (1990)