Andrew Davis on The Fugitive 30 Years Later: Exclusive Insights

First of all, congratulations on the 30th year anniversary for an incredible film. I got a bunch of questions to ask. I almost want to start by saying this. So, this movie is based on a very well-acclaimed TV series. So, what was the pressure like to adapt a very well-known show and to make it into a film and do the show justice? Well, it's interesting because people ask about whether I watched the TV show and I was a big fan of it.

And this was the 60s and I was not sitting home watching TV in the 60s. I was a student. I was involved in all kinds of other issues. But the basic premise is very empathetic for the main character. He's a guy who's unjustly accused of killing his wife. He's a doctor who still wants to help people no matter what. And so, we took that premise. The script that I originally got didn't have the elements that we wound up having in it.

The drug protocol and the whole issue of Provasic and the name of this pharmaceutical company, something we created as a way of resolving the issues that the script didn't have. So, it turns out it's very relevant today. You know, drug companies are criticized all the time and they've pulled some real shenanigans. And so, it gave us a wonderful bad guy, you know?

Oh, absolutely. And speaking of a cast, to say you have an incredible cast in this movie, I mean, Tommy Lee Jones, Harrison Ford, I mean, I could go on and on. Talk about your fondest memory working, especially with Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford. Well, there are very few scenes of them together. Yeah. Well, you know, for example, the scene where Harrison jumps off the dam.

We had built this set over this very scary looking dam in North Carolina. And Harrison was all wired in, you know, and so he wouldn't fall down the dam. And we were doing the sequence together, you know, and it was cold and we were, you know, trying to get it done. And Tommy said, you know, this guy's the greatest silent actor in the world, you know, because Harrison's doing all these motions like, don't kill me, you know?

And so that was fun. And, you know, I think it's emotional when they walk out of the Hilton Hotel at the end of the movie and you realize that, you know, Tommy has come around. From I don't care to I do care. You're innocent. I'm not going to let you go down, even though, you know, my job was to just bring you in, but I want to make sure you don't get in trouble because I know you're innocent.

I figured it out. Right. And speaking of, so I looked at the law stuff and I found out that throughout the shoot again, please correct me if I'm wrong on this one, but I found out that the batteries of the cameras kept freezing constantly. Oh, so IMDB screwed me over on that one. I mean, listen, how many films have I shot in Chicago? You know, I mean, I mean, Chain Reaction was the coldest movie.

Morgan Freeman was freezing, you know, Keanu. But no, I don't think there was a real problem. We had a good crew and they knew how to keep things warm, you know, so I don't remember ever waiting because a battery was bad, but, you know, it's cold, you know, and we wanted the feel of that and the look of that. So I remember the St. Patrick's Day parade was very cold.

Now, but the giving of the rap guy, I want to ask one question. You knew this was coming about the train crash. So you got to talk about how, because you only had one take to get this right and talk about how hard it was to prep that scene knowing that, hey, you only got one shot at this. Well, there are two parts to it. One is the engineering of making the train go off the track and turn over and explosions to happen.

And the other was where do you put the cameras to capture that? So I think we had, I don't know how many cameras, 15, 20 cameras everywhere buried in the ground and shooting from different angles. And, you know, we had taken a lot of time to figure that out and storyboarded it. And I think I was busy shooting the scene on the bus before it spins and turns over and goes down.

And they were all getting the other cameras ready. And we wound up getting the bus down the hill. And then we said, okay, let's roll it. And we actually pushed the train from behind. That's how we did it. The train, there was no engine in the car. We pushed the train from behind. It hit the right track and flipped over and went down. And this is Roy Arbogast who engineered it.

And Peter McGregor-Scott was, my producer was critical in terms of making this all happen properly. [Music]