- Notes provided by Universal Pictures. -

Terminal Island: The very near future.
The world's hunger for extreme sports and reality competitions has grown into reality TV bloodlust. Now, the most extreme racing competition has emerged and its contestants are murderous prisoners. Tricked-out cars, caged thugs and smoking-hot navigators combine to create a juggernaut series with bigger ratings than the Super Bowl. The rules of the Death Race are simple: Win five events, and you're set free. Lose and you're road kill splashed across the Internet.
International action star JASON STATHAM (the Transporter series, The Bank Job) leads the action-thriller's cast as three-time speedway champion Jensen Ames, an ex-con framed for a gruesome murder. Forced to don the mask of the mythical driver Frankenstein, a Death Race crowd favorite who seems impossible to kill, Ames is given an easy choice by Terminal Island's ruthless Warden Hennessey (JOAN ALLEN of The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum): Suit up and drive or never see his little girl again.
His face hidden by a hideous mask, one convict will enter an insane three-day challenge in order to gain freedom. But to claim the prize, Ames must survive a gauntlet of the most vicious criminals-including nemesis Machine Gun Joe (TYRESE GIBSON of Transformers, 2 Fast 2 Furious)-in the country's toughest prison. Trained by his coach (IAN MCSHANE of Deadwood, The Golden Compass) to drive a monster Mustang V8 Fastback outfitted with 2 mounted mini-guns, flamethrowers and napalm, an innocent man will destroy everything in his path to win the most twisted spectator sport on Earth.
Director/producer PAUL W.S. ANDERSON (Resident Evil series, AVP: Alien vs. Predator) reimagines ROGER CORMAN's classic Death Race 2000 for the screen. On the production, he is joined for Death Race by producers PAULA WAGNER (Mission: Impossible series, War of the Worlds) and JEREMY BOLT (Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Resident Evil: Extinction).
The behind-the-scenes creative team that brings the shocking reality show to life includes director of photography SCOTT KEVAN (Cabin Fever, Stomp the Yard), editor NIVEN HOWIE (Dawn of the Dead, Resident Evil: Extinction), production designer PAUL DENHAM AUSTERBERRY (30 Days of Night, Resident Evil: Apocalypse) and composer PAUL HASLINGER (Underworld, Prom Night).
Death Race is written by Paul W.S. Anderson and based on the screenplay by ROBERT THOM and CHARLES GRIFFITH, from a story by IB MELCHIOR. The film's executive producers are Roger Corman, DENNIS E. JONES, DON GRANGER and RYAN KAVANAUGH.
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Revving Up for Death Race
It is not surprising that British filmmaking partners Paul W.S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt were fans of executive producer Roger Corman's Death Race 2000. Considering the duo first gained notoriety for Shopping-a dark tale about joyriding youth set in the near future-it seems only natural the world created by producer Corman and director Paul Bartel in 1975 would inspire their choices.
Recalls Anderson of his memories of the original: "I was a big fan of the Corman movie. I saw it on video when I was still living in England as a teenager. It was the movie your parents didn't want you to see, because it was just packed with senseless violence and unmotivated nudity. So, of course, I just loved it."
At a screening for Shopping at the 7th Annual Tokyo International Film Festival, producer Bolt and Anderson first met Corman and discussed the idea of reworking Death Race 2000 for a new audience. At the time, Anderson and Bolt were about to make Event Horizon for Paramount, the studio where they first met Paula Wagner and Tom Cruise. The production partners had just launched C/W Productions and expressed interest in developing the project.
Bolt recounts: "I met with Paula at the Dorchester Hotel in London, and she thought it was a fantastic idea. They came aboard, optioned the material under their deal with Paramount and started to develop it. At that point, the idea was a movie similar in spirit to Roger's film. In other words, it was slightly satirical."
More than a decade would pass before the project would finally gel. Taking their cue from society's current obsession with reality television, Anderson and the producers decided to set the film in a dystopian near future. There, they would incorporate the most extreme of reality TV and turn the drivers into prisoners fighting a gladiatorial battle.
Anderson, who by this time had written and directed successful actioners such as Resident Evil and AVP: Alien vs. Predator, took over writing duties, and the project found a home at Universal. Of the Earth he imagined, he explains, "It's a slightly rougher world than we live in now, but still very much recognizable. The explosion in crime rates and the fact that reality television is big have led to the Death Race. It's the ultimate in reality television: nine racers who race to the death on this sealed course. They're the gladiators of our time, and the racetrack is their coliseum."
While this action-thriller is quite different from Corman's classic, one thing would not change. The fans are just as zealous in their passion for favorite drivers to massacre competitors. The more blood shed, the happier these Romans.
Locking Up Cons:
Casting the Film

When casting Death Race, the filmmakers looked for performers who embodied the gritty realism of the world Anderson imagined. After meeting him, the director felt British actor Jason Statham was his Jensen Ames. "The idea was to fashion a very blue-collar hero," offers Anderson. "That's why I thought Jason was a perfect choice to play Jensen, a man who's got a hard-luck story."
Through Ames, Anderson sets up the future. In the violent, impoverished world, there is little hope, but Ames has found a reason to live. "He's working in a crumbling, rust-belt town as a steel worker. The steelworks is closing down, and he's just lost his job," says Anderson. "This is a tough guy who's been to prison before and would've gone back if it weren't for the fact that he's found this woman who loves him. They've had a child together, and she's his second chance at life."
It didn't hurt the lifetime athlete's chance at landing the part that in his long résumé of action films-from The Transporter series to Crank and The Bank Job-he has done a good deal of his own stunt work. Apart from the attraction of such a role and fast cars, Statham was also impressed by how intricate Anderson's vision of the near future was. "Paul was a wealth of information about this story," recalls Statham. "It was so detailed: pictures of the cars, the emotion of the character; he knew every beat of the story. I thought the script was emotional, fun, dark, violent and sexy."
Statham, a self-professed "massive car geek," especially liked the sketches of the cars Anderson showed him, particularly those of the Mustang that he'd be driving as Hennessey's "Frankenstein." "We've seen cars with nitrous oxide systems before, but I've never seen anything like what Paul does in this movie," Statham says.
For the warden who forces Ames to become her star driver and the coach who trains him, the producers didn't want stock character actors. They looked to dramatic performers such as Joan Allen and Ian McShane to add credibility. "You're not used to seeing Joan Allen in a movie like this," laughs Bolt. "It was awesome to hear her swearing like a trooper, because I associated her with roles like a female president or a headmistress."
Tony Award-winning and three-time Academy Award® nominee Allen was asked to play Warden Claire Hennessey, a well-tailored jailer who has all the power on Terminal Island. "It was a very cool script, and I was really taken with the characters," Allen recalls. "I thought the cars were amazing and the concept was exciting. It reminded me of Road Warrior and Blade Runner in look and feel. After I met Paul and saw how he was conceiving it, I just thought, 'Wow, this could be really incredibly cool.'"
The actor looked forward to taking on a character like no one she'd played before: an extremely pious sociopath. "Hennessey is an interesting study of somebody who gets wrapped up in the media and numbers and forgets human lives are at stake," Allen continues. "My character only sees Death Race as an incredibly popular show that people really want to watch. She takes pride in that and gets kickbacks from it."
For the role of Frankenstein's Coach, the filmmakers turned to Ian McShane, most recently seen on Broadway in Daniel Sullivan's revival of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. The actor was interested in being a part of a film he describes as "like NASCAR to the death, inside prison. Everybody tunes in to watch convicts kill themselves in their cars and blast the crap out of each other around this racetrack." For his part, McShane believes, "Coach is one of the good guys-an honest man who's been in prison for so long that he's adapted and made it his home. As the chief mechanic, he knows all the cars, but he mainly works on Frankenstein's Mustang."
Multiplatinum-selling musician and actor Tyrese Gibson knew playing a ruthless murderer would be a challenge. "Machine Gun Joe is evil," says Gibson. "He's an inmate, a leader and a killer. This role was so dark. It was really hard for me to come on set and be dark and then, between takes, get back to being my normal self: fun, laughing, cracking jokes."
NATALIE MARTINEZ stars as the sexy and tough Case, who is shipped in from the women's jail-as are almost all navigators. Her job, as we are led to believe, is to help Frankenstein to victory in the Death Race. But Case has got a couple of sneaky moves of her own. "She's in jail, and the warden's waving freedom around," explains Martinez. "Case is very easily manipulated to do anything anybody wants." Martinez, however, did not have to be coerced to hang tough. During production, the performer literally threw herself into her role, even hanging out of the window of the moving Monster during gunfire takes.
Cast as Frankenstein and Coach's pit crew were JACOB VARGAS as wiseguy Gunner and FRED KOEHLER as the brilliant-but-shy Lists. Frankenstein's competition is a rogues' gallery of hardened men. They include mob man Yao Kang, aka 14K (ROBIN SHOU); The Grimm Reaper, aka Grimm (ROBERT LASARDO), a clinical psychopath who worships the warden; and Travis Colt (JUSTIN MADER), a former NASCAR driver who killed several innocent people when wasted. Ames also has to contend with one of Hennessey's favorite drivers, psycho neo-Nazi gang leader Slovo "Angel Wings" Pachenko (MAX RYAN), as well as the warden's henchman, Ulrich (JASON CLARKE).
Cast and crew locked, it was time to create a holding facility that would serve as the last stop for those who've had a life of crime...and a racetrack from which most would never leave.
Welcome to Hell:
Designing the Near Future

While Anderson, the producers and production designer Paul Denham Austerberry wanted to create a decaying world that reached slightly into the future, there were aspects that came into focus only when they settled on location. The solution was found in Montreal, which offered a prime space for Terminal Island in the now-defunct Alstom train yards in the Pointe St. Charles district. The yards served as primary exterior shooting locations and offered a grimy, industrial warehouse in which to house production. Alstom also had enough room to build sets for the island's interiors. With much of the infrastructure gone, the crew had to rewire and replumb the space to make it usable.
Offers Anderson: "The locations look almost like they've been built for the movie, but they were found; they give Death Race great production value. The movie wasn't written for these locations, so I had to go back and rewrite the script to tailor them to these fantastic places we found."
The team envisioned the death-trap racetrack to run between the disused warehouses in Alstom. "The big straightway with the gantry cranes on either side was a fantastic race straightway," says Austerberry. "It looked, at night especially, like you were on some other planet. As soon as we saw it, we knew we had to make it work. The key was trying to create a full racecourse."
The crew felt constructing the desolate hellhole of Terminal Island and the racecourse was like assembling a 3-D jigsaw puzzle. Because Anderson wanted to use actual locations versus a computer-generated island, the production designer had to create separate sets that would-when put side by side on film-create a contiguous world.
Anderson storyboarded the entire production, and he and Austerberry used a large-scale foam-core model to help the special effects and stunt teams, the DPs and the various units visualize the scenes for which they were prepping. "It took about a week with a huge crew of us going through the script bit by bit," explains Austerberry. "You could physically locate elements on our foam-core model well in advance of actually prepping the locations.
"Repeating certain bits of Alstom to be different parts of the racetrack, we pieced it all together," he continues. "We created a model, which sits in Hennessey's office. When we shot a scene inside her office, half the crew looked at the model and said, 'Oh, now we get it!' They could really see the whole lay of our fictitious land."
This systematic jigsaw-puzzle approach allowed them to choose which elements they needed to create the racecourse and prison on an oppressive island. "There were silos in the Old Port in Montreal, which had beautiful industrial architecture and surrounding water," says Austerberry. "The key was selling the fact that we were on Terminal Island." Coupled with Anderson's notes to director of photography Kevan to shoot low angles-with just enough wide shots to suggest a menacing, overwhelming environment-the design offered a bleak war zone that crushed prisoners.
Another piece of the puzzle was found in the Bleeker Tunnel, a wide space that gave new depth to the Death Race. When he tied together visuals of the silos in the Old Port and the straightway in Alstom, Anderson had his behemoth racetrack.
For exterior shots of the Terminal Island prison facility, the team lensed at an abandoned, turn-of-the-century prison, St. Vincent de Paul. Though closed more than a decade ago, the massive exteriors and interior courtyards were exactly what was needed for the penitentiary. In fact, the jail reminded many in the production of the look in Franklin J. Schaffner's seminal prison film Papillon.
Tyrese Gibson comments that locations were so realistic it felt as if they were in jail. "No acting was required," he says. "You just had to look around, see the big, old walls and all the barbed wire to focus on what you were there to do." There was, however, some break for the new inmates. Because interiors of St. Vincent's were too moldy, decayed and dangerous in which to shoot, Terminal Island's interiors were lensed inside the warehouses in Pointe St. Charles.
The actual steel mill used in the spectacular opening shot where we first are introduced to Ames added to the gritty reality. The production secured permission from the mill to shoot documentary-style in the working factory, with Statham placed among the real workers while enormous cauldrons full of molten steel were poured in the background.
Anderson and Kevan took advantage of the opportunity to lens a worker clad in a fireproof suit using a high-pressure hose to clean out a cauldron-complete with the residual slag-between shift rotations. Explains Statham, "I think they knew it was our last pour of the day, and they filled that sucker up. Literally, as they called 'Action,' I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck start to disintegrate. I swore a couple of times in the back of my brain and just kept a stoic face as I walked towards the camera."
The resulting footage was so good, it almost doesn't look real. In one key scene, Statham walks toward the camera and takes off his helmet as molten iron is poured behind him. It truly looks as if it's a visual effect-the performer against green screen- but he was actually there.
Welding Destruction:
The Cars of Death Race

The cars in the action-thriller are not just an extension of the men driving them; they are characters themselves. It was key to the production that the Death Race autos were insane modifications of expected models. It was like designing two movies in one; creating the cars was just as difficult as developing the characters.

Look and Specs
Anderson and Austerberry worked with two concept illustrators to begin the process. "We had to pick cars you could easily recognize in the fray of the race-those that have different silhouettes," explains the designer. "We also wanted cars that would appeal to a broad range of ages."
The industrial character of the autos came from the gritty, bashed-up aesthetic, as these are machines built by the criminals. The actors loved their respective rides, complete with napalm, nitrous-oxide (NOS) tanks and ejector seats. Says Statham, who, as Ames, drives a tricked-out 2006 Ford Mustang GT known as The Monster-armed with a ¾-inch steel tombstone and two mounted mini-guns that spit out 3,000 rounds per minute: "The Mustang's the signature all-American muscle car. Just the drawings were enough to seduce any man, so to get to see what was available behind the door..."
Gibson as Machine Gun Joe drives a weaponized, armor-plated 2004 Dodge Ram 1500 Quad Cab 4WD. His truck was designed to incorporate a Vulcan machine gun pulled from a helicopter gunship, which makes the car slower than the others but heavier all around. "It's a big piece of metal, and that makes sense. My car was a reflection of my character in the movie," says Gibson. "I have the biggest car because I'm a bully."
Neo-Nazi Pachenko drives a 1966 Buick Riviera chop top, lovingly known as the "Death Machine." "The arch-villain's car is quite different; it's like a Hot Wheels car," says Austerberry, adding that inspiration came from a picture of a Riviera with a chopped-down roof in Hot Rod magazine. "We combined those things together and created Pachenko's villainous car. It has a bright '60s color on the side and matte charcoal gray on the top to squish it down, with a low roof and narrow windscreen."
The other cars driven by Death Race principal competitors were a variety of fiendish makes and models. They include 14K's 1978 Porsche 911, outfitted with four hellfire missiles on the roof and four mini-rocket clusters on the hood; Travis Colt's 1989 XJS Jaguar V12 with two M2s (.50 cal.) on the hood front; Grimm's 300 monster car, a 2006 Chrysler 300C with three MAG 58s (.308 cal.), rocket-tube machine guns on the hood front and hellfire missiles on the back.
Of course, the deciding factor in the design was maneuverability, but that didn't mean drivers couldn't die in style. Others who meet an early death in the race roll out in a 7 Series BMW (1989 BMW 735i) made to look like an aircraft cockpit. The design team imagined one-half would be cut out of it, and they put the navigator behind the driver (with a mini-gun on the side) to create a different silhouette. There was also a 1971 Buick Riviera "boat tail" with a pointed back nose, quite the contrast to Pachenko's '66 Riviera chop top-with its points on either side, front and back.
Alongside these beauties, Anderson commissioned a rebuilt 1979 Pontiac Trans Am with a cattle guard, .50-cal. gun on the hood front and .308-cal. mini-gun. They were designed to be painted in a way that kept them looking like battered, rusty machines that have seen and done some damage over the six years since the Death Race began. When all cars were lined up in the Bleeker Tunnel, they made an impressive sight.
Finally, Warden Hennessey has control over the biggest, meanest vehicle of them all. The Dreadnought is the monster of all monsters. It's painted battleship gray and comes smoking down the track, guns blazing and fire spitting. With its flamethrower, six heat-guided rockets, PKM machine gun and wheels of solid Dayton Kevlar, the Dreadnought is designed as a weapon of last resort, to be unleashed in a fury of destruction whenever Hennessey feels the playing field is getting too...even or boring.

Building the Racers
It took approximately eight weeks of working through concepts before the team began assembling and set up in a Montreal fabrication shop. Explains Austerberry: "We had four draftsmen and two concept artists working in Toronto, then we came to Montreal. There was a huge team [50 crew members] who set up the auto fabrication shop, then we started getting the base cars, the real cars."
Special effects foreman JASON HANSON and picture-car mechanic BRIAN LOUIS and his crew worked with 30 base cars to gut and get them ready for production. This meant destroying electrical systems, airbags and antilock braking systems. "We stripped them down to bare metal, then built them from the ground up, doing roll cages, fuel cells and racing seats," he says. "Then the special-effects crew took over and did their body fabrication on the cars."
Austerberry describes the high-tech process of translating the raw materials into a Death Race car design on computer. "A handheld 3-D scanner [known as AndiScan] was passed over the raw car itself. Then another team in the effects design shop took the concepts and drawings and elaborated on those in 3-D, so they could send them out for cutting and fabrication of the various pieces." While that outsourcing took place, each base car was stripped of its gas tanks and a fuel cell was installed-as were safety features such as full roll cages that were fitted for specific stunts.
JEAN-MARTIN DESMARAIS, special effects designer and fabrication manager, describes the efficacy of the AndiScan process (which takes approximately one-half day per car) as "highly accurate; it scans within a thousandth of an inch. It uses three optical cameras and three laser sources to find all the points on the surface that are being scanned. It weighs three pounds and scans anywhere you can get the scanner into."
The 3-D modeling enabled DesMarais' team to validate placement for all parts- from armored plates and racing seats to weapons-and to find potential conflicts among them. It also allowed Anderson to get a feel for the shots he would be able to achieve with each car...and the visibility actors and stunt drivers would have when driving. The process saved the production about three months of work, about how long it would have taken to hand-fit the 500 to 900 parts put on each of the cars.
It took approximately six weeks per car for the mechanics and fabricators to put the racers together, then another week to make the thin sheet metal that was used to imitate the thick-plate steel armor necessary to survive any blast from enemies. Death Race drivers wouldn't last long without heavy armoring on their rides. Not to mention the fact that viewers get annoyed when a competitor is blown apart in two minutes.
To account for the armor and guns added onto the cars, Louis and his crew added in heavy-duty suspension. To illustrate, he offers: "On the Dodge Rams, we changed over from a 1,500-pound to a one-ton rear dual axle to take all the weight. On those, we added almost 2,500 pounds with the steel, guns, excess ammo batteries and whatnot in back of that truck. The cannons on the back are almost 800 pounds-just between the two Vulcan cannons on each side of the Dodge."
Explains MARTIN MANDEVILLE, in charge of building interiors for The Monster, "The inmates scrounge and make cars with whatever they can find, so it was appropriate for us to make this up with stuff from the scrap yard." His team used a variety of parts, including those from other modes of transport. "I found aluminum aircraft parts and built the napalm dispense. There's also a series of tanks used for defensive weapons." The ejection seats were another main feature of Frank's Monster and play into the story arc. As an actual ejection seat can be quite mammoth, Mandeville simplified its elements so Frank could feasibly eject a couple of seats from his Mustang.
In total, 34 cars-including six Mustangs, five Dodge Rams, four Porsches, three Jaguars, three BMWs and three of each-style Buick-were used to portray the 11 main cars and a few extras from the Death Race. The Fords, Chryslers and Dodges were primarily acquired from manufacturers, while the Rivieras, Porsches and Jaguars were secured online. Additional cars were found through auto-trader magazines.
Building (then arming) the bombastically loud and lethal Dreadnought was a massive task: two tractors were shipped from L.A., and the shell of a tanker was obtained in Canada. The Dreadnought was built in Calgary in a shop with facilities to contain the colossus. NIGEL CHURCHER, in charge of the process, notes: "We wanted it to seem as if it was a reconfigured existing truck, as opposed to something that had been specifically designed and built so that it would suit the rest of the film."
Though the crew saw pictures of the Dreadnought before it arrived, no one, including Anderson, knew what was coming. The noise of the guns, blazing at once, was deafening. The concussion shook the cast and crew, who cheered when it first drove by.

Arming the Death Race Cars
As head armorer, it was CHARLES TAYLOR's job to weaponize the cars. "The challenge was to take firearms never meant to be mounted on cars and mount them on cars like the Dodge Ram," explains Taylor. "In the original artwork, they had big Vulcan cannons on the side. They didn't know they were actually available to put on the car. I said, 'A friend of mine has two of them, and I can make it work.'"
Originally, the production intended to fake the weapons' gunfire, but Taylor convinced them otherwise. "There's no better way than to just fire them the way they were meant to be fired," he says. "We put a very simple mechanical or electrical system in, based on the type of gun, so that it would fire the way it was supposed to."
He asserted that, to achieve the proper effect, it should be very noisy. "It had to be that loud because it had to have that kind of pressure to make the guns operate," Taylor states. "On the Ram, we had four .30-caliber 1919 machine guns, along with the two 20 mm Vulcan cannons. That firepower alone would make anybody that knows weapons say, 'Oh my God, what's on the next one?'"
The loudest of all, though, had to be Hennessey's Dreadnought, commissioned by the warden to be created purely for destruction and ratings grabs. With huge, extremely noisy guns, the Dreadnought's weapons were the most impressive guns to fire because the muzzle flash was so large. Taylor mounted a full-on arsenal on the Dreadnought.
He explains, "You have the cowcatcher on the front and two M3 high-speed, .50caliber machine guns on the hood. In the sleeper cab are two M134 mini-guns, and then on top are a .50-caliber machine gun in the front and a .50-caliber machine gun in the middle. Underneath that is a flamethrower. In the back, there's a 76 mm tank turret, and-on top of the turret-is the PKM machine gun. When this thing lights up and is firing all guns and using the flamethrower, it's beyond impressive. It's hell on wheels."
Crashes and Fights:
Filming the Stunts

Cast and crew of Death Race would not leave the production without their fair share of bumps and bruises. The cars, however, would barely exit the track on all four wheels after the punishment they received at the hands of the stunt team and second unit.
Bolt discusses how three units were used to film Death Race: "We had a splinter unit, first unit and second unit. The second unit, running parallel to the first unit, was directed by SPIRO RAZATOS. He executed the action very specifically, carrying out Paul's storyboards. Paul directed all the drama and actors, and we had a splinter unit hovering in all the inserts-feet on accelerators, rev counters, steering wheels...all of those small pieces that really make up a movie."

Lensing the Races
With multiple autos racing at top speed, there were many challenges during filming. Some spectacular stunts could only be done once, so Anderson's team shot as much footage as possible. Up to eight cameras shot from multiple points of view-both in the air and on the ground. Cameras were rigged in crash boxes to protect them from impact, fire, heat and debris, and mounted on the cars so they'd be in the middle of the action. Often, the second unit was just outside the windows of cars zooming by.
For the writer/director, shooting Death Race offered a nod to another era of filmmaking. "In the 1970s and '80s, there was a limit to how close you could get the camera to some of these crashes," Anderson says, "a limit to how much you could move the camera. We've built a load of unique rigs that have never been seen before in movies-built specifically for this film. We were able to get the camera so close to these real crashes, these real explosions-cars on fire, cars spinning 20 feet in the air-all done practically and all done safely."
In order to implement his vision of a deadly place and time, Anderson worked with a seasoned film and stunt crew. Second-unit stunt coordinator ANDY GILL notes: "Luckily, everything we could do in the physical world, Paul wanted to do. For a lot of big wrecks, we had some effects wirework that helped with the stunt work, but we tried to keep it as real as we could. We stayed away from the special and visual effects for flipping cars through the air...unless it was physically impossible."
To keep stunts organized, Gill created diagrams of all the races, which he color coded to indicate details such as which cars would explode and how many bullet holes they had in them each lap. Matchbox cars were used to block out the action in miniature.
When the team needed to make actual cars blow up, it built some that didn't need human drivers. "We got with special effects to build these rigs: remote-control cars," explains Gill. "When we needed to shoot at high speed and have a very violent wreck with the cars ripping themselves apart... we didn't put stunt people in."
The other Gill on the set, Andy's brother Jack, was the lead stunt driver. He drove the 600-horsepower, "new muscle car" Mustang and worked with the other stunt drivers (and actors when at the wheel) to secure all moves were done safely. It was mandatory, as, for instance, the Ram had very limited visibility and the size of the window in the chop top is approximately 3 inches tall.
Jack Gill says they employed all kinds of special driving tricks and stunts to make the races look spectacular. "The reverse-drive rig is something we've been using for about five years. It's an ingenious little thing where you hook up a steering wheel and a set of pedals and a brake in the back of the car so that another driver can sit in back and look out the back window." The reverse-drive rig allowed the stunt crew to create spectacular driving action as, essentially, two guys drove for one stunt.
To keep the story in sync, it was crucial to get shots of the actors in the cars driving. Statham did a lot of his own wheelwork, but often he and the actors needed help. Jack Gill had the perfect solution: the pod car. He describes the invention as "convenient when you want to get actors' reactions-ones you can't get on green screen-in real traffic and in actual cars banging together. The pod sits on top of the race car and is attached to the car with a steering wheel, brake and accelerator pedal. I drove up there while the actors sat inside with cameras pointing at them."
This many fast, exploding cars posed plenty of danger, and, because of the amount of fire and explosions, the stunt team wore three-layer fire suits at all times. Empty shell casings from the firepower also offered hazards such as punctured tires.
To keep things moving, a mobile pit stop was set up off camera, and a crew of mechanics worked throughout the night to prepare the cars for the next day. "Every day we'd start off in the morning by getting all the cars prepped," explains Louis. "Going through each car, making sure they're all safe. Then, at the end of the day, we actually brought the cars back to a night crew. Those guys worked all night long to repair all the damage we inflicted."

Creating the Fights
While exploding cars were left to the stuntmen, actors did a good amount of their own driving and fighting. The fight scenes needed to be as violent and real as car scenes, and Anderson called for a level of subtlety and basic physicality from the actors. "I'm used to doing very stylistic fight scenes," explains Statham. "I didn't think that was suitable for the Jensen Ames character. He's a race driver, not a martial-arts expert, and he's not someone with Special Forces tactical training."
Though the actors' environment was broken-down, the roles in Death Race required them to bulk up to portray the hardened men of Terminal Island. To physically realize the character of Jensen Ames, Statham trained for months with LOGAN HOOD, an ex-Navy SEAL. Hood, one of the key trainers on 300, knew a thing or two about getting men into fighting condition.
The first time we see the level of Ames' skills (and the months of Statham's training) is in the penitentiary's mess hall. To inform his role, Statham visited Corcoran State Prison in California-the current residence of Charles Manson-during preproduction. As Statham discovered during his trip: "You walk into the mess hall and see this sign: 'No Warning Shots.' There are guards with guns walking around. If any skullduggery takes place, they are the first people to quell that kind of nonsense."
Fight coordinator PHIL CULOTTA, Statham's stunt double on Transporter 2, filled in the moves to create that explosive fight-a process that took about two weeks before the final version of the scene was locked. Culotta says that he relied on the basics to make it look like a dogfight. "To keep it down and dirty, we tried to make each hit be a 'done hit.' You get hit in the face at full steam by Jason Statham-just a gigantic rip- then, you're done. We end up trying to grab everything, including the kitchen sink, and just hit people."
The fight in the auto shop-where Ames is jumped by the neo-Nazis, slammed in the head with a pipe and choked with a chain-also required that Culotta choreograph substance and raw style. "For the prison auto-shop fight scene, we wanted to make it realistic and incorporate some of the things that you would use in the auto shops," Statham explains. "Some props we got our fingers on were great: fire extinguishers, big pipe wrenches...there's even chains you were getting choked with."
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Filming wrapped, a weary Death Race cast and crew reflect on their experiences and hopes for the action-thriller. "It's a very adult form of entertainment and certainly plugs itself into what my taste is all about," Statham says. "You got hot chicks, boys being boys; what more do you need?"
We conclude our notes with a parting comment from the filmmaker, who was so inspired by the cult film as a boy. Anderson sums: "In Death Race, I want to stay true to the slightly irreverent tone of Death Race 2000 without becoming intentionally campy. I want to tell a more serious story and have it be a darker movie, still with comedy in it. I made a very different film but one that still has a little social commentary in it. Just like the original Death Race did."
Universal Pictures Presents, In Association With Relativity Media-An Impact Pictures-C/W Production-In Association With Roger Corman, A Paul W.S. Anderson Film: Jason Statham and Tyrese Gibson in Death Race, starring Ian McShane and Joan Allen. The music is by Paul Haslinger; the editor is Niven Howie. The film's production designer is Paul Denham Austerberry; the director of photography is Scott Kevan. Death Race is based on the screenplay by Robert Thom and Charles Griffith, from a story by Ib Melchior. The action-thriller's executive producers are Roger Corman, Dennis E. Jones, Don Granger and Ryan Kavanaugh. The film is produced by Paula Wagner, Jeremy Bolt and Paul W.S. Anderson. Death Race's screen story and screenplay are by Paul W.S. Anderson, who also directs the film. (C) 2008 Universal Studios www.deathracemovie.net

ABOUT THE CAST
Born in Sydenham, England, JASON STATHAM (Jensen Ames) was one of the best divers on the British team. He placed third in the Olympic trials on three different occasions, eventually placing 12th in the world.
While training at the famed Crystal Palace National Sports Centre in London, film crews and photographers pursued him as a new talent for commercials and print campaigns. One of those jobs was a French Connection print ad where he met the owner of the company, who was also executive producer of a film in preparation: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Statham had a meeting with the director, Guy Ritchie, who gave him a role. He went on to work with Ritchie again in his next film Snatch, starring opposite Brad Pitt and Benicio Del Toro. Next came Turn It Up with U.S. music star Ja Rule, followed by a role in the sci-fi film Ghosts of Mars and The One, with Jet Li.
In 2002, Luc Besson cast Statham in the title role of Frank Martin in The Transporter. He starred as Handsome Rob in the summer 2003 blockbuster remake of The Italian Job and as the adrenaline-compromised action hero in Crank. Statham returned as Frank Martin in Transporter 2 and reteamed with Jet Li in War. He was recently seen in Roger Donaldson's The Bank Job, which opened No. 1 in the U.S. and the U.K., the true story of the 1971 Baker Street bank robbery, a story of intrigue, scandal and danger. Statham will next star in Transporter 3, out this Thanksgiving, and Crank 2: High Voltage, reprising his iconic role as Chev Chelios.
TYRESE GIBSON (Machine Gun Joe) was born and raised in Watts, California, a section of South Central Los Angeles. Gibson discovered a love of music at an early age and released his self-titled debut album at the age of 19. Soon after, he received an American Music Award for Favorite Soul/R & B New Artist in 2000. In addition to his music career, Gibson has found success in both acting and modeling, appearing in numerous television series and commercials, including an exclusive contract with GUESS.
Gibson made his motion picture debut as the star of John Singleton's Baby Boy and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award as Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture for his lead role as Joseph Summers. He again worked with director Singleton on 2 Fast 2 Furious, playing Roman Pearce. Gibson was recently seen in Transformers. His others credits include Flight of the Phoenix; Singleton's Four Brothers, starring Mark Wahlberg and Andre Benjamin; Annapolis, directed by Justin Lin; and Vondie Curtis Hall's Waist Deep. Gibson is currently shooting Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
IAN MCSHANE (Coach) is currently earning critical acclaim for his Broadway performance in Daniel Sullivan's revival of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. It's a 40th anniversary for both the play and McShane, as he made his Broadway debut in a production of The Promise in 1967, the same year The Homecoming first played on the Great White Way. McShane was recently seen on screen in Fox-Walden's fantasy adventure The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, as the mentor Merriman Lyon in the adaptation of Susan Cooper's beloved novel.
McShane's unique and distinctive voice has made him an in-demand voice talent adding his vocal prowess as Captain Hook in Shrek the Third; the villainous snow leopard Tai Lung in Kung Fu Panda, bowing in 2008; Mr. Bobinski in Laika Entertainment's first animated feature, Coraline, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's international best-selling book and directed by Henry Selick; and as Ragnar Sturlusson in the first installment of New Line Cinema's trilogy The Golden Compass, alongside Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig.
McShane earned the coveted Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series-Drama for his versatile performance as Al Swearengen on HBO's hit series Deadwood. His charismatic and alluring performance also led him to a 2005 Emmy and 2005 and 2006 SAG Award nominations for Lead Actor, as well as being voted "TV's Sexiest Villain" by People magazine in 2005.
His performance in Deadwood gained him a wave of critical acclaim, which earned him the Television Critics Association's annual award for Individual Achievement in Drama, and being selected as one of GQ's "Men of the Year." They described the character of Swearengen as "infectious" and "darkly irresistible." The New York Times dubbed him as "one of the most interesting villains on television," and Rolling Stone magazine bestowed the title of "Hot Barkeep" and described the character as "played to perfection."
McShane has continually shown his range of talent over the last few years appearing in numerous projects embodying a diversity of roles from Hot Rod, a comedy directed by Saturday Night Live's Akiva Schaffer, in which he played the macho, athletic stepfather to accident-prone daredevil Andy Samberg; Paramount Pictures' thriller Case 39, playing a detective opposite Renée Zellweger; Warner Bros.' true-life drama We Are Marshall, opposite Matthew McConaughey and Matthew Fox; Woody Allen's Scoop, alongside Scarlett Johansson and Hugh Jackman; Rodrigo Garcia's critically acclaimed true-to-life character study Nine Lives; and Jonathan Glazer's critically acclaimed indie Sexy Beast, giving another riveting performance by transforming himself into the dark, sinister and very handsome character Teddy Bass, prompting one London writer to declare McShane "the king of cool."
Having starred in more than 30 films, McShane made his debut in 1962's Young and Willing, which led to other roles in Battle of Britain, The Last of Sheila, Villain (co-starring Richard Burton), Exposed and Agent Cody Banks.
McShane has enjoyed a long and creatively diverse career in both British and American television, including a role in the David L. Wolper's seminal 1970's miniseries Roots, as well as BBC and BBC America's Trust, playing the eccentric megalomaniacal head of the firm, Alan Cooper-Fozzard. Starring turns in Whose Life Is It Anyway? for Granada TV, the role of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights for the BBC and Harold Pinter's Emmy Award-winning The Caretaker, are among his other television highlights. McShane has also stepped into roles as well-known figures, taking on parts such as Judas in NBC's Jesus of Nazareth, directed by Franco Zeffirelli; Prince Rainer in the network's The Grace Kelly Story; and the title role in Masterpiece Theatre's Disraeli: Portrait of a Romantic. Additional miniseries credits include Wonderworks: Young Charlie Chaplin, A.D., The Great Escape II: The Untold Story, Marco Polo, Evergreen and War and Remembrance.
In the late '80s, the actor formed McShane Productions, which produced the much-adored Lovejoy for the BBC and A&E. Lovejoy gave McShane a vehicle to star in as well as produce and direct. He followed his lovable rogue character Lovejoy by producing and starring in the darker and more serious lead role in Madson and the comedy drama Soul Survivors for BBC and Showtime. Lovejoy is currently enjoying a revival with audiences worldwide.
In 2000, McShane returned to the West End in London to make his musical debut starring in Cameron Mackintosh's successful musical The Witches of Eastwick as Darryl Van Horne. His varied stage career has included roles such as Hal in the original cast of Loot, the title role of The Admirable Crichton at the Chichester Festival, Tom in The Glass Menagerie and Charlie in The Big Knife. He co-starred with Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen in Promise, which successfully played London and debuted on Broadway. In Los Angeles, he starred in three productions at The Matrix Theatre, including the world premiere of Larry Atlas' Yield of the Long Bond and two others for which he received the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award: Inadmissible Evidence and Betrayal.
Born in Blackburn, England, Ian is the son of professional soccer player Harry McShane, who played for Manchester United, and Irene McShane. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Ian and his wife Gwen Humble reside in Venice Beach, California.
A Miami native, NATALIE MARTINEZ (Case) is a Cuban beauty whose mother inspired her to audition for Jennifer Lopez's JLo clothing line, and ultimately beat out 5,000 girls and became the face of the line. She recently moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting.
Martinez made her acting debut in MyNetworkTV's Fashion House. She portrayed Michelle Miller, the wife of a manipulative and controlling husband Lance (Mike Begovich) who doesn't want her to pursue her dream of becoming a fashion designer, so that she can be a stay-at-home wife. Natalie also appeared in the network's television series Saints & Sinners.
Three-time Oscar® nominee JOAN ALLEN (Hennessey) is one of the film world's busiest actresses.
Allen was most recently seen in the box-office smash reprising her role as Pamela Landy in The Bourne Ultimatum, opposite Matt Damon. In 2007, she was also seen in Bonneville, alongside Jessica Lange and Kathy Bates. Before that, she appeared in Yes,a modern-day, cross-cultural love story for writer/director Sally Potter. In 2005, Allen starred opposite Kevin Costner in The Upside of Anger for director/writer Mike Binder and in Off the Map, directed by Campbell Scott. In 2004, she was seen in the blockbuster The Bourne Supremacy and in the same year in The Notebook. Allen completed Hachiko: A Dog's Story, alongside Richard Gere, which is due to be released this winter.
Allen starred in The Contender, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award, a SAG Award, an Independent Spirit Award and an Academy Award® for Best Actress.
Allen starred in Pleasantville, opposite William H. Macy and Jeff Daniels, which earned her several critics' awards. Her role opposite John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in the smash-hit film Face/Off earned her critical kudos as well as Blockbuster and MTV Movie Awards. Her emotionally devastating role in The Ice Storm, opposite Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver, also earned her several critics' awards.
In 1996, Allen starred in Oliver Stone's Nixon, for which she received an Academy Award® nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She also won seven critics association awards, including the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics Awards.
Allen received her second consecutive Best Supporting Actress Oscar® nomination in 1997 for her role in Arthur Miller's The Crucible.
Allen has appeared in numerous feature films including Compromising Positions, Peggy Sue Got Married, Manhunter, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, Ethan Frome, Josh and S.A.M., In Country, Searching for Bobby Fischer, Mad Love, All the Rage and When the Sky Falls.
Allen is also one of the New York theater world's most honored actresses and winner of every major prize for her work on and off-Broadway. She received the Best Actress Tony Award for her performance opposite John Malkovich in Lanford Wilson's Burn This, and was nominated in the same category for the title role in The Heidi Chronicles. Off-Broadway, she starred in The Marriage of Bette and Boo (for which she won an Obie Award), and reprised her Steppenwolf Theatre/Joseph Jefferson Award-winning role in And a Nightingale Sang, for which she received Clarence Derwent, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Theatre World Awards. Off-Broadway, she also starred in Delores and The Heidi Chronicles. An original member of Chicago's famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Allen starred in their production of Burn This, Earthly Possessions, Reckless, A Lesson from Aloes (Joseph Jefferson Award), Balm in Gilead and Of Mice and Men. Allen will next star opposite Jeremy Irons in the upcoming Jack O'Brien play Impressionism, which will debut in Spring 2009. This will be her first time back on Broadway in 19 years.
Allen received an Emmy nomination for TNT's The Mists of Avalon, opposite Anjelica Huston and Julianna Margulies.
She lives in New York City with her daughter Sadie.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
From humble Newcastle beginnings, British-born director, producer and writer PAUL W.S. ANDERSON (Directed by/Screen Story and Screenplay by/Produced by) teamed up with producer and fellow Brit, Jeremy Bolt, early in his career to found Impact Pictures. The first film of the pair's ongoing collaboration, under the auspices of Impact Pictures, was the low-budget success Shopping (Channel Four Films, 1994), which Anderson wrote and directed. Starring Sadie Frost and Jude Law (with an appearance by legendary singer Marianne Faithfull), this dark film about joyriding and ram-raiding British youth (banned in some U.K. theaters) established Anderson's love of cars, dystopian futures and high-impact action.
Shopping paved the way to Hollywood for Anderson, and 1995's Mortal Kombat became Anderson's first American No. 1 box-office smash. It was also the first successful movie adaptation of a video game, a fact that soon established Anderson's reputation as the man who could take the game out of the box and make it explode on the screen. Sidestepping offers to direct a sequel to Mortal Kombat, Anderson chose instead to turn his attention to sci-fi. His next directorial projects included Soldier and Event Horizon. Blade Runner screenwriter David Peoples wrote Soldier, a "sidequel" to Blade Runner, which starred Kurt Russell, Connie Nielsen and Jason Isaacs. Now a cult classic, Event Horizon's stars include Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Jason Isaacs and Joely Richardson.
Anderson returned to adapting video games for the big screen with the survival horror Resident Evil (2002), starring Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez, which he wrote, directed and produced. A resounding commercial success, the movie spawned a successful franchise that includes No. 1 hits Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) and Resident Evil: Extinction (2007). Anderson wrote and produced the sequels with Jeremy Bolt.
Anderson consolidated his box-office muscle when he wrote and directed the highly anticipated AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004), starring Lance Henriksen, which opened at No. 1 and went on to be the highest-grossing film in both the Alien and Predator series.
Anderson is currently preparing a remake of the gangster classic The Long Good Friday, which he will write, produce and direct, as well as the sci-fi horror Pandorum, starring Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster, which he will produce, and the video game adaptation and action-horror Castlevania, which he will write and produce for Rogue Pictures/Universal Pictures. Anderson's producing partner, Jeremy Bolt, will produce all three.
PAULA WAGNER (Produced by) has worked in the top ranks of the entertainment industry. She was a powerful talent agent, then a successful producer and now currently helms one of the most famed studios in Hollywood.
Wagner began her career at Creative Artists Agency (CAA) where she spent 15 years representing some of the top actors in the business. In 1993, she launched Cruise/Wagner Productions with her former CAA client Tom Cruise. For the next 13 years, she and Cruise produced a wide range of pictures that earned numerous awards, widespread critical praise and global box-office success. The first film released under the C/W banner was the international hit Mission: Impossible, the success of which brought the company the 1997 Nova Award for Most Promising Producers in Theatrical Motion Pictures. C/W went on to produce such critically acclaimed films as Without Limits, Shattered Glass, Narc, The Others, Vanilla Sky, Elizabethtown, The Last Samurai and Ask the Dust, not to mention such international blockbusters as Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds (which Wagner executive produced) and Mission: Impossible II and Mission: Impossible III, which Wagner produced. In all, in the decade that separated Mission: Impossible and Mission: Impossible III, films produced by Cruise/Wagner Productions earned more than $3 billion in worldwide box-office receipts.
In November 2006, Wagner took on a new role as co-owner of United Artists Entertainment, LLC (along with Cruise and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.) and also serves as the company's chief executive officer, overseeing all its day-to-day operations. She and Cruise took charge of United Artists with the aim of reviving the venerable studio founded nearly 90 years ago by movie legends Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith. Since then, the reborn studio has released its first film, the political thriller Lions for Lambs, directed by Robert Redford and co-starring Redford, Meryl Streep and Cruise, and is set to release the World War II thriller Valkyrie, directed by Bryan Singer and starring Cruise in 2009.
Wagner was honored by Premiere magazine with the Women in Hollywood Icon Award in 2001. The following year she was featured in Bravo's Women on Top,a documentary that profiled exceptional women in entertainment. In 2004, she and Cruise were honored by Daily Variety as "Billion-Dollar Producers." That same year, Wagner and Cruise received the UCLA/Producers Guild of America Vision Award. In 2006, Wagner was the recipient of the Excellence in Producing Award at the Sarasota Film Festival and served as the president of the First-Time Directors Jury at the Venice Film Festival. Wagner has also served as co-chair of the Hollywood Film Festival for several years. She was also honored by the Costume Designers Guild with its Swarovski President's Award in 2008.
Wagner serves on the board of trustees of Carnegie Mellon University, where she received her bachelors in fine arts. She is a member of the American Cinematheque's board of directors and the executive committee of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Wagner also serves on the board of Interlochen Center for the Arts and the National Film Preservation Foundation through the Library of Congress.
Since creating Impact Pictures with Paul W.S. Anderson in 1992, producer JEREMY BOLT (Produced by) has produced the majority of Anderson's movies. Their first collaboration, 1994's Shopping, starring Jude Law (Channel Four Films), was an action-packed film about joyriding and ram-raiding British youth that revved up Bolt's career and established his love of cars and death-defying races. Having gotten Hollywood's attention, Bolt was producing big-budget films such as Event Horizon (Paramount Pictures) and Soldier (Warner Bros.). Sony Screen Gems' 2002 film Resident Evil was the first movie under the pair's joint venture deal with Germany's leading independent distributor, Constantin Film, and made $100 million worldwide.
Under the joint venture with Constantin, Bolt also produced Sony Screen Gems' Resident Evil: Apocalypse in 2004, written by Anderson and directed by Alexander Witt; the psychological horror The Dark, directed by John Fawcett; the teen action film DOA: Dead or Alive, directed by Cory Yuen for Dimension Films, an adaptation of Tecmo's best-selling video game franchise; and the third movie in the block-busting Resident Evil franchise, 2007's Resident Evil: Extinction, which debuted in the No. 1 U.S. box-office position and has grossed $150 million worldwide.
As well as producing big-budget genre movies, Bolt has proven his talents as a versatile and eclectic filmmaker, producing the arthouse film Vigo for Channel Four Films (directed by Julien Temple) and the comedy Stiff Upper Lips (starring Peter Ustinov). He has also produced There's Only One Jimmy Grimble (starring Ray Winstone and Robert Carlyle) and the teen horror film The Hole (starring Thora Birch and Keira Knightley), both for Pathé Pictures International.
Bolt is currently in preproduction on Pandorum, a sci-fi horror for Constantin Film and Overture Films, starring Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster. He is also preparing Castlevania for Crystal Sky Pictures and Rogue Pictures and a remake of The Long Good Friday for HandMade Films and Columbia Pictures.
The career of independent filmmaker ROGER CORMAN (Executive Producer) contradicts F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous statement, "There are no second acts in American lives." Corman's career is a three-act success story.
In the '50s and '60s, he blazed a pioneering trail as an independent producer and director, making a phenomenal number of low-budget features in a variety of genres.
His reputation as a trendsetter started with some of the cult classics he made during this period, including The Little Shop of Horrors (featuring the young Jack Nicholson in a must-see role of a masochist at the dentist's office), The Day the World Ended, The Intruder (the first film to tell the story of the integration of schools in the South), a classic cycle of horror films based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, The Wild Angels (the first "biker" movie, starring Peter Fonda, which opened the Venice International Film Festival to great acclaim and became the highest-grossing independent film of 1966) and The Trip (written by Jack Nicholson and starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, which was an official presentation at the Cannes Film Festival).
By the end of the '60s, Corman's provocative films had won him international acclaim. He was the youngest director ever to be honored with retrospectives at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, the British Film Institute in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The second act of Corman's legendary career started when he founded his own independent production and distribution company, New World Pictures. During the '70s and early '80s, Corman's company became the major independent producer of fast-paced, youth-oriented genre pictures, including such cult classics as Death Race 2000, Rock 'n' Roll High School, Big Bad Mama, Piranha, Battle Beyond the Stars and Grand Theft Auto. The huge success of pictures such as these enabled Corman to also release high-quality foreign films by world-class directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa. In a 10-year period, New World won more Academy Awards® for Best Foreign Film than all other studios combined.
In 1983, Corman sold New World Pictures and founded a new independent production and distribution company, Concorde New Horizons, launching his third act. The company, now known as New Horizons Picture Corporation, has a library of over 450 films. Many of them premiered on Roger Corman Presents, a series of science-fiction, horror and fantasy films made for Showtime.
Corman's eye for talent and unique abilities as a mentor, based on his extensive experience as a producer and director, have launched a number of stellar careers.
Graduates of the "Corman film school" include producers Jon Davison and Gale Anne Hurd; writers and writer/directors Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Towne and John Sayles; actors Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Sandra Bullock, Sylvester Stallone, Charles Bronson, William Shatner, Peter Fonda and Lisa Kudrow; and directors Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, Timur Bekmambetov, Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich, Carl Franklin and many more.
Corman has received an honorary doctorate from the American Film Institute, lifetime achievement awards from the Producers Guild of America, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the American Cinema Editors, The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films and the American Film Marketing Association. In 1998, he won the first Producer's Award ever given by the Cannes Film Festival.
Combining all three acts, so far Corman has the unique honor of having produced more commercially successful films than anyone else in the history of the American film Industry.
Over the past three decades, DENNIS E. JONES (Executive Producer) has been a producer, line producer and UPM on various studio and independently financed films. Fearing that either he was being typecast or it may only have been a sheer coincidence, Jones was understandably hesitant in accepting the position of executive producer on the third film in a row in which some mention of "death" appeared in its title. However, he finally did for the feature Death Race, a "reimagining" of Roger Corman's original 1973 cult-classic B movie Death Race 2000, on which Jones had been the first assistant director.
Prior to Death Race, Jones executive produced Land of the Dead for director George Romero, starring Simon Baker, John Leguizamo and Dennis Hopper, and Dawn of the Dead, a "re-imagining" of the 1978 Romero cult classic, directed by Zack Snyder and starring Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames and Mekhi Phifer.
Born to Czechoslovakian parents who had escaped their Nazi-occupied homeland, Jones was born and brought up on the east coast of England in the North Sea fishing town of Grimsby. Upon completing his grade-five school year, his family immigrated to Toronto, Canada.
Jones was able to put himself through college and graduated with a bachelor of arts in economics from the University of Toronto. It took him two years at Canada Cement Company to realize that the job did not offer a concrete future and that he needed some redirection in his life, which he got by attending Ryerson University's Radio and TV Arts Program for studies in television and film.
After Ryerson, Jones worked for the next two years on the CTV series Here Come the Seventies (distributed in the U.S. as Towards the Year 2000) as UPM/associate producer. Jones then traveled to Duck Lake, Saskatchewan, and worked in the property department on his first feature film, Alien Thunder (aka Dan Candy's Law), which starred Donald Sutherland.
After working in various capacities on several low-budget, independent features including Invasion of the Bee Girls, Katie Can't Help It and Linda Lovelace Goes to Washington, Jones was hired on his first feature as first assistant director on Roger Corman's Death Race 2000, starring David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone, Simone Griffeth and Mary Woronov. Soon after, Jones became a member of the DGA and continued work as an assistant director on such features as The Gumball Rally, Trackdown, Bobby Jo and the Outlaw, The Amazing Dobermans and Outlaw Blues.
Jones' first studio feature as a UPM was at MGM on George Cukor's Rich and Famous. Despite showing up for his next job interview in a brown suit borrowed from the MGM wardrobe department because he didn't own one, producers Steven Spielberg, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, all dressed in jeans, hired Jones as UPM for Poltergeist anyway. Next came Twilight Zone: The Movie (segments two, three and four) for directors Steven Spielberg, George Miller and Joe Dante, followed by Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future.
During this period, Jones also worked as an associate producer on the cult classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension and Gillian Armstrong's Mrs. Soffel, starring Mel Gibson, Diane Keaton and Matthew Modine. Jones went on to co-produce director John Badham's Short Circuit, starring Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy.
Following that, Jones produced Michael Jackson's feature-length music-performance film Moonwalker, which had to be completed in between Jackson's World Performance Tour promoting his "Bad" album. Jones then co-produced and was second-unit director on John Schlesinger's Pacific Heights and produced the MGM television/NBC telefilm Prime Target. He went on to co-produce the psychological thriller The Surgeon (aka Exquisite Tenderness) and Walt Disney Pictures' Honey, I Blew Up the Kid.
Jones' credits also include Wolfgang Petersen's Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Kevin Spacey; Charles Russell's Eraser, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; Virus, starring Jamie Lee Curtis; the Canadian feature Dark Summer; and the Spelling Entertainment/CBS Civil War-era television pilot Glory, Glory.
Jones also was executive producer Universal Pictures' The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas and associate producer on 20th Century Fox's High Crimes, starring Ashley Judd, Morgan Freeman and Jim Caviezel.
Jones lives in Toronto with his daughter Llyandra.
In the 19 years DON GRANGER (Executive Producer), senior executive at United Artists, has been involved in the motion picture business, he has rapidly established himself as one of the industry's consummate creative forces.
From 1987 to 1988, Granger was a creative executive at Weintraub Entertainment Group. He then joined Touchstone Pictures, where, as creative executive and later director of motion picture production, he worked on such films as Pretty Woman, Three Men and a Little Lady and The Doctor.
As senior and then executive vice president of motion picture production at Paramount Pictures from 1990 until 2001, Granger was responsible for bringing most of the large-budget action-adventure movies made at the studio during this period to the screen and some of today's most powerful filmmakers to the fore. Granger was the supervising studio executive on the Mission: Impossible, Star Trek and Tomb Raider franchises, Patriot Games, Sliver, Clear and Present Danger, Varsity Blues, The Saint, Kiss the Girls, Along Came a Spider, The Sum of All Fears and Saving Private Ryan (which was nominated for 11 Academy Awards® and won five).
In 2004, Granger joined C/W Productions, headed by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner, as its senior executive. While at C/W, Granger was in charge of all production, development and operational aspects of the company, helping to bring War of the Worlds, Mission: Impossible III and Elizabethtown to the screen. Granger also served as a producer with Cruise and Wagner on the C/W production of Ask the Dust and also served as one of the producers of New Line Cinema's Snakes on a Plane, under Granger's former partnership with Mutual Films.
Granger grew up in Woodbridge, Connecticut. He received a BA in political science from Yale University in 1985. Before moving to Los Angeles and entering the motion picture business, Granger also worked on Wall Street as a financial analyst.
Granger lives in Los Angeles with his wife and young son and daughter.
RYAN KAVANAUGH (Executive Producer) is a principal of Relativity Media, LLC, a financing, consulting and production company that structures slate financing for both major studios and independent production entities.
Kavanaugh, along with his Relativity partner, Lynwood Spinks, creates business and financial structures for a number of studios, production companies and producers and has introduced more than $3.2 billion of capital to such structures. Clients and deals include Marvel, Atmosphere Entertainment MM and French distributor/sales agent Exception Wild Bunch, among others.
Kavanaugh recently created a unique financing package, Gun Hill Road, LLC, which provides discrete and separate funds for both Sony Pictures Entertainment and Universal Pictures, marking the first time two studios have received funds from the same funding source and providing production funding for a total of 22 films in various stages of production and release. He facilitated a $528-million multipicture co-financing arrangement for Warner Bros. Pictures, as well as a $525-million financing deal for Marvel Enterprises, and structured and raised a 120-million euro acquisition, production and distribution fund for Exception Wild Bunch S.A., the French distribution and sales company founded by former StudioCanal management.
Through its partnership with Virtual Studios, Relativity finances two to three pictures per month. Kavanaugh recently arranged the financing for and will be executive producer of Conquistador, to be directed by Cannes and Sundance award winner Andrucha Waddington and star Emmy-and three-time Golden Globe-nominated actor Antonio Banderas; Morgan's Summit, written and to be directed by Academy Award® winner Tom Schulman; and The Great Pretender, starring Emmy-and Golden Globe-nominated Ewan McGregor. In addition, Kavanaugh arranged the financing to bring Top Cow Productions' Witchblade to the big screen, with production beginning last year on two feature films to be shot back-to-back. The films are based on the best-selling action-fantasy comic book, which also earned a loyal following as a TNT television series.
Kavanaugh also arranged the financing for and was executive producer of two films for Mark Canton's Atmosphere Entertainment MM-George A. Romero's Land of the Dead and Full of It. Recently, he has executive produced films including 21, The
Bank Job, Charlie Wilson's War, 3:10 to Yuma, Gridiron Gang, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry and The Kingdom.
Prior to his work with Relativity, Kavanaugh started a venture capital company at the age of 22, and during that time raised and invested more than $400 million in equity for a number of venture and private equity transactions.
SCOTT KEVAN (Director of Photography), a Detroit native and AFI graduate, has garnered both critical and popular attention for his cinematography on an impressive selection of films in a variety of genres. He has been recognized for creating startling images, iconic silhouettes and hallucinogenic, brightly colored dreamscapes.
In 1992, upon graduating from The University of Texas at Austin, Kevan moved to Los Angeles where his time was split between working as a camera assistant and shooting time-lapse images around the world for travel documentaries.
Kevan continued his education, earning his MFA in cinematography from the American Film Institute, where he received the Mary Jane Pickford award for excellence. Upon graduating in 1998, Kevan went on to earn critical nods for lushly realized images in the southern-gothic drama Briar Patch, the Gerald Hirschfeld ASC Best Cinematography Award at the Ashland Independent Film Festival for his work on Bug, and another Best Cinematography award for The Woman Every Man Wants at the Nodance Film Festival.
Kevan's breakthrough came in Eli Roth's 2002 horror smash Cabin Fever. Fangoria magazine wrote that its cinematography created "a remarkable and eerie rural ambience, with just the right use of color, lighting and shadows."
Kevan went on to lens the psychological thriller Deepwater; the independent Chinese period drama Beauty Remains; the road movie Simple Lies; the camp-driven horror flick Tamara; the reality-based, grit-filled Borderland and the comedy If I Had Known I Was a Genius, starring Whoopi Goldberg and Sharon Stone.
In early 2007, Kevan had another box-office hit with the dance spectacle Stomp the Yard, in which he captured the excitement of precision step dancing with an intense energy and passion. This led to The Hollywood Reporter recently proclaiming Kevan to be one of "the brightest and most talented cinematographers under 35" in its 2007 Next Generation issue.
Kevan's recent work includes director Renny Harlin's Cleaner, starring Samuel
L. Jackson and Ed Harris; Hell Ride, a Quentin Tarantino production and a 2008 Sundance Film Festival selection; and Overture Films' Humboldt Park, directed by Alfredo De Villa and starring John Leguizamo, Alfred Molina and Freddy Rodríguez.
PAUL DENHAM AUSTERBERRY (Production Designer) recently designed 30 Days of Night, starring Josh Hartnett. Other production design credits include Take the Lead, Assault on Precinct 13, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Highwaymen, The Tuxedo, Exit Wounds, the Canadian feature film Men With Brooms and Mercy.
As art director, Austerberry's credits include X-Men, Forever Mine, The Corruptor, Half Baked, The Real Blonde, Extreme Measures, Harriet the Spy and Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy. He was awarded a Gemini Award for his work designing Yo-Yo Ma Inspired by Bach.
In the early 1980s, while studying at college, NIVEN HOWIE (Editor) was part of a successful local band and consequently believed he would follow a career in music. However, events led him to a job as a trainee editor at a film and video facility on Wardour Street, Soho. Because of his affinity with music, he very quickly established himself as one of the most sought-after music-video editors in London. He soon added commercials to his portfolio, and it wasn't long before his work began to win awards. In 1988, he directed his first music video, which led him to work in New York, Los Angeles and all over Europe. He continued to edit for a few of his favorite clients, one of whom, British filmmaker Julien Temple, asked Howie to edit Temple's feature film Bullet, starring Mickey Rourke, Tupac Shakur and Ted Levine. Howie never looked back.
He has now completed several very successful feature films-Resident Evil: Extinction, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Dawn of the Dead, just to name a few but still finds time for music. In 1993, he edited Sting's Grammy Award-winning Ten Summoner's Tales. He was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2002 for his work on Paul McCartney: Back in the U.S. In 1998, his work on Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels earned him a BAFTA nomination. Two of his documentaries were nominated for the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize: Glastonbury in 2006 and Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten in 2007. Niven is a member of the Motion Picture Editors Guild in Los Angeles.
Austrian-born PAUL HASLINGER (Music by) has secured a distinctive reputation for composing film scores, which incorporate both robust classical elements and compelling electronica. Formally trained in his hometown of Linz, Haslinger ventured to Vienna, where he continued his classical studies while exploring the new domain of electronic music. Auditions for the band Tangerine Dream led to a five-year collaboration, four albums and several films, including Miracle Mile, Near Dark and Canyon Dreams.
After his "Dream" period, Haslinger released three solo albums and scored two landmark animated science-fiction films: Planetary Traveler and Infinity's Child. He continued perfecting his film-scoring skills as the programmer for Graeme Revell, supplying memorable textures and atmospheric style to Blow, The Negotiator, The Siege, Pitch Black and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, to name a few.
Haslinger earned his first solo credit as a film composer for the 2000 movie Cheaters, directed by John Stockwell. Since then, he has worked on Stockwell's Crazy/Beautiful, Blue Crush and Into the Blue, starring Jessica Alba and Paul Walker.
The year 2002 found Haslinger composing and producing musical segments for Steven Spielberg's thriller Minority Report. In 2003, Haslinger scored Len Wiseman's Underworld, his first film to open No. 1 at the U.S. box office. In recent years, Haslinger has made a conscious effort to expand and diversify his work. His scores for Ubisoft's Xbox releases Far Cry Instincts and Rainbow Six Vegas were enthusiastically received by the gaming community, so much so that he was asked to return to score both games' sequels. His work on the Golden Globe Award-and Emmy Award-nominated series Sleeper Cell (Showtime) received wide critical acclaim for its mix of Western and Middle Eastern music elements.
Haslinger continues to be in high demand as a film composer, having completed work on several feature film releases including Crank (directed by Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine), Vacancy (directed by Nimród Antal), Shoot 'Em Up (directed by Michael Davis) and the Sony Screen Gems thriller Prom Night (directed by Nelson McCormick). Upcoming film releases include The Mayhem Project's Make It Happen (directed by Darren Grant).
Haslinger's immense vision embraces film, games, albums and live performance in a modern musical world without boundaries.
GREGORY MAH (Costume Designer) recently designed for Dimension Films' Black Christmas, written and directed by Glen Morgan. Mah previously worked with Morgan and writer/director James Wong on New Line Cinema's Final Destination 3 and Willard. Also for New Line, Mah designed the costumes for the horror/thriller Freddy vs. Jason. He designed costumes for Bill Pullman and Lena Olin for Ignition and clothed Stanley Tucci, Bridget Fonda, Giancarlo Giannini and Talia Shire in The Whole Shebang. His other feature credits include Mr. Rice's Secret, starring David Bowie.
For the small screen, Mah has designed costumes for numerous telefilms including 14 Hours for Paramount Pictures and TNT; Ground Zero for NBC; Final Run for Lions Gate/CBS; A Cooler Climate, starring Sally Field and Judy Davis for Paramount/Showtime; and The Baby Dance, starring Stockard Channing and Laura Dern. His series television credits include Touching Evil, Pasadena and The Commish.
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