'We’d like to crash a plane into your hotel for our film': director Simon West on how he made Con Air

Made on a $75million budget, Con Air – about an airplane transferring hardened criminals being hijacked by its passengers – is now considered one of the definitive action films of the Nineties, the last of a breed of preposterously bone-headed thrill-rides filled with big-budget explosions, cartoonish slo-mos, a wry, endlessly quotable script ("Make a move and the bunny gets it"), and some of the best character names ever to feature in cinema (Cyrus the Virus, Diamond Dog, Johnny 23, Bill Bedlam, to name a few).  

I love the film but it was met with mixed reviews in 1997. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle lamented: "Con Air really might be the dismal future of movies. With a unique lack of pretense, the picture just goes through the motions, laying down its arbitrary context for the big orgasm at the end: 20 minutes of nearly nonstop mayhem – crashes, explosions, fireballs." The Daily Telegraph's Sheila Johnson, meanwhile, was slightly more complimentary, arguing that although "none of this breaks new ground", it "races along enjoyably enough". The actors didn't seem that fussed at the time, either. Asked why he'd appeared in Con Air, Malkovich simply replied: "Money." 

The film, which received a couple of Oscar nominations for Best Sound Mixing and Best Original Song (LeAnn Rimes’s How Do I Live), was made by first-time director Simon West, who'd cut his teeth shooting music videos, the most famous of which was Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.

Here the 55-year-old from Hertfordshire – who went on to make films such as The General's Daughter, Lara Croft: Tombraider and The Mechanic – explains the story of Con Air. 

'I moved to LA with $400 in my pocket'

"I’d actually done a music video for Mike & the Mechanics, with Mike Rutherford from Genesis. Around it, I'd sneakily shot a little story that I knew I could always take out and edit down into a commercial. Basically, I thought the best way into film was through commercials – as Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Hugh Hudson and Adrian Lyne had proved. So I moved to LA with $400 in my pocket and one fake commercial. I ended up doing two years of commercials and eventually a couple of them were used during the Super Bowl, which is the nirvana of commercials, obviously. They caught the eye of Jerry Bruckheimer and I got the call: 'Would you like to meet Jerry, and talk about doing a film?'"

'It was a small, little character-driven film when I read Con Air originally'

"I went to his office and he plucked a few scripts off the shelf – he had hundreds – and said, 'Read these over the weekend and tell me which one you'd like to make with me.' One of them was Con Air. It was a small, little character-driven film when I read it, and it had these great characters called Diamond Dog, Sally-Can’t Dance, and Cyrus the Virus – I was hooked. It had been written by Scott Rosenberg, who wrote Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead and Beautiful Girls, which were small indies – and, you know, there’s not an action beat in them; it’s all relationships and characters. 

"I didn’t actually watch action films at that time. I’d grown up on Kubrick and David Lean, and had pretentious aspirations of making great epics like those people. But I was attracted to Con Air because of the characters and the dialogue. So, once I’d said I'd make it, Jerry said, 'Well, now you’ve got to turn it into a summer blockbuster, because we want to release it in June and we're competing with all these giant summer bubblegum films, so you’d better start expanding it, and making it into something huge."

'I'm going to make the plane more like a flying prison bus'

"I sat down with Scott the writer, and we just spitballed ideas. I visited prisons and airplane spaces, doing loads of research. Scott had already flown on the real Con Air, which actually isn’t quite as glamorous or as cool as the one in the film; it’s actually just like a normal commercial jet. There were a lot of airplane films at the time such as Air Force One and Turbulence, and I've never really liked those types of films because there's nothing really going on in a plane. I mean, it's just a white tube. So I looked at prison buses, and the inside of a prison bus is much cooler: they’re all metal, so that they can hose them down from the blood and whatever, and they’ve got metal cages in there – like animal cages that transport these criminals. I mean, it’s sort of Forties technology, really, in the prison buses – they haven’t changed. 

"So I thought, 'I'm going to make the plane more like a flying prison bus. It’s all going to be metal; we’re going to get an old funky plane with propellers. We’ll strip all the paint off it; make it silver, metallic.' "I wanted it to be small and claustrophobic, because, in my mind, I was basing it more on films like Das Boot. Everything was hard and metallic, to go with the hard men that were in it. So once I had that look, and designed the idea for that, we just started expanding the film."

'Jerry would put his head round the door of my office and say, "OK, you’ve got to make it even bigger"'

"You know, when the plan landed in the desert, originally, it was just a quick exchange; but I changed it into this whole thing whereby the bad guys stash a jet there, and then they try to escape but the jet crashes before they can get out of there, and then there's the 'Sayonara' line as Cyrus the Virus blows them all up. Even during pre-production, you know, another film would come out in the summer, and Jerry would put his head round the door of my office and say, 'OK, you’ve got to make it even bigger.' 'Even bigger?!' I said. 'How do we make this even bigger?!' Then I thought, “Well, you know, when they’re in the desert, the detective could have taken his partner’s car, and get a really cool car, and then it can get attached to the plane, and get dragged through the air...' You know, the privilege was – because it was a big Hollywood thing, I could just draw anything on the storyboards and throw them out the door, and somebody would start making it, and that was the luxury of something like that."

'I actually planned a whole underwater sequence as well for the ending'

"They did eventually say, 'OK, you have to cut something out of this – it’s just too big.' There was going to be a bigger sequence at the end, where the plane crashes into the casino. I actually storyboarded a whole underwater sequence as well. I was going to do it at the Mirage casino in Las Vegas, which had a big volcano, and it had a lake in front of it. I scouted it, and I went and met its developer, Steve Wynn. He showed me all round it, and I went underneath and saw the mechanisms of water and the volcano, and the idea was the plane would crash into the water, and then it would eventually come up and crash into the volcano, and the volcano would explode. 

"After I’d done weeks of prep with Steve, though, and the whole thing had been planned out, he said, 'OK, send me the script now, and we’ll sign off.' I sent him the script, and he went, “Whoa, this is an R-rated film! I didn’t know that,' and I replied, 'Yeah, it’s tough guys in prison,' and he said, 'Well, no, we can’t be associated with that, sorry,' because at that point, Vegas was trying to be a family resort like Disneyland, and it was trying to rid itself of its ‘Sin City’ reputation."

'I called up the Sands Hotel and said, "We’d like to crash a plane into it for our film"'

"So I was in the middle of shooting in Utah when I happened to see in the LA Times that the Sands Hotel and Casino, which was across the street from the Mirage, had shut down, and they were going to blow it up in two weeks’ time. So I called up quickly, and said, 'Can you delay blowing up the hotel, because we’d like to crash a plane into it for our film?' They replied, 'Yes, sure, but you’ll have to be quick, because we’re starting to demolish it.' So even when we were filming there, they were knocking down the back of the building. They didn’t have a lake, so, of course, this being Hollywood, we built a lake in front of it. But that’s when we hit the end of the budget, and I couldn’t actually have the plane go underwater and have the whole underwater sequence."

'Nicolas Cage wanted to play the bad guy'

"Because it was the first film Jerry had done without Don Simpson, who died in 1996, I was just given free rein. I basically could cast anyone I wanted, and because I wasn’t from an action-movie background, I didn’t really know any of those Chuck Norrises or people like that. Nic had just won the Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas, and he had been in The Rock before, but as a sort of nerdy scientist who won the day by chance, and had no fighting skills really. 

"I mean, the whole film was such an amazing gamble: turning Nic Cage into a leading action star, and giving the film to me, a first-time director, and even for Jerry, you know – it was the first time he’d produced without his partner. Also, the script was very non-traditional in an action movie sense, because it had very strange characters and dialogue. Yes I put all this huge, rollercoaster stuff around it, but at the centre of it, the film was almost like a surreal comedy. 

"I had to talk to Nic a lot about why it was going to be OK for me to direct it, and how I was going to do it, and go through the whole thing and get him on board. Obviously, he was going to get paid a lot for the film, but he had the pick of any film in Hollywood, so there was a lot of persuading from me to him – I talked about about how I'd gone into cells and talked to the lifers and I'd got all these photographs and references, and researched all the tattoos, the haircuts, the gangs. I did this whole pitch on what it would look like, what the environment is, what these people do, what they talk like and everything. At the end of it, he said, 'Well, I really want to play the bad guy.' He was used to playing the quirky underdog, or the guy completely out of his depth, or the psycho – you know, the extreme character. So his inclination was still to be more attracted to the weirder part. 

"However, I showed him this picture of one prisoner whom he loved – he had long, greasy, straggly hair and big muscles – kind of what he ended up looking like in the film. But the other thing this man had was a giant handle-bar moustache, which covered most of his face and Nic loved that! I said, 'OK, well, I’m not sure. I like it too, but it’s not your classic 'leading man look'. Anyway, that’s something that I went back to Jerry and said: 'He loves everything I pitched to him. He loves the story, he loves the character thing' – and I left it until the end to say, 'He also wants to have this huge handlebar moustache!' You know, the bottom line is, they’re not going to pay someone £15million and then cover their face up with a handlebar moustache. So that was the one thing, I think, out of the whole process, that Nic didn’t actually get his way on." 

'Dave Chappelle ad-libbed all the time'

"Dave Chappelle, who was a stand-up comedian, was fantastic: he ad-libbed all these great jokes, and some of them were just so obscene that I couldn’t use them. He'd do, like, five takes, each with different gags. At the beginning of the process, I just chose all the indie actors whom I liked. The problem was that too many people wanted to be in it. You know, Willem Dafoe was almost Cyrus the Virus. He got very far down the line. Because it's 20 years ago I forget who else auditioned [Gary Oldman, Tim Robbins, Ed Harris, William Hurt and Kevin Bacon were reportedly interested in starring in Con Air]. There just weren’t enough parts; in fact, one of the downsides of the film is that those great actors who appeared in it could only have a certain amount of screen time. You know, any one of them – Steve Buscemi or Malkovich or Ving Rhames or Cage – could have been the biggest actor in it, really. I had to spread it thinly among everybody."

'Cage came up with the line, "It's your barbecue, Cyrus, and it tastes good"'

"Nic's got great ideas – he’s a very creative guy, and he’s very funny, and he suited the film tonally, with that sort of dark, twisted, ironic humour. He didn't necessarily do ad-libs because he’s a very well-prepared actor, but the day before, he’d usually come up with some ideas, and then they would likely be put into the script. He came up with lines like, ‘It’s your barbecue, Cyrus, and it tastes good’, and 'Well, Baby O, it's not exactly mai-tais and Yahtzee out here – but let's do it.'

"It was also his idea to make Cameron from the Deep South; he loves that part of the world. I think it’s probably one of the concessions made for him: 'You can’t have the handlebar moustache, but you can have the Deep South accent.' I sent him down to Alabama, where he spent time with the people there and really picked up the accent, because he wanted it to be as authentic as possible. When he came back, he sounded to me like Elvis – but I guess he’s from near there as well."

'Cage had a cleaner at his cottage in Somerset who wouldn't let him use his own gym'

"He definitely has some unusual tastes. I’ve been to his house, and he does have snakes and weird art and things like that. I mean, he does love the extreme in everything, but he’s a very intelligent, funny person, so he’s very easy to be with. It’s not like you’re wondering if he’s going to jump on you and strangle you the next minute I think he loves to put on a show [like the infamous 1990 Terry Wogan interview], but I find him one of the least crazy people in Hollywood. I think those eccentric things he does are much easier to be around than a lot of Hollywood stars who are so egocentric, and so crazy in other ways, that you don’t really want to spend that much time with them. Nic is someone you could hang out with. I mean, he had a house in Bath, and he would sit out in cafés in the street in Bath, and certain people would come up to him and be all weird, and make these funny faces at him, and then he would politely nod back. 

"I don’t know if he still has a cottage in Somerset, too, but used to tell me stories of his crazy cleaning lady. He had a barn with a gym in it, and she wouldn’t let him in it! I'd be, like, 'You’re Nic Cage! You’re a big Hollywood star, you should be able to tell the cleaning lady that you’re allowed in your own gym,' but he didn’t want to upset her, so he would work out outside. He loved Avebury and Glastonbury; he was into the whole standing stones and ley lines thing. He loves all that mysticism."

'Con Air wouldn't get made today'

"Now, when I watch a modern studio film, I can see the framework, I can see the meetings, I can see the many hands – they don’t tend to have a single voice, or a few voices, like we did. Con Air had a very small group of people – Scott and I had a very big influence on what was in the film, and what it looked like, and what it sounded like, and who was in it. I was done on a big canvas but it had more of that independent film feel. Action films are a little bit more frenetic now, and I mean, it’s more, gag upon gag upon gag. They’re not even pretending it’s straight action; they are embracing the comedy full-on – like Guardians of the Galaxy. With Con Air, we were about concealing the jokes, saying, 'Right, this is an action film, but if you look closely, there’s a lot of humour in it.' I don't think the genre would have someone as quirky as Nic Cage now."

'The first five minutes of the film were added on'

"Originally, the start of the film was the sequence in which all the in-mates are introduced. My view was that anybody that turns up in the film should have a big entrance – like when John Cusack’s character turns up, his entrance is a close-up of his sandals, because he’s a detective that wears sandals, that's his thing. And then with Colm Meaney’s entrance, we see his flashy sports car. But with Nic's character, we definitely got pressure from a lot of people – even Nic, I think – saying, 'Well, I don’t know anything about this guy... You know, why’s he in prison?' I quite liked the mystery of not knowing what he’d done before; that he just ended up doing the right thing eventually. But the extra scene at the beginning – the first five minutes, where he’s going home to meet his pregnant wife, and he gets in a fight and kills a man, and goes to prison – that was added on."

'I've joked about a Con Air sequel'

"There's nothing definite regarding a sequel. As a joke, I have said before that it should be in space, but now I'm thinking that might be a great idea!"

'I turned down directing Black Hawk Down'

"My one career regret is turning down directing Black Hawk Down. I bought the rights to Mark Bowden's articles and book right after Con Air. I spent a few years developing the script but when the studio green-lit the production I was still editing Tomb Raider.  I was pretty exhausted after doing three big films back to back. So I stayed on as a producer and let this guy called Ridley Scott have a crack at it. Not sure what ever happened to him."