Catching Up With... Alex Kurtzman and D.J. Caruso

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D.J Caruso

Paste: How did it come to be that you had a chance to work with Alex Kurtzman?

Caruso: They sent me the script. I read it. I went over and met Bob and Alex and I talked to them, and we worked diligently for, like, three or four months on the script. In the original screenplay the character Jerry Shaw was much older, like 30 years old. We decided to go younger and then we got Shia back in. [Caruso directed LaBeouf in Disturbia.]

Paste: There’s an element here I also saw in Disturbia.

Caruso: Disturbia took people by surprise, which I kind of liked, as opposed to “Now, you better deliver again!” It’s also nice cause Shia and I have a good working relationship. It’s not his re-introduction, because he’s never left, but now I felt like he’s a young, adult star. He’s not playing a teenager anymore.

Paste: Is that why he has the facial hair?

Caruso: I gave him the facial hair. I did. Believe it or not, those are things studios don’t usually like. It sort of matured him up. Sometimes with this black overcoat, walking down the streets of Chicago, he had kind of this James Dean quality to him.

Paste: It must have been hard to edit this. There’s so much action in it when you went to the cutting room you probably said, “What’s going to go?” Was that difficult?

Caruso: Actually, the toughest thing to edit was the story momentum scenes. 'Cause the action scenes, you shoot ‘em as puzzle pieces. You can only go from point A to point B. So, cutting the action sequences were easier to cut than the story sequences. I know that sounds crazy. I feel like we can keep tweaking and tweaking until the end. There’s probably more edits in the first reel alone than in the entire movie of Disturbia.

It’s a fun kind of popcorn action movie with a political undertone, a little bit of science fiction, but at the same time there’s a lot of plot in the movie. It’s sort of a tightrope you’re walking. And it’s a nerve-wracking tightrope. You think you have a scene locked and it’s working really well. But then when you play the whole movie back with that scene you just worked on, somehow it’s like it’s not in key. It doesn’t quite work. So then you kind of go back and shape things around it. The piece is almost like a fine piece of music that has to stay in sync.

International journalists were saying, “What are you saying about your government?” Well, I’m not saying anything. The fact that you’re thinking that is okay, but once you know the who and the what [in the film], the why is just as interesting.

Paste: How did you come up with Michelle Monaghan for the film?

Caruso: I saw Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and I so loved that movie. I so feel like it was a cousin of Salton Sea. Because Warner Brothers released both of those movies and didn’t release them at all. You know what I mean? Her performance just blew me away. I’d asked how she was in Mission Impossible III which Alex and Bob had written and they said she was fantastic. And she and Shia together, it just made good sense to me.

Paste: Future opportunities for you?

Caruso: It’s just got to be something I can give everything to, because between family and movies—that’s all I have in life. But I feel very blessed that now I know I can make a movie this big and complicated. Sometimes you watch and think, “How do those guys do it?” Now I know how to do it.