Director Antoine Fuqua says terrorist attack in ‘Olympus Has Fallen’ could really happen
theGRIO REPORT - During an interview with theGrio, 'Olympus Has Fallen' director, Antoine Fuqua,talks about his new film and opens up about the long-awaited Tupac biopic...
Plus, with security measures more relaxed, the entire scheme appears oddly feasible. Fuqua speaks to the TSA’s recent decision to allow knives on planes, calling it “insanity” and noting that the government moves on from the past too quickly.
“Part of the reason I wanted to make this movie is because I really do feel like we have short memory,” Fuqua remarks. “On 9/11, [they used] box cutters and now you’re going to let knives on the plane? Why? Let’s say we have different things now; we’re prepared for that. We’ve got the doors that the pilots are in. If you give somebody a knife and he’s crazy enough, he’ll just attack and kill the flight attendant. Why would we want to lose anyone? Why take that risk? It makes no sense whatsoever.”
“Again, it’s the short memory; it’s arrogance,” he continues. “That’s why we’ve got to get before it. We lacked imagination, and that lack of imagination caused us a horrific attack. We lost a lot of great people. For them to even consider knives tells you everything you want to know.”
As far as who could be the next group to preemptively strike America, Fuqua doesn’t necessarily believe it’s the Koreans; rather he suggests it would be an individual on a tyrannical mission. In his research, the director says he generally found that extremists like Osama bin Laden always had a personal issue to avenge. He thus created the idea of the movie’s villain Kang (Yune) from an image he saw of a starving kid in a documentary.
“In North Korea, they are taught to hate America,” Fuqua comments. “They’re brainwashed. They have concentration camps. It’s crazy. They don’t know anything else. They don’t have phones. They don’t have Internet. They only know what the great leader tells them…So, [the kid] could become a very dangerous individual.”
Furthermore, Fuqua observes that, often, American culture has infatuated the minds of the country’s greatest enemies.
“We wind up catching [the terrorist] in the bunker, and they got like Whitney Houston albums, NY Yankee baseball hats,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Well I thought you hated us.’ We get inside; they got Dennis Rodman visiting them. I mean, really? That’s what I was aiming for. Make it about an individual, not the entire country…Although I couldn’t predict in the news that it would be going parallel like this.”
He adds, “No one can predict Rodman. Not even the Chicago Bulls when he was playing could predict Rodman.”
Despite his brief hiatus, the director says he’s been developing several “personal projects,” some of which will come to fruition soon. Among them, he’s working with Eminem on the rapper’s second film, Southpaw, and directing the upcoming movie on Colombian cocaine lord Pablo Escobar.
Additionally, he says the long-awaited Tupac Shakur biopic has been a challenge to write due to the late rapper’s enigmatic persona, but the script is currently in progress.
“It’s such a mystery with Tupac,” he explains. “Makaveli was a character he developed. He studied Shakespeare. He was acting but he knew he had to do that. He flew to close to the sun though. There’s fantasy and there’s reality. If you let your fantasy bleed into reality, and you’re playing a gangster, then you pay the price of a gangster.”
Follow Courtney Garcia on Twitter at @CourtGarcia
