For the most part, Antoine Fuqua has been out of commission since he made 2009’s Brooklyn’s Finest, so it seems only fitting for him to step back into the spotlight in the grandest way possible: by destroying the White House.
The director’s new film Olympus Has Fallen, in theaters today, imagines a hypothetical yet hard-hitting terrorist attack on the nation’s capital in which Korean extremists take the president [Aaron Eckhart] and his office under siege. Violent and suspense-driven, the movie goes from zero to 100 in a mere 15 minutes, as rebel armies launch a citywide gun battle leaving few alive, and setting the scene for the fall of our democracy.
According to Fuqua, it’s possible.
“If we didn’t have certain things in place, this is one scenario that could happen,” the 47-year-old director tells theGrio. “Unfortunately, we were attacked with some sick individuals using box cutters. Who would have thought, you know? So a well-trained mercenary group – extremists, willing to die for their cause – every tool they used [in the movie] belongs to us. The weapons were all ours, the garbage trucks…the C-130. They use all of our own things against us. They use our freedom against us. So, absolutely.”
The film was brought to Fuqua’s attention years ago by friend and lead actor Gerard Butler, and was shot over six weeks in Shreveport, L.A. It additionally stars Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Dylan McDermott, Rick Yune, and Melissa Leo. Fuqua’s research for the project included reading books, speaking to professionals in the White House, and watching relevant movies. Before committing however, he insisted on scouting locations in the South to be certain he could believably recreate the White House, one of the more intimidating aspects of the production.
“When I was first told, for tax reasons, Louisiana was the best place for it, I just thought, ‘Washington D.C./Louisiana? I don’t know,’” Fuqua recalls. “I went down there, and I saw a big empty field and this huge road, and I was standing there like, ‘There’s nothing here. Nothing. No trees. Nothing.’ And I was with my production designer, and I said, ‘Could you build it?’ And he’s like, ‘I think so.’”
And with that, the monument was erected. Fuqua says his team built as much as possible, including the front facade, rooftop and interiors, and exterior components like Pennsylvania Avenue, the North Lawn, fountain and gates. It was so realistic in fact, that it became a local tourist attraction once it was painted.
“People were driving to work and they would just see the White House,” he remembers. “They would come hang out there, it was crazy. They would take pictures. I think they should have kept it up.”
Of course, after it became a battleground for Fuqua’s fancy, the ravages were evident. The film alternates scenes of nonstop shooting and warfare with those of strategic command, as the White House is attacked from every visible angle. It is as much an entertaining action thriller as it is a communal fear realized, particularly given North Korea’s volatile relationship with the U.S.
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