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After that, Mostows output seemed to slow to a crawl.
(Among other things,Breakdownis one of the all-time great truck flicks.)
Deep down I dreamed of being a filmmaker but it just didnt seem like a realistic goal.
Id been a fan ofDallas, which was made by a company called Lorimar.
I shall go find this Lorimar and I shall go become a parking-lot attendant there.
If you scratch behind any filmmaker, you will find someone that perhaps should have been a used-car salesman.
Were going to make a prototype but we needall the moneyjust for the prototype.
But if you dont like the prototype, you cant get your money back.
I ultimately succeeded in that.
The next day they gave me a check to complete the film.
That began a relationship.
In the 80s, it had been turned into a movie that Stephen King himself directed,Maximum Overdrive.
The soundtrack was wildly successful but the film itself was perceived as a misfire.
But Dino and Martha had retained the rights to the underlying short story.
When that fell apart, I was desperate to salvage the situation.
And the idea forBreakdownjust popped out of my head.
Was Kurt Russell your first choice?Yes.
Id been developingThe Game, which was ultimately directed by David Fincher and starred Michael Douglas.
Id wanted Kurt to star in that movie.
So, whenBreakdowncame up, he was the guy I wanted.
Through a multitude of little behaviors, subtle cues, you get what hes thinking.
A lot of people forget.
He was in the Mike Nichols filmSilkwood, and he co-starred with Meryl Streep and Cher.
Theres a wonderful scene in that movie where theyre flying.
Theyre all in coach, sitting three across.
All he can do is follow the conversation.
You get exactly what hes thinking.
Thats just an incredible gift to audiences and to a filmmaker.
I am in physical pain, and I dont understand it.
And he said, Then, I finally realized itsthis character.
And if you know Kurt, whos completely non-neurotic, this is the opposite of who he is.
Its interesting that so much of this came after you had developedThe Game.
There are interesting echoes between the two films.In my mind, its the same movie!
In the final movie, they changed it so it was hundreds of people involved.
And so, inBreakdown, Kurt Russells character thinks the whole town is in on this.
But in fact, we get right down to just these four criminals, this band of thieves.
Its a brushstroke, but its there, right?
Tell me about working with J.T.
was the definition of the ideal character actor.
I helped put together a memorial service for him at the Directors Guild Theatre.
Several hundred people showed up.
We showed this 30- or 40-minute clip reel on the big screen.
Because he would subsume himself in that particular character.
But when you literally become part of the woodwork, its hard to build that up.
So, he didnt get the recognition he deserved within the Hollywood beltway until actuallyBreakdown.
AfterBreakdown, his salary shot up.
He had struggled for years financially because he never became a star.
What was your relationship like with Dino De Laurentiis?
I gather he was a real character.Dino was like a character in a Moss Hart play.
He had this fantastic sense of his own over-the-top-ness.
This is a man who produced 500 movies.
He built movie studios on, I think, three different continents.
Were doing it my way, on any particular issue.
He and I would often get into heated arguments about the way to do some particular thing.
Hed be banging the table.
I used to be a high-school debater so I guess I liked the arguing.
And the thing would end unresolved.
The next day, wed come back and wed have the same argument.
However, overnight, I would have thought about what he was saying and realized, Yeah.
Hes right about that thing.
And he would have done the same thing.
So, wed have thesameargument but wed switch sides on this thing and then argue with the same intensity.
It was a fantastic relationship.
He was like a mentor to me.
Breakdownwas an unexpected hit.
1 and got really nice reviews.
It opened on a Friday and so that Monday, he called me into the office.
And he said, I made a big mistake.
I gave you this big break by financing this movie.
I should have signed you to a two-picture deal.
By this point, I had fancy agents and lawyers who had signed on because theyd seenBreakdown.
I called them up and said, What should I do?
He cant do that!
So, I hung up the phone and I signed it, because Dino was absolutely right.
I did my next movieU-571also with Dino and Martha.
And again, a great experience.
I got sucked into the middle of that.
In fact, here actually, Ill show you.
[Picks up and displays a framed letter from his office wall.]
I actually keep this on my wall.
It is inspired by actual component events.
I saw that and said, Oh jeez, we got to do something about this.
I reached out and I found this guy.
He was in his 80s at that point, Lieutenant Commander David Balme.
He was the lieutenant aboard a British surface ship that had depth-charged a U-boat in 1942.
He didnt know what an Enigma machine was.
And this guy was sworn to secrecy.
The British government didnt want it leaking out that we had captured one of their submarines.
And this guy came out, saw everything.
And he said, I have no problem with this.
But from a public-relations standpoint, you cant unring that bell.
For years when I would go to England, I would get stabbed about it.
It was a public-relations disaster.
That is a no-win situation for us.
And Id be like, No, no, you cant do that!
I literally would leave and go home, because I was like, No, thats not okay.
I was really impressed with how darkTerminator 3managed to be.
Actually, all but one of my films have been independently financed films.
It had to be kept in a safe, and no one else was allowed to read it.
I also wanted that to be a surprise for the audience.
So, we said to Warner Bros. and Sony, We really want to keep this a secret.
So we scheduled the premiere for just like two nights before.
T3came out the year Schwarzenegger became governor of California.
Was his political career at all a thing during the shoot?Yeah.
I joked that we had somebody from every level of elected office visit the set when we were filming.
Because Arnold, hes a born politician.
So he would have all these, like, VIPs who were visiting.
We had everybody from the local city councilmen to the mayor.
We had governors of other states come.
At one point Bill Clinton came to set, with the Secret Service and everything.
Hed just got out of office, and hes looking at this thing, and hes going, Wow.
Like on a whole other level of amazing of what he had seen.
And I thought, Okay, if he thinks thats amazing, I think its amazing.
So that was a great, great moment.
Did you ever talk to James Cameron aboutT3?
I cant even remember exactly what film that was.
I think it was two different films, actually.
We mustve talked aboutT3, but I dont remember the specifics.
Im embarrassed to say that, because youd think I should remember this.
All directors, I find, are incredibly sympathetic to other directors.
The problem inTerminator 3is thatTerminator 2was such a seminal movie.
The liquid-metal man, no one had ever seen that before.
I knew that we wouldnt be able to achieve that.
So thats why we made the choice to use humor, which is front-loaded earlier in the movie.
But if you went to the theater at the time, it worked with the audience.
Was the response toT3in any way a problem for you?
Afterwards, you didnt work for a while and since then youve only made two films.No.
It did really well overseas.
I dont think it quite hit the marks that maybe they were hoping for domestically.
I would say, Okay, heres the film I want to make.
And that would always work out.
Ive got to grab a job and jump into something else.
At the same time, I was starting a family.
My oldest child was born the week beforeBreakdowncame out.
In fact, he was born the night of our screening.
So, I made a deliberate choice.
I figured theres always going to be movies but my kids are going to be young only once.
I wanted to be more present for that so I didnt keep a heavy foot on my career accelerator.
Where that becomes problematic is when you have films that dont work out.
I had two films where I was set to go.
Id written them, they were being green-lit, ready to go … and the studio head was fired.
Were now doing different things.
And I was never somebody with a lot of projects in development, so that hurt me.
Itd take several years to have a go at get something else going.
Also, Ive been too picky.
When I go to work, I have to feel like, I think this could be great.
Now, theyre not always great.
Thats the awful thing about this profession.
In fact, its quite bad.
And this happens on such a public level that kind of destroys you.
Why is that?Theres two reasons.
It was really like a traveling circus.
You just couldnt do it today.
The second reason goes back to why the film was hard to make in the first place.
Every studio passed onBreakdown.
They passed on it when it was a script.
They passed on it when we had Kurt Russell attached.
(Back in the day when scripts were printed, theyd literally bring home a box of scripts.)
And suspense exists not in the lines, but between the lines.
You almost have to imbibe these scripts in real time.
Thats just not feasible if your job is to analyze 20 scripts on a weekend.
So a lot of these scripts just slip by people.
Long ago, I was the first director attached toSe7en.
I had found the script as a spec script, unsold.
Nobody knew about it.
I tried to get that going, and people would go, Its a cop buddy movie.
Theyre out of favor right now.
Im like, Its not a cop buddy movie!
Its an incredibly suspenseful story!
But again, when youre going real fast, you dont see it.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
