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Vin Diesel will get $20 million to make the sequel to his new film,
XXX. Will Sean Plummer get 20 minutes of his time? Photos
by Richard Sibbald
The bigger the star, the more elusive they are.
It’s a Hollywood dictum that certainly applies
to Vin Diesel. Securing an interview with the in-demand star of last
year’s surprise hit The Fast And The Furious and the upcoming
XXX proved impossible, although it wasn’t for lack of trying.
E-mails sent this spring to George Zakk, Diesel’s
production partner, directed us to Karen Samfilippo, his publicist.
By the time Ms. Samfilippo called us back, she was no longer working
with Vin (among her current clients: Oscar winner Halle Berry), but
she did pass Access on to Stacy Boniello, Diesel’s manager.
A call from her office then put us on to the Los Angeles office of Columbia
Pictures, the film’s distributor. They referred us back to square
one: Columbia’s Toronto office. Our rep there did her best to get
us Vin but, alas, he continued to prove elusive.
Which is too bad because Diesel is an entertaining
and charismatic interviewee. Access spoke to the former nightclub
doorman back in February 2000. At that time, he was in Toronto to talk
up his lead role as the cold-blooded but conflicted killer Riddick in
Pitch Black, a low-budget but high-quality sci-fi monster flick
that became a minor hit.
At that time, the New York-born actor, director, screenwriter
and producer was tired from the promotional tour. Not too tired, though,
to give a hapless newspaper shutterbug grief for not knowing how to
shoot him properly. (Access had no such problems.) Diesel reclined
on a sofa at the posh Top Of The Senator lounge, waiting for the photog
to snap the damn picture. Many poses were suggested and shot down, and
the hovering publicist glanced anxiously at her watch. Strained as it
was, the smile on Diesel’s face looked like it could be worn by
a ticking bomb.
And Diesel isn’t the type you want to set off.
Before getting Hollywood’s attention with a small role in Steven
Spielberg’s WWII epic Saving Private Ryan (written specifically
for Diesel at the director’s behest), the burly actor worked as
a doorman at various hip Gotham nightspots for eight years, disarming
potentially volatile situations without benefit of knife or gun. (A
script based on the experience and penned by Diesel, called Doormen,
is in the works.)
Years of small-time theatre work — “triple
off, off Broadway was a luxury” — honed Diesel’s artistic
temperament. He began acting at the age of seven at the Theatre For
The New City in Greenwich Village and continued to work in the theatre
throughout his youth. Later, he majored in English at Hunter College
and soon began writing screenplays. The actor turned writer-director
on the low-budget indie projects Multi-Facial and Strays
(the 1997 Sundance entry which grabbed Spielberg’s attention).
But it’s in film, not the stage, that Diesel saw his immediate
future.
“I like filmmaking more than theatre,” he
told me. “I like the immortality. I like the capability of perfecting
it and enhancing the story, reworking a story. You can’t do that
in theatre. Theatre is a one-shot deal. You get on stage and it begins
and that’s the experience — and that’s cool. I don’t
know if I need the immediate gratification that the theatre gives. You
hear the applause at the end of the production... I don’t necessarily
need that. I’ve done that, and some people still get a high off
that. I get a high off creating a piece of art that lasts forever.”
Pitch Black went on to garner generally favourable
reviews, many of which singled out Diesel’s performance, and grossed
more than $40 million, making it a modest success and spurring talk
of a sequel. But it wasn’t until Diesel’s huge success the
following summer in The Fast And The Furious (which took in over
$144 million on a $38 million budget) that Universal greenlighted Pitch
Black director David Twohy’s expansive — and expensive
— concept to bring Riddick back in up to three more films. (The
first sequel, Riddick, is tentatively scheduled to start shooting
in October for an October 2003 opening.)
“I’ll be honest with you,” Diesel said
at the time. “The only idea that [Pitch Black] was going
to be a big film was the fact that we were dedicated to making it a
big film. Otherwise it could easily have fallen into the trap of being
just another sci-fi picture, especially because the budget was so miniscule
in terms of sci-fi pictures.
“When I did Saving Private Ryan, there
was the comfort of knowing that Tom Hanks was in it, it was a huge picture
and that it would be something that everybody would see, and Spielberg
was the director. [Pitch Black] didn’t have any of those
elements. It was an underdog picture from the start: underdog director,
underdog cast, underdog budget. But we made it a point on the set to
treat it as though it was going to be something special.”
That dedication has paid off for the 35-year-old,
who follows up 2001’s Furious summer with the much-anticipated
XXX (out August 9). Diesel stars as Xander Cage — aka Triple
X — an extreme sports superstar coerced by a secret government
agency to help stop a madman intent on destroying the world. Samuel
L. Jackson, rapper Eve and Asia Argento co-star. Filmed in LA, Austria
and Prague, XXX reunites Diesel with his Furious director
Rob Cohen in a picture Columbia is obviously hoping to turn into a Bond-like
franchise. In fact, trade paper Variety recently reported that Revolution
Studios is already developing a sequel, with Cohen and screenwriter
Rich Wilkes signed to reprise their duties. Diesel will be paid $20
million. (Not bad considered his Furious pay cheque was $2 million.)
And that’s not all for Diesel. The Canadian-filmed
mob drama Knockaround Guys finally comes out this October, while
Diesel stars as a DEA officer seeking revenge from the Mexican drug
cartel responsible for his wife’s death in an untitled action pic
directed by F. Gary Gray (The Negotiator) which is set to hit
theatres next spring. Again, New Line is so confident of its success
that it’s already hired the film’s writers to pen a sequel
to star Diesel.
Given his busy schedule and increasing profile, Diesel
was in no rush to hurry back to the world of low-budget filmmaking even
two years ago. “I’ve acted all my life,” he said. “I’ve
acted since I was seven-years-old in the theatre. I was most familiar
with the acting. The directing is... an opportunity to tell stories,
the directing is an opportunity to make statements. That’s what
attracts me to filmmaking. Filmmaking is by far much more challenging
than acting for me, whereas acting is more therapeutic and the acting
is something that I have to do. The telling of stories is more
of a challenge and more of a luxury, and I’ll act in many more
films than I’ll direct, but I will direct as well. I love both.”
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