Production Notes
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Rating: Rated R (for frenetic strong bloody violence throughout, crude and graphic sexual content, nudity
and pervasive language)
Run time: 95 mins.
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THE CAST
Chev Chelios………………………………………………………….JASON STATHAM
Eve………………………………………………………………………….AMY SMART
El Huron………………………………………………………...CLIFTON COLLINS, JR.
Venus…………………………………………………………………..EFREN RAMIREZ
Ria……………………………………………………………………………….BAI LING
Poon Dong…………………………..……………………………..DAVID CARRADINE
Orlando……………………………….…………………………………..RENO WILSON
Chico………………………..…………………………………..JOSEPH JULIAN SORIA
and
Doc Miles……………………………………………………………DWIGHT YOAKAM
THE FILMMAKERS
Directed by……………………………………..…...... NEVELDINE/TAYLOR
Written by……………………………………………………..NEVELDINE & TAYLOR
Produced by…………………………………………………………..TOM ROSENBERG
GARY LUCCHESI
SKIP WILLIAMSON
RICHARD WRIGHT
Executive Producers……………………...………………………NEVELDINE/TAYLOR
ERIC REID
DAVID SCOTT RUBIN
JAMES McQUAIDE
MICHAEL PASEORNEK
PETER BLOCK
MICHAEL DAVIS
Director of Photography……………………………………………...BRANDON TROST
Production Designer……………………………………………………JERRY FLEMING
Edited by………………………………………………………....FERNANDO VILLENA
Costume Designer………………………………………………………….DAYNA PINK
Music by………………………………………………………………….MIKE PATTON
Casting by……………………………………..…...KELLY MARTIN WAGNER, C.S.A.
Lionsgate and Lakeshore Entertainment Present a Lakeshore Entertainment / Lionsgate Production In Association with @radical.media CRANK HIGH VOLTAGE
SYNOPSIS
In the 2006 action hit CRANK, hitman Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) spent twenty-four hours in over-drive: fighting, killing, and keeping his adrenaline flowing at full-force to combat a deadly poison injected into his body. Now, in the high-octane sequel CRANK HIGH VOLTAGE, Chev has managed to survive—and is about to face a brand new day.
Picking up immediately where the first movie left off, CRANK HIGH VOLTAGE finds Chev surviving the climactic plunge to his most certain death on the streets of Los Angeles, only to be kidnapped by a mysterious Chinese mobster. Three months later, Chev wakes up to discover his nearly indestructible heart has been surgically removed and replaced with a battery-operated ticker that requires regular jolts of electricity in order to work.
After a dangerous escape from his captors, Chev is on the run again, this time from the charismatic Mexican gang boss El Huron (Clifton Collins, Jr.), and the Chinese Triads, headed by the dangerous 100 year-old elder Poon Dong (David Carradine). Once again turning to Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam) for medical advice, receiving help from his friend Kaylo’s twin brother Venus (Efren Ramirez), and re-connecting with his girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart), who is no longer in the dark about what he does for a living, Chev is determined to get his real heart back and wreak vengeance on whoever stole it, embarking on an electrifying chase through Los Angeles where anything goes to stay alive.
Lakeshore Entertainment and Lionsgate present CRANK HIGH VOLTAGE, a Lakeshore Entertainment / Lionsgate Production In Association with @radical.media; produced by Tom Rosenberg, Gary Lucchesi, Skip Williamson and Richard Wright. The film was written and directed by Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor, the duo behind the 2006 original.
RESURRECTING CHEV
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
At the end of CRANK, hitman Chev Chelios plummets from a helicopter, high above downtown Los Angeles, seemingly to his death. But when the film’s use of hugely innovative visual techniques and non-stop action turned it into a theatrical success and DVD smash, creators Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor became interested in the prospect of Chev Chelios living to see another day.
Taylor admits that at first he and Neveldine never expected to be so intimately involved with the sequel. “Originally we were just going to write CRANK HIGH VOLTAGE for someone else to direct,” Taylor says. “We were going to write it, produce it and move on to something else. But by the timethe script was finished, we had fallen in love with it and we were not going to let anyone else touch it. We came back to Lakeshore and said, ‘We want to do it, we need to do it and nobody else can do it.’ So that’s how it happened. The script took on a life of its own.”
“With the first CRANK, Mark and Brian just wanted it to be one of those films where the hero dies in the end and people can’t believe it,” notes producer Skip Williamson, who originally championed Neveldine and Taylor and brought them to Lakeshore. “They’re great writers so it was easy for them to come up with another idea for the second film. And with the sequel they just took it to the nth degree.”
“We didn’t want to cop out and have it be a flashback or have Chev’s falling out of the helicopter be a dream or a prequel,” Neveldine points out. “We wanted CRANK HIGH VOLTAGE to be a true sequel in that it starts where the last film left off. So literally the first shot in this film is the last shot in CRANK, and we just keep going.”
As such, CRANK HIGH VOLTAGE begins with Chev hitting the asphalt of a busy downtown LA intersection, only to be kidnapped by a mysterious group of Asian gangsters. Three months later, Chev wakes up on an operating table, where a team of Chinese doctors have surgically removed his heart and replaced it with a battery-powered artificial device that needs to be charged regularly in order to keep him alive.
Producer David Rubin explains, “Once you buy into the notion that the hero may have lived, it opens up endless possibilities. Mark and Brian have a crazy sensibility and they bring to their work that insanity, and the script is evocative of that. Really, in terms of CRANK, death is only a state of mind. As soon as someone says you can’t do something to Neveldine and Taylor, it’s immediately a dare to try and figure out how to do it. And not only how to do it, but to do it well.”
For Neveldine and Taylor the writing process proved to be much easier for CRANK HIGH VOLTAGE primarily because the characters and the world they inhabit had already been established.
According to Taylor, “When we wrote the original, we didn’t know that Jason Statham would be the guy, or that Amy Smart would be the girl, or about Efren or the other actors, so we were writing characters in the dark. Statham’s character in the first movie was an LA guy; we didn’t know he was going to be a Brit, but we couldn’t find the tough American badass we were looking for so we had to go across the pond. It was pretty cool in the second movie to be able to write dialogue specifically for Jason, stuff that we knew Jason could just kill. Same with all the other characters too.’
“It was like riding a bike downhill,” continues Taylor. “Everything was so easy because you knew exactly who you were dealing with. The actors knew the characters. We knew the characters. And we’re using lots of little colloquialisms and stuff Jason says just from knowing him as a guy -- things we couldn’t have written in the first script.”
Neveldine says that despite the comedy, action and sex, all of which have been amped up in this new installment, the screenplay for the sequel rose from a relatively simple idea.“At its core,” Neveldine explains, “CRANK HIGH VOLTAGE is a story about a guy trying to find his heart. Isn’t everybody looking for their heart?”
In terms of making a sequel to CRANK, the studio and filmmakers knew that in order for it to work, there was no doubt that they needed the charm and menace that Jason Statham expertly brought to Chev Chelios in the first installment.
Statham, fresh off a busy trio of films – The Bank Job, Death Race and Transporter 3 – was thrilled to return to the physically demanding role of Chev Chelios. “I was in right from the suggestion of doing a part two,” Statham recalls. “There was an open-ended closure to the first film. If you look closely, you’ll see that there was a heartbeat and the blink of an eye. So it was really about whether Mark and Brian had the inspiration to go and make another one. It was always left open in their eyes.”
“We felt confident that if we were going to direct the movie, Jason would also want to do it,” Neveldine remembers. “When you’re writing a movie for a specific cast, you really hope that you can get the cast that you want, and when you’re writing a sequel, you need the original cast or most people probably won’t care.”
Taylor adds, “Obviously you write the best movie that you can and hope that if you love it then everyone else will love it, and that was the case here. From the moment Jason got the script, he was texting us eighty times-a-day quoting lines. He was going off the deep end! From Jason’s point of view, CRANK was one of the most fun things he’d ever done. We knew that having the two of us and Jason onboard, it would be impossible to have a higher level of commitment and enthusiasm.”
The feeling was mutual. Statham notes that the trust and refreshing environment that the co-directors create during filming was a key in his involvement in the sequel. “It’s a complete and utter trust. I had implicit faith in these two, knowing they’re going to do something cool with things that can be quite ridiculous. I think you must have a real rock-solid trust with the director asking you to do these things, and with Mark and Brian it’s as solid as it gets. It took only one or two days of working with them on the first film, and then I was in.”
Statham knows that when reading a script by Mark and Brian the rule is anything goes. “There’s an initial shock value of oh, this is never going to stay in the film – which is how I responded to the first one,” he says. But Statham understood quickly that, indeed, the sky’s the limit. “This film is going to be ever more ramped up, ever more offensive, with more action, more ridiculousness, more everything. I was completely excited by how ludicrous and outrageous they made part two. This one takes it to the next level.”
Rubin recalls, “The first day of filming was amazing because as soon as Jason stepped in front of the camera, he was back. He was Chev. It was like we had just finished shooting the first film yesterday.”
“It was really just about putting on the old jeans and sneakers and away you go,” smiles Statham.
Another key ingredient to the first film’s success was the comic performance of Amy Smart as Chev’s girlfriend Eve Lydon, who initially had no idea that she was dating a hitman but soon found herself surprisingly turned on by the idea. At the beginning of CRANK HIGH VOLTAGE, however, it’s apparent that the three months she has spent without Chev have not been kind to Eve. Upon returning, our hero finds her working as a dancer at a seedy strip club and dating a creep named Randy (Corey Haim).
Neveldine believes that “Eve is an evolution from the first movie. Oblivious no more, she realized that she was dating this tough dude and actually took on some of those traits. After she thought he was dead, she decided to get a little more edgy with her life. She got involved with a strip club so she could make two-grand a night, and after watching her boyfriend kick some ass, she took on some of those skills and put them to work.”
“My character definitely evolved,” says Smart. “She was far more in her shell in the first film, and in this one she’s blossoming and becoming more assertive, trying out the qualities she likes in Chev. She’s sort of turning into this badass and having fun with it.”
Williamson believes that sense of fun is definitely up on the screen. “Amy loves working with Jason. They have such great chemistry,” says the producer. “The second he was going to do it, she had to be in it. We couldn’t have made it without her. To have a different girlfriend would have been crazy. She and Jason just committed one hundred percent.”
Smart agrees: “I went into this film sortof in the same way I went into the first one. It’s outrageous and fun and over-the-top—you can’t really be in the gray area. You have to be all or nothing. I had to throw myself into it. I ended up doing a lot of the stunts myself, partly because I thought it looked really fun. “
“Amy brings this angelic beauty in and amongst all this carnage I’m causing,” notes Jason Statham. “The loves story that occurs between Eve and Chev gives it that nice balance rather than him just running around firing into all these thugsthe way he does.”
Also returning to the cast is country music legend and actor Dwight Yoakam, whoonce again comes up with ways for Chev to survive his internal condition as the unconventional medical practitioner Doc Miles.
Yoakam believes that his character was a relatively good doctor at one point in his life, “but due to any number of odd events that have occurred, he decided to drop out and become a little more underground. At one time he took what he’s doing really seriously, but it slipped through his fingers, and now he drinks a little too much. I’ve played him like he’s a very capable guy who quit trying a long time ago and is now looking for a reason to care.” And Chev’s insane predicaments give Doc that reason.
“Doc Miles is one of the craziest, funniest things I’ve seen put on film,” laughs Jason Statham. “Chev uses Doc Miles to figure out how to stay alive. So without him he’d be screwed!”
Efren Ramirez, who played Chev’s crossing-dressing friend Kaylo in CRANK, returns to play Kaylo’s twin brother, Venus, who seeks vengeance against the men that killed his brother. In real life, Ramirez actually has an identical twin brother, so he found it doubly appealing to play a twin in the film.
Ramirez explains, “When I was approached for the sequel,Mark and Brian said it would be more intense. We decided to create a twin. We knew what Kaylo was like. He was much more of a civilian. Venus is more of a soldier. He understands the art of war. When I received the script there was so much happening. Venus is so intense—he’s so full of rage, he wants revenge. I felt at home with it.”
To play this new character, Ramirez jumped into the physical side of filming in a more extreme way than he had in the first film. “They gave me three months to prep. I started taking kung fu and learning weaponry,” he recalls. “I had a trainer, a nutritionist. The gym became my home for five hours a day.”
Adding to the highly-charged world of CRANK HIGH VOLTAGE is new cast member Bai Ling, who plays Ria, a scantily-clad, fast-talking Asian call girl who obsessively latches onto Chev after he rescues her from a gang of Chinese thugs.
Ling says that her character provided her with one of her best moviemaking experiences. “It’s easily the most fun I’ve ever had making a film,” she enthuses. “It’s almost like my dream role in a way because I usually play very serious roles or very sensual, sexual roles. This one allowed me to show more of my own spirit. Ria is just wacky, crazy, and the role allowed me to be extremely funny.”
CRANK HIGH VOLTAGE hasn’t just increased the action, sex and comedy for the sequel; according to Taylor, “We had about eight villains in CRANK and we have about twelve villains in CRANK HIGH VOLTAGE. But the absolute top of the villain chain is El Huron, which means ‘The Ferret’ in Spanish.”
Critically-acclaimed character actor Clifton Collins, Jr. plays El Huron, a mustachioed Mexican mob boss whose hideout is a decadent, gaudy estate overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The filmmakers recall that after watching Collins’ performance in the 2001 film TIGERLAND,theyhad decided they had to work with him.
It turns out Collins had been a fan of the first CRANK and was relishing a chance to play one of the men who put Chev through the ringer. “El Huron is an old-school character,” says the actor. “I wanted to make him special and create a character we’d all remember, that we could all laugh at and laugh with and love to hate.”
Williamson confesses that it was a dream to work with Collins. “He was our number one choice,” he states. “We never thought he would do it. But once he read the script and met the guys and figured out what we were all about, he was in a hundred percent and brought something so special to the character that none of us ever envisioned. Really, it’s HIS character. Clifton created that character on every level. He put so much thought into it.”