Director Ric Roman Waugh was a stuntman. This explains how he has built such a body of work so quickly. He knows his way around an action scene. After the Val Kilmer & Stepehn Dorff-led prison thriller Felon, and the Dwayne Johnson’s Snitch, Waugh hit a streak with Gerard Butler through Angel Has Fallen, Greenland, and the just-released Kandahar. It looks like he could be about to enter the next phase of his career with the sequel Greenland: Migration and the follow-up to Stallone’s Cliffhanger.
Very little has been known about either project, until now. Waugh gave an in-depth interview to Collider (via Dark Horizons) where he revealed more details on both projects. First up, Greenland: Migration:
“It’s 5 to 7 years later. It’s enough that, which was very true about the last extinction event, was that there was so much toxicity in the atmosphere that nobody could live above ground for quite a while. There were still fires, and there’s all kinds of stuff going on, ash, you couldn’t breathe.
So we went by science and allowed a number of years to go by to where you realize that these people have been imprisoned underground. What does that do to the human psyche? How does that contribute to when you do go into a migration mode, and you’re trying to find new places to survive, and you have all of that trauma?
A little boy that was eight years old, or seven years old, that’s now 13 or 14, what is his life as a teenager when he’s known nothing else but cement walls and underground? These are the things that we want to play with. So we feel like time underground, it’s factual of what happened, but also it helps us with the story.”
He also said a fourth Has Fallen movie is in the works – Night Has Fallen – before he spoke about Cliffhanger and how this proposed sequel is actually also a reboot:
“Stallone’s character will be, of the age he is now – Gabe Walker – he’s got a daughter, he’s got an heir apparent, pseudo son, and they have a mountaineering company, Italian Alps. Tragedy strikes that’s very similar to what happened in the original movie, so the father and daughter have to deal with that and how to overcome tragedy.
[How do we get through traumatic experiences and fight to move forward? It’s what extreme sports like climbing are all about. And of course, there might be some nefarious bad guys that show up in the Italian Alps, and all hell breaks loose.
Sonically, the sound design that wasn’t there in the early ‘90s. What we can do now with sound design. We’re gonna put you on the edge of that 1000-foot cliff when your fingernails are hanging onto a ledge the size of a penny, when you hear a boulder fly past your head and go to infinity, and your heart beats reverberating off the rocks “
He referenced Top Gun: Maverick and how they did the flying for real in that movie, an approach he intends to follow for the Cliffhanger sequel including shooting in the actual Dolomites in the Italian Alps.
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