On "Cop Car," Thrillers, and Budgets
First off, if you haven't seen Jon Watts's Cop Car, from 2015, I think you should. It's a great thriller (the term, like all genre identifiers, should be understood loosely) and at the same time is full of examples of what makes thrillers great. I'll write about it without spoiling much of it.
The film starts with two best friends, maybe ten years old, walking across the plains of eastern Colorado. Travis (James Freedson-Jackson) is the more adventurous of the two; Harrison (Hays Wellford) is a bit more timid and sensitive. The boys are daring each other to say verboten words, starting with "wiener." They come to a barbed wire fence and Travis climbs through easily. Harrison struggles, getting his clothes caught, and then pausing the whole operation because he's found what he claims is an arrowhead. Finally, he catches up with Travis and they go back to naming bad words until they get to the f-word, which Harrison refuses to say.
As the scene progresses, we realize they're running away from home, or really, "running away from home," as their only provisions consist of a stick of beef jerky Harrison has in the sleeve of his jacket, which they vow to eat at a pace of two centimeters a day.
It's the thrill of this illicit running away that causes them to panic when they come across a sheriff's cruiser. Parked in a grove of cottonwood trees, it has apparently been abandoned, although it has a mostly-empty bottle of beer on the hood. The boys dare each other to run up and touch it. When no one appears, they try the door handles. The driver's side is unlocked. They climb in and pretend to drive; after a moment they discover the keys.
What happens next feels inevitable: Travis starts the car, and soon they're careening across the plains, on and off dirt roads, taking turns driving, hollering "This is our cop car!"
At this point, we cut to Sheriff Kretzer (Kevin Bacon) who has been burying a body he pulled out of the trunk of the cruiser and dragged a few hundred yards away so it wouldn't be found. He covers the body with quicklime. He discovers that one of the man's shoes fell off as he was dragging him, tracks the shoe down, and throws it in with the body. He smokes a cigarette. Then he returns to the cottonwood glade to find that his cruiser is missing.
What's worse is that there's still incriminating evidence of his murderous drug deal in the trunk...
The thriller – again, understood loosely – is a story with deep roots in American storytelling, reaching back at least to the work of Edgar Allen Poe, and perhaps all the way back to the colonial captivity narratives. Some of the first published stories in American history, these were partially fictionalized tales of white women captured by Native Americans and forced to live with them before escaping and returning to "civilization."
Stories like this tend to have a few recurring elements. One is that they often feature protagonists faced with vastly powerful forces. So, in Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," the protagonist wakes to find that he's been imprisoned in an inescapable torture chamber by the Spanish Inquisition. Similarly, the women in captivity narratives are taken deep into the forest by mighty tribes of (to them) terrifying people.
From a storytelling perspective, this is effective because it puts the reader in the position of identifying with someone under dreadful threat, making the character's eventual triumph enormously satisfying; maybe more importantly, it allows the reader to confront intense, archetypal fears: the psychology of torturous containment, in Poe's case, and the colonists' anxiety about the Native Americans.
This is one reason that, in movies, thrillers so often feature things like women confronted by physically more powerful men, "ordinary" people confronted by psychopaths who are comfortable trading in violence, or regular cops confronted by dark conspiratorial legions. In Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling is a green recruit from rural West Virginia who faces off against not one but two unstoppable serial killers; in Jaws, Chief Brody hates the water and has to try to deal with the largest shark anyone has ever seen; in The Night of the Hunter, the kids John and Pearl have to confront the immense evil of Reverend Powell, who will stop at nothing to make them reveal the place they saw a man burying money. All of these stories give the viewer the thrill of confronting something they themselves may worry about, and the storyteller the chance to delve into psychologically and socially menacing areas.
Layered into this is another element. The dark forces confronting the hero also tend to posses a kind of alluring moral corruption, a knowledge of something beyond the hero's ken that's both forbidden and attractive. Through Puritan eyes, for example, the Native Americans were demonic (they were literally, in a good deal of Puritan lore, the offspring of Satan) but also intoxicatingly powerful, closer to the potency of nature, having yet to be "corrupted" by society. (There are strong sexual undertones in many captivity narratives, of course.) The women in these stories could never be quite the same after their adventure; in both good and bad ways, their old selves were lost and some new moral or worldly knowledge had been gained.
So in Silence of the Lambs, Clarice learns the depths of evil of which people are capable, which is knowledge she's been resisting since the anecdote that gives the film its title; in To Live and Die In L.A. Secret Service agent John Vucovic triumphs over the counterfeiters and avenges his morally corrupt partner Richard Chance, only to find that he has become exactly as morally compromised as Chance was; in Zero Dark Thirty CIA analyst Maya eventually finds the intel that leads to the death of Osama Bin Ladin, but in the process loses some essential human part of herself that she began the quest determined to defend.
None of this push/pull, repulsion/attraction would have any force if it didn't also take place in the audience. It allows us to feel as though we've traipsed verboten fields along with the character, glimpsing things we have perhaps never been able to admit we're interested in – violence, moral corruption, sexual darkness – and could never, or would never, explore in the real world. Like the hero in the story, we're given the sense of being empowered by the action at the cost of some small element of our innocence.
Cop Car has more darkly comedic elements than many thrillers, but one sees how well it uses these traditional storytelling elements to its advantage. The boys, at ten years old, are immensely vulnerable, physically and psychologically at the mercy of any adult they come into contact with. They're also too young to quite understand the implications of stealing the cop car, let alone the menace confronting them. (This is all aided immeasurably by the performances of Freedson-Jackson and Wellford, which are pitch-perfect.) Because of this, the movie manages to build a tremendous emotional force through our fear for the boys. And this is only heightened by their experience of transgression. This begins with their own act of theft, and is furthered when the criminals they encounter reveal to them a terrible side of existence. At stake is both the boys' innocence and a dark future looming on the horizon: it's suggested that they're from broken homes and that it's not impossible they'll end up going down the same road as someone like Sheriff Kretzer.
The power of this is only possible because of Watts's impeccable direction. Beyond the structural and plot elements, thrillers tend to succeed to the degree that they manage to instill in the viewer a feeling of suspense about the outcome of both specific scenes and of the whole film. At its best, this is a sensation of overcharged reluctance about continuing to watch, perfectly matched with an inability to stop watching: we're terrified of what's going to happen, but would be enraged if someone prevented us from finding out how it ends.
Watts (who co-wrote the script with Christopher Ford) is fantastic at coming up with sequences that instill this feeling in us. Imagine the possibilities when the boys find a stretch of rural highway and decide they want to see how fast a car can actually go, or find a bulletproof vest and an assault rifle in the back seat and decide they want to try them out. And beyond inventing these sequences, Watts is masterful at constructing them on the screen. When a woman driving along a rural highway and listening to Christian rock sees a cop car approaching in the distance, Watts doesn't let rush the sequence but instead luxuriates in its effect on us. Wow, we slowly register with the woman, that car is driving kind of erratically. It seems like it's going incredibly fast, too. And it's using both lanes of the two lane road, crossing back and forth over the yellow line at random. And it's definitely going way too fast, and swerving, and coming toward me, and—
A final fascinating element of Cop Car is that it was made on a budget of $5 million, which is (relatively, as these things go in Hollywood) very small. Making a good film on a budget like this is difficult but does have its advantages, as the temptation with bigger budgets seems to be to solve problems with money, resulting in the lazy technical construction of so many blockbusters.
With less money, one has to be relentlessly inventive. The script of Cop Car is superb in this regard. It has essentially only five actors, which is a great way to keep costs down, even if one of those actors is Kevin Bacon. It also makes great use of its locations. Putting the boys in a car, for example, means that from the filmmaker's perspective we get all kinds of different locations – the cottonwood grove, the open plains they drive across, rural highways – without having to pay for much beyond things like insurance, equipment, and shooting permits. These scenes aren't necessarily easy to film, but they help give the movie a feeling of size and visual scope.
Similarly, most of the film is shot outside, during daytime. As with moving-car scenes, there are difficulties here, a large one being that you're at the mercy of the weather. But if you can find the right string of warm fall days in Colorado – when the weather is, actually, fairly predictable – it means that there are no locations to be rented or sets to be built.
And importantly, Watts is great at creating sequences with set-ups that require minimal time from the actors – another major concern when you're paying someone like Bacon. As an example, Watts creates an absolutely convincing sequence where the Bacon steals a car with a minimal number of shots. He shows Bacon running up to the car in a long shot, and then cuts to a medium shot from the other side of the car of Bacon trying the door handles and eventually managing to get the driver's side window down an inch or so. Bacon then kneels and pulls a lace out of his boot – it's clear he's done this before.
Watts uses an over the shoulder from behind to show that Bacon has tied a small loose knot at the end of the lace and is feeding it through the open window, down toward the pull-up knob of the lock; he then goes back to the medium from the other side of the car to show Bacon trying to hook the knot onto the knob. With only four or five camera set-ups – the initial medium, the over the shoulder, the medium from the other side of the car, and one or two close ups from inside the car – Watts creates a three-minute sequence in which Bacon struggles to get the door open (anxious because he is, of course, a Sheriff) reties the knot twice to because it's too loose, gets startled by a man getting into a near by car and then again by a dog that starts barking, and eventually opens the door and steals the car.
It's tight, suspenseful, and absolutely convincing; it's also notable because it minimizes the time that the highly-paid actor had to work. In several of the close-ups – the shot where we see hands pulling the lace from the boot, and the shots showing the knot actually hooking the pull-up knob of the lock – Bacon may not have even been present, and the shots from Bacon's point of view of the neighbor getting into the car and the barking dog don't require Bacon to be there at all.
Sequences like this not only show off Watts's ability on the technical side, they also highlight how intelligent the construction of the whole film is. To return to our initial ideas about suspense, in this moment it's the Sheriff who's faced by a greater foe (the revenge on him by society if he's discovered to be a murderous drug-dealer who's stealing a car) and also by the thrill of the alluring illicit, which for this corrupt cop is the potential that he might actually have to face justice for what he's done. Not to mention that he's now mirroring the boys' theft at the beginning, which set everything in motion.
It's a neat reversal, and a great sequence in a movie full of them. If you enjoy these kinds of things in film, it's a movie well worth your time.
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