Talkin’ Aces

A Hotel Room Chat with Joe Carnahan and Jeremy Piven

With a movie as raucous, over the top and energetic as Smokin’ Aces it goes to figure interviewing writer/director Joe Carnahan and actor Jeremy Piven wouldn't exactly be a low key affair. My mini roundtable interview with the duo at downtown Seattle's Hotel 1000 was as all over the place and as crazy as the bullet-riddled motion picture. Thankfully, it was also just as entertaining.

“I'm just thankful to be here,” exclaims an exuberant Piven, his director sitting at a couch next to him trying to contain his laughter. “I've never been number one on the call sheet before. It's a little bit different.”

Truth of the matter is, this promotional tour should be different for the actor. His character Buddy ‘Aces’ Israel is the man everyone in the picture is trying to get close to. Still, that doesn't mean he’s the lead. “It’s interesting. I mean this truly is a real ensemble piece,” says Piven regaining his composure. “I know most people say that but every character [here] has their moment in this and they are fully realized creations although they may be incredibly brutal and at times hyper-violent, but it is also a dark comedy so there all these different tones working at once. But then suddenly you have the ideology coming out of the character, so each [person] has their own full life which I think is really rare in a movie.”

But if the film is really that complex, where did the inspiration for a multi-layered hitman comedic action melodrama come from? “A lot of things,” states an emphatic Carnahan. “It partly came from my fascination with Frank Sinatra and his relationship with the mob and his proximity to legitimate criminals and thugs, this idea that if Sinatra ever decided one day, ‘I want to be a crime boss.’ And I thought, what would happen if he ever decided to do that? What if he decided to parlay his considerable status as an entertainer and put that into a whole other field?”

Ryan Reynolds, director Joe Carnahan and Ray Liotta on the set of Smokin' Aces.

“That's where Buddy comes from. The guy just gets fed up being an [entertainer] and says to himself, ‘I’ve seen Scarface enough, I've seen The Godfather enough, I know how this world operates. I'm going to do it.’ Then he realizes, oh my gosh, he’s bitten off way too much, far more than he can chew, and now he’s in this situation where he’s kind of resorting to what he does best, what he's excelled at, which is illusion. And that’s the heart of the movie. It’s all illusory, it's all a figment; this kind of visual hologram that [Buddy] has set up that when you touch it you realize that there is nothing there, but he’s still going to use that to broker his way out of the situation.”

But inspiration doesn’t strike overnight. “You get creatively inured over the years and you get going on something you just say I'm going to bring everything to this party,” continues the filmmaker. “I mean, I started writing the first little inceptive thing in for the film in [1993], which is pre-Pulp Fiction if you can imagine that. Then the bulk of it was really written over the last two years was when it really all finally came to fruition and I finished it. It got to rattle around in my head for a lot of years which was good because as you get older, I became a father within that time, and different things start to influence you, become important, so it was good that I had that time to let it sit with me a bit.”

Bringing up Tarantino leads to the inevitable comparisons, however, and it is impossible to not look at Smokin’ Aces and not think about pictures like Pulp Fiction, True Romance and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. “It’s inescapable,” admits Carnahan honestly, “because I think that whole neo-noir movement became such a heavily categorized [genre.] Immediately anyone who touched a handgun and said, ‘Fuck,’ was suddenly lifting from those films.”

“While I have nothing but love for Quentin Tarantino and consider him an unqualified talent, not everything has come from that particular wellspring and this movie is not of that ilk. I never thought about him. I never thought about those types of movies. Listen, my favorite Tarantino film is Jackie Brown...”

“I love Jackie Brown,” exclaims Piven. “Love it.”

“Which is also his least successful picture,” continues the director. “But it is the work of a real true kind of master. Do I like Pulp Fiction? Sure. Do I like Kill Bill? Well,” Carnahan shrugs his shoulders, “well, you know. But [Jackie Brown], that film in particular, is really the Quentin Tarantino I love and admire. Yet the comparison here is inescapable, I can’t do anything about it so it is pointless to try and do anything about it because that tidal wave, tsunami, whatever, remains seven-stories high and keeps moving.”

Jeremy Piven in a scene from Smokin' Aces.

“But to be honest with you,” interjects his star, “when I read [the script] I didn’t ever think of Tarantino or Guy Ritchie and I love Fiction and Lock, Stock and Snatch yet I didn't even think of that stuff. It was such an intricate, rich and original ride, the narrative is really layered and each character has its own voice. He wrote two female black women who are hitmen that jump off the page. It felt like here was a guy who could channel many different types of people. As you can see,” points over at his director, “Joe is a beautiful black woman.”

The hairy Caucasian director wearing a black baseball cap leans back on the couch with a bemused smirk on his face, eating up his star’s enthusiasm and humor. “Seriously,” continues Piven after the laughter worked its way out of room, “he could channel these different types of people and speak in a voice that’s genuine and real. It was remarkable and jumped off the page.”

“Taraji [Henson] was convinced I had dated a black woman,” laughs Carnahan. “But I was so in love with Taraji... I wanted her before anybody. I had seen John Singleton's Baby Boy and had absolutely fell in love with her. She absolutely marauded through that film and got a performance out of Tyrese above and beyond what anybody thought he could give because of sheer force of her will and her considerable talent. I love her to death.”

“[Here] she took dialogue I had given her and played some stuff straight and then other stuff I thought she augmented so beautifully with Taraji, with herself, with who she is, It is a testament to that woman and her confidence that she made the decision she was going to play her role with no makeup. She said that there was absolutely no way this woman was going to sit across the way [in a hotel room] looking through the sights of a rifle knowing she was going to have to kill and worry about eyeliner. And because she is so god damn beautiful you don't even notice.”

And it is the characters that set Smokin’ Aces apart from the pack. If a person only noticed the raging gunfire and how grandly things blow up then they would be missing the majority of the nuances Carnahan was striving for. “Listen,” states the director, “I try to give everybody in the film equal time. Regardless of the character everyone has this moment where they really show you their humanity.”

“But none of it is ever meant to be smug or smarmy, and that’s the problem I have with most of the films in this type of genre. Most of the people are just too fuckin’ cool. They want to be glib and kind of indifferent about it all, and I find that kind of false. I think that is what ultimately bothers some people about [this] film is that they are forced to see someone where there is this actual emotion not allowing them the escapism they're used to. This is a movie where I consciously tried to take everything I ever loved in a film and see if I could stitch it, put it into a collage and stick it on the wall and go okay, that's art. Listen, you either step off the cliff and you go or you don't. It's on or off, to me, this movie. There is no middle speed.”

Peter Berg, Ben Affleck and Martin Henderson in Smokin' Aces.

A hallmark of both this film and Carnahan’s previous endeavor Narc is its emphasis upon friendships, dirty difficult, complicated, tough, hard, ever-lasting friendships. “Absolutely,” exclaims the director with a punch to the glass coffee table separating us. “Yes, yes, yes, yes. That you pulled that out of there is absolutely fantastic. That’s what I want people to discover.”

“This is my biggest problem with the viewing audience. American filmgoers have been fed such dog shit for so many years that we don’t understand nuance, we don’t understand subtlety. If it’s not a brick in the head then we just don’t get it. So I’m so glad you were able to pull that out of there because what is really important to me is that [the viewer] sees that theme echoed throughout and understands what is going on.”

Those themes bouncing off one another are a part of what made playing a character in the film so much fun for Piven. Still, for a character actor known for taking on motor-mouth dynamos (i.e. Entourage) unable to shut up, playing someone like Aces probably took him outside his comfort zone. “It’s interesting,” comments Piven, “but I probably stepped inside my comfort zone with this character actually.”

“I connect with emotionally available characters. That is closer to my center than a Type A aggressive, abrasive, Hollywood agent. I’m capable of being a verbal stunt pilot and that’s what’s needed [most times] because it’s a high level of difficulty and not everyone can do it. That’s why I can step into those kinds of roles and play them. But that’s not all that I am.”

“I just got finished doing this Neil Labute play where I portray a guy who is incapable of completing a sentence and is completely emotionally available and ultimately is a train wreck. So, I’ve been capable of doing these types of roles onstage, been exploring them my whole life, and I just haven’t gotten that shot [on film].”

“It’s a very competitive field, acting, and there are so many great actors who have not gotten their chance or their shot, so I kind of knew I was always capable of contributing in this way. I just needed someone like Joe Carnahan to get the joke and ask, ‘Do you want to go deep?’ I mean, I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to ask that.”

“It’s the only route I know how to run, baby,” states the filmmaker, pumping his fist like he just scored a touchdown. “It’s the only way to get it done.”

Piven smiles, shaking his head in agreement before continuing, “And it takes somebody like Joe to see that. I mean, just look at the casting to this. He’s giving Alicia [Keyes] her first shot. He’s giving Common his first shot. And these are artists. Very deep, prolific and important artists, and someone who doesn’t get the joke would think they were just musicians. But the reality is they’ve been performing their own material their whole lives. They were made for this.”

“Why do we treat this like some Grand Canyon divide between music and cinema?” asks Carnahan. “These are narrative storytellers. Alicia writes her own stuff. Common writes his own stuff. This is not that big of a bridge to cross and I think when you see the film they insinuate themselves perfectly into the movie.”

“And, it helps that they had real legitimate [actors] to work off of. In Alicia’s case she had Taraji and in Common’s case he had Jeremy, so you could do a lot worse. That’s what was so extraordinary about this. They really had competent, capable, working professional actors to work of off, so that’s why I think you don’t see any seams in their performances. And I think they’re wonderful.”

“I’ve never understood why it was such a big jump to go from music to movies. Movies when they are really rockin’ feel like music. We always talk about tempo and pace; those are musical terms.”

“I actually think it would be a lot harder to make the transition from being an actor into becoming a musician,” responds Piven. “That would be difficult. That would take skill.”

So, as much fun as they had working on Smokin’ Aces and as good a time as they keep having during these interviews, does that mean we can expect another collaboration from Piven and Carnahan sometime in the future? “Absolutely,” states the director with emphasis. “You can count on it.”

“Without a doubt,” responds the actor. “With Joe, whatever he wants to do next, I am in. I know he’s good to go and that he’s going to bring it beautifully and hard. That’s more than enough for me.”