Eraser director Chuck Russell had a major problem on the 1995 set of his Arnold Schwarzenegger-led actioner. He and his team caught wind of the fact that their third-act set piece had just been pulled off by Tom Cruise and Brian De Palma on the recently wrapped Mission: Impossible. With Eraser scheduled to release a month after the first installment in Cruise’s now-signature action franchise, Russell and co. pivoted on the fly.
“The CIA heist scene where Tom Cruise drops in on wires, I had Arnold doing almost exactly the same thing to get a disc out of the CIA, and we had to rewrite it to instead have Arnold get into the enemy company, Cyrez, another way,” Russell tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of Eraser’s 30th anniversary 4K release. “I at least changed that much. I didn’t want to have exactly the same scene.”
Written by Tony Puryear and Walon Green, Eraser chronicles Schwarzenegger’s U.S. Marshal character, John “Eraser” Kruger, who serves as the last line of defense for witnesses who’ve been compromised while in Witness Protection (WITSEC). From staging their deaths to erasing their identities, he goes the extra mile. Vanessa Williams’ Lee Cullen then presents him with his most dangerous case yet, as she uncovers that her employer, Cyrez, is planning to sell electromagnetic rail guns to terrorists on the black market.
Oddly enough, the name of that defense contractor, Cyrez, nearly derailed Eraser’s release date in June of ‘96. Russell shot the movie with the company branded as Cyrex, but during post-production, the eleventh-hour discovery of a company called Cyrix forced a mad scramble.
“Warners offered the company some money, but they said, ‘Look, we really do this. There’s no [amount of] money you can offer us.’ So at the last minute, we had to change the letters in at least 70 shots,” Russell recalls. “We went out to every effects company because they all had to be done very quickly within a week. So that was breathtaking, especially in those days when we had to deliver physical film. We almost missed the delivery ahead of our big opening.”
Below, during a conversation with THR, Russell also discusses another coincidence involving Schwarzenegger’s character name, as well as The Mask’s role in him landing the directorial job.
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As painful as it is to say, happy 30th anniversary of Eraser.
(Laughs.) I appreciate the irony. I’m honored that it has a new audience and demand for it, but 30 years? Really!?
I remember seeing TV spots for Eraser, but at the time, I never connected the dots that it was the same director as The Mask. One would think that you’d keep riding the comedy wave or that the industry would insist on it. So how did Eraser become your next move?
I’ve jumped genres. People have mentioned that about my career. I started with horror, and I didn’t want to get stuck with horror. The original intention was for The Mask to be a horror film, so I worked hard to turn it into a comedy. New Line, thankfully, believed in me and let me go that way with both Jim [Carrey] and Cameron [Diaz], who were still new at the time. But I love action movies, and I had a jones to do an action movie.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Russell on the set of Eraser
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was at the peak of his powers in 1995. True Lies had come out a year earlier. How much wining and dining did you have to do to get him on board?
Schwarzenegger approached me; it wasn’t the other way around. He loved The Mask, and I saw the opportunity to do a big studio movie with all the bells and whistles. The Mask looks like [a studio film]. We all worked hard to make it look absolutely great, but it was an independent film that picked up studio distribution. New Line eventually became a part of Warners. So Eraser was an opportunity to work with the whole studio system and see what making a movie on that scale was like. I had an idea, but you’re really kind of a ringmaster with hundreds of crew members and dozens of trucks. And in the case of Eraser, there were a lot of pyrotechnics and action sequences to carefully design.
Arnold and Sly Stallone were often in the mix for the same roles. If one said no, the other said yes. Was that actually the case here?
I don’t know both sides of the story, but there was a friendly competition. Arnold is a very competitive guy, which is part of his charm. He was competitive, with a sense of humor, regarding Sly. I’ve met Sly before, and he’s also a great guy. So it was a healthy competition. [Writer’s Note: The internet rumor has long been that Stallone said no to Eraser, but I later found a quote in which co-writer Tony Puryear denied the claim, noting that Warners originally backed the project with Arnold in mind because they hadn’t worked with him yet.]
Considering you directed A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors featuring Freddy Krueger, were you responsible for Arnold’s character being named Kruger?
No, that was weird. I intended to change it, but never did. It just seemed to stick. You’re the first person who’s mentioned this to me, and I thought it was an odd coincidence at the time. But it was not done by me. I came onto the movie after there had been a couple of drafts of the screenplay, and then I did my own director’s polish.
Apparently, there were a lot of rewrites mid-production. How stressful was it to change plans at the last minute?
In this case, I was deeply engaged in it. [Russell questions whether he should tell the following story.] Mission: Impossible shot just prior to us, and it had gotten back to us that there was an action scene that was almost exactly the same as one of ours. The CIA heist scene where Tom Cruise drops in on wires, I had Arnold doing almost exactly the same thing to get a disc out of the CIA, and we had to rewrite it to instead have Arnold get into the enemy company, Cyrez, another way. I at least changed that much. I didn’t want to have exactly the same scene.
These things are bizarre. They’re very likely a coincidence, but when they happen, you’ve got to respond on your feet. And frankly, it gets my adrenaline up. It was like, “Okay, we’re going to do an even better scene, but we’ve got to write it tonight. We have to get a move on it.” It brings a certain momentum to a film. No one wants this kind of thing, but it wasn’t the end of us. I have a competitive side too, and I wanted to do our best with our team as well. So that was the nature of that rewrite. There weren’t any new pages because of an actor’s performance. The performances were wonderful. I cast it purposefully to raise Arnold’s game and had him play against Jimmy Caan and Vanessa Williams.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s John Kruger and Vanessa Williams’ Lee Cullen in Eraser
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
I knew that Eraser and the first Mission: Impossible came out within a month of each other, and the Vanessa Williams sequence where she covertly downloads sensitive information onto an optical disc was the one that actually reminded me of that Mission wire heist where Ethan Hunt (Cruise) transfers data onto an optical disc.
The Arnold scene that was too similar was the one rewrote. That [Vanessa Williams] scene doesn’t particularly bother me because our movie had its own tone and everything. But whatever, I’m a Tom Cruise fan. I love him. I’ve worked with him. I executive produced Collateral. So it’s all good, and there was room for both films, for sure.
You had various advisers from the CIA and the U.S. Marshals’ WITSEC [Witness Security] program. Did their insight add anything interesting?
Yes, as a matter of fact. What’s fun is when you get that level of expert advice and one guy from WITSEC and one guy from the CIA disagree on how an op would be handled. I wanted the film to be fun entertainment, but also have a level of authenticity to it. So we engaged those guys. I kept telling the CIA that they’re not the good guys in this story and to not be upset with me. But I made sure they read the script, and they were cool with it. It’s wonderful collaborating with agencies like WITSEC and the CIA. It was a big deal for me.
Eraser’s electromagnetic rail guns seem like a sci-fi invention, but they do exist in a much larger, real-life form, just not the handheld version in the movie.
That was my whole take. It was the other thing that was new to the script. In the original script, everyone was running around for a disc. Thank God we changed that because that’s what Mission: Impossible did in that first episode. I said, “Look, I don’t want to [just] do a disc. I’ve seen it a million times. There’s such a thing as a rail gun. Let me tell you about it.” I happened to be familiar with the tech, and I knew it would be brutal if they were able to miniaturize it into a long rifle size.
After the movie came out, I got a very interesting back-channel compliment from Naval Intelligence that said I got the rail gun right. I thought that was cool. So I wanted to add a near-future element to it, and it’s something fun that people seem to remember about the movie.
Arnold Schwarzenegger as John Kruger in Eraser
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
You mentioned the villainous defense contractor, Cyrez, earlier. According to the internet, you had to change the name from Cyrex to Cyrez in post. It’d be a breeze today, but was it quite the hassle in ‘95 or ‘96?
It almost affected the release of the movie. It did affect my final color timing on the crocodiles, which pissed me off because it has to be dark for the CGI to work. And the last pass on the CGI crocodiles, it got too bright. Right around then, in the sound mix, by a hysterical coincidence, one of my sound men decided to call information for the bad guy company name — Cyrex, as it was scripted — and got a number to call in Texas. Somebody really answered the phone, and they really were on a government contract to make weapons. So I don’t know how legal missed it, but there was a real company with a similar name called Cyrix.
Warners offered the company some money, but they said, “Look, we really do this. There’s no [amount of] money you can offer us.” So at the last minute, we had to change the letters in at least 70 shots. We went out to every effects company because they all had to be done very quickly within a week. It was Murphy’s law that the name of the company was on everything: helicopters, tops of buildings and cap-wearing guards. So that was breathtaking, especially in those days when we had to deliver physical film. It wasn’t sent digitally through the internet. So we almost missed the delivery ahead of our big opening.
When you watch the film now, do you see other ways in which your filming experience would be so much easier today?
I hadn’t seen it in years. I revisited it [for the new 4K release]. I wanted to do the remix and the new colorization because it would become my new master. So I wanted to be involved, and they invited me to be involved. But I was impressed at how much we did physically. It really was an ambitious film in terms of the scope of the sets and the action. Yes, there was CGI, but it wasn’t as perfected. It was pretty new still at that time.
Most of the action was well-staged physical action involving Arnold, my actors and my great stunt teams. We had an incredible parachuting team that did the plane sequence. So the stunt work was quite remarkable. But what I thought to myself recently was how I would be asked to use CGI for so much of this movie now. Real physical stunts bring a level of suspense to the audience. They can sense that the stunt was actually risky because it also increases suspense in the actors’ performances. Real stunt work and physical action add to the thrill of the movie.
Arnold Schwarzenegger on the set of Eraser
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
It’s been reported that you and producer Arnold Kopelson didn’t click with one another. Was every decision a struggle?
I’ve been hearing this lately, and I think it’s gotten a little overblown. I would be happy to tell you if I had been wronged or something. But what happened was the original script was rather typical. It was Arnold with a handgun and fistfights. True Lies had also been out the year before, which I loved. So when I was asked to do Eraser, I just said, “Arnold, we’re going to have to do some things I’ve never seen before in an action movie. We need three big action set pieces. Here are my ideas.” And Arnold Schwarzenegger loved them. So maybe that was the source of what some people perceive as a conflict [with Arnold Kopelson]. Maybe [Kopelson] was happy to move ahead with the original version, but he never really came at me about it. Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted [the new take], and he understood why I wanted it. So the studio agreed, and they got what they wanted, which was Arnold’s next $100 million hit blockbuster. So the pressure was on me, and that’s what we delivered.
One of the trailers has some shots of Vanessa Williams posing as a dead body, much like the mobster and his wife at the start of the movie. It looks like the same set and area rug were used in both cases. Did you film those pieces for the trailer at the same time as the movie’s opening sequence?
It’s in a trailer?
Yes, the Vanessa Williams trailer footage mirrors the movie’s opening. There’s exterior shots of the same house too.
I do not remember shooting both. We shot that [opening] sequence in New York. Vanessa was there for scenes in New York, but I don’t recall pulling her into that sequence for a few shots. Look, it’s been 30 years. Maybe I’m misremembering. So that could have been done by marketing, and the area rug was handy. Who knows? Marketing teams get creative sometimes, so that’s an interesting fact that I didn’t know or recall.
Lastly, what day on set recurs most often in your mind?
It’d be some of the stuff at the end with the boxcar in the air. There was stunt folk on it, and I always have good stunt craft. I’ve done it for years. Nobody’s gotten hurt. But on the day, I remember thinking, “Once I say action, this is out of my control.” Fortunately, it all went well. But that’s rather personal. I had my own reasons. I would not have shot it if it was actually dangerous, but I just had a feeling that day. Ultimately, everything worked out fine, and it was all good. It may not be a fun anecdote, but that’s what comes to mind.
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Eraser is now available on 4K.