Director Jaume Collet-Serra knows that Liam Neeson is an action-movie genre unto himself. Following his shark-versus–Blake Lively movie The Shallows (2016), Collet-Serra reunited with his main man for the fourth time after 2011’s Unknown, 2014’s Non-Stop, and 2015’s Run All Night. In his latest, The Commuter, Neeson plays Michael MacCauley, a regular family man who’s just been laid off. He also happens to be a regular commuter on New York’s Metro-North line, and on the evening of his untimely firing, he’s approached by a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) who proposes what seems like an innocuous game: Find and identify a passenger on the train who doesn’t belong. Michael receives a $25,000 cash advance, with the promise of another $75,000 at the end. Of course, the game reveals itself to be much more sinister the deeper Michael falls, with fatal consequences and a web of conspiracy surrounding it—and he must work against a ticking clock to save himself, his fellow passengers, and his loved ones.
Collet-Serra likes contained settings. Non-Stop was on a plane, The Commuter on a train. (Maybe we’ll see Liam Neeson on a boat next.) But in an era when action movies sprawl across cinematic universes, Collett-Serra’s work calls back to ’90s thrillers like The Fugitive and Speed. GQ spoke to the “vulgar auteur” (a term Collet-Serra just learned) about his relationship with Neeson (he’s like an old dance partner) and how he sets up his intricate mysteries.
GQ: The editing in The Commuter is great, and I love how you show the mundanity of Liam Neeson’s life in the beginning, before the big mystery. How did you think about how much you wanted to reveal about him and the other characters throughout the movie?
Jaume Collet-Serra: I really strongly believe in making the audience a participant in the mystery. I don’t want, as a viewer myself, to be given the same information as the main character, so I don’t feel at the end of the movie that I had no chance of figuring it out. I embrace a style that is very point-of-view–based, so that the audience sees what the character sees, and basically sees how he reacts to that situation. That’s why I did this montage in the beginning. People commute, but not everybody has experienced the day-to-day in a train. They’re not aware that you have this familiarity with the passengers, that if you take the same train for 10 years at the same time, you basically coincide with a lot of people. I wanted to show that. I wanted to show the monotony, but I wanted to also give the information to the audience: “These are the tools that this particular character has to play with.” Also, when Vera Farmiga sits in front of him and says, “You’re uniquely qualified to do this for me, because you’ve taken the same train at the same time for 10 years,” I wanted the audience to know what that meant. Obviously, people in New York or Chicago know, but in L.A., for instance, we commute in a very different way.
Yeah, the details are key.
Then in the crafting of the thriller, I like to write or work with a writer in a way in which I sort of know where I’m going, but I leave enough room to be surprised in the creating process, so I can come up with stuff that will also surprise the audience. Then hopefully at the end, everything makes sense and I’ve laid down all the clues, so they’ve had a chance to figure it out. I try not to lie, and I try not to purposely hide something from the audience. I believe that sometimes when something is very obvious, the audience or even the main character will not pick it up because it’s actually so obvious. When you’re trying to hide something, everybody can feel that and their radar goes in that direction. I actually tried to just treat every piece of the puzzle as the same size, to use a puzzle metaphor. That’s that.
In the past couple months, there have been a lot of Agatha Christie adaptations (including Murder on the Orient Express), and this almost felt like a modern take on that particular book, even though I know it’s not. Are you influenced by her writing at all?
I’ve probably read a lot of her books back when I was young, in the same sense that I’ve watched every Hitchcock movie and whatnot. I like mysteries of all sorts. The Agatha Christie–ness of it all is, I think, that she forced the reader to really pay attention. She knew people very well. Everything had a sort of a cross-section of society. She wrote about people that were very affluent, but then there were all these slices of society that sort of resonates with everybody. Hitchcock did the same thing. I think Hitchcock treated the audience with respect, put them in the situation, posed a question for them, and was really able to play with the tension. I think because he came from a silent-film background, he was the first one to understand that you can manipulate time with film. That’s one of the biggest tools, to make something feel longer or shorter. That’s the key to creating tension. Obviously, I’m not consciously inspired every time, but those are the rules that I go by every time I do a movie like this. You cannot go wrong with that.
This movie also reminded me so much of the movies that I grew up watching in the ’90s, like Air Force One, The Fugitive, and Speed. It feels like such a return of that kind of genre, which I have been missing.
Yeah, I just try to entertain and not to be apologetic about it. I think going back to House of Wax, what people took away from that movie is that it was a movie and genre they knew. You had fun. All of my movies, I try to have fun and not to be too serious. It’s entertainment. I think in the ’90s, that was great. People were just like, “Let’s see how we can outdo each other in this and that,” and then obviously somebody goes too far and it becomes ridiculous. If you keep it within the reality, people understand that it’s a movie. People understand that in normal life, things might not be exactly like that, but they appreciate there is a message, there is an arc for the characters, there’s a nice beginning and a nice ending. I don’t apologize for making entertaining movies.
You shouldn’t! Do you know about the term “vulgar auteurism,” by any chance?
No, but sounds very crooked.
A lot of film critics and cinephiles love your movies. You’re considered an auteur, but you also work in this very mainstream genre.
Sure, I will take it. I am an auteur in the sense that since House of Wax, I haven’t done a single other remake. I haven’t done sequels. I mean I did Goal II: Living the Dream, but again, I was young and I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ve tried to craft my movies. I’m very involved in the writing of them and the casting, every process from beginning to end. “Auteur” is usually given to people that actually fully write their movies. I don’t write them fully, but definitely my hand is in every aspect of it, for the good side and the bad side. I take the responsibility for both. I do think that it is a genre that there’s not a lot of anymore. Now movies are just bigger spectacle, or awards movies. Hey, you know, I’ll keep doing this instead.
You must have such a trusting relationship with Liam Neeson now. How do you go about introducing a new movie idea to him at this point?
We think very much alike in that sense. He loves thrillers, he loves the Agatha Christie of it all, even sometimes the Northern European thrillers, TV shows, and whatnot. We want to continue working together because when you have a partner like this, you just want to keep doing it together. We talk all the time, and if we’re on set or a story or whatever comes to mind, we develop it a little bit, and then we kind of jump on board and we try to make it happen, fit it in our schedules and whatnot. He obviously does other movies. I do other movies as well without him. It’s just a nice thing to come back to, and just do a movie once in a while together, and hopefully people like it.
Every time, I try to show a different side of Liam. I know Liam better, obviously, than most people. I want to keep discovering those sides for the audience. For the movie, I tried to make him more normal. He’s not an alcoholic, he doesn’t have a past, he’s just a good guy. He doesn’t have any power whatsoever. He’s just a fellow passenger. He needs to be more charming, he needs to manipulate. We see other sides of him than in Non-Stop or Run All Night, where he always had a gun was threatening. It’s like a dance, we’re like old dance partners. We don’t talk too much about the scenes. We talk about the story, the movie, we just do it. We just kind of have that shorthand.
You guys are like the modern day John Ford and John Wayne!
He always says that he wishes he would have been around for those days. He loves Westerns. I mean movie making is about creating a family. We have a family. It’s not only Liam—he has a team, I have a team. It is nice to bring the families together and try to do something. They’re very good, very professional, but at the same time, we have a good time. Hopefully we’ll continue to do it, honestly.
Is there something you improved on in this film that you learned from making your past action thrillers?
Definitely, the more you do it, the more you learn about it. Some of these things that I do in another movie, maybe they’re not seen. It’s something that we discover in editing and then we fix. Then you don’t do that again. This particular one, I think we worked a lot on the ending, to make sure that everything was explained and it came together nicely. I’ve had problems in the past where I’ve had to re-shoot some of the ending or shoot additional stuff because it was not clear. In this one, it didn’t happen. In this one, we worked a lot on the ending, to make sure that every little thing was explained and it worked out.
From a technical point of view, I learned many things from Non-Stop that I applied here, and that made things very easy. From other movies, I learned to make the action sequences very short, so people wouldn’t get exhausted. I remember early in my career, my action sequences were long and I had a lot of complaints. A short little action scene goes a long way. I start to make them shorter in that sense. Each movie is completely handcrafted to the concept, and then it has its own pains and its own problems, and it’s very hard to bring them to another movie. After The Shallows, I learned how to shoot in water, but after The Shallows, I don’t want to shoot in water anymore.
