The new Liam Neeson thriller “The Mongoose” is one of the actor’s best genre vehicles since “Taken” made him one of the world’s biggest action stars almost 20 years ago. Fast, funny, and often surprising in its emotional delicacy and depth, the story of a falsely accused special forces vet leading cops on a high speed pursuit has both some of the best set pieces of Neeson’s career (particularly the climactic helicopter chase) and one of his loosest, most relaxed performances. He seems to be having a really good time, and the positive vibes are infectious.
That Neeson is so comfortable in “The Mongoose” probably has something to do with the director at the helm, Mark Vanselow. “The Mongoose” is Vanselow’s feature directorial debut, but he’s hardly a newcomer — as a stunt performer, stunt coordinator, and second unit director, he’s racked up over a hundred credits. More than 30 of those are on films he made with Neeson, who he first met when he doubled the actor in 1998 on “Gun Shy.”
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Since then, Vanselow has been Neeson’s stunt double (and in many cases, stunt coordinator and more) on over 30 films, including last year’s “The Naked Gun” — another movie that found Neeson in a refreshingly hilarious and relaxed mode. Vanselow credits Neeson with encouraging and supporting him as he moved into new positions over the years, and with fighting to get him on overseas productions like the “Taken” movies where it would have been easier for producers to hire locally.
“Liam was really instrumental in fighting for me every step of the way,” Vanselow said. “As I transitioned from stunt performer to other jobs, he almost saw those attributes in me before I did.” Together, Neeson and Vanselow tried not to settle into established ways of doing things, often finding new ways to stage action that required battles with filmmakers and financiers more comfortable with the status quo — luckily, Vanselow taking the reins as director meant that he and Neeson could try anything they wanted to on “The Mongoose” without fear.
It also meant they could work more efficiently. “ A lot of times, as a stunt coordinator or second unit director you’re trying to act on the director’s vision,” Vanselow said. “And then you’re in a situation where you might not have had time to talk about that, and you’ve got to decide, ‘What do I think the director’s going to want here?’ So we’ll shoot in multiple angles to give them more material to work with. But as the director you get to say, ‘I don’t need to have that — but I need that.'”
By carefully planning the movie with his department heads, Vanselow was able to shoot “The Mongoose” in 35 days, a tight schedule given the movie’s scale and ambition. One key factor was reuniting with cinematographer Tom Stern, who Vanselow and Neeson had worked with before and who got used to working quickly during his days with Clint Eastwood. “With Tom, you’re not waiting to go, it’s just there,” Vanselow said. “He’s a magician with these images, and you don’t have to wait.”
Vanselow was careful to use take full advantage of prep to get everyone on the same page. “We worked really hard to keep everybody pulling on the rope in the same direction,” Vanselow said. “Sometimes you work on a film and it feels like everybody’s going in different directions, and having been in that position I worked really hard to be clear about what we were doing.”
That clarity was essential not only given the speed of the shoot but the challenge of the location, as “The Mongoose” doubled Australia for the U.S. “First of all, in a car movie, all the steering wheels are on the wrong side,” Vanselow said. As part of prep, Vanselow drove the exact route Neeson’s character drives in the U.S. and shot footage of every stop along the way. He gave the material to his production designer and other collaborators, enabling them to find locations in Australia that worked as convincing facsimiles.
Coordinating all of his department heads and units in prep allowed Vanselow to focus more intensely on performance during the actual shoot, which paid off not only in terms of Neeson’s work but that of the supporting cast. One of the real pleasures of “The Mongoose” is how stacked the ensemble is, with fine contributions from Marisa Tomei, Ving Rhames, Michael Chiklis, and other actors who match Neeson’s enthusiasm and intensity. For Vanselow, who began as an actor himself, working on dialogue scenes isn’t all that different from staging stunts.
“Fight choreography is just non-verbal dialogue,” Vanselow said. “You approach it the same way. I really wanted to do a character-driven story, and we worked on peeling it like an onion. At first, it looks like it’s just a car chase, and that gets you into the theater. As you dive deeper there’s a little more going on, so that it’s not just action for action’s sake. The action supports those stories. I just tried to create an environment where the actors could do the best work possible.”
“The Mongoose” opens in theaters on Friday, October 30.