After “John Wick”, “Atomic Blond” and “Deadpool 2”, here is “High Speed Train” by director David Leitch and which brings together Brad Pitt, Joey King and Aaron Taylor-Johnson to name but a few.
“Dave comes from the stunt world. Dave became my stunt double in 1998 for “Fight Club” and he was the one who taught me regarding fighting. Our association worked so well that we continued to work together until 2004. And then he left me. And now we’ve come full circle and it’s a pleasure to have had him as our boss,” said Brad Pitt during the press conference to present the film to an audience of journalists gathered in Berlin, Germany, last month.
“Bullet Train” is the adaptation of the Japanese novel “Maria Beetle” by Kōtarō Isaka and takes place in the train that connects Tokyo and Kyoto, the feature film lasting 126 minutes, the approximate duration of the journey.
On board, Ladybug (Brad Pitt), a decidedly unlucky assassin, must recover a briefcase according to her mission given by Maria Beetle, whose voice is provided by Sandra Bullock. The problem is that he quickly realizes that he is not alone on the spot. The Prince (Joey King), is a fearsome killer who pretends to be a student. Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), he is British and is the “twin” of Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry). And that’s not counting Yuichi Kimura (Andrew Koji) and a few other surprise assassins.
Not just action…
More than an action film, “High-speed train” is also a black comedy, completely crazy for which “the actors brought everything to a level that we did not expect”, thus underlined the producer Kelly McCormick.
“On the set, told Aaron Taylor-Johnson, we were in different spaces depending on the scenes to be played, which generated a very important feeling of claustrophobia for me. We’ve all used that with our characters.”
It is because it was shot in the midst of a pandemic that the film is so “flyy”, the actors improvising many of their dialogues.
“We were in lockdown, it was before the vaccines, we were surrounded by a dark cloud and we all said to ourselves that we had to have fun while working so that the public might laugh. I was exploring my character and I was able to take inspiration from Brian and thus adapt the dialogues,” explained Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
During “Bullet Train”, Ladybug often reflects on her bad luck, fate, fatality. And Brad Pitt also asks himself the same questions. “It’s a very funny film, but in which there is a subtext of ‘fatality’. I tend, on a personal level, to believe in fate. But I often have discussions with myself and I ask myself the question of knowing to what extent our life is a fatality – we are only puppets – and to what extent our will and our free will are exercised. I simply believe that life is a mix of the two…simply because I don’t have a better answer,” the actor said.
A mixture of violence and humour, “High-speed train” is, for the director, “a balance of tones, which is moreover the greatest challenge of a production. The fact of creating a universe bordering on the absurd allowed us to explore this kind of comic book world. It is for this reason that we can also include more serious subjects. It is important that a film transports the public, that the latter lives an adventure and we can have all these tones within the same feature film, ”said David Leitch.
“High-speed train” entered the station in theaters across the province on August 5.