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 Benicio
Del Toro (pictured with director, William Friedkin) plays a Special
Forces assassin who, after returning from a mission in Kosovo, begins
to hunt Americans in the Pacific Northwest. Tommy Lee Jones is his
former instructor, who must take him down. Directed by Oscar winner
William Friedkin (The French Connection). (1 hr. 42 mins.;
R) — BILGE EBIRI
Opens March 14
• Showtimes
& tickets (movietickets.com)
Spotlight: Director William Friedkin
“There are less than ten great chase scenes on film,”
says director William Friedkin, who inarguably caught one
in his Academy Award winner The French Connection, and sets
out to do it again in The Hunted, his seventeenth film. “It’s
very hard to come up with an original idea. What I do is go to a
location without storyboards and place the two characters in opposition,
then pit them both up against whatever is there.” His new
picture, filmed around Oregon’s waterfalls and bridges, matches
Benicio Del Toro (as a Special Forces assassin turned psycho) against
Tommy Lee Jones (as the man who taught him his Ramboesque ways).
The story is drawn from real life. “The film is based on Tom
Brown Jr., who trained the Delta Force to kill,” Friedkin
says. “Twenty years ago, Tom went through a crisis of conscience—one
of his young men wigged out, and he was the only guy who could find
him. I’ve been wanting to make a picture of it ever since.”
Friedkin honed his method while shooting documentaries and more
than 200 live television shows in the late fifties. “I describe
my filmmaking style as ‘induced documentary.’ I use
the camera to search out the story, which creates this sense that
the action is actually happening, that the camera is trying to find
it,” Friedkin says. “That way, the audience feels like
they’re inside the chase.”
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