Chris Warner is undeniably one of the finest actors in Hollywood, with a long list of amazing successful movies on his resume! He is especially known for Sin City, No Country for Old Men, Machete, Criminal Minds, NCIS: L.A & Prison Break just to mention a few.
ScreenBinge invited Chris for an interview and he told us some very intricate information on how Sin City was produced, and it totally shook us!
Chris started his career around 20 years back in Austin, with humble beginnings, but packed with the talent he was sure to hit the bright lights of Hollywood. He’s also an incredible screenwriter and a voice artist!
Here’s Some of Our Conversation With Chris Warner!
Hi, guys welcome to screenbinge.com! And today we have Mr. Chris Warner with us.I love your choice of movies. I loved Sin City so much, but I’ll be honest with you part 2 wasn’t as great!
Chris Warner: Yeah… yeah, I appreciate that! That was probably because they forgot to come in too! So, that’s why.
Exactly! Because that film is such a work of a genius, even in this time and age, you produce a monochrome film and it’s just amazing! So, tell me a little about how it was made?
Chris Warner: Oh, you know since Sin City was a blast to make! Robert Rodriguez, I call him a sweetheart. He’s a very kind soul. Robert’s an amazing individual as far as being an entertainer being creative. He has his own studio set up in Austin Texas.
So, my experience in that movie is a lot… it was done green screen, and just see… what we shot on set and what Robert created visually… uh was amazing. I mean… the thing you were talking about where Alexa Vidal is walking down the street and we pull up to her… and in the car and then Benito Del Toro’s character, Jackie boy is talking to her. The only thing that was real is the car, the whole post setting was on a green screen stage.
The floor was green, the walls were green, they took a treadmill and they took it apart and they had a guy on the ground cranking the treadmill to move. It wasn’t electric and she was walking on a treadmill next to the car and the car was sitting still.
So, all that was sitting still and he made it look like it was we were moving down the street. And you know, once you see it in the movie you just can’t tell we were sitting still.
They had a guy with a big tube that blew air conditioning air… so he would blow the air by us so it may look like our hair was blowing and then there was another… and then there were several guys standing with the lights flashing them side to side to make it look like the cars were moving by us.
So, yeah to see what we were shooting and then to see what he made…. wow, he’s amazing, Robert is a true artist at heart. He can do everything on a movie set and everything all from a movie set.
Your last film was Willy’s Wonderland, how was it working with Nicholas Cage?
Chris Warner: Nicholas Cage, you know he’s a sweetheart he’s a really nice gentle guy, even though he plays kind of tough guys and stuff like that. It was a great experience to be on camera with him!
When you hear that word “action” all of a sudden, the magic starts to happen and things fall away and you know when you get to be…. in kind of the magical moment with an artist of that calibre… is you know it was an honour, to be honest…with him of course, you get to learn and see so much.
So, when you’re on set like that and not even shooting a scene necessarily… you get to observe their process… I feel very fortunate again to be around somebody of this calibre.
Wow… that sounds great, totally what you’d expect from a star like him… moving on, how was your experience with “No Country for Old Men”
Chris Warner: It’s funny a story I have about that… we were in Texas in the middle of summer. It was probably 110 115 degrees and I shot this scene where it’s a railroad kind of depot that got destroyed. And my character ends up carrying these railroad ties… several railroad ties back and forth and I thought it was called acting.
But these guys actually had real railroad ties which are pretty heavy, I mean I’m a pretty big dude but they’re pretty heavy and then that heat and gearing those all-day… uh what you saw on screen was authentic.
My ass was worn out… I was tired at the end of the day, right, so yeah that was funny the railroad ties that we used to carry were real and they were probably between 75 and 100 pounds. The rails were foam they weren’t metal but the actual ties were way too heavy…that was a long day of acting.
Do you have any upcoming projects? Are you working on anything right now?
Chris Warner: I’ve been pitching a tv show right now, for the last six months as a kind of a vehicle for myself right? So, probably the next project I have is a short film which I wrote that I’ve kind of projected into a feature screenplay I’m going to probably turn it into…but I’m going to shoot that probably in the next few weeks.
Would you like to disclose something further about it?
Chris Warner: Sure, the tv show is called “Bisbee”. It’s about a small town in Arizona which is in the south part of the United States that becomes overrun by the Mexican cartel and so we have our hero our protagonist, who is a marine…a United States Marine sniper who comes home to retire in Bisbee, his hometown. And finds out again home’s not what it used to be and that’s because the cartels come over and more or less invaded it. So, someone like Johnny Rambo is not going to tolerate that kind of stuff.
So, from that point on we start seeing some conflict build between the hometown hero and then the cartel…. until the end when we have an epic ending that, folks won’t ever forget that’s for sure!
It’s like a one-man army, a Frank Castle Punisher if you will kind of imagine what’s it going to be like!
Check out Chris Warner’s complete interview with ScreenBinge at the top and discover the little-known facts behind some of the greatest movies!