Extreme Ops: The Anti-Oscar Movie

Originally from Canada.com
by Glen Schaefer of The Province
Sunday, November 10, 2002

Burnaby actor's new film has maximum stunts (and minimum dialogue)

Among all the Oscar-worthy human dramas high-browing their way into the multiplexes over the next two months is Extreme Ops.

It's a straight-ahead story about a group of extreme skiers and snowboarders who come to a shuttered alpine resort to film a shredder TV commercial — only to come up against a cadre of eastern European terrorists bent on global destruction.

I see Geoffrey Rush as one of the leads with maybe Kristin Scott Thomas playing his nuanced love interest, a Sports Illustrated supermodel.

Bzzzzt. Wrong approach, movie snobs. Extreme Ops, filmed over five months in Austria, Germany and B.C., with a minimum of dialogue and a maximum of stunt-men and pyrotechnics, is what the movie-makers call counter-programming. Sharing the ticket line-ups with those serious movie fans are the perennial crowd of kids who want to have fun.

Burnaby's Devon Sawa stars in the movie as a jock-videographer, alongside Rufus Sewell and Bridgette Wilson-Sampras.

"We're going up against a lot of the Oscar pictures," says the 24-year-old Sawa over the phone from Los Angeles. "This is the type of movie, if you don't want to go see the Oscar films, it's kind of a no-brainer, good time."

And sometimes making a thrill ride actually is a thrill ride. Sawa says most of his character's daring-do was performed by one of the movie's more than 100 stunt performers.

"We had some of the best skiers in the world come to Austria and do our stunts. You'll see the stunt man flying down the hill doing these crazy stunts and then they'll cut to a close-up shot of me coming to a stop and breathing hard. That's about as much skiing as I got in."

But Sawa had to step in for one scene involving the videographer hanging under a speeding train to get a shot.

"It was intense," he says. "They strapped me in, put me under this train, got the adrenaline going, it was just fun. It was about half a day. I thought of it afterward, that if a bit of rock had come up..."

The movie was filmed over five months — two in Austria, two in a Berlin studio and a month around Squamish for the movie's opening kayaking sequence.

"In the Austrian alps a helicopter would take us up the mountains every day," Sawa says. "The cast was really family-like — we'd have a couple of beers after work. It was a lot of fun. Whether the movie does well or not, I had a blast."

Sawa is making the move towards adult roles after coming to the movies with child roles in Casper and Wild America. He just finished an ensemble dating comedy called Extreme Dating with Amanda Detmers and Jamie-Lynn Sigler of The Sopranos. From one extreme to another?

"Yeah, that'll be your headline. It's about a bunch of young adults who work in a marketing firm. They have no time to find real dates so they set up extreme dates, where they lock each other in elevators or kidnap each other."

Sawa's own extreme dating days are over — next year he'll marry his longtime girlfriend, an American makeup artist named Jessica.

Off-screen hours are filled with hikes in the hills around Los Angeles with the couple's three dogs, including a five-month-old golden retriever. "We're doing the puppy-school thing, have a trainer in once a week. They're a lot of work. I think kids would be easier."

And Sawa is gradually moving away from the teen roles that have been his bread and butter.

"It's still in the process," he says. "Three-quarters of the scripts I'm getting now are still senior high school or just going into college. I'm still breaking into the adult roles. It's rare for me to find a script where I'm playing my age."

Meanwhile, there is Extreme Ops.

"I wouldn't get anywhere near the Oscars with this," he says, laughing. "If it did, people would stop watching the Oscars. The movie is what it is. There's not a lot of dialogue. If you want just to go to a movie and watch the action, then this is a movie to see."

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