Summary

• Director Phillip Noyce discusses what attracted him to Fast Charlie and how screenwriter Richard Wenk brought charm and humor to the story.
• Pierce Brosnan was Noyce's first choice for the role of Charlie due to his combination of icy coldness, gun skills, and comedic talent.
• Morena Baccarin joined the cast just before shooting began and formed a loving and trusting relationship with Brosnan, resulting in a magical on-screen performance.

Pierce Brosnan is a fixer out for revenge in Fast Charlie. Based on Victor Gischler's novel of the same name, the movie centers on the eponymous mob fixer and hitman whose easy life gets upended when a rival mob boss tries to make a play to take over power in their region, resulting in a quest to avenge the deaths of his friends.

Alongside Brosnan, the ensemble Fast Charlie cast includes Morena Baccarin, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Christopher Matthew Cook, Toby Huss, David Chattam, Brennan Keel Cook, Fredric Lehne, Sharon Gless and James Caan in his final role. Helmed by acclaimed filmmaker Phillip Noyce, the movie is a darkly humorous affair with well-rounded characters and slick action sequences.

In anticipation of the movie's release, Screen Rant interviewed director Phillip Noyce to discuss Fast Charlie, why Brosnan was his first casting choice for the title role, how Baccarin saved the production, and reflecting on his legacy with Harrison Ford's Jack Ryan movies.

Phillip Noyce Talks Fast Charlie

Screen Rant: Fast Charlie is such a fun movie, it's fast-paced, it's slick. I love Pierce in the role. What about this project initially sparked your interest to want to be a part of it?

Phillip Noyce: What first attracted me to Fast Charlie was the chance to work with Richard Wenk, a screenwriter that I've admired for a long time. We've tried to work together over the years, but couldn't find anything. And the producer brought me the novel by Victor Gischler. I said, "Okay, yeah, get Richard Wenk, I'm in." So, he did, and Richard transferred the story from southern Florida and Miami to the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans, and sort of took the characters and placed them, and told the same story with the same characters, but with much more — even than the original — charm. Much more of a sense of yearning, much more romance, and much more humor, even than the original novel. So yeah, that's what got me in the initial story, and then the chance to work with a great screenwriter.

This is a movie that lives and dies on Charlie, as much as it does the writing. What was that search like for you to find the right person to lead this cast?

Phillip Noyce: Well, I think Pierce was the only actor we went to. He seemed such a natural for this role, particularly as I remembered how well he played the hitman in The Matador all those years ago, 20 years ago. It's bringing the icy coldness of the James Bond character that he developed, and taking it sort of down to the bottom of the heap of criminality. But combining those two, those two amazing qualities that Pierce has, he's also so suited for this part, because he knows how to fire a gun, but he can also fire a more powerful missile just with the tip of an eyelid, sort of a look. That is like a bazooka firing. And he's so skilled at humor, his one-liners, his winks, his shoves, his little comments that he comes up with, some of which were improvised on set, he's really good at comedy. So, he was the perfect choice, and the only choice for this part.

I love that you referenced The Matador, which is an underrated movie. What was it like scouting for this? Because the locations in this movie feel so rich and layered, even something as simple as Morena's isolated home in the boonies.

Phillip Noyce: Well, first of all, I went to Orlando, and then took the journey that Charlie takes up to Miami. I stopped at a lot of seedy places along the way to sort of get a feel for that. And then I went to Mississippi, to the Gulf Coast, around Biloxi, and I sort of enveloped myself in that world there, which is different, but the same, and then on to New Orleans. I think that the story is just as cogent, just as strong, in those locations as it would have been still set in Florida.

But the Gulf Coast also gave me a chance to find a unique place for Marcie, the character played by Morena Baccarin, to live. She's a woman who married young to to a guy who turned out to be a low-level gangster, but not very good at that either. A loser gangster. She fell in love with the wrong guy, and found herself in a world that she's running away from, so she's isolated herself there on the coast, up on stilts, alone. Almost a hermit-like existence, so that seemed like the ideal shell for her to come out of, you know, like a butterfly finding its wings.

That choice alone was something that we couldn't have found back in Florida. For a director, the location hunt is easily the best part of making a movie, because everything's possible, including your imagination. There's no limitations on what you can achieve, and you play the movie out several times over in each location. You imagine where the characters are going to live. Like, for example, James Caan lives in a horse ranch. We must have chosen seven different places before I ended up putting him in that location, and each one carried with it a story, so we make our movies more than once in our minds.

Speaking of Morena, I love her in this role. I feel like we've seen her in similar roles with things like Firefly and Deadpool. What was it like finding her for this role? Was she similar to Pierce in that she was the only one in your mind?

Phillip Noyce: Quite the opposite, but she was our savior. We lost our actress just before shooting, we had a hiccup with the financing, we lost Marcie, and we started to film out of necessity. It wasn't until day seven that we found Morena to play the part. She came to New Orleans and stepped straight onto the set, which was quite unusual for me as a filmmaker.

Usually you get your key cast, and they rehearse, and they read, and they do chemistry reads, and they have to feel good together. Morena came in when we ran out of script that we could shoot with Pierce alone. If we were going to keep shooting, we had to have our Marcie, and she turned up just in time. But I was full of nerves on that first day, as they read together for the first time. They just seemed to hit it off, just like Marcie and Charlie in the movie. There's a certain reservation, try and work your way out, but quickly, they were in quick step together, like a dancing couple on Dancing with the Stars. You know. They formed a very loving and trusting relationship that I think is quite magical for the audience who will watch this film.

Ssince she came on later in the shoot, were you able to shoot her and Charlie's scenes together in chronological order?

Phillip Noyce: Absolutely not, they were completely out of order. The beginning was shot right at the end, and the end was shot right at the beginning. That's one of the wonderful merry-go round rollercoaster rides of filmmaking, that as a director, you need to keep the whole story clearly in your head. It never turns out that the schedule is how you would want it to be, and in this case, it was absolutely the opposite of what I could have ordered up myself. [Chuckles]

What was it like creating the look for this movie? Because I love that it has that warmth of the South, but also has an elegance.

Phillip Noyce: Well, that's the work of the relatively unheralded, but very well-known amongst cinematographers, DP who shot the film. I'm talking about Warwick Thornton, an indigenous Australian director, screenwriter, and cinematographer who, recently at the Camerimage Festival of Cinematography in Poland, was voted by the world's other best cinematographers as the best of 2023 for his film, The New Boy, which premiered at Cannes in May, and starred Cate Blanchett. Warwick is a master, and he brought his mastery to this film, so it has a beauty and elegance and a naturalism all at once.

I couldn't agree more. Was there any one scene that when you heard his vision for it, he maybe had a different vision for it in mind, and you loved his vision more?

Phillip Noyce: He is such a subtle character, you hardly got a word out of him. I' got more out of him at night than I did during the day, because we had a house that we rented together in New Orleans, and Warwick, like Charlie, is a chef. He would cook while I was watching my dailies — the film that I'd shot the day before — Warwick would be in the kitchen cooking up something wonderful for us to eat and talk, but we wouldn't talk about the movie. We'd talk about the food, just like Charlie and Marcie.

But to answer your question, was there one scene where I really appreciated his work? You know, it was every scene where he was — as he always was — ready when the actors were ready. He never kept us waiting, and that's the beauty of working with an Australian DP. I always try and use them, Chris Doyle, who worked with Wong Kar-wai, shot Rabbit-Proof Fence and Quiet American. Don McAlpine shot the films with Harrison Ford, the Tom Clancy movies, for me. Dean Semler shot The Bone Collector, who won the Academy Award for Dances with Wolves, and who I'd worked with back in my 20s, making documentaries in Australia.

Australian cinematographers go for something that's visually stunning, but they never forget the major priorities, which are story and character. And neither did Warwick, he always had story and character. He never wanted to keep anyone waiting for him.

I love your work on the Jack Ryan movies. They're still my favorite for that property. It's pretty amazing that it came back with the John Krasinski show on Prime Video, and I'm curious if you got the chance to watch any of that. If so, how did you feel?

Phillip Noyce: No, I didn't. I just couldn't. Because, for me, Harrison Ford is Jack Ryan, and no one else could be Jack Ryan. I invested so much in that collaboration, it pulled me in, because my dad worked in intelligence, in army intelligence, in the Second World War. I was brought up on his stories of training guerrilla fighters to be parachuted in behind the Japanese lines in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. So, the Jack Ryan films were, in a way, a fulfillment of a desire to get closer to my own father, who had been a spy, kind of an operative, just like Jack Ryan. Different era, different warfare.

I watched the trailers for John's series, and they look great, but also it was kind of a special thrill going with Harrison Ford to the CIA, and having them open up to us in the way that they did, revealing the technology that's become part and parcel of modern warfare, satellite imagery, and so on. When nobody knew about that stuff, and the CIA did it again for Angelina Jolie on Salt. She's playing a double agent, and they collected eight female double agents, and put them in a room in Langley, and we were sitting over at Paramount and were talking to them. Some were behind the camera and couldn't reveal their true identities. But so, you know, it's hard for me to watch other people's spy movies, because I was so steeped in the ones that I made.

About Fast Charlie

Charlie Swift (Pierce Brosnan), aka "Fast Charlie," is a fixer with a problem: the target he's whacked is missing his head. And he must prove it's the intended target to the man who paid for the hit - New Orleans' most prominent and most ruthless mobster, Beggar Mercado (Gbenga Akinnagbe). Charlie enlists Marcie Kramer (Morena Baccarin), the victim's ex-wife and a woman with the backbone and skillset Charlie needs. Dragging Marcie back into a past she was determined to escape sends the two of them on a wild and unpredictable odyssey that's unexpectedly amusing, action-propelled, and ultimately heartfelt. Along the way, Charlie and Marcie fight to protect the legacy of Charlie's best friend and mentor, Stan Mullen (James Caan in his final performance), while bringing down Beggar and his entire operation.

Fast Charlie is now in select theaters and on VOD.

Source: Screen Rant Plus