TrustMovies: You have a real facility for action – making it fast, quick and most important understandable.
Stephen Campanelli: Thanks. I’m really happy to hear you say that because I wanted to make the movie exactly that, a smart, fun action film that keeps you on the edge of your seat.
TM: How did you choose this project? Did it fall into your lap, or did you find it and help push it through.
TM: That sounds like it was pretty easy, overall…
SC: Yeah -- things don’t normally work that well. This was a very rare thing.
TM: I liked the overall visual sense in the movie – as well as how you made the action both comprehensible and real.
SC: I’m a very visual person so I tried to give it the most visual impact that I could; And keep the movie short, too, so that people would remain engaged for the whole ride.
TM: And we were! Boy, James Purefoy makes such a great villain.
SC: Doesn’t he!
TM: And Kurylenko was a great choice here, too. She manages to make her lean, lithe body look like a real weapon.
SC: Olga was a dancer and a model and so she’s slim. I wanted her to seem like a normal person who has these amazing skills so that any woman might say, hey, maybe I could do that!
TM: What are you working on now?
TM: When might we see it?
SC: It’s still in the process of being sold. We just finished editing it, and we're now trying to get it to different networks. We hope to see it out within a year. The stars are Victor Webster and a wonderful and beautiful Brazilian actress, Thaila Ayala.
TM: How did Momentum's South African location come about?
SC: The script was first based in any North American city, but because the producer and some of the money was South African, we decided to shoot it there.
TM: Shooting in a city we don’t see a lot is more interesting, I think. I also like the way you handled the violence in the movie. There’s plenty of it, and it is – particularly the threat of it – pretty awful. And yet you never quite overdo it. This is a difficult line to walk without toppling over in either direction.
TM: What about a sequel? Momentum leaves itself wide open—in fact, it practically promises us one!
SC: We’re hoping the film does well enough, overall, so that this will happen. Olga would do it in a heartbeat, and if we give Morgan Freeman (shown above, left) a bigger role, he will, too. So I already have some good ideas for this. I’d love to do it again. A sequel might be able to deepen things, too. We would probably do the closure on the second one, rather than make a trilogy of it. But, again, if it got popular enough….
I also love it when a film has a strong female protagonist in the lead So, yes, I really hope we can do the sequel.
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Momentum, released to Blu-ray and DVD via Anchor Bay Entertainment, hits the street tomorrow, Tuesday, December 1 -- for purchase or rental. For more information, click here.
