You see that desert out there and you're inside the movie theater, it's all cool and you're drinking a Coke.
I'm sitting out in 120-degree weather baking my skin off, waiting for that stupid mount on that bike to drive."
Kahn insists it was all worth it, although anyone who actually saw that last motorcycle movie, DreamWorks' "Biker Boyz," might be turned off from the genre forever. Both movies were shot in 2001, but "Biker Boyz" wrapped and released quickly, only to bomb at the box office and receive harsh reviews. "Torque" was supposed to have been released around the same time, but in an attempt to disassociate itself from "Biker Boyz," the film was held until 2004.
" 'Biker Boyz' isn't an action movie. It's a drama," says Kahn. "It's a drama, lifestyle movie. Ours is not like that. Ours is a full-on action picture.
"If you look at superbikes, they're all very colorful, the outfits are colorful. They want to be seen when they're driving. |
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If you watch a movie like 'Biker Boyz,' they downplayed that, and they made the whole movie dark and muddy and all that other stuff, and kind of hid the bikes. I decided to make the movie kind of feel like the bike itself — super colorful."
Besides, Kahn says, movies like "Biker Boyz" and "The Fast and the Furious" are limited because they attempt to portray reality.
"Our movie, on the other hand, is hyperreal. It has more similarities to, say, Japanese animation, than it does to the real biker culture," says Kahn. "I'm doing things with motorcycles that you can't normally do in real-world physics.... There's a lot of little cheats that I've done in order to tell a story. In my movie, a bike jumps on top of a train."
Nervous about the actors' safety, Kahn actually advocated using computer graphics whenever possible.
"Every time one of my actors got on the bikes, it just put a knot in my stomach," he says. |
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