Whiteout - Alex O'Loughlin, Chad and Carey Hayes Interviews

with Rebecca Murray

Transcript: Whiteout - Alex O'Loughlin, Chad and Carey Hayes Interviews

Rebecca Murray from About.com Hollywood Movies at the Los Angeles premiere of Warner Bros Pictures' Whiteout.

Alex O'Loughlin – 'Russell Haden' in Whiteout

So your character is described as kind of rowdy, kind of a smartass. How easy is it to play that?

Alex O'Loughlin: "Well it's not much of a stretch. But that's a part of who he is. He has a lot of front, this guy, and he uses it to keep people at arm's length because he has…his M.O. is something like this."

So he has a good backstory?

Alex O'Loughlin: "Yeah."

And he's a pilot. So did you do any pilot training?

Alex O'Loughlin: "Yeah, I got my pilot's license and I bought a Cessna, and I actually flew into this premiere tonight. It changed my life."

And you get to ad-lib, I heard. Did you change things around a lot?

Alex O'Loughlin: "Yeah, we ad-libbed a bit. I mean, the script was pretty tight. But everybody was open to…you know, we had the writers on set and Greg [Rucka] was very open to us bringing what we needed to it and knowing if something wasn't fitting, making it our own. Every writer was different. It was good. It was great. It gives you great freedom."

How easy was it to work in that cold climate?

Alex O'Loughlin: "Well it's a character in the movie and it's where the movie's set. So, actually, if I can be – there's no acting required, if you know what I mean?"

To freeze.

Alex O'Loughlin: "It's great for me – yeah, to freeze and die. It actually makes my life easier when I don't have to pretend that it's cold and it actually is."

How long would you personally last as somebody who's up there doing this in the Antarctica?

Alex O'Loughlin: "I don't think the weather would be the main problem for me; I'm kind of resilient. I think the mental, the isolation – you're geographically so isolated that I would go crazy."

And Moonlight, were you guys just ahead of the craze?

Alex O'Loughlin: "It's like we jumped the gun and then got disqualified."

Any chance you guys will bring it back?

Alex O'Loughlin: "No. Well, I don't know. Where's Joel [Silver]? Ask him. It's his show."

Would you do it if they asked?

Alex O'Loughlin: "I'm already on a show now. You could do a head cast and put it on another actor, though. But then there's the talent question."

Whiteout Screenwriters Chad and Carey Hayes

I was thinking that it's not the cold so much as what it does to you psychologically. How do you work that into the script?

Chad Hayes: "It was immersing yourself in an environment where… I mean this movie takes place a handful of days before winter over, which is the evacuation. The idea of existing on a place where man is not meant to live was really cool for Carey and I. And when you start researching you figure that you die in two minutes if you're fully exposed."

Carey Hayes: "The elements became a character in the movie. They were one of the bad guys."

Chad Hayes: "You know what? You're right. It was like that became part of who are you up against, a villain in the film. You know, kind of like the unspoken villain but one that's always there."

Carey Hayes: "It's something you don't always count on. It's that dark left turn. It's like, 'Oh, wait, I didn't count on that,' and now there's another element…"

Chad Hayes: "Well, without giving it away, Kate's character, she is fully versed in how to deal with the environment, but she gets subjugated to a lot of really bad things only because of what happens in the film, and it's interesting how she deals with it. And that was kind of fun to write."

Carey Hayes: "She makes conscious choices against that enemy."

How long would you guys last up there?

Carey Hayes: "Without a jacket? Not long. What I heard from everybody shooting who had a jacket was that it was really cold."

Chad Hayes: "I don't know, Santa Monica gets really cold. No, I don't know. People that choose to live there it's very interesting, the choice. And a lot of people choose to live there over the dark-out, the winter over, which is…that baffles me. That really, really baffles me."

And you guys are going to direct next?

Chad Hayes: "Yeah, we're directing a film. We're doing a film called Djinn and we're going to India to direct our first movie."

Why India?

Carey Hayes: "Why India? Because of the belief system they have there, and if you look up djinn you'll understand what that belief system is. Djinn means 'the hidden', like a genie – a scary genie movie based on a true story. It's really neat."

Chad Hayes: "It's based on a Tahir Shah novel called The Caliph's House. We kind of took that and revamped it into an India story. It's fresh. It's very new."

More on Whiteout:

Behind the Scenes of Whiteout

Whiteout Photos

Whiteout Poster, Interviews, Credits, and Trailer

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