Emmanuel Itier: Is this film a departure for you?

Paul Walker: I wouldn’t say this is a departure. It plays in that same demographic — The Fast and the Furious audience. It’s pop culture, it’s urban, and I like that audience. That audience has been good to me. I enjoy making movies for them because they get off on seeing my movies. This film has that same feel and it has immediate credibility…

EI: Your butt is in the trailer.

PW: That’s fantastic!

EI: Was that a butt-double or was that your own butt?

PW: That’s a secret. My ass has been seen twice prior…

EI: I remember. Did they make you wear a sock?

PW: That’s another secret! [Laughs]

EI: We don’t have secrets in this room. We are in Cancun!

PW: [Laughs] The water was cold, alright?

EI: Was it fun to be playing the bad guy?

PW: Yeah, because he’s a good bad guy. The crew was kind of similar to what you have walking the line — likeable but bad; similar to what you saw in, like, Oceans 11 or Point Break.

EI: Would you describe yourself that way too?

PW: Yeah, I’m definitely criminally minded!

EI: You are likable but bad?

PW: Yeah, the bad is the criminal mind.

EI: What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done that you can share?

PW: I was 18 years old, and for two weeks, I was facing a felony, so I was pretty bad. I didn’t hurt anybody. I did some stupid things when I was younger — I think we all did.  I was always the guy who would find a way around this or I would find a way around that, and usually, when I smiled or winked, I would get out of trouble, which enabled too much. I was just that guy.

EI: I’ve interviewed you for over ten years now, and you still don’t appear to have grown up — in a good way. You’re like a big kid.

PW: I’m like Peter Pan with fast cars and the speed, yeah.

EI: Is that why you chose certain roles? This film is a high-testosterone film with an all-guy cast.

PW: Yeah, I’ve gotta be honest with you — usually when I read these types of movies, they are not the movies I want to go and see.  They are the audience I like making movies for. It’s different. It’s like there are two different parts of me. There’s a side of me that is competitive, and if I’m going to make a commercial movie, I want to see it hit. So I look at this and I think it’s commercial and it makes sense to me on the most fundamental levels. I take the budget into consideration, and I definitely take the fun factor into consideration. The location plays a big part when I’m looking at something like this. I even looked at the time frame, because I’m thinking there are other things I want to do this year outside of the Hollywood game — How is this going to work? What’s the time commitment here? I talked this all over with the studio head now; it’s not the chain of command, so I get the shorthanded version. So okay, who’s going to be involved and are they really attached or not? Cool. When can I start and when can I finish? That sounds awesome. Let’s go do it and let’s have a great time.  I love the action sequences because my whole life has played right up to it.  In my opinion, that’s my strength — from racing cars to martial arts to shooting guns… My father was the 1979 World Speed Shooting champion. He is a rifle expert. My father has traveled all around the world giving seminars on marksmanship, so that’s what this movie had, and they had me driving a car again, which isn’t a coincidence.  They got me doing some fight sequences and they had me shooting. I love getting in and figuring that out because not only is that the challenge — those are my friends. My closest friends in the industry are all stuntmen and stunt coordinators, so we get in and we get to go and have a field day. We get to play make-believe like you can only dream of on the studio’s money. We get to blow stuff up, crash cars and kick the crap out of one another.  It’s a lot of fun. People ask me if I’m concerned about being type-cast or stuck with the genre. I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” I get off on it. This is life to me! That’s the living part. If I’m not doing it when I’m getting paid for it, I’m doing it for fun, so I might as well get paid doing what I love to do.

EI: What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done in real life?

PW: I think it’s what I’m doing now. My first love was marine biology. Jacques Cousteau was my idol. I was always hoping, in the back of my mind, that there would be a way that somehow things would kind of intersect and that I would be able to have my cake and eat it too, so I’ve been putting the feelers out there for a long time. Marine biology is my first passion, and it wasn’t too long ago I was approached by this foundation called the Billfish Foundation. They study Blue Marlin and Black Marlin — they are sporting fish. They are a great indicator species because they sit at the top of the food chain. I’m on the board of the Billfish Foundation. They’ve got money and they love sport fishing, and they want to ensure it’s there for the next generation so they thought, “What can we do?” So basically, they throw $7,000 on every fish they catch, in a nutshell. These guys are doers — they are the Wrigley’s, they’re the Budweisers, they’re the Barcadis — I mean, those are the families who are doing this kind of thing. So we are pulling Blue and Black Marlin out of the ocean. We are taking DNA samples and we’re putting satellite tags on them and releasing them. It’s great because they are an indicator species now, and they are easier to monitor because they sit high on the water and bask.  They sit up close to the surface and they warm up and they are full of vitality, and they can go and hit something else and get another meal. If their numbers plummet, we have a pretty good idea as to what is going on with the remainder of the ocean and the general health of it. One of the guys on the board is called Chris Fisher, and this guy designed the solar dispenser, so you can get an idea of the kind of guy he is — he’s a player. But he’s a doer, and his idol was Jacques Cousteau.  I was like, “Son of a bitch, me too!” So we get along really well, and Michael Dolmayer is a doctor on the board of the Billfish Foundation who also happens to be one of the leading Great White Shark experts in the world. Chris has a ship which is really unique that allows him to send the ship off ahead of him with a sport fishing boat, which is 60 feet sitting on top of it. You can send the captain to virtually anywhere in the world and tell the captain to have his boat in the water anytime he gets there, so when he gets there, he can go and catch fish. He did that for a little while and then the doctor saw it and said, “Do you think you can pull a Great White Shark on that platform?” Chris is like, “Yeah.” He hadn’t even thought about it, but he’s going to figure out a way, so he’s a guy who puts his money where his mouth is. He thought, “I want to be Jacques Cousteau; I’ve got the means and I’m going to roll.” He approached a couple of networks and they knew what he was talking about was totally bananas. He was talking about going out there literally hooking a Great White Shark, which is over 15 feet long, pulling them by hand into this giant boat, taking blood samples from them and putting satellite tags on them, and then releasing them.  Nobody has ever done that before.  So Chris rolls and we went out and did it. We were permitted by the Mexican government to capture seven off of Guadeloupe Island, which is northwest of here. We went out for 11 days and we caught all seven of them.  In the process, we broke three records.  We caught the three largest fish ever caught in the East — all over 4,000 pounds.

EI: Did you document this?

PW: Yeah, and guess what — Geo (National Geographic network) — they love it now. So we air in November on Expedition Week. That’s our first episode. Ten hours next summer.  I have three more trips this year, but it’s great because what we’ve done now with the help of Michael Dolmayer…he’s one of the leading scientists on this stuff because we’ve taken everything they’ve thought to be factual within the shark understanding community and we’ve dumped it right on its head. Everything they thought they knew, they didn’t know. They were only speculating why the males were in certain areas at certain times of the year — they said they were here to breed…they were guessing.  The only way to check a male is to pull him out of the water and to check his penis and see if there is seminal fluid in it.  Those sharks are 14, 15 feet long before they reach sexual maturity.  So we pull them out, we look at his penis and, if we see seminal fluid, guess what? They are here to breed, so we push them back in the water.  On top of that, we are able to take hormone samples and blood samples from the females, and now we know what the hormone levels are when they are ready to breed.  The gestation period is two years; we don’t know where they disappear after they are impregnated, so we are going to figure that out. What’s great about the satellite feedback is that we know where they are.

EI: Have you heard back from them now?

PW: Oh yeah, every time you hear “dunna, dunna…” their satellite information is streaming and it’s going to a website.  Soon enough, there is going to be public access.

EI: Do you eat fish?

PW: Yeah, I love to eat fish.

EI: You just sound so passionate about them — that’s why I asked.

PW: I’m passionate about animals and I hunt too. It’s like I save and I kill.  I’m a walking, talking contradiction. I’m all about preserving the environment but I’m racing cars on the weekend.  I tell everyone I’m a gun-loving hippy.

EI: What’s the website?

PW:  It’s not open yet, and they’re still trying to figure that out because the real concern is that there is some radical who wants to be Tarzan who is going to harpoon one of these Great White Sharks if he has live pinging access to where it is, so there will probably be some sort of delay. But there is a Great White Shark in just about every sector of the Earth, and it used to be that they were a real territorial animal and that they didn’t really travel too far, and it was just a year and a half ago, as a result of Dr. Dolmayer’s work — he stuck a satellite tag on one off the coast of California, and two weeks later, it was found off the coast of Hawaii. Everyone was like: “What the hell?” They travel all over open ocean; no one thought they did that before. So we’re going to visit the coast off of San Francisco, we’re going to go back to Guadeloupe Island by the end of this year, and we’re either going to go to New Zealand or South Africa and do the same thing. Now that we know what the female hormone levels are when they’re breeding, we are going to be able to eliminate a lot of the guesswork. If we get one blood sample, we will be able to rule out if they are breeding or not.

EI: So all of these causes are planned around shooting Takers?

PW: Yeah, I like this one the most though.  That’s the problem I have right now my representatives are trying to make me work this year, and I just want to go and catch sharks.  That’s the wildest thing I’ve ever done, because I know how leader because I’ve caught sport fish so many times. Big Marlin, Blue Marlin and Black Marlin, and there’s a technique because you’re pulling them in by hand.  If you don’t leader right and the shark decides it wants to swim again — because we fight them for a little while and wear them out, and then we swing them into the boat, and every once in a while, they’ll play possum — two pumps to the tail and they’re hitting 20, 30 miles an hour, and if your hand gets caught in that wire cable and they pull you in, you’re not coming up.  So as far as risk — commercial fishermen die all the time catching Blue Marlin and Black Marlin with the same technique, and those fish weigh up to 500 pounds.  I’m doing this on fish that are over 4,000 pounds.

EI: What do you get out of being a shark catcher, compared to being an actor?

PW:  I like working hard — it doesn’t really matter what it is.  I have a good work ethic which was instilled in me when I was really young.  I like taking chances. I like walking the edge — walking that line, what’s in control and what’s out of control…anything that has that element to it, I love it.

EI: Danger?

PW: Yeah.

EI: Do you get hurt a lot?

PW: No, I don’t because I know my limits. I’m not reckless. I’m not out there doing stuff with reckless advantage. I get hurt sometimes when I’m really pushing myself. I’m really drawn to those things because what you find, more often than not, unless you’re racing cars, you come into a certain turn and auctioning that turn and hitting the apex just right… One week I’m there and I’m coming out of that turn at 130mph, and I couldn’t go any faster because I tried and I spun out or I crashed. But the next time I come, I’m like, “That’s it — that’s the pinnacle — 130 mph, and I’m making it around the track in a minute and 42 seconds.” Next time I come, it never ceases to amaze me — I’m coming around that corner 5 mph faster, and my lap-time is now a half-second faster.  I love that. I push myself as far as I can — that’s the best that I can be, and then next time, you’re better. That’s what I get off on more than anything in life.

EI: We need talk about your role in Takers. Who do you play?

PW: I play John, who is the right-hand man in the crew. He’s the guy who wants to commit crimes. If you’re going to be shady, you want him involved because he’s going to do things the way you want them to be handled, which is the right way, and if things go wrong, he’s a man of action and he makes things right.  He will bail you out of a situation and, worst case scenario, if you’re caught, he’ll take bamboo slithers up the fingernails; he’ll take a gun to the forehead and won’t crack. That’s the guy he is.  He’s a marksman. His skill set is crazy. He’s a great driver. A great wheelman.

EI: Does Hayden Christensen play your younger brother?

PW: Is that what they are saying?

EI: That’s what’s implied.

PW: No, it’s never said, but it could be interpreted that way, no problem. That works — I like him enough.  [Laughs] But yeah, fun character.  I got to do some fun stuff.  The crew is a likeable crew; it’s a mix of personalities. Guys come from different sides of the tracks.  It’s a code, and they just all want to understand one another.  They all get high on the same thing, which is doing illegal stuff — walking that line, pushing the limits and seeing what they can get away with.

EI: Can Chris Brown act?

PW: Yeah, he’s a great guy.

EI: What’s he like to work with?

PW: He’s so much fun. I love Chris.  He’s awesome. We had a blast together. He’s dancing and singing all the time.  He is great energy to be around.

EI: With him and T I on set, was it music the whole time?

PW: T I is older, he’s cooler. Chris is a kid.  He’s just excited to be where he’s at and he’s having fun and enjoying life. T I is a tycoon. He really is.  That guy owns it and runs it all.  He’s an executive producer on this.