Arnold Schwarzenegger set piece had to be retooled after discovering Tom Cruise had just filmed a similar wire heist
Eraser director Chuck Russell had a major problem on the 1995 set of his Arnold Schwarzenegger-led actioner. He and his team caught wind of the fact that their third-act set piece had just been pulled off by Tom Cruise and Brian De Palma on the recently wrapped Mission: Impossible. With Eraser scheduled to release a month after the first installment in Cruise’s now-signature action franchise, Russell and co. pivoted on the fly.
“The CIA heist scene where Tom Cruise drops in on wires, I had Arnold doing almost exactly the same thing to get a disc out of the CIA, and we had to rewrite it to instead have Arnold get into the enemy company, Cyrez, another way,” Russell tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I at least changed that much. I didn’t want to have exactly the same scene.”
The Cyrex to Cyrez scramble
Oddly enough, the name of that defense contractor, Cyrez, nearly derailed Eraser‘s release date in June of ’96. Russell shot the movie with the company branded as Cyrex, but during post-production, the eleventh-hour discovery of a company called Cyrix forced a mad scramble.
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“Warners offered the company some money, but they said, ‘Look, we really do this. There’s no [amount of] money you can offer us.’ So at the last minute, we had to change the letters in at least 70 shots,” Russell recalls. “We went out to every effects company because they all had to be done very quickly within a week. So that was breathtaking, especially in those days when we had to deliver physical film. We almost missed the delivery ahead of our big opening.”
Jumping genres to action
Russell, who directed A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and The Mask, jumped genres to take on Eraser. The original intention was for The Mask to be a horror film, but Russell worked hard to turn it into a comedy. New Line believed in him and let him go that way. But he had a “jones to do an action movie.”
Schwarzenegger approached Russell for the project after loving The Mask. “I saw the opportunity to do a big studio movie with all the bells and whistles,” Russell says.
The rail gun and authenticity
Russell added the electromagnetic rail gun element to the script, which he says was a near-future tech addition. “After the movie came out, I got a very interesting back-channel compliment from Naval Intelligence that said I got the rail gun right,” Russell reveals. “I thought that was cool.”
The director also engaged advisers from the CIA and the U.S. Marshals’ WITSEC program to add authenticity to the film. “What’s fun is when you get that level of expert advice and one guy from WITSEC and one guy from the CIA disagree on how an op would be handled,” he says.
Physical stunts over CGI
Russell revisiting the film for its 4K release was impressed by the physical action. “Most of the action was well-staged physical action involving Arnold, my actors and my great stunt teams,” he says. “Real physical stunts bring a level of suspense to the audience. They can sense that the stunt was actually risky because it also increases suspense in the actors’ performances.”
Eraser is now available on 4K.
