It’s been 40 years since Beverly Hills Cop broke box office records, sent its hit-packed soundtrack to the top of the charts, helped invent the action/comedy genre and cemented Eddie Murphy’s status as a superstar. Now Murphy’s alter ego Axel Foley is back in
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, the fourth installment of the franchise’s tales of the maverick Detroit cop on the loose in the land of the rich and famous.
After his daughter’s life is threatened, Foley teams up with a new partner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and old pals Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and John Taggart (John Ashton) to turn up the heat and uncover a conspiracy, leaving plenty of room for awesome chase sequences and the comedian’s non-stop comedy routines.
The new film, streaming on Netflix and once again produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, was directed by Australian director Mark Molloy, who is making his feature film directorial debut following an award-winning career directing commercials and television. His creative team included editor Dan Lebental, director of photography Eduard Grau, VFX supervisor Bryan Grill and composer Lorne Balfe.
Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, Molloy (pictured above) talks about the challenges of making the film, collaborating with Murphy and Bruckheimer, and his love of editing and post.
This is a huge project for your movie directorial debut. Did you feel like you’d jumped in the deep end?
“Yes, the very, very deep end, and I definitely picked a big film for my first one. It wasn’t a shock, but everything was big about it, from working with Eddie and Jerry Bruckheimer, to all the great actors, to the sheer scale of the shoot, and then the weight of the franchise.”
How did your background in commercials and TV help prepare you for this?
“I’ve probably been on more sets than most directors, and my whole career’s been spent shooting, so that part of it’s all fine. I know where I want the camera and so on. That’s the easy part for me. The new part was the whole scale of it and the different dynamics of a film like this.”
Photo: Jerry Bruckheimer and Mark Molloy
What sort of film did you set out to make?
“When I read the script, I told Jerry, ‘I want to make an ‘80s action/comedy.’ I loved the first two films in the series and I wanted to go back to the well and make a film with the same essence and spirit as those.”
This is really Eddie Murphy’s baby. Talk about how you collaborated with Eddie on this. Any surprises?
“You’re right, it’s definitely Eddie and Jerry’s baby, and Eddie told me it’s the most important role he’s ever played. As for surprises, you know going in he’s one of the great comedians of all time and that he’s definitely going to bring the funny, but it’s amazing just how dialed into character he was. And not just in the scene, but how dialed in he was to the bigger picture of Axel, and how the character would behave 40 years after we first met him. And he’s just such a great actor, and he’d take a little moment or a line of dialogue and do so much with it, with just a look or the way he’d phrase it.”
What were the big technical challenges of pulling this all together?
“My other pitch for the movie was to go back to the first films and shoot as much as possible in-camera — no green screen, no 3D, none of that shit. I feel now in these kinds of films it’s all so perfect and choreographed and designed that you just don’t feel the danger anymore. So I wanted to go back and do it all in-camera — but that’s not so easy these days, and it’s far easier to build it all in 3D. We had some huge helicopter chases, and I was like, ‘I want to make mistakes, and have that sense that the camera might get smashed.’ And they did get smashed. And while we shot so much of it in-camera, we also had to integrate post and all the VFX on day one. You have to on a big film like this.”
Did you do a lot of previs?
“I did a lot of storyboarding and some previs, which Halon did. All the action scenes were very designed, but in a way that allowed for some spontaneity, so you’re not locked into a shot or frame. I wanted a bit more freedom, and a couple of times the GoPro cameras did get smashed, and I loved that, and we used all that footage.”
Cinematograph
er Eduard Grau shot this. Talk about the look you went for.
“We talked a lot about the visual approach, and Marty Brest and Tony Scott, who directed the first and second films respectively, gave us great points of inspiration. We probably went more with Tony’s aesthetic on Beverly Hills Cop II in the end. In terms of the camera and lens package we used, we shot with Alexa 35s and a few C series lenses, but mainly we used these really old, huge zooms that we kept on the camera the whole time. So that gave it this real ‘80s look. And we didn’t move the camera that much, as it was so bulky and heavy. We did tests for shooting on film, but we were rolling so many cameras that it just wasn’t practical.”
How tough was the shoot?
“It was pretty demanding, as we had a big cast and a huge crew all on-location all the time. We shot most of it in Beverly Hills, and we had seven to nine cameras rolling most of the time on all the action sequences, and never fewer than three for any setup at all, so it was a lot just in terms of all the logistics and scale. But I’m a nut for prep, so I was really prepared and ready to just accept the shit I couldn’t control on the day if things went wrong. So prep was key and the LA shoot was huge and crazy but fine. But we also shot the big snowplow opening sequence in Detroit over a week of night shoots, and that was very tough. It was all in-camera and we’d just been in a heatwave in LA and it was freezing in Detroit at night. That was a shock.”
Tell us about post. Where did you do it?
“We did all the editing here at my offices in Santa Monica, and we did all the sound work on the Fox lot. We had an amazing VFX team at Scanline, led by VFX supervisor Bryan Grill, and they were in-house and partners with us through all the edit and post. I do love post. I love shooting even more.”
It was edited by Dan Lebental. How did that work?
“I like to talk to my editor the whole time we’re shooting, to see what I can do better or if we’re missing things, and how it’s working tonally, especially with the big action sequences. We’d send him dailies and on the rare down day I’d sit down with him and watch stuff we’d just shot. I was so lucky to have him on this, as he’s an amazing editor who’s cut huge movies like Iron Man and Spider-Man: Homecoming, and worked a lot before with Jerry, and he’s so experienced. I really enjoyed the whole process and I learned so much during the edit, starting with the basic idea that there’s the film you shoot, and the one you edit. And Jerry would come in all the time, watch a sequence, not say much, but he’d make a couple of suggestions: ‘You don’t need that shot, reverse this one.’ And they were always spot on. He was such a great resource.”
What were the main editing challenges?
“It’ll surprise people — and it really surprised me too — but the music was a big challenge on this. I thought it was going to be easy, as the original soundtrack gave us a great jumping-off point, but it was really tricky then finding the right new music to blend with that. Where did we want to find the nostalgia, and where did we want to move on from that? Lorne Balfe composed the film’s score and he did a brilliant job of combining the old and the new, and evolving rather than reinventing the old sounds. All that took a lot of time and patience on his part. Then, of course, finding the right pacing and tone in the edit also took time.”
There are obviously quite a few VFX. What was entailed?
“Even though we did as much in-camera work as possible, we needed VFX for some of the more complex scenes, such as the big helicopter chase. A lot of the helicopter stuff was shot for real, but we did do some green screen to get Eddie and others into the scenes. And we did a lot of atmospheric work in the shoot-outs. Scanline did the bulk of the film’s VFX work, including all the squibs and gunfire in those scenes, and we had a lot of cleanup work done by Lola and [Netflix] Mumbai. Basically, we had the bones of everything in-camera, and in post we used VFX to help create atmosphere, remove cameras and rigs, and do all the stuff we couldn’t handle on-set. In the end we had hundreds of VFX shots, but we didn’t have whole sequences built of VFX. It was more about enhancing what we’d shot, like the opening scenes in Detroit, where we added VFX snow and rain, and removed stunt drivers and did cleanup.”
Can you talk about the importance of sound to you?
“It’s huge, and we had Chris Diebold, our supervising sound editor, with us in-house from the very start of the edit and the first assembly, so as we screened the film during post, we already had great sound. Then Paul Massey did the final mix at Fox, and we did the score on the Sony lot.”
What about the DI? Who was the colorist and how closely did you work with them and the DP?
“We did it at Company 3 with colorist Tom Poole, and I’m very involved. He and I have worked together for years and years, and we began talking about the look from the very start, including stocks and how to create that ‘80s look, but also bring it into our contemporary world. Another big thing was making LA another character in the film, so we spent a lot of time on getting the right palette and finding that golden light that I remembered from the first two films. And it’s been like a childhood dream for me to make this film and shoot here in LA. I’m very happy with the way it turned out.”