Of shooting multiple violent scenes in the Oliver Stone film, Salma Hayek says, 'It was very hard for me as a person to stomach it,' while Taylor Kitsch says, 'We had a riot doing it.'
- Jul 5, 2012
AceShowbiz - Shooting multiple extreme violent scenes in Oliver Stone's "Savages" was not an easy job for some of its starry cast members. For Salma Hayek and Blake Lively, filming the brutal scenes was a quite tough challenge. Still, John Travolta and Taylor Kitsch gushed that they had fun doing it.
"You can't [prepare for the violence]," Hayek who plays the film's main antagonist Elena told MTV News. The actress admitted it was very difficult for her to act brutal as a villain, stating, "I'll be honest, it was very hard for me as a person to stomach it. So to be the character doing it, I get really disturbed by it. It's not easy."
Lively, meanwhile, recalled her hard time when shooting an intense scene where her character O was kidnapped by Benicio del Toro's Lado. "With my stuff, the people that are hitting me are really hitting me," she said. "They're putting a cigar cutter around my finger and squeezing it tight and saying, 'We're going to squeeze it tight but we're not actually going to cut off your finger'."
"You're really experiencing a lot of the things, not to the extent you see in the movie, but when you're in the environment and you hear stories of the people... I spoke to a girl who was kidnapped bu the Mexican cartel, it feels real," the "Green Lantern" actress shared.
Contrary to the female cast members, the males seemed to enjoy shooting some sadistic scenes. "I had fun when [Kitsch] stabbed my hand. I thought that was fun," Travolta gushed. "We had a great time. Also, I think the privacy of the acting in close quarters, there is some reality that comes out that's different than when you are out in the open."
"You can just get down to the truth of the scene. I think a lot of that helped, because you're all day sitting in this tight little space so all you have is the reality of what you're going to say and do... The trajectory of that scene, it's all over the place," he added.
Kitsch chimed in, "That was a good 12-hour day in that jeep. Because there was just a ton of dialogue as well going back and forth and I'm just listening, taking my sunglasses off, getting ready to stab away. That was a long day. We had a riot doing it."
On doing nude scene in the film, Kitsch shared, "I was pitching full frontal. Long, slow-motion shots. But Oliver didn't want it." He added, "No, I mean it's all part of it. Look, the movie's called 'Savages', it's directed by Oliver Stone. I think we got away with just that, considering what this could have been. So it's all part of it, you sign up for it. I'm not going to complain about it, I think it was done really tastefully and it actually does serve the story."
Travolta went on adding, "Even the violence, I mean as violence goes, I thought it was pretty well done. Because that opening scene, I thought, 'Oh no,' I didn't know that it was done this way. I thought, 'Oh no, I can't watch this,' but then it became OK."
To open wide in the U.S. on July 6, "Savages" follows two best friends Chon (Kitsch) and Ben (Aaron Johnson) who date the same woman (Lively). Together, they work to distribute the best-quality pot on the planet.
When they resist being muscled by a Mexican drug cartel, their girl is kidnapped and the ransom is every cent they've made for the last five years. The two buddies finally agree to pay but hatch an alternate plan to get their girlfriend back, get revenge, and then get lost.
