Interview: John Hyams, director of Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning

DiscDish recently spoke with filmmaker John Hyams, director and co-writer of the unabashedly violent 2012 sci-fi action film Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (Sony, Blu-ray $36.99; DVD $26.99). A wildly entertaining follow-up to 2009’s Universal Soldier: Regeneration, the new film features Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren (who starred in the franchise’s original entry, 1992’s Universal Soldier), alongside Scott Adkins (Expendables 2), a seasoned martial artist, kickboxer and actor who gives his all in many of the film’s bone-crunchingly intensive and graphic action sequences.

Hyams, the son of filmmaker Peter Hyams (who’s numerous films include such hard-hitting action flicks as Sudden Death, TimeCop, and End of Days), spoke with us passionately about his love of movies, his love of making movies, his love of his latest movie, his love of his father’s movies, and Sean Connery.

DiscDish: A quick online search for you and Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning reveals that you really enjoy talking about your work!

John Hyams: I do like to talk about my work. Believe me, I’ve spent a lot of time where nobody was interested in what I was doing. So when the time comes when people want to talk about my work, I’m in! Of course, I’m happy to promote the work, but I also just love talking about movies. I can sit and talk about them all day long.

DD: Reviews for Day of Reckoning have been all over the place! From loving to loathing…

JH: It’s true, really true—this one really runs the gamut. You can find people who absolutely love it and people who absolutely hate it, and I think it’s great. It’s nice to have a dynamic reaction. Nowadays, with so many different sources of reviews—it’s not just journalists, it’s everyone posting anything on IMDB or Amazon—you’re getting it from all directions. What I realized from this is that the kind of movies I like and make are not really for everybody. That’s the point. Really mainstream movies, a movie like Argo, for instance, are the movies that everybody likes. My kind of movies play to a very specific audience. Day of Reckoning is very violent and dark and R-rated. On top of that, it’s not just a straight-forward genre movie. I think we always assumed we’d get a wide range of reactions and, fortunately, a lot of publications whose opinions have meaning to me really stood behind me. Good reviews in places like the Village Voice and The Atlantic, a highbrow publication that gave us a brilliant review, were very satisfying.

DD: Speaking of the R rating—and your film is quite a hard R, I must say—are you game to go back into the editing room and cut an unrated version?

JH: Oh, absolutely. When we first submitted the film for the rating, it came back rated NC-17, and then I began trimming. I was always kind of promised that the unrated version would be on the Blu-ray, but it never happened. The unrated version can be seen outside of the country—in Canada, German, the UK—but domestically, they went with R.

DD: Can you deal with the R-rated version?

JH: To me, the cuts were hard. It really bummed me out to make some of them, but that’s what happens. What’s funny is that people who’ve watched the R-rated version think it’s the most violent film they’ve ever see!

Actions speak louder than words in Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning.

DD: The Blu-ray of Day of Reckoning contains two solid bonuses: a commentary track by you and Mr. Lundgren and a really nice feature-length making of documentary. I assume you’re a big fan of extensive supplemental materials?

JH: Oh yeah! Watching discs over the years, I’ve always been excited about audio commentaries. Coppola’s commentaries on Apocalypse Now and The Godfather are unbelievable—like courses on moviemaking. David Fincher and Soderbergh—they give great commentaries. I just love them. I can even listen to audio commentaries for bad movies, I find them so engrossing. The same goes for featurettes and behind-the-scenes material. The making-of pieces for Panic Room and Kick-Ass are amazing. So when we were thinking about Day of Reckoning, we thought that, at the very least, we should do a behind-the-scenes piece that’s very nuts and bolts and straight-ahead. We wanted to pull back the curtain to show everyone everything, because that’s the kind of thing that I would want to see.

DD: I’ve got to ask you a couple of questions relating to your father. I assume you’ve seen all his movies?

JH: (laughing) Oh, yes!

DD: And maybe you were on a bunch of his sets while he was in production…?

JH: Yes…

DD: So, which of his films had the biggest effect on you as a young person and then as a filmmaker?

Sean Connery in 1981's Outland, directed by Peter Hyams.

JH: The one that had the biggest impact on me because of the movie itself—and because I was on the set literally every day—was Outland.

DD: With Sean Connery. Love that one!

JH: I was nine or ten years old and it was shot in the summer, so I was there all the time. I’ve always loved being on the set, especially for that one. I could sit on the set all day and not say a word and just watch what people were doing, and I would love it. I would eventually move around and watch different departments doing their thing–making sets, setting up effects, creating different appliances. Unbelievable. Plus there was Connery. Of all the actors I met who were working with my dad, Connery was the one guy who was truly larger than life than he was on the screen. He was a total bad-ass, he really was. He makes quite an impression on a kid!

DD: Your father was a genre journeyman who worked in science fiction, action, crime, thrillers, horror, romance—just about everything. Given the opportunity to choose, what genre would you like to take on next?

JH: The goal is to try something different every time out. There are small gradations of what can be considered “different” and then there are vastly different ones. If you asked me ten years ago what I thought I’d me making today, I’d say probably comedies. To me, I love a guy like Stanley Kubrick, who you can say is his own genre. But in every movie, he explores a completely different scenario—the satire of Strangelove, the dark comedy of Lolita, the hypnotic sci-fi of 2001, and so much more. I’d like to deal with all those things—horror, comedy, sci-fi, everything. I don’t know that you should intentionally try to do something different, but rather bring your own voice to it. If you remain true to your voice, the movies, for better or worse, will continue to be whatever that thing is you bring to the table. Truthfully, it’s about the ideas that I have. That’s what’s going to decide what I do. Let’s see where it all goes.