The whole “repeat the same day over and over again” has been done before, by a ton of different filmmakers in different genres, all to varying degrees of success. None have been done quite like Boss Level, which was just released on Hulu this month. The film brings an action-heavy approach and a sense of dark humor to its time loop, aiming to feel more like a video game than a movie at times. It’s a unique experience, and it took a couple of unique brains to bring it to life.
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Enter director Joe Carnahan and star Frank Grillo. If you’ve ever seen the previous work of these two, you’ll probably wonder why it took so long for them to do a movie together. With Boss Level, the duo takes their sly action sensibilities to the extreme, and they took some time to chat with ComicBook.com about how it all came together.
“I mean, I love movies like this, and it’s hard to find a film in this sub-genre that doesn’t work,” Carnahan told us. “And so at some level, people just have this kind of vicarious thrill with these types of movies and maybe it’s because the idea that you can get better, you can repeat things, you can change your destiny, change fate, so on. But I thought that for us to do it, it had to have a unique perspective by the sense of humor, the comedy of the action itself, the kind of the over the top way that we’re going to attack this. And then I think again shifting into something that was unexpected, which was this love story, father and son, and this kind of fractured family and we don’t ever really hit the nail on the head, but I think that that’s where the movie gets very very interesting. Because it’s now no longer just this goofy special forces guy, who’s a little bit of a wreck, but lovable loser that it becomes something very different. And I think that’s what both Frank and I were always trying to push toward was that we can’t just repeat what other people have done really exceptionally well, be it Harold Ramis or Rob Zemeckis, or you name it. They they’ve done these types of films exceedingly well.”
Boss Level offers Grillo a chance to show off his funnier side, something he hasn’t been able to do a whole lot of in previous projects.
“I mean, look, I’m a goofy kind of guy. I laugh a lot, Joe and I laugh all day long and you know people don’t trust me doing that,” Grillo joked. “But Joe did and I never had more fun making a movie. I mean, never not in my life ever or anything. And, you know, I welcomed the opportunity,it’s my kind of humor. It’s our kind of humor that Roy kind of exudes. I hope to get to do it again. I really do.”
Not only did Carnahan trust Grillo to play Roy, he wrote the character specifically with him in mind.
“That was probably the first time, I’ve actually written a script for an actor. I wrote Roy for Frank,” Carnahan said. “So there’s a tailor-made quality to that.”
You can check out our full interview with Joe Carnahan and Frank Grillo in the video at the top of the page, and you can catch Boss Level streaming now on Hulu.
