Brian Skiba is the kind of filmmaker who has been grinding away at low-budget, but memorable, genre fare for years, and who in recent years has started to find a bit of a foothold in the mainstream market. With 2020’s The 2nd, the filmmaker associated with movies like Rottentail (yes, an evil mutant rabbit movie) and Blood Moon Rising found himself working on one of those slick, direct-to-streaming action movies that big-name stars are doing in between their theatrical projects these days. Working with Ryan Phillippe, Casper Van Dien, and Samaire Armstrong, Skiba set the stage for a prolific couple of years.
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Alternating between TV movies, low-budget genre fare, and slightly bigger actioners, Skiba currently has five movies in production or post-production, according to IMDb. First up: Pursuit, a thriller coming on Friday, which stars John Cusack, Emile Hirsch, Elizabeth Ludlow, and William Katt. Skiba gets a writing credit on the film, alongside Dawn Bursteen and Ben Fiore, whose script came across his desk and attracted him to the film.
“I was brought in on the third or fourth draft, came in, and then I did my director’s pass,” Skiba told ComicBook. “[The producers] came in and said, ‘Look, this is where we want to go with it. It’s not quite there yet, but let’s get it there.’ I lugged it the rest of the way with my director’s pass, and then from there, John [Cusack] came in, and John and I got it to final draft. John is very hands on with his scripts, and loves character development. We sat there, we talked through everything, we talked through the lines. It’s fantastic working with a mind like his, because it’s very deep, and it was fantastic.”
Skiba called Cusack an “absolute gentleman” and “a wonderful person on set,” but was especially excited by the reaction Emile Hirsch had to the screenplay. Having started out as a likable everyman type, Hirsch immediately wanted to dig into the dangerous Rick Calloway in Pursuit.
“Emile called me after reading the script, and was like, ‘Man, I really like Rick,’” Skiba told ComicBook. “He wanted to play the bad guy. And I think it was because Rick was so faceted, he was able to bring something to it. He had all these ideas. He had ideas for the neck tattoo, and so we got tattoo artists in. I think for him, it was a chance to play a character, which Emile is fantastic at. I think he needs more opportunities to play characters and be a character actor, because he is, and he’s just great at it.”
His praise wasn’t limited to those two stars — or even to Ludlow and Katt. Skiba name-dropped Grant Patrick Martin and Jake Manley, too, and said it all comes from that original script.
“All these great actors just started surrounding the film, and I really attribute that to a great script, great story,” Skiba said. “Once people get their hands on something, they go and they see the vision, it’s like, ‘Wow. Yeah. This is something that’s going to be cool.’”
Pursuit is coming to Digital and getting a limited theatrical release on Friday, February 18.
