Liam Neeson: “The Passenger is a bit like Non-Stop, but on a train”

Back on TF1, this action film will be followed by another, this time in the snow: Ice Road.

TF1 will rebroadcast this Sunday at 9:10 p.m. The Passenger. At the time of its release, in early 2018, we met its star, Liam Neeson. Note that the actor will be in the spotlight for the entire evening of the channel, since at 11:05 p.m. is scheduled Ice Road (2021), previously unseen on television.

News of January 24, 2018 : Liam Neeson was in Paris last week for the purposes of promoting The Passengerhis latest film, a new variation on his post-Taken a former cop (or secret agent) who should not be messed with. This is his fourth film with Jaume Collet-Serra, after Without identity, Nonstop And Night Run, in which he hunts down bad guys and races against time on a commuter train. A bit routine but still fun.

In September, at the Toronto Film Festival, the actor announced that he was going to quit action cinema, too old for his bullshit (65 years old), but has since explained that his comments had been distorted. The Irish giant still wants to fight. Just before leaving to Telluride to shoot under the direction of the Coen brothers (for an episode of their Netflix series The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), he deciphered in front of a group of French journalists the issues of The Passenger. Excerpts.

On his relationship with Jaume Collet-Serra:
“We are not particularly looking to surprise ourselves, with Jaume. We are getting closer and closer, professionally speaking. We don’t overanalyze things, we don’t sit down and discuss the character’s motivations. I arrive on set, he describes the action to me, the choreography of the scenes, the camera movements, I tell him “OK, I understand”, and here we go. It’s that simple. The team likes it, because they know it’s not going to take five takes before it’s in the can.”

His routine on set:
“We shot The Passenger at Pinewood Studios, just after Star Wars broke camp. We built a wagon mounted on a hydraulic system. A single wagon to represent all the wagons of the train. Behind, there are green backgrounds. To be honest, I still don’t understand how it works! But the illusion they manage to create is extraordinary. My routine on set? I wake up at five o’clock, I go to the room, I arrive on the set where we shoot continuously, until 6:30 p.m., then I take a little nap for a quarter of an hour, then return to the room where I train with the stunt guys to choreograph the fights. And after that, I collapse! This is my life for three months. Very monastic.”

The concept of The Passenger :
“I liked doing Non-Stop (Liam Neeson tracks down terrorists on a plane – editor’s note), a suspense film in a very small space. We were shooting in a tiny studio, the challenge was exciting, I found Jaume very inventive with the camera. When I read the script for The Passengerwhich is a bit like Nonstop on a train, I was curious to know how Jaume would do! We are preparing a fifth film together, a new thriller. In an even smaller space! An elevator ? No: a closet! (laughs)”

His character The Passenger :
“I like playing the man in the street. Here, an insurance agent, a former cop, who finds himself fired overnight because he is sixty years old! I think a lot of viewers can relate to that. The middle class is slowly dying – at least in the United States and Ireland, I don’t know the situation in France. I want to play normal guys, not superheroes.”

Trailer :

Non-stop is perfectly trippy entertainment (review)