Ric Roman Waugh has built a career on action films that prioritize emotion as much as spectacle, and 'Shelter' may be his most personal to date.
In his first collaboration with Jason Statham, the director blends brutal realism, moral complexity, and an unlikely surrogate-family story.
Roman Waugh recently sat down with Metro to talk more about his latest project.
I am always looking for films and projects and stories that grab me emotionally, but they can also be big commercial-driven films at the theaters—it's about the cinematic experience where you take on action films or genre films like ‘Greenland’, but they're driven by emotion at [its] center. I've always been a fan of Jason and I've been fortunate that he's been wanting to work with me, and we've talked about some things before. But he called me about this script that he was just really, really excited about making.
And when I read it, I got it. You get the big action star that we love and admire, but you get something fresh. You get to be reminded of what a great actor he is and have a story that is reminiscent of ‘Man on Fire’ where the antihero comes into a young person's life and they find family in one another. But then that dark cloud is following them and it becomes about protection and that moral conflict that comes into play here, of doing the greater good, or are you doing somebody else's bidding? I just loved all these themes that the movie had to play with.
Well one, knowing that Jason is known to do his own action and is very capable—he trains like a madman and he's a real fighter and a real martial artist—so having that background, I was excited that I get to go and do action for real and actually use the star himself to be in that ride with us. And there were times when you wonder how a younger kid is going to stand up to that as well. And when Jason is rescue swimming Bodhi in these turbulent waters, that's really Bodhi Rae Breathnach, at 13 years old, in the water with him playing unconscious.
My mantra with action is that you're not watching action just for the sake of action, but you feel like you're participating in it like an IMAX ride and you're emotionally engaged in it. You're in the action ride in a way that you feel a part of it versus just watching it on the screen.
There are two themes of the movie for me — one is really about exile and how so many of us have dealt with that in our own lives, whether it's by loss, tragedy, or obviously the global pandemic that happened. And we really come to terms with how much we are social creatures and we need each other and how both these characters were in their own forms of exile and find family and don't want to lose it. But the bigger theme that I thought was really interesting that is so applicable to today is about justice. What is justice? Where is our moral compass in the world today? What is right or wrong? Where's our own personal line in the sand when we're worried about politicians and we're worried about global events that are taking place?
I love that the movie played with that. [Jason’s character] took a stand and it cost him—the wolves are now trying to kill him. And you get the other side of it, the wolf played by Bill Nighy, and what I think is always scary for me, not only in the antagonist in film, but in modern in our world that we live in, is when people live by a certain conviction that scares us... because they think they are doing the greater good and they're so far outside the lines of the law and legality that we wonder, where are we heading?
And then you put somebody like Naomi Ackie’s character dead smack in the middle of it, wondering, 'Is my mentor outside the law and running amuck? Have I been sent to kill an innocent man who I thought was a terrorist?' And so you get to play with all of these different gradients of the system of justice.
I am not a big person to shoot on sound stages — they bore the hell out of me. I feel like everybody falls asleep. I love shooting on real locations, and we wanted an abandoned lighthouse. So you start looking at places that can give you authenticity where you can build it, and we found this amazing [spot] in Wicklow, South Dublin in Ireland called Travelahawk with real ruins and the real cliff and real inclement weather.
We built everything to full scale. So you do your research on how big the lighthouses were, where they put them, how the living quarters were situated, the boathouse, and all that, so when you're seeing the characters inhabit this place, they're not in a sound stage, they're in the real environments.
I'm making big commercial cinematic films, so I take cinematic license, but if I'm asking you to buy into these characters and to feel like they're relatable to you, then they need to be authentic. And that means the world around them needs to be authentic. That's just part of the brand that I love in the stories that I am personally excited about.
I think the biggest example of that was [my film] ‘Greenland.’ It gave you different elements: It gave you the fantasy of fragments coming from the sky and putting us in our next extinction event, but it also dealt with a reality of man versus man, what we're capable of doing to one another, and then also the convictions of a family that are basically coming undone and doing everything they can to put themselves back together. And then realizing that there is so much more to life when it's life or death, and it reminds us of what we really need.
Then suddenly this thing called COVID hits, and we go into our own real-world global disaster, and now you're going, who the hell is going to watch a disaster film in the middle of a real disaster?
And yet it was No. 1 around the world. It was the biggest streaming deal because there were no theaters in the US at that time, and it really gave me a lesson that you can transport people into a world that they can appreciate that's not theirs for that moment—but there's enough relatable things within it that make me think about my own life and what is going on in the world today. It's still a form of escapism, and I like threading that needle.
I like finding worlds like ‘Shelter’ where you're living in an abandoned lighthouse with this guy living in his own form of exile, and then you're going down into London and all the new technology that is surveilling us today and all these different themes. Movies can let us escape reality, even if they're giving us versions of our own reality at the same time.
‘Shelter’ hits theaters Jan. 30.
