The riveting, pulse-pounding, action packed and yes, often hilarious Free Fire is hitting theaters this week. We got to catch up with stars Sharlto Copley and Sam Riley at the film’s recent press day and the two were as rapid fire awesome as their characters are in the Ben Wheatley film that chronicles what happens when an arms deal between two groups goes decidedly and emphatically down the tubes.
It’s 1978 Boston and Copley plays Vern, a South African (like the actor himself) arms dealer who is contacted by both Justine (Oscar winner Brie Larson) and Ord (Armie Hammer) to bring a bunch of people from different walks of life together when Cillian Murphy’s Chris seeks to purchase a cavalcade of weapons to ship back to his Irish brethren in the IRA. The night before, Riley’s Stevo did something not-so-nice and when that comes to light in the middle of our weapons deal, all hell breaks loose.
Q: Sam, were you a little disappointed you couldn’t use your British accent and everybody else got to use their native tongue?
Sam Riley: It was quite amusing that the two guys from Boston were from Bradford [laughs].
Sam Riley: The only non-Americans …
Q: You did a nice accent.
Sam Riley: Thank you very much.
Q: It was very believable.
Sam Riley: I like doing accents. I mean it is nerve wrecking and Boston is so particular. It was tricky, but it also helps distance yourself from yourself. Which is always quite nice.
Sharlto Copley: You were also high the entire time, so people can’t be too picky [laughs].
Q: Do you guys do any backstory to figure out where these guys came from before they walked into that warehouse and into the crossfire of hell?
Sharlto Copley: You know people ask about this. I don’t do usually. I don’t do an enormous amount like external sort of research. I just energetically hook into something and then work from there. I work from a voice. I work from the deepest place that I can with the character. In this case I had a great point from Ben and Amy (Wheatly and Jump, co-writers) in the script of like Vernon was misdiagnosed as a child genius and never quite got over it. I can see what that might be emotionally.
Sam Riley: Yeah it’s a brilliant start.
Q: Sam, actually we did get to know a little bit about you. You are not a nice guy. Not very charming.
Sharlto Copley: He’s got a good heart underneath so. When his friend dies, he’ll never forget you. It’s funny, both of our wives actually quite… Loved our characters!
Sam Riley: I don’t know what the redeeming qualities. You even feel sorry for him though — my wife was saying that — so, at one point I was like wow, okay.
Sharlto Copley: My wife also just loved Vernon, as it turned out. I was like “really?” That is crazy. [Talks as Vern] Want to do the dishes babe? I’m gonna go get a beer.
Q: Was it tough ducking and crawling through those debris and rubble throughout Free Fire?
Sam Riley: It’s uncomfortable to some extent, but we were all in it together. You could only complain on it to the phone to somebody later at night. You could never complain in front of the others.
Sharlto Copley: Everyone has to just toughen up. Although, putting the wet jeans on every morning. It was like sticky as hell.
Sharlto Copley: From the blood.
Sam Riley: From the blood, yeah. Not from peeing myself.
Sharlto Copley: I covered you there [they both laugh].
Q: One of the brilliant things about this movie is it is so violent and you have no idea who is going to make it out alive. But, it also works as a dark comedy. Was that aspect present from early scripts you read?
Sam Riley: I think that developed as we were doing it. I remember the very first version of the script that I read, it was funny, but it was grim as well. It started to develop as we were doing it and this fantastic process of improvisation mixed with a brilliant script and flipping between the two things. But, you’d get rewrites very often and they’d be tailored more to how she saw us taking over the character. It got funnier. It would be a pretty grim film if it wasn’t funny.
Q: Well Brie was saying that how you guys all just laughed for the most part.
Sam Riley: There is a lot of laughter, but there wasn’t any corpsing, which is when you laugh on during a take. It was usually, it was between there was a lot of it, but there was always an element of anxiety before every take.
Sharlto Copley: Once the shooting started…
Sam Riley: Because of the gun fire and there was always a sense with me certainly, at the end of each day that everyone was all right. For me it was the most dangerous set in the sense of what could have happened.
Sharlto Copley: The number of charges [gun charges], it was the most dangerous in terms of like number of squib hits that were right by my head at a given time. Ben would do long takes, so normally into something, you would have like, okay, we’re gonna do the shot where someone shoots at me and I would move off the chair and then the squibs blow up and we do three of those. But, in Ben’s thing, we do all of our chairs and then we do the sequence, a guy comes in and starts shooting and we all going to the ground. So, if you get the timing wrong with any of that stuff, the charges are gonna go off right next to you and then it absolutely will damage you.
Sam Riley: There’s a lot of concentration. We all sensed the responsibility for one another’s well being.
Q: That warehouse looked like it had seen better days. Was it also dangerous with a spare nail or anything that you could have hurt yourself on?
Sam Riley: It had been industrially cleaned in order for it to be made filthy. It was right behind the supermarket in Brighton.
Sharlto Copley: Oh God, remember that!
Sam Riley: We used to dare each other to go in and buy sandwiches. There was a brilliant sign outside the supermarket. It was sort of telling people not to call the cops.
Sharlto Copley: They put the sign there on the first day.
Sam Riley: Do not be alarmed by gun fire.
Sharlto Copley: Yes!
Sam Riley: Just some men walking around in 70s clothes covered in blood.