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You may know Seth Gordon for directing the recent Baywatch remake, but his latest movie, Back in Action, is Cameron Diaz's acting comeback and teams her with Jamie Foxx.
Yes, Gordon has directed comedies in the past, such as Horrible Bosses and Identity Theft, but Back in Action is his first foray into action filmmaking. He spoke to ClutchPoints about his new movie (streaming now on Netflix) amid the LA wildfires. Luckily, Gordon and his family are okay.
“We know a lot of people that lost a lot,” he said. “And our hearts and prayers are with them.”
He wanted to step into something unfamiliar with his next project eight years removed from Baywatch.
“I have experience with comedies, and I have experience with some action. I wanted to take it up a notch,” Gordon said. “It was super fun to do and also really challenging.”
There was a bit of a learning curve for Gordon, but luckily, he had an “amazing” crew to help him. He praised them for their help in making the movie happen.
“It's definitely a level of ambition and action that I hadn't had access to before,” Gordon acknowledged. “We had an amazing crew, amazing stunt team, [so] shoutout to them.”
He praised the crew for their “thoughtful and ambitious approach” to the action sequences rather than rushing it and sacrificing the movie's quality. “Usually, the case is like trying to put 10 pounds of stuff into a five-pound bag,” Gordon said, putting a spin on the old “square peg in a round hole” aphorism.
Now that Back in Action is out for the world, Seth Gordon can appreciate and take it all in. He was grateful for me noticing the ambition of the project.
Did Back in Action take Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx overseas?
Back in Action brings Emily (Cameron Diaz) and Matt (Jamie Foxx) to England. After their monotonous fake life is interrupted, they go to England to retrieve a key from Emily's mom, played by Glenn Close.
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As Den of Thieves 2 shows, just because a movie is set in one location, it wasn't necessarily filmed there. For Gordon, he was fortunate to shoot “the vast majority of it” in London. Anything set in suburbia was, obviously, not shot in England (it was shot in Atlanta, Georgia).
Candidly, part of it may have been the tax rebates that incentivize studios to shoot in cities. Gordon isn't naive to the reality of the situation, calling the rebates an “attractor” for Netflix.
The beautiful country home
In England, Close's character lives in a beautiful old country house. It looks like something that you would see in Downton Abbey or a Guy Ritchie joint.
The owners of the property were excited to have a movie shoot there. It may partly be due to the expenses required to keep up an estate. Either way, it worked out, as Gordon felt the estate complemented Close's character.
“There are these estates all over England — I don't know if it's for landed gentry or what — but they're everywhere,” said Gordon. “In a lot of cases, it is something that has been handed down over generations. [This] was one of those where they were looking for someone to come film there because they've got all this space and this amazing house.”
Seth Gordon's Back in Action movie sets up a sequel. Hopefully, his latest movie will be received better than Baywatch. He recently stepped up his game, and this could be the start of a career revitalization.
Back in Action is streaming on Netflix now.
