David R. Ellis Quotes

No, in Lethal Weapon I was a taxi cab driver that Mel jumps in front of the taxi and pulls me out of the car and steals the taxi. Then I did some other indie driving for some of the car sequences.

Well, I think on second units it's all about execution. Because you come in there, you don't have to worry so much about the studio and all the other actors and all that.

I felt that if there wasn't going to be a good opportunity, then I would just go back to second units which I love, keep working with great directors, keep learning and knowing that the opportunity would come when the time was right.

So then I started doing a lot of episodic TV, just car chases or helicopter chases or whatever.

Waterworld was the best time of my life. It was physically demanding, but it was fun. I mean, you're in Hawaii for nine months shooting on the water every day.

They do think it is a big summer movie and that's why they want to give it a great chance, but they don't want to go up against Spider-Man 2 or some of the other big movies, the $100 million films that are coming up.

I think my biggest break though came probably on Patriot Games because it was the biggest, longest second unit up to that point. It was like five months of shooting and a huge crew.

I like Soderbergh, Spielberg, Lucas. There's a lot of talented guys out there obviously, and if you're a fan of films, you have to look at that stuff and learn from them.

We're talking to New Line. They've got a couple projects they're interested in me doing and I'm having meetings at MGM. There's a lot of available projects.

I mean, you have a general tone of it but it's pretty much you get to come in and you're going to flip this car and it's going to blow up and you're going to come out on fire and you go oh, that's cool, and then you get paid a lot of money.

Comedy. I think that's something I'd really like to do.

No, we always had something to do because I did all the wave runners and jet skis and boats approaching the atolls and stuff like that, so you could do that without showing the actual atoll or the set that you're going towards, but detailing all those guys racing towards it.

It was great. I mean, it's a blast directing underwater stuff.

Unless you go out and say what you stand for, other people will do it for you.

I jumped 18 cars on a motorcycle, so I did almost everything.

They had some really cool rigged cars and things that were different that they would tow behind the camera car that were actually on these trailers that manipulated side to side and stuff like they were getting hit, and actually put the actor right in the middle of the chase.