The Fugitive Interview: Director Andrew Davis Talks 30th Anniversary, 4K Remaster & Rollercoaster Production

A Harrison Ford classic is getting a stunning re-release as The Fugitive celebrates its 30th anniversary. Based on the ’60s TV show of the same name, the thriller centered on Dr. Richard Kimble as he is wrongfully convicted of his wife’s murder and, after surviving a bus crash on his way to prison, races against time to evade the law and find the true culprit behind her death.

Alongside Ford, the Fugitive‘s ensemble cast included Tommy Lee Jones, Sela Ward, Joe Pantoliano, Andreas Katsulas, Jeroen Krabbé, Daniel Roebuck and Julianne Moore. Helmed by Andrew Davis fresh off his success with Under Siege, the movie was a critical and commercial hit on release, grossing nearly $370 million against its $44 million production budget and netting seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, while Jones won for Best Supporting Actor.

In honor of the movie’s 30th anniversary, Warner Bros. has released a special 4K remaster of The Fugitive, and to celebrate, Screen Rant interviewed director Andrew Davis to discuss the new release, why the thriller is still relevant today and the challenges of its “rollercoaster” production.

Andrew Davis Talks The Fugitive 30th Anniversary & 4K Remaster

Screen Rant: I’m very excited to chat with you, Andrew, I still remember the first time I saw The Fugitive as a kid and was just amazed by it, and it looks glorious now in 4K, how does it feel for you reflecting on this movie’s legacy after all this time?

Andrew Davis: Well, when I went into remaster the picture and the sound, I was just so taken by everybody’s contribution, what a great job the team that I worked with did. From James Newton Howard to production design, and especially the cast, I felt very grateful that I was given this opportunity, back then, to make this movie. It was a wild kind of shoot, because the script was going through changes a lot, and we were trying to make it relevant and up to date, up to the last minute, so it was a wonderful experience. I loved being in Chicago, Harrison and I are both from Chicago, we had a good time digging into the hot dogs in the bowels of the city, and I’m very proud of the movie. I think it’s relevant, it’s about something.

It’s crazy to think that it’s continued to inspire future installments, whether it be US Marshals or a couple other Fugitive TV shows in the years since. What do you think it is about this property and about this premise that continues to be so relevant today?

Andrew Davis: Well, it’s a very tragic story about an unjustly accused man, you know, it goes back to Les Misérables, that’s the same story. So, you have great empathy for Harrison’s character, for Dr. Kimble, and you want to see that he can find justice and stay out of jail and resolve what happened to him. Then, you’ve got Tommy, he was chasing him, he was just trying to do his job, but as this goes along, he’s such a good Marshal, he realized this doesn’t make sense. This guy’s putting himself out there to solve this problem, to solve this crime, because he didn’t do it, so he has to have some reason for doing this, because he’s innocent. So it gets resolved in a very human way at the end.

I loved seeing the dynamic of those two play off of one another, especially in the dam scene in particular. It remains one of the more iconic scenes in, I feel, action movie history. Can you walk me through what it was like shooting on that day with them and walking them through how they should interact with one another? Especially Tommy’s line, “I don’t care,” that’s still one of my favorites of this whole movie.

Andrew Davis: Well, this is interesting, because there’s been quite a few articles written lately about the making of The Fugitive. Rolling Stone did one, and there have been several things, and I’ve learned things I didn’t know before. Harrison said, “We had pages and pages of dialogue, and we decided we didn’t need it. We just needed, ‘I didn’t kill my wife,’ and ‘I don’t care.'” Supposedly, according to my script supervisor, Tommy made up that line, but then somebody did some research and found out there was a Walter Hill draft done many, many years ago, where he says, “I don’t care. You’re a fugitive.”

So, who got credit for what is very confusing, and yet, it seems to me that we just simplified everything on the day of, and that’s how it turned out. When you’re working on a movie like this, less is more, in some ways, you didn’t want to have pages and pages of dialogue in a tense situation like that. And that was the story of the whole movie, and then other times, we added stuff to it that wasn’t in the script. For example, Tommy’s great line, “Newman, what are you doing?” “I’m thinking.” “Well, think me up a chocolate donut with sprinkles on top.” That was made up on the morning we were shooting that scene.

I love that. So what would you then say was one of the biggest changes, whether it be to the narrative or to a character, that you came up with during this roller coaster of a shoot?

Andrew Davis: Well, the biggest change happened before the shoot started, which was basically the premise of the movie. I was given a script that in those days, Harrison’s character had worked on Tommy Lee Jones’ wife as a doctor and messed up. Tommy Lee’s character was going to get back at Kimble for messing up on his wife, it didn’t make any sense. The studio wanted to make this movie, and Harrison had committed, and we had to figure out how to fix it, so I called up my sister Josie, who was a nurse in LA at Cedars Sinai, and I said, “Dear sister, what can get a doctor in a lot of trouble?”

She said, “I’ll get back to you.” Two days later, she called back, she met a young bright resident who she was working with, and she said, “What if there’s a drug protocol?” And this doctor says, “This stuff is lousy, this is bad, it’s causing people to bleed.” And that became the premise of the whole movie, and we created a drug called Provasic, and we created a company called Devlin-MacGregor after my dear producer, Peter MacGregor-Scott. That became the structure, and it’s very relevant today to have the pharmaceutical companies be the bad guy.

I think that’s another one of the many reasons why this movie holds up, and I love that you made that change, it would have been too convoluted to have the other conflict be in there. In looking at the 4K remaster, I thought it was a movie that looked beautiful even on VHS back in the day, and yet it somehow looks more beautiful. Is there any particular sequence or just one shot that when you were going through the remaster, you were amazed to see how it looked in the new format?

Andrew Davis: Well, first of all, when we made the film in ’93, all I could do was make it brighter or darker, or bluer, or redder. That’s all we could do in a film laboratory, so now, when you remaster and you’re working in the digital world, they went back to the original negatives, which was in a vault somewhere or in a salt mine, they rescanned it, and you had this incredible range of flexibility as to what to do. So, for example, there’s a scene where Tommy’s leaning up against the trailer, and the lighting didn’t match from one angle to the other, and I was able to go in there and take one side of his face down, and color it density-wise so it could match.

The reality is — I’ve told this story, I saw the movie on a $40,000 monitor when we were remastering the picture, and I think that the quality of what’s available on a 65-inch high-def screen with a 4K Blu-ray is better than you’ll see in any theater in the world. There’s more information coming off of that monitor than we can project, and my friend Tom Holman, who was the creator of THX, the Tom Holman Experiment Crossover. I went to college with him, and he verified that, he said, “Unless you’re using Dolby Digital, this is better looking.” So, for people who are aficionados of high quality, the 4K Blu-ray with the new players is the way to go.

I love that attention to detail, especially as that’s something that could be easily missed by audiences, but it’s something that’s going to pick up great.

Andrew Davis: In terms of audio, what’s a great story is Frank Montaño was a 27-year-old kid who was mixing for the first time, he got a job working as a mixer. The guy named Donnie Mitchell, who was the top mixer in Hollywood, we did Under Siege together, he got nominated for an Academy Award. The next movie was The Fugitive, he got nominated again. He went on to become this incredible mixer at Universal, so when Frankie found out that we were going to remaster it, he said, “Andy, you gotta let me do it. I was the guy who was there, this is my legacy. I want to make sure it sounds the way I want to make it sound.”

So, luckily, we were able to get Frankie to do the remastering of the audio, and when I first heard it, the sound is so clean and clear. I said, “You need more background noise, more noise in the background, because the dialogue was so clear.” Anyway, it sounds great, and James Newton Howard’s score, It’s incredible to hear it in Atmos and through all these different speakers and stuff like that. It’s really a great improvement on the original movie.

I love that. Before I let you go from my final question, that train crash is obviously one of the more iconic sequences from this movie. The Introvision tech that you used to create that was stunning back then, remains stunning today. How does it feel to see where that technology has gone of being able to project these big sequences onto sets after having used it yourself for that train sequence?

Andrew Davis: You know what, if we would have done it today with modern technology, the sequence would not have the impact people feel as a real train. The great part is the next day, when after everything is over, and Tommy’s walking around with his Marshals, you see the carcass of this train. It’s an incredible reminder of what’s going on, so I don’t know. I think we had four or five different kinds of Introvision shots in there, but pretty much it was real, and I wouldn’t want to do it the same way again. I don’t know what the costs are one way or another, but if I can convince whoever’s financing the movie to do a train crash, I’d say, “Let’s do with a real train.” The train is still sitting there on the tracks, it’s a tourist site.

About The Fugitive

The Fugitive stars Academy Award nominee Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble and Tommy Lee Jones as Deputy U.S. Marshall Sam Gerard, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The film also stars Sela Ward, Joe Pantoliano, Andreas Katsulas, and Jeroen Krabbé. Directed by Davis from a screenplay by Jeb Stuart and David Twohy from a story by Twohy, the film is based the television series “The Fugitive” which was created by Roy Huggins and ran from 1963 to 1967. The film was produced by Arnold Koppelson.

The Fugitive 4K Ultra-HD remaster is now available in stores and on digital platforms!