Media made a deal to release it directly to video. Production wrapped in late 1990, but the film sat on the shelf for a year before I.R.S. To complete the film on time, Franklin turned to a colleague from his Roger Corman days to shoot second unit footage, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who went on to win Oscars for Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). The film was shot in Arkansas and in and around Los Angeles, which stood in for stops on the criminal road trip. The $2.5 million budget was a significant increase for Franklin but small for a Hollywood production, and they had to make the most of their resources. Jim Metzler and Earl Billings played the L.A. It was only her second film, after making her debut opposite Denzel Washington in Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues (1990). As Franklin explained, "That was what I thought made these characters much more frightening, that they are so much just ordinary people." Cynda Williams's completes the criminal trio as Ray's girlfriend Fantasia. ![]() The script called for a large, imposing man, but Franklin thought it would be more effective to make him smaller, more average looking, and he cast the Juilliard-trained Michael Beach, who plays the quiet, deliberate Pluto behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. The character of Pluto, Ray's brilliant but cold-blooded partner, is the opposite of the emotionally volatile Ray. "We worked together on changing a lot of scenes, sometimes a couple of minutes before we would shoot, and he was incredible to work with," remembered Franklin. Franklin was nervous about directing an actor who was also the writer, but Thornton was open to collaboration. Thornton took the role of Ray Malcolm, an impulsive, sadistic, southern-born criminal in Los Angeles. ![]() "When he's spare, it's just a wonderful thing to watch." The real issue was trying to get him not to do as much, and to recognize that he’s a leading man." He worked with Paxton to pull back and rely on his presence to carry his scenes. And that was the character Hurricane," Franklin said in a 2018 interview. Franklin convinced them that Paxton was the right choice. Though he was the best known actor in the cast, the financiers wanted a bigger name in the lead and insisted on looking at other actors. The film finds its center in small town chief Dale Dixon, a young, garrulous, rural character with the nickname "Hurricane." Franklin found his leading man in Bill Paxton, a likeable young actor who with memorable turns in Aliens (1986) and Predator 2 (1990). "I felt that the honesty of trying to depict a real, violent situation was necessary." "It had to be brutal in order to show that violence is not fun, it's not like RoboCop." They visualized the murders of the opening scenes with a dispassionate, matter-of-fact presentation, as if a TV news crew had filmed it, and Franklin agreed, as he related to Gross in the same radio program. "We wanted to show violence the way it really is," Thornton explained to Terry Gross on the public radio series Fresh Air. Thornton and Epperson talked to Los Angeles police officers and detectives and studied crime scene photos while writing their script. One False Move follows a trio of criminals on the run from a cold-blooded robbery and six murders and two veteran LAPD detectives who fly to a rural Arkansas town to await their arrival with the help of an enthusiastic but naïve small town police chief. It was a crash course in practical filmmaking, a path taken by such filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme and Joe Dante, but it was Franklin's AFI thesis film, a dramatic short called Punk (1986), that got him the job. He enrolled in the AFI Conservatory to study directing and supplemented his education with a two-year stint working for Roger Corman as a writer and director and other jobs on exploitation pictures at Concorde Pictures. A veteran stage and TV actor, Franklin made a career change at age 37. ![]() It went into preproduction in early 1990 with a budget of $2.5 million and director Carl Franklin at the helm. Hollywood was interested but it languished at the studios until independent producers Jesse Beaton and Ben Myron shopped it to I.R.S. The original screenplay was written by Billy Bob Thornton, at the time an actor struggling to make a career for himself, with his friend and longtime collaborator Tom Epperson. ![]() And it almost skipped theaters entirely for direct-to-video release, a fate it escaped thanks to critics who championed the film. An independent film with richly drawn characters, complex relationships and brutal violence, it was helmed by a filmmaker just breaking out of exploitation pictures and featured a largely unknown cast. One False Move was a startling revelation for audiences who discovered this lean, gritty crime drama in 1992.
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