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mr and mrs smith
Getting the perfect couple to behave like assassins was, however, another matter. Both stars have had extensive experience of movies which required them to take extreme forms of action, Pitt most notably in last summer’s Troy, Jolie in the two Lara Croft films. But handling the weaponry of the modern assassination business was quite another matter, requiring long weekends of training at a shooting range in Canyon Oaks, north of Los Angeles. “Brad and I have separately appeared in action films,” explains Jolie, “but that’s a specific method of training. I’ve never had a partner on film before and it’s very different working with one. We had to learn to move in tandem with fully loaded pump shotguns, crossing each other, running into houses, breaking and covering an area, shooting at moving targets. It was crazy, but we learned to trust each other.”
After all the sparring, the movie finally reaches its climax in that epitome of suburbia: the DIY home-improvement store. “We combined a mixture of styles for each character for the finale,” says stunt co-ordinator Simon Crane. “It looks like John makes up his plan of action as he goes along, but Jane is more succinct and very direct in her approach. Jane uses a sniper rifle whereas John is blasting away as he moves around. We had to come up with comedy beats within the scene and still make them look like killers.” “Our philosophy was that, up to this point, the Smiths were having problems, but now they’ve solved many of their underlying issues and are learning to work together,” adds Liman. “It was fun to watch them work as partners, like a smooth machine. In a way, we’re taking two people capable of near super-human feats and dropping them in the middle of suburbia, making them face the same type of problems you and I face every day. “In the end,” he concludes, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a spectacle that riffs on something we all struggle with: living with another human being.”
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