EXCLUSIVE: Director Gavin O’Connor Chats Bringing The World Of ‘The Accountant’ Back To Life In ‘The Accountant 2’
Christian Wolff and brother, Brax return for another intense adventure in The Accountant 2. To promote the film’s release, BeautifulBallad got the opportunity to hear from the director of the new film, Gavin O’Connor, about The Accountant 2.
On creating a new film without losing the momentum of its predecessor: “Just a lot of conversations with Bill [Dubuque] in regard to there was certain DNA that it was important to preserve, and then after that, it was a lot of left turns and just try to refill the tank in a very different way. I know we wanted to recycle the same thing that we did in the first film, so it was just a matter of how do we just start recreating the character in a way that is putting him on a different journey, integrating Brax, wanted to bring Cynthia [Addai-Robinson] back. We knew the key in the ignition was to kill Ray because I wanted it to be personal for both of these guys. And most importantly, I just wanted to make a movie that was fun and entertaining and put people in the seats and go to a movie theater and the lights come down and have a communal experience where they can walk out of the theater and go, ‘Man, that was a fucking ball. That was a great time at the movies’ and that’s really what we were going for.”
On the fun dynamic between Jon Bernthal’s Brax and Ben Affleck’s Christian: “I don’t think we ever said like, ‘Oh, it has to be funny.’ When I say I wanted the movie to be fun and entertaining, Jon and I had so many sit downs where we would dissect the character and what’s the intention in this scene, but once you just put these guys together, they both have specific wants, and if you’re not getting your want, and both of these guys, their characters are slightly bonkers in certain ways. If you just let them do their thing, it was such a fertile kind of environment for them just in the scenes that it just created. The reason I think it works is because they weren’t trying to be funny. No one was trying to be funny. They were so ingrained in their characters. And they had very specific wants, and if you’re not getting that, it’s like banging your head against the wall.”
On approaching the action sequences to this film compared to a superhero film: “Not try to make it feel stunty or some of these, we can cite action movies that are great but it just feels like the action is in front of the characters, and for us, and the same with the girls, we were always coming from characters. So like what we were always tracking when we got to the third act was like, “How are these guys working together? How are they now united?” We knew what the stakes were, we knew what they wanted, so inside of the action and the choreography, really it was about the emotional line between the two brothers and how are they going to try to accomplish this together, and that was really what the conversations were about. The action is like dance, right? It’s just doing it in beats. But action is an emotional, and disposable violence, who cares about, right? So it was really evoking emotion because you care about the characters.”
On Ben Affleck line dancing in the film: “The thing about the scene that we were trying to accomplish that was really important is obviously there was that happening, but it was also like we just left the plot of the movie. It was like, “Are we going to leave the plot for a while? What’s going to go happen?” Because that whole scene is really about the brothers. They’ve been in all this conflict driving up to that scene, and then at the end of the scene on the Airstream, he says, “Let’s go get drunk.” And then that scene became, they’re still kind of in conflict trying to figure, but once he goes to dance, Brax is like, that started to unite the two brothers, and it was just baby steps to get these guys there.”
The Accountant 2 drops in theaters tomorrow on April 25.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Photo Credit: Warrick Page/Amazon MGM Studios