An Unchaperoned Conversation With Triple H
Triple H opens up about acting and the WWE.
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By Chris Radtke February 11, 2011 |
| 7 | Triple H and The Chaperone |
Chris Radtke: The Chaperone is not your first movie,
but it's your first staring role. What's it like working with a bus full of
kids?
Triple H: Yeah, you always hear,
"don't work with animals or kids." Right? These guys were great, the kids, we
had a really great, professional bunch of kids, when it was time to work they
were all business, the rest of the time it was like being back in junior high,
it was all the little romances, and he-said-she-saids, and you know the drama
of being in junior high, it was quite entertaining. I suppose its tough when you're a 12 year old kid and there's a 6'
4'', 250 pound wrestler leaning down on you trying to intimidate you into
remembering your lines. Sometimes it got a little bit challenging.
Chris Radtke: Did you make anyone
cry?
Triple H: Not cry, but very
nervous a few times. It was actually between Ariel and, you know there's always
the little romances going on, and there was one little one - one of the kids was
really after her and they were dating, and I had to pull him aside and say, "Y'know
I'm just playing her father in the movie, but I got my eyes on you." And he's,
"I'm a gentleman, I'm a gentleman." It was very cute.
| 6 | Triple H: Studio Man! |
Chris Radtke: Are you looking at
scripts as a part of WWE studios?
Triple H: Well, being behind the
scenes, and in front of the cameras for WWE, I have a lot of different roles,
and one of the roles - actually I read scripts all the time for WWE studios, I'm
part of what we would call our green light committee and read scripts and
decide whether its something we'd like to see made by the company. I think
people are misunderstanding a little bit what WWE studios is. We're not just
making movies to put our talent in, we're making movies. We're just trying to
make good movies. If there's a role that fits our talent, great. If there's not
a role that fits our talent, that's okay too. We just did a movie that was in the
Santa Barbara
film festival, called That's What I Am.
Stars Ed Harris and Amy Madigan, and Randy Orton's in it for a minute, two
minutes. It's not about getting our guys, its about trying to make good quality
films.
Chris Radtke: You're an
entertainment company.
Triple H: Yeah, an entertainment
company that can make a film or a TV show and put it out there, with the
right people in it and the right positioning. If it makes one of our super-stars
bigger, great, if not, if we can make the right movie, we're not looking to
make Avatar and spend a couple
hundred million dollars making something and have that gamble, but we're
looking to make good quality films that make a nice profit and if we get an
opportunity to make a big one, we will, but we're just getting our feet
wet in this genre and really for us, everyone looks at it and says it is a logical
step for the talent, it's also a logical step for the company. Like you said,
we're an entertainment company, what we do is tell stories, within our show,
whether its your cup of tea or not, what we do is tell stories, and we think we
do it pretty well, and we're going to start to try to do it in films and other
television.
| 5 | Triple H and the System |
Chris Radtke: Are we going to see
the movies stick to the PG level of the television shows?
Triple H: Right now, that's where
we're at. We're very conscious of trying to keep it within that PG-13 genre, but
we're open, you know, Vince is smart, he's very much an entrepreneur, so everything
you're seeing we're kind of doing in our own way, and in doing that we're taking Hollywood's model and turning it a little bit. Some of it's
risky, some of it's not. I think, hopefully, some of it's going to pay off. You
know, a lot of people are watching what we're doing, especially the reduced
window for DVDs and all that stuff, you know but same thing with every aspect
of it, as far as making the movies, we're kind of reading scripts, if they're
good and we can make them PG-13 we will, if we read something and it's good,
but, well, that's definitely an R, we might still take it and put it aside, and
say let's see where we go and we might want to do this in the future.
Chris Radtke: Originally there
was a deal with FOX to distribute the movie?
Triple H: We have a DVD pipeline that's phenomenal. To be able to
take and put our stuff out there in theaters in a limited release basis
keeps our costs down. We're making lower budget, but good quality films, we're
doing it by shooting movies back to back in New Orleans, we're saving on costs of crew
and studio changes and all that stuff. We're doing a lot of things to save
stuff, shooting it faster and more efficiently, using our services that we
already have, that are our stuff so we're not paying to do it outside, and then
promoting once, as a opposed to promoting twice so we're not making a 20
million dollar film and spending 20 million to advertise and then having to
make back 40, yeah, and then spending more when the video comes out, we're
doing it one time.
