DEMOLITION MAN

As Stallone and Snipes’ explosive and surprisingly prophetic action classic turns 30, director Marco Brambilla turns back the clock with Buff to reflect on a sci-fi with satirical muscle.

Nineties cinema had some wild predictions for our future but none feels as eerily resonant as the one depicted in Demolition Man. Imagine a crime-free world that lives in fear of personal insult or social faux pas, where video conferencing is commonplace and the few criminals that still exist are hidden away in cryo-pods to serve their time, like social-media blocking but in real life.

‘One of the things that makes the movie so relevant today is a lot of its commentary about political correctness and how society has evolved,’ suggests Marco Brambilla, the filmmaker-turned-artist who helmed this now-classic sci-fi satire. ‘The exaggeration that existed back in 1993 is no longer an exaggeration; I think that’s why people still connect with it.’

Produced by Die Hard’s Joel Silver, Demolition Man gave Sylvester Stallone one of his most successful action films of the decade. He starred as the brilliantly named John Spartan, an LAPD supercop and the only guy hard enough to take down the equally brilliantly named Simon Phoenix, an eccentric blond-haired baddie played by Wesley Snipes. Spartan’s explosive, collateral-damagecausing antics are so wild as to earn him the nickname of the movie’s title.

When a fiery scuffle goes awry, both are sentenced and cryogenically frozen in 1996, only for Phoenix to escape in 2032 in what’s now San Angeles, a fictional megalopolis where violent crime has been abolished. With future cops unable to recapture a dangerous 21st-century criminal, Sandra Bullock’s rookie Lenina Huxley convinces her superiors to defrost Spartan to help out. Cue explosions.

‘I was both apprehensive and excited,’ remembers Brambilla, casting his mind back to when he started the film at just 27 years old. Brambilla cut his teeth in commercials alongside David Fincher, and Demolition Man served as his Hollywood calling card and an opportunity to show what he could do with a $70m action-movie budget. ‘It was a great opportunity,’ he tells Buff. ‘At the time, it was rare to have a young guy be given that kind of budget. It was a little bit horrifying to deal with that pressure, but at the same time it was just filmmaking to me. I wasn’t worried about politics or anything like that.’

That last element came in handy when working with Stallone and Snipes, both of whom were at the height of their powers in the early 90s. ‘Stallone was incredibly easy to work with. He loved the fact that he was in a movie with a guy who had attention to detail and I was the only director to ask him to do 14 takes on things,’ laughs Brambilla. ‘When you’re that young, you don’t really understand how daunting a project like this can be, you just jump in.

‘Wesley was also fantastic,’ he continues. ‘He’d show up and improvise and do things that were off the page. We were rewriting his dialogue based on what he’d done and the direction his character was taking. It was a very free-form experience. Before the fight scenes, we’d play the Rocky and New Jack City music, and he and Stallone would get into the mood. It was a really fun shoot.’

That’s not to say it was without its stresses. In addition to going over schedule, an early clash on set led to a last-minute cast shuffle. ‘Lori Petty was originally playing [Huxley] but after the second day of shooting, we realised it

just wasn’t working with Stallone. Luckily, we saw Sandra two days later and she jumped in with the most enthusiasm I’ve ever seen,’ recalls Brambilla. ‘She brought this innocent, goofy sense of humour, which was very much her own personality. She’s essentially playing herself in the future.’

Casting aside, Brambilla - now a successful contemporary artist with works in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim - had fun crafting his vision of a near future: from glycerine-filled cryo-prisons (‘[Stallone] insisted on being nude for the freezing,’ he chuckles) and high-end Taco Bell restaurants (‘McDonald’s turned us down,’ he says) to those mysterious toilet seashells. ‘I wasn’t expecting people to believe this was actually the way people would use toilets in the future,’ admits Brambilla on Demolition Man’s bizarre and never-explained toilet paper alternative. ‘It’s basically a McGuffin and something that had no answer.’

As Demolition Man turns 30, Brambilla’s pleased it has endured in unexpected ways: ‘Whenever I work with younger people, it’s the first thing they mention,’ he smiles. ‘Many moments of technological advancement came out of 70s pop culture and we’re now living in that future, and I think it’s the same with Demolition Man. We’re actually living in another aspect of that future where everything has to be sanitised, no one can be offended and people are very fragile,’ argues Brambilla. ‘Demolition Man is similar to how many of these cautionary tales about technology used to be made.’