(Photo Credit: Maverick Film)
ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Murder Company director Shane Dax Taylor about the new World War II movie. Taking place during D-Day, the film stars William Moseley, Pooch Hall, Gilles Marini, Joe Anderson, and Kelsey Grammer. Maverick Film & Complex Corp will release the movie in select theaters, digital, and on demand on July 5, 2024.
“In the midst of the D-Day invasion, a group of US soldiers are given orders to smuggle a member of the French resistance behind enemy lines to assassinate a high-value Nazi target,” says the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: There’s such a rich history of war movies that have tackled such a wide range of subjects within all that encompasses. So what was your overall goal with Murder Company?
Shane Dax Taylor: I come from a military family, so I’ve always wanted to direct a military film. I’ve always been a fan of them. My grandfather was General Patton’s Aide, so my family owns General Patton’s guns, so it’s always kind of been part of my family. I’ve now directed about 10 films, and it was just kinda like a bucket list thing. Now that I’ve done it, I want to continue to do more. The support for this film, from active military to retired military, has just been amazing.
One aspect of Murder Company that really impressed me was the troop dynamic. You really establish that in the film, especially them being this mixed unit, kind of a ragtag group. How key was it to make sure people really cared about these soldiers before we saw the action really take off?
Oh, it was huge. Fortunately, Pooch Hall and Jilon VanOver, some of these guys I’ve known 20 years, so to bring them together, and it was important to me to… I mean, I was actively involved, other than Kelsey, I worked to get all these actors on board because I knew they would mesh well together, not only fantastic actors, but there’s no bad apples, so to speak. I’ve been on films where you just can’t wait to get through, get an actor off set. But this was one where we were hanging out on weekends together. After cut, we’d go have dinner together, we’d work out together, we’d do other things together. So that’s rare that you could have literally the entire cast come together like that. It made it just that much better on screen for these guys to have that camaraderie.
Murder Company takes place around D-Day, but it shows this alternate story that’s going on during those iconic events. What did you like most about having D-Day in the background? Because obviously that’s very familiar to most people.
This being a true story is important. That once these guys landed on the beach, that they had a way to get off. So the whole story takes place about trying to take out a high-ranking Nazi general who controlled the roadways. When we say roads, I mean, just trying to get a tank over a bridge that could be five feet, would be considered a ditch. But if that bridge is taken out, then that tank and those trucks can go through. So this Nazi was just trying to take out all roads so no one could come off the beach. It was important for these guys to kind of take him out so we could get tanks and soldiers and, and Jeeps, everything off the beaches. It was quite important.
The actor you got to play the main Nazi general in Murder Company, the German actor Roman Schomburg. He’s very intense. He gives such a good performance. How was it working with him?
It was amazing, man. I probably looked at over a hundred actors for that role, and people submitted multiple times. It was important to me to have a German come in and not someone pretending to be. With the accent but also the intensity, you could just see it in his eyes. Once he sent in a tape, and then once we talked, it was like, man, the intensity just kinda went through the screen, and it really holds up on camera as well. He was good, but yet at the end of the day, he was ready to let that go and then go hang out and have a beer with William and Pooch and everybody else. So it was good.
I did want to ask about William Moseley. His character’s really interesting in this because he’s in this in-between period for him as a soldier. He’s growing into becoming this leader, and he is hesitant about really stepping up into that role. What did you like most about the character of Southern?
Yeah, it was important for me. I chose out William once I heard there was interest. We were looking for actors in the UK, and once his name popped up, my kids had been a fan of the Narnia films, and I’d seen him in other films, and he just comes off as younger than these guys, but as a leader, as a true leader. So him jumping out there and, and running across, it takes a lot of guts to do that. The reluctancy of him and how he played it worked extremely well for this film.
You mentioned Kelsey Grammer earlier. He’s a general in this. He always gives a very stern performance in Murder Company. What really attracted you to working with Kelsey?
Like I said, it was like a bucket list. I’m friends with a lot of other directors, writers, and actors, and going back 10-15 years, people are like, “You gotta work with him.” He is the nicest guy, and he would show up on set and no matter what your position was, he just wanted to talk to you and hear where you are from. We just really just hit it off. It was an honor to work with him on this film, and I look forward to doing definitely in the future as well.
Most of the movies that you’ve directed in the past, you also wrote. So how different was it directing somebody else’s script this time around?
With this script, I took it on, and then once we decided to go to Bulgaria and shoot, then I kind of made it match these sets. It seems like a lot of films these days, or when I was starting out, you’re shooting 25-30 days, and now you’re trying to shoot in 12 or 15. It’s just a matter of like, “Okay, we love these set pieces, and we have some huge set pieces in this film, but it’s also how do we scale it down and make it so we can shoot this?” Because that that was quite important to me. [Writer] Jesse Mittelstadt was a great collaborator. I would send him notes, but yet on some days, I would be changing the script and making this work.
Because there’s a section where they’re traveling far, and there’s these rock formations and different things that Bulgaria had that made it feel like they went a hundred miles. So it was just little changes like that to the script and just continuing to move them forward and make it. It’s a contained film in the sense that there’s a core group of actors, but the scope is huge in this film. With some of these battle sequences, we had 150 actors and 300 people on set, and it was quite daunting. I think we pulled it off.
The battle sequences are definitely a big highlight throughout Murder Company. How would you kind of describe your approach to actually putting together those war scenes? We’ve seen so many out of the years,so how’s it putting your own twist on that?
It was hiring a great crew, a great stunt coordinator, and a lot of these guys have worked on The Expendables films. They do a lot of Millennial films. So they’re used to these large-scope action sequences. So it was just sitting down with these guys, weeks in advance, and saying, “Okay, this is how we plan on doing it.” It’s just important to trust the people that we’re working with and help pull it off.
But yes, it was kind of my vision of this valley then coming from all sides and getting surrounded and just explaining to these guys, like, okay, we are going to hit them from all sides, but let’s make it look like it’s not some over here, and then some over here. We’re not gonna green screen it. When they’re getting attacked, they’re getting all attacked at the same time. Like I said, we had 150 actors and it really filled up the screen for sure.
One of my favorite aspects of these types of movies is definitely the period piece aspect. What did you like most about filming in the forties, seeing these old weapons and all the uniforms? They look great.
Fortunately, Millennium Media, over at there studios, they had the costumes, they had the trucks, they had the Jeeps, they had the tanks. I mean, they had all the stuff. So it was just like I was like a kid in a candy store walking through there going like, “Wow, I get to choose.” Normally, you show up, and you need a Jeep, and here’s the one Jeep they have. We showed up there, and there were 10 trucks, and they’re like, “Choose. This one’s from this area, this one’s from this one, this one fits.”
Some of these jeeps were made in the late forties or fifties after this timeframe, so it was important to us to make sure that it actually fit as well as the uniforms, the helmets, the weapons, everything was of that time. It’s something they would’ve been using then.
Since you are continuing on this incredible legacy of World War II movies with Murder Company, I was curious if you have any particular favorites from the past,
Of course, Saving Private Ryan. Sisu that came out last year was a phenomenal film. I studied that. It’s amazing what you can do with no dialogue and just make people excited for it. But there’s been so many, but definitely Saving Private Ryan is one. I had the poster on my wall when it first came out. It was important to me to kind of live within that world and study that, but yeah, I hope to do more for sure.
You have a movie called Fight or Flight coming up. What can we expect from that?
I stepped in. There was a director, Daniel Zirilli, who tragically passed away while he was in prep for that film. So I stepped in literally when everything was set. Dolph Lundgren, Michael Jai White, Scott Martin, a lot of great action actors in that one, and Charlotte Kirk. It’s kind of nonstop action. An assassin who wants to take out other assassins. Chad Law wrote it, who’s written a ton of fantastic little action films. So that was a wild one.
We just started editing yesterday, but tragically, we shot in Ruidoso, [New Mexicon], and if you’ve seen the news, the fires have just hit there. So the sets we shot on two weeks ago have now been destroyed, and we have cabins in that film. The restaurants we shot in, the house I stayed in. Within the last couple of days, they’ve just been destroyed. So my thoughts and prayers are definitely with everybody there in Ruidoso, where I’ve now shot three of my last four films. Christmas Classic, the ski resort was destroyed there. Best Man I shot with Luke Wilson. That area is near and dear to my heart. So, thoughts and prayers to everybody at Ruidoso right now.
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