Knight and Day Director James Mangold sat down with Ben Mortimer. The wide ranging discussion ranged onto the topic of dumb blonds.
Q: Cameron Diaz’s character is quite the tom boy, but her character at the beginning is kind of a throwback to the ‘screaming blonde’. Was that an intentional nod to older films?
JM: When you find yourself making a movie, you find yourself asking yourself, ‘how many blondes know how to use a gun? Or who wouldn’t scream when driving the wrong way down a highway at high speed’, so it actually dawns on you the other reality of the depiction of people, not just women, but just people in predicaments like that, you’d pretty much be screaming your head off, and begging for mercy, and holding guns awkwardly.
Hitchcock (evoked in the interview) made his bones by making movies where the average guy became a hero. But what you expect from a town fueled by greed, cynicism and hypocrisy?
