A storytelling torch is carried into the 21st century with Assault on Precinct 13. Performance firepower from the troupe of actors complements and enhances the twists and turns of an all-new film updating writer/director John Carpenter's 1976 feature of the same name, which was itself inspired by Howard Hawks' 1959 Rio Bravo. The impulse is constant - to entertain and excite filmgoers with an action-packed thriller revolving around a showdown.
The latter-day filmmakers see their movie, AP13, as a re-imagining of the 1976 film, rather than a remake in the traditional sense. The title and the basic concept of a group of people from both sides of the law under siege in a doomed police precinct remain, but the characters and story have been updated.
The concept of updating the Carpenter movie first occurred to producer Pascal Caucheteux, the head of Why Not Productions, in 1997. At the time, he was producing director Jean-Francois Richet's second feature, Ma 6-T va crack-er (Crack City). As executive producer Sebastien Kurt Lemercier (also of Why Not) remembers it, "Pascal was looking at Jean-Francois' film in the editing room and thought there was a feel, a vibrancy to it that reminded him of one of his favorite movies - Assault on Precinct 13. There was an urban western quality to the violence that Jean-Francois had captured which sparked his remembrance of the John Carpenter movie.
"So, at that very moment, Pascal said to me that we should contact Carpenter and try to find a way to remake his movie! It took quite a while to get in touch with him. We e-mailed him to explain that we were a smaller French company, producing auteur films for art houses. We also got in touch with his lawyer. Then, suddenly, we got an answer back from Carpenter's wife that we could meet with him in L.A."
The two French producers promptly flew to California and met with Carpenter in the garage office of his home. Lemercier recalls, "John sat behind his desk, surrounded by this beautiful library full of books - science-fiction books, books about cinema. We spoke about our doing a remake. John said, 'Okay, let me look at [Jean-Francois'] movie and then we'll speak about it more.' We gave him a tape of Jean-Francois' movie [Ma 6-T va crack-er] - and we also gave him this very beautiful vintage French poster of Rio Bravo. That was what really broke the ice, because John reveres Howard Hawks and had quoted the Western throughout his movie, which is really an urban Western. John basically invented that genre with Assault on Precinct 13, and we wanted to make an urban Western of our own."
During that first meeting, Carpenter made some incisive comments and suggestions that helped shape the direction in which AP13 would go. Caucheteux notes, "There was this newspaper story about LAPD corruption and, almost jokingly, we said, 'It could be the cops attacking.' He thought that made perfect sense. That put us on to the whole new idea of corrupted cops That put us on to the whole new idea of corrupted cops as the bad guys.
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