Powered by iconic performances from Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, The Fugitive set the bar for intelligent action blockbusters. Thirty years on, director Andrew Davis tells Empire about the chaotic making of a classic.
Read an extract of our exclusive The Fugitive feature from our Summer 2023 issue below, or see the full piece here.
Walk west through the tiny town of Dillsboro, North Carolina, in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains, and you will stumble across a spectacular sight.
In a woodland clearing, just a stone’s throw from the banks of the Tuckasegee River, lies the rust-bitten carcass of a freight train. Crumpled in front of it: the charred skeleton of a single-decker bus, the words “ILLINOIS DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS” still just about visible on its side. It looks like the remnants of some terrible disaster. In fact, it was the beginning of a monumental success.
Roughly 20 minutes into The Fugitive, Harrison Ford’s wrongfully accused surgeon Dr Richard Kimble leaps from his upended Death-Row transport just seconds before a speeding locomotive rips it in half. The sequence — which sets the movie’s man-on-the-run plot in motion — took ten weeks to plan, and 60 seconds to execute. And 30 years on, its remains still remain — scattered across the Jackson County woods like giant mechanical roadkill.
“It’s become a tourist spot,” laughs the film’s director, Andrew Davis. “They sell tickets: ‘Come and visit the Fugitive wreck!’ Same with the laundry room at the Chicago Hilton [the setting for the film’s climactic fight scene] — they were running tours of that for a while, too.”
When it opened in August 1993, The Fugitive did more than just attract obsessive pilgrims to its shooting locations: it garnered glittering reviews, spent six weeks atop the US box office and then notched seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture (it lost out to Schindler’s List). Three decades on, it is as beloved as ever, regularly heralded as the kind of movie Hollywood just doesn’t make enough of anymore: an intelligent, character-driven action thriller. Not bad going for a production that was steeped in chaos — awash with injuries, sackings and hazardous stunts.