Trigger Warning made Jessica Alba’s knife fighting dreams come true

Why did sexy model-turned-ball-killer Jason Statham become Jason Statham, but not Jessica Alba? Not only Netflix’s new action movie Trigger warning give the 2000s icon permission to blast his way through goons armed with machine guns, it reminds viewers that Alba should have been doing this all along.

James Cameron knew this, giving Alba her big break at the age of 19 by casting her as a super soldier on the run in the 2000 Fox television series. Black Angel. Hollywood noticed immediately – a little? When Black Angel finished in 2002, Alba broke into cinema, playing a dancer with dreams in Dear; a stripper born from tragedy in Robert Rodriguez’s film city ​​of sin; Sue Storm, a character steeped in the logic of 1960s gender roles, in Fantastic Four; and a diver turned treasure hunter Into the blue, a role that seems to revel in the fact that its lead actor could logically wear a bikini for 95% of the runtime. Alba felt the gaze. “The storylines I get are always for the hooker, the leather biker or the horny maid,” she told Page Six in 2005. “I don’t think that happens to Natalie Portman .”

Over the years, a few filmmakers understood Alba’s true physical potential, which went beyond her beauty. Rodriguez let her character Nancy go on the attack in the sequel Sin City: a lady worth killing for. In 2015, in what felt like a turning point for a hero arc she never got, Alba played a villain in the action comedy. Barely mortal. She even joined Jason Statham in Mechanics: Resurrection, where she lands a few punches (in a bikini). Yet no one seems to see Alba for what he really should be: a devastater, a killer, and a worthy peer of the Expendables.

Trigger warning lets her rip as Parker Calvo, a Mexican-American special forces soldier who returns to his hometown to investigate a series of crimes linked to a larger arms trafficking operation and corrupt local politicians. Parker wants to make things right and get revenge on his father. It’s a dirty action setup that Alba, unsurprisingly, carries out with extreme brutality. Polygon spoke to Alba and Trigger warning director Mouly Surya, an Indonesian filmmaker making her English-language debut, talks about her escape Again. With knives.

Polygon: Jessica, it was nice to see you Trigger warning. But it made me wonder, around Black Angel Or city ​​of sin Or Fantastic Four, were people talking to you about making a nasty action film? Obviously, male stars were getting these offers.

Jessica Alba: I always wanted to be Jason Bourne. And I always wanted to be Bond. And I always wanted to be the character in Tom Clancy’s novel. But they were always written like guys! And so it was kind of like a wish fulfillment that I could star in a realistic action movie, but really embracing the feminine and this fierce woman.

I think this genre is so male dominated that when you see women, you often see them through the lens of a “badass woman”, if you’re a guy. Often, she is rather stoic and does not overflow with emotion. Usually it has some sort of square shape. She will wear high heels. She will probably wear some sort of tight dress that is not ideal for action or practical. Or she’s a damsel in distress, and she needs to be saved by the guy. So when I joined this film, it was really important that there was a more female take on this genre.

Mouly and I, with the producers, were saying, “What do we really want Parker to be? “So we brought in a female writer and really built this world and the characters in a way that you could provide a lot of layers and levels to everyone, so the bad guys weren’t just nameless and faceless. (Parker) not just some random person from somewhere. Everything seems very nuanced and rooted in a reality that was important to us.

Mouly, you come from Indonesian cinema where action is a major space, but I feel like it’s similar to Hollywood, in the sense that it’s still dominated by men. So what are your touchstones for creating a film that kicks ass but fits the specificity Jessica was looking for?

Mouly Surya: Growing up, there weren’t many Indonesian action films. There were a few, and now more than ever. You probably saw Lowering, which was great, but I grew up with a lot of Chinese martial arts movies. This is what I know very well, in fact. And I think that’s what I was trying to inject into the film. There’s a certain dramatization, there’s a certain type of spatial awareness that I’m trying to bring into this film.

Jessica, in Trigger warning, you fight a man wielding a chainsaw. When you’re producing your own action film, do you make requests like “I want to fight a man wielding a chainsaw”? What was on your personal action wish list?

Alba: My two things that I really wanted to do was hand-to-hand combat and I wanted to take advantage of more of a dirty, gritty style of krav maga. I wanted it to be really grounded and messy and not so buttoned up. I didn’t want a ton of weapons, compared to what Parker uses throughout the movie. Certainly, if she needs to defend herself, it would just be more interesting to see hand-to-hand combat, I wanted that, and (Surya) agreed. We figured a more realistic way to take out an opponent, especially a guy who might be twice my size, was to have knives. So I was able to practice with many different types of knives. It was new and fun. And being able to use knives during hand-to-hand combat was really different – ​​it was almost like a step back in time.

There are a lot of movies these days, especially action ones, where there are a ton of special effects, a lot of computer-generated stuff, but this one was pretty practical. We were in a real hardware store. I really pulled the guys off a hook. I really had to whip it. I had to learn how to whip it properly! And I did all this in real life. It took a lot of coordination, but I think it looks great and is very original.

Not only do I think you both authentically foregrounded the feminine in Trigger warning, but it is possible to combat other xenophobic action tropes. I thought of Rambo: Last Blood a few years ago, which pitted Stallone against the Mexican cartels in what amounted to a banal and chauvinistic garbo. Meanwhile, Parker is a Mexican-American veteran who takes on domestic terrorism in her hometown. Have you decided to take some kind of retaliation against films like this?

Alba: I don’t know if it’s a retaliation to that particular movie, but for us it was a real retaliation to all the stigmas and stereotypes that had been placed on women and certainly on the Mexican American community and Latinos and the way they have been historically represented. . It was just nice to make a hero out of the person this town least suspected. They underestimated her and undermined her powers, these corrupt people of this city. Having a heroine like her, we thought it would be really inspiring.

Surya: From the beginning, when we attached Jessica to the script… I always loved her as an actress – I’m sorry to say that in the third person!

Alba: Wow thank you! I’ve never heard that, it’s good news. (Laughs)

Surya: She has such a quality about her; the emotional part is what Jessica really brings to the role. Parker has always been strong, on paper, physically and mentally. But Jessica brings us a lot of emotion, a rage, I would say. Which makes the character interesting, complex and real! That’s what I wanted, that specificity. She embodies the character. She is fiery. This kind of thing I don’t really see in other action films. It has a little retro feel, like it wasn’t made in the 80s, but it looks like something that could have been made in the 80s. But you don’t see an 80s action movie with a main character who is a woman.

Trigger warning is now streaming on Netflix.