Crime thriller shot in Arkansas opens On Demand Friday

Brian Skiba works with actor Andrew Stevens on the set of the film — which was filmed and set largely in Arkansas.

In the new movie “Pursuit,” Arkansas winds up defying several rural stereotypes by becoming a hub for computer hacking, drug running and crime syndicates. The film even features an NYPD cop named Mike Breslin (Jake Manley), who may be out of his depth in dealing with crime in the Natural State.

Asked by phone why he chose Arkansas as both a location and setting for the film, director and co-screenwriter Brian Skiba was blunt: “It was due to tax incentives.”

Getting a crime thriller made is a lot easier when the producers can afford to shoot the story of how a hacker named Rick Calloway (Emile Hirsch, the Wachowskis’ “Speed Racer”) escapes from police custody and makes life miserable for his father, John (John Cusack), who just happens to be a retired gangster with secrets that could get them both killed.

As he got further into recounting how he made the movie in and around Lonoke, Skiba sounds more enthusiastic as he describes how the city and county made his film possible.

“I think that the geography is beautiful, with all the water and the rivers. It’s not something that I’ve filmed before. I’ve done a lot in Dallas. I’ve done some in Louisiana, but Little Rock seemed pretty unique.”

In a pinch, it seems that Arkansas’ capital can also pass for Manhattan.

“We went and just searched the alleys and found alleys that worked,” Skiba says. “… as far as the action stuff that’s supposed to be in New York, that’s downtown Little Rock.”

He also says the location is good for attracting crews for independent productions. Other nearby locations have capable talent nearby. Being close to Dallas and Nashville is a plus.

Skiba is quick to credit Christopher Crane and the Northwest Arkansas Film and Entertainment Commission for helping to set up the shoot, but the story offered challenges to any location where the filmmakers might have worked.

If you’ve ever watched someone else sit at a computer, it’s hard to make the sight interesting, much less tense. Rick may be frantically negotiating with kidnappers who have his wife, but watching someone else type isn’t always fun.

Everyone remembers the scenes with Patrick Swayze at the pottery wheel in “Ghost” but not the ones where he’s using banking software.

“When I was looking at that and going, ‘Oh, man, in the first minute in the movies, the hacker is sitting in front of a screen. How do I make this exciting?'” Skiba says.

“I kind of harkened back to my childhood watching like ‘Hackers’ and these ’80s films like “The Lawnmower Man,’ and what they did to kind of make it fun. But also, I got rid of boring visual effects.

“So instead when he’s typing on the screen, you just cut when we cut to a screen. It’s not just some random visual effects. It was an actual screen that we then shot with the camera, and we shot it in a way that we had very shallow depth of field. And then we gave it a look and a feel and a little bit of life. Between that and the subject or the context of the themes, it’s very interesting.

“Hirsch did his part by finding a way to make Rick look memorable. If you don’t mingle with people much, your appearance can be any way you want it. Apparently, Rick keeps tattoo artists employed.

“He kind of disappeared for three or four days. I was thinking, uh, OK, and then he came back and said, ‘I got it.’ He’s a (rapper) Post Malone-type hacker. He pitched me the voice. Here’s how I would say some of the dialogue, and we just built from there,” Skiba says.

While there are the requisite car chases, explosions and gunplay, “Pursuit” also features hand-to-hand combat with axes and other potentially lethal implements that don’t normally make their way into cinema action.

“I guess I had to get really creative with my fights, you know?” Skiba says. The director revised an existing script that was developed by veteran producer-actor Andrew Stevens (“The Boondock Saints,” “3000 Miles to Graceland”). Stevens must have liked Skiba’s changes because the director received a screenwriting credit, and Stevens has a supporting role in “Pursuit.”

“I do a lot of TV (“Christmas Truce,” “Deadly Excursion”), and in TV, they hand you a lot of drafts, and I’ve gotten quite good at taking something that doesn’t have the story and dialogue and do a lot of punching up these things,” Skiba explains.

“For me, it’s about building characters first that people care about and then putting them in the action situations. I think too often we just see relentless action with characters that don’t matter. And it just becomes a draw of this visual on the screen. Whereas, you know, if you tell a great story and have characters that are founded and real and people that we care about, then when you put them in the action that makes the action not much better. I think for me, it’s always about finding the characters that are flawed, so people could look at them and go, you know, um, I really identify with them. I really identify with Rick. He’s a hacker. He seems like a really cool dude, somebody I’d want to have a drink with, but at the same time, this guy is a cold-blooded killer.”

“Pursuit” is getting a limited release in theaters in New York, Illinois and Michigan today, and is available On Demand through most streaming services.