Driven to ramp up 'Race' mayhem

On a Monday in late August 1995 -- after "Mortal Kombat" was the top-grossing movie of the weekend -- the film's then-30-year-old director, Paul W.S. Anderson, had lunch with the king of exploitation films, Roger Corman, who asked him, "What do you want to do next?" Anderson said that he had always wanted to do a remake of the Corman-produced, 1975 B-movie classic, "Death Race 2000."

"That's fantastic," Anderson remembers Corman replying. "We'll make it your next film."

"And in typical Hollywood development fashion," Anderson now says, "cut to 13 years later -- and I've finally made the movie."

"Death Race," starring Jason Statham and Joan Allen, crashes into theaters today, with the promise of Anderson's long-gestating vision to "re-imagine" the post-apocalyptic movie about fast cars, machine guns and exploding bodies -- of both the automobile and human form.

While Anderson is keeping Corman's central conceit -- a car race to the death -- he is updating it by making the cross-country rally a pay-per-view style, moneymaking venture that plays out on a single track, in the hands of an evil, for-profit prison system.

But what really sets the movies apart are their budgets -- "Death Race" was made for $75 million, while Corman's film was made for just $350,000.

"I always felt the [original] movie was hemmed in," says Anderson, who first saw the film as a 13-year-old in Newcastle, England. "What stayed with me was this idea of killer cars that have been developed to run each other down. But some of the cars had machine guns mounted to them and they didn't use them because of budgetary restrictions. I always wondered what would happen if those cars were really unleashed."

It was Anderson's directorial debut that landed him on Corman's lunch calendar: The low-budget "Shopping," starring Jude Law, takes place in a near-future England where youths get their kicks from driving cars into stores and making mayhem. Corman, who first saw "Shopping" when he was a judge at a film festival in Japan in 1994, was so impressed by it, he distributed the film in America in 1996 through his New Horizons production company.

The two have stayed in touch over the years, as Anderson has built a reputation Corman could appreciate; the 43-year-old director is popular with thrill-seeking audiences, if not with critics. He is known as a genre film director, particularly for science-fiction and video-game adaptations such as the "Resident Evil" franchise (he wrote and directed the first installment and was the writer-producer of its two sequels). Corman served as an executive producer of "Death Race," but says his involvement was limited.