TAYLOR LAUTNER IN NON-STOP KINETIC ACTION IN “TRACERS”

Press release

Impressive stunts are normally the silent heroes of movies.  As a moviegoer, we know they’re there because we can’t believe our eyes. But they are supposed to take us seamlessly into the action and have us believe that James Bond or Jason Bourne are those daredevils flying through the air, racing across roof-tops, skiing down impossible and impassable slopes…and on and on and on. 

Photo courtesy of Pioneer Cinema

                Parkour has hit big in some of America’s urban areas.  The prestigious New York Times previously ran an article in its Sports Section: “Parkour, as Pastime Born on the Streets, Moves Indoor and Uptown.”  The article notes, “They are skateboarders without skateboards, urban acrobats who scale walls, hurdle mailboxes and leap between buildings in stunts that might give ‘Spider-Man’ pause.”  The article goes on to note that, “Practitioners of parkour, a daring pastime born in the streets, have long seen public spaces as their playground, and parkour as the ultimate rebel’s game; one with no rules, league, equipment or winners.  It started in France and has spread around the world: Gaza, Tokyo, Rome and Miami are parkour towns.”

                And this is the world in which “Tracers” is set, and the world that Cam (Taylor Lautner) is brought into through Nikki and her gang of lost, broken boys and Miller, their nefarious leader. 

                In the heart-stopping “Tracers” starring Taylor Lautner, along with him are the film’s truly unsung heroes - stunt coordinator/2nd unit director Gary Powell and assistant stunt coordinator Lee Morrison who are responsible for the breathtaking action scenes at the backdrop of the very popular sports parkour.  “Kids all over the world are now doing because it’s actually a very cheap but very good exercise where it’s all natural stuff so pretty much everyone can do it.  So for Tracer we embraced that with our lead character Cam, played expertly by Taylor Lautner, a bike messenger riding throughout New York City with ease and speed.  He meets up with a group of kids that are using parkour as a way of getting around New York without being seen by the authorities…and he takes to their modus operandi and quickly becomes part of their gang,” says Gary Powell of the movie’s story and action style.

                Very much the look and the story of Tracers take place on New York rooftops.  “We spent a lot of time looking around for these rooftops so, said Powell, “what makes it look so good is that the parkour is done for real; there’s no cheating. If we’re high up, we’re high up; if we jump in gaps we jump in gaps.  There’s no computer graphic enhancement.  We had a rooftop for one scene where there was a wall that was eighteen feet high.  Taylor ran toward it, hit a plank, and ran up the wall.  That’s pretty impressive.” 

                For Taylor Lautner, Tracers provided an opportunity for him to show the world that he’s an actor to be taken very seriously. He’s emerged into a talented force on screen that not only can pull of the amazing demands of a fast-paced action thriller, and is equally facile at the more character-driven connective threads that keep Tracers as a whole a fast-paced, heart-stopping drama too.

                The story is also refreshingly new.  “It’s a very unique story,” says Lautner.  “I haven’t seen anything like it in that I’ve never seen a movie rooted in the world of parkour – the art of movement and the movement of art combined – rooted in an intense connection between the mind and the body.  Also,” adds Lautner, “the issues that our characters are dealing with throughout the narrative and their complex relationships with one another are extremely original ideas which is something I really love about it.”

                Director Daniel Benmayor knows that audiences are going to be blown away by the excitement and authenticity of Tracers. “They can expect something that feels real and possible and relatable because we don’t have super-tweaked special effects.   So as extraordinary as the stunt work is – and it is extraordinary – it feels grounded, believable, realistic on a level where the audience can actually access it and it doesn’t feel fake to an audience either on the emotional side or on the action side.  And again I have to emphasize that Taylor did great work both in terms of character development, his character’s arc, the plot, his emotion, plus seeing him do the real stunts which is pretty amazing stuff!

TAYLOR LAUTNER FACES HEART-STOPPING CHALLENGES IN “TRACERS”

Press release

“Twilight Series’” heartthrob hero Taylor Lautner stars in the upcoming action thriller “Tracers” in the midst of parkour’s dangerous backdrop. 

              Lautner plays Cam, broke and depleted of luck trying to scrape off his debts, one day crashes into Nikki (Marie Avgeropoulos), a complicated stranger caught up in a gang of broken street criminals who seduces him into her dangerous world. The parkour takes him to places he has never been before and lands him a lucrative job under the gang’s leader, Miller (Rayner).  Ultimately extricating himself from a world unimagined and unanticipated becomes a whole different heart-stopping challenge.

Tracers is on its surface very simple.  It’s about a guy – ‘Cam’ – who finds a girl – ‘Nikki’. The girl allows him to reclaim a part of his life and a spirit in his life.  At the exact same moment that happens, outside forces are pressing in on him.  And that’s where Tracers takes off.

And for Tracers it was critical that the cast be as believable as possible.  “So for this film,” says producer Marty Bowen, “the real challenge was finding actors that we could believe could do this work.  The honest truth was, there was no other actor that could pull off the leading role of Cam better than Taylor Lautner.  And frankly, there are things that even his stuntman – his stunt double who taught him to do parkour, cannot do as well as Taylor can.  He’s just a truly gifted athlete.”  So Tracers is that perfect marriage of a great action drama that utilizes these highly tuned physical skills as a means through which things get done quickly, efficiently, and definitely differently than we’ve ever seen before in a film.  But the other extremely critical thing to note here is that Lautner is not only physically up to the challenges of the film, but concurrently he’s grown as an actor, and this role demanded real acting chops.”

              “Tracers is a real Dickensian story in the vein of Oliver Twist about a young man who essentially has been orphaned; his father and mother are gone, and he’s been forced, at a very early age, to fend for himself.  So Cam dreams of getting his father’s old sport car up and running and moving far, far away,” says Bowen. 

“Our story begins with Cam, a young bicycle messenger who, through a series of unfortunate circumstances, owes the wrong people money.  He is trying desperately to figure out how to get them the money quickly so that he can get his father’s car that he’s working on fixed and just leave town and start a new life.  But along the way he meets a girl and becomes besotted with Nikki and that changes his plans completely when she introduces him to a world that he didn’t know existed – the world of free-running, and in which he finds she and her street criminal friends and they become his new surrogate family of orphans.  But along with that, there’s the underside of things going on behind the scene that are very complicated; and what these new family members are doing, under Miller’s stranglehold on them, is clearly illegal. And before he realizes it, he’s in far deeper than he expected.  He realizes that in order to get out of this world, he’s got to do some drastic things,” says Bowen.

For Taylor Lautner, Tracers provided an opportunity for him to show the world that he’s an actor to be taken very seriously.  He’s emerged into a talented force on screen that not only can pull of the amazing demands of a fast-paced action thriller, and is equally facile at the more character-driven connective threads that keep Tracers as a whole a fast-paced, heart-stopping drama too.