Eric Bana and The Beast Tonight on Speed

The Star Trek star talks to IGN about his new documentary - and his 25 year love affair with his Ford Falcon GT.
by Matt Fowler

December 16, 2009 -

After playing a genocidal Star Trek villain, Hector of Troy, Henry the VIII and Bruce Banner over the course of his film career, Australia's own Eric Bana decided to step behind the camera for the first time and direct himself in the documentary Love The Beast. With Beast, Bana decided to share a part of his life with all of us; a passion that we might not have known about. And that passion is Bana's love for racing, and the love he has for his very first car, a Ford GT Falcon Coupe. Bana's had this ride for more than 25 years and it's become a centerpiece in his life. Beast follows Bana's restoration of his GT Falcon and his subsequent participation in the grueling and dangerous motor race, The Targa Tasmania Rally. After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival and a DVD release in the UK, Love The Beast will now make it's broadcast premiere on cable - December 18th on The Speed Channel at 8pm ET/5pm PT. IGN TV had a chance to speak with Bana about this docu-labor of love, which also features Jay Leno, Jeremy Clarkson, and Dr. Phil.

IGN TV: What was it that got you into racing? Was there a specific moment when you were a kid? Eric Bana: There wasn't really a specific time, I guess. It was just something I've always been obsessed with since I was a young kid. So it wasn't something that I took up. It was something that was always there. IGN: I would have to think that the movie Mad Max might have played a role in your affinity for the Ford Falcon. Bana: Mad Max was probably more influential in pointing me towards acting. I was already in love with muscle cars, and in particular that model of car. It did help solidify my love for sure, but it was more influential to me as young boy as something that made me love movies and acting. It was a kind of double whammy, that movie. It got me on two levels.

Eric Bana...and his beast!

IGN: What made you decide to tell the story of your car? And why make it a documentary?

Bana: It was a combination of a two things. A very close friend of mine who I race with, who produced the film with me, we always discussed how it would be interesting to do a racing project together - a movie project. We've always been really frustrated by most car films, and it put me off doing one myself. Then one day I was talking to him about what I felt was missing from most of the racing movies out there was the whole notion of there being any kind of emotion in them. I gave the example of my own car and how this car has been the centerpiece of my life for friendships and so forth. That was something that's never ever explored in a traditional car movie. I was saying how that a bad version of this story would be a narrative. Then I started thinking more and more about it. And about how a car can be kept and maintained for a very long time and can travel through our lives as a physical object and I just thought that the only really way to capture this subject matter was as a documentary. I really couldn't be bothered with trying to go off and find someone in the same exact position as myself so I thought that I might as well use my story.

IGN: In Love The Beast, you describe your car as a campfire for you and your friends. What did you exactly mean by that?

Bana: Yeah, I guess it has been. It's provided a physical excuse for us to get together and I think that, as guys, we need that more than women. Women can gather around and talk while I feel that men are much more comfortable doing something. Even if they're not talking. My car just became that "something" over time. It became an excuse to get together when we were teenagers and continued to be that as we became adults; as dads and husbands and divorcees and all the rest. It was the one constant excuse to get together. We weren't down at the pub, we were in a shed working on my car.

IGN: You directed this documentary yourself. What was the experience like for you? Especially since you were revealing things about your own life?

Bana: I never really thought about it like that. To me it was just all about telling a story. My background is standup comedy and I used to get up on stage and talk for an hour about all kinds of stuff. Any time you're performing as an artist you're revealing something personal about yourself. Obviously I'm more comfortable with the public knowing as little as possible about my family life, but I was more than comfortable in sharing this part of my life with people. You don't really come into my home. It wasn't an invasion. I would not have allowed someone to direct it because there's just no way that the people involved would have allowed that to happen. They trusted me and I enjoyed having that trust. I just looked at this as being a storyteller and that it was my story to tell. Not someone else's. I really loved doing it. It was a really fantastic experience.

IGN: How long did this project take to complete?

Bana: It was probably over a two year period. And the editing was done over a long period too. As you can imagine there were things happening in my professional life at the same time so I would edit, disappear for four months to do a film and then come back and start cutting again. The film was shot roughly over a two-year period.

IGN: Your beloved Falcon comes into some considerable danger in the Targa Tasmanian Rally. Can you talk a little about that race and what makes it so dangerous?

Bana: It basically encompasses very large stretches of public road being closed off to the public. The road then becomes a legal racetrack. If you can imagine closing the PCH from Santa Monica to Carmel and telling the residents that they can't use the PCH for the next five days and letting a bunch of lunatics loose at thirty second intervals, that's pretty much the gist. We race around the island of Tasmania. The race coordinators choose the best roads in that state to race on and one stretch might be ten miles long and then the next stretch might only be three miles long. It's a timed race; like a traditional rally. But they are on public roads, so if you make a mistake then you're going to crash into a fence, or into a tree or into a house.

[Source: tv.ign.com]