L-R: Ben Bishop (Owen Wilson) and Hank Malone (Alan Ritchson) in ‘Runner.’
Courtesy of Angel Studios
Scott Waugh knows a thing or two about stunt-driven filmmaking.
After all, he comes from action royalty.
His father, Fred Waugh, was a Hollywood stunt veteran with credits on Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, The Towering Inferno and The Amazing Spider-Man television series. As Scott proudly declared over a recent Zoom call, “My father was the original Spider-Man.”
History repeated itself years later when Scott became a stunt professional himself and worked on Sam Raimi’s blockbuster take on Marvel’s iconic wall-crawler. His literal action-packed résumé also includes Speed, Waterworld, xXx, We Were Soldiers, The Italian Job, Bad Boys II, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Similar to John Wick duo David Leitch and Chad Stahelski, he eventually made the jump to directing via 2012’s Act of Valor— soon followed by Need for Speed (2014), 6 Below: Miracle on the Mountain (2017), Hidden Strike (2023), and The Expendables 4 (2023).
“I like to immerse my audience in the action,” stressed Scott. “That’s important to me. Coming from a stunt background, I always want the audience to get to experience the action from my lens, because I’ve been inside that world for so long. Rather than making you feel like a voyeur, I want you to participate.”
That philosophy is very much on display in his latest directorial effort, Runner, an action/buddy comedy starring Alan Ritchson (Reacher) and Owen Wilson (Loki) as a mismatched duo on a high-stakes mission to deliver a liver to a terminally ill girl at a hospital on Australia’s Gold Coast.
“I had been looking for something that was a throwback to the ‘80s and ‘90s style of films like Lethal Weapon and the movies I grew up on,” noted Scott. “I’d been doing a bunch of tentpoles and just wanted to get back to some grounded, really fun movies that had emotional drive and strong character work inside the action. I read the script and was like, ‘Man, I really, really dig this material!’”
He also cited the dynamic between Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin in 1988’s Midnight Run as a major influence on the movie, explaining, “When you can find that magic between two actors, you’re just mesmerized. You want to keep watching them. Being able to pair [Alan and Owen] together, and let them do what they do, was really fun to be a part of.”
Ritchson’s Hank Malone is more the straight man, a former soldier now working as a glorified errand boy in the Land Down Under. Wilson’s Ben Bishop, on the other hand, is a motor-mouthed softie who finds a way to disarm the bristly and cynical Malone. These clashing personalities
“Owen’s speed, temperament, and style is contagious,” added Scott. “He’s so funny and witty and always coming up with these little innuendos and one-liners. With Alan, I’d say, ‘Don’t get sucked into his orbit. You’re not the funny guy. You’re funny, but you’re not the funny guy. He is. You’re the emotional strength in this movie.’ Alan did a wonderful job playing against that, which is, I think, where the comedy comes from.”
The pair’s road trip to the Gold Coast is far from smooth once a ruthless cartel criminal Damian Zaldívar (a wonderfully psychopathic Rodrigo Santoro) sets his sights on the briefcase carrying the liver. The organ’s worth is near-priceless, given the fact that it is compatible with an extremely rare blood type.
As such, the director and supervising stunt coordinator Ryan Tarran structured the fight scenes around the MacGuffin.
“I said, ‘I want these to be brawls,’” recounted Waugh. “’Kind of messy fights, but interestingly choreographed, so it’s not like a Hong Kong fight. It’s not John Wick. These are more grounded and brawls.’ And I said, ‘Camera work has to tell the story because it’s always the fight for the case. All the fights were choreographed around the case.’ We needed to keep the camera focused on the case without compromising the intensity. And that was super challenging because it was, ‘Don’t lose the object of focus, but don’t also lose the energy of the action around it.’”
And like he mentioned above, Waugh places a great deal of emphasis on “emotional drive” when mapping out action.
“That really makes a sequence seem better,” he mused. “If the emotion isn’t behind it, you would go, ‘Wow, that was kind of boring.’ But then, if I put the emotion underneath it, you’re like, ‘That sequence was amazing!’ That’s really paramount for me.”
Scott Waugh on the set of ‘Runner.’
Courtesy of Angel Studios
The original Runner script from Miles Hubley and Tommy White set the action in Los Angeles at night, in the middle of the rain. Waugh moved the setting to Australia for practical and budgetary reasons.
“I was like, ‘Do you how hard it is to shoot a car chase at night in the rain?!’” remembered the director with a smile. “That was the first thing we changed. And then, when we were just looking at it from a financial position, we decided we could really get a lot more bang for our buck down in Australia. So we actually rewrote the screenplay for Australia, and made the story pivot as well.”
He continued: “I really wanted to showcase the difference between Brisbane and Gold Coast. I’d been to Gold Coast 20 years ago, and the topography has completely changed. We wanted to showcase Australia in a little bit of a different light because most people think of Crocodile Dundee and the desert.”
High-octane stories driven by relatable emotional stakes are something of a Waugh family specialty. Scott’s older brother, Ric Roman Waugh, is also a director (known for his collaborations with Gerard Butler on Angel Has Fallen and Greenland), but the siblings prefer to keep their professional and personal lives separate.
“We’re like cheerleaders for each other,” said Scott. “We don’t really give ourselves career advice because we’re brothers and really made a conscious choice to stay brothers, and not colleagues. It’s really maintained our brotherhood together and I cherish it. He’s wonderful at what he does and he supports me in what I do.”
Scott’s devotion to practical stunt and fight choreography is emblematic of why an Oscar category for Stunt Design (debuting at the 2028 ceremony) feels long overdue.
“The community in Hollywood’s recognizing that we too are storytellers; that what we do is a craft worthy of recognition,” concluded the filmmaker. “It’s rightfully deserved. These guys are definitely in the shadows, and they love that, but what they bring to the table—especially in a genre that’s the most profitable—it’s a shame to not recognize them.”
Runner is now in theaters. Click here for tickets.
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