NASCAR returns to the big screen with Steven Soderbergh's 'Logan Lucky'
CONCORD, N.C. — Steven Soderbergh knew he was in a flimsy bargaining position when he arranged a meeting to pitch a movie idea with NASCAR executives last year.
“If we didn’t have NASCAR, we didn’t have a movie,” he admitted.
Those on the other side of the table were unaware of their ultimate leverage when they convened in NASCAR’s Los Angeles office with the lure of a potential project involving a director who won an Academy Award for Traffic in 2000.
“Steven came in — and like a great filmmaker does, with a surprise — and that ‘we’re going to bring a movie star in and we’re not going to tell you who it is’,” said NASCAR VP/Entertainment Marketing and Content Development Zane Stoddard.
“And we walked into our conference room and its Channing (Tatum) and Steven. First and foremost, we were excited about being in business with Steven and Channing, but it had to be right for us.”
Logan Lucky, in theaters Thursday night, became the right vehicle for the sport as this summer NASCAR made its first major foray back into pop culture in more than a decade. And it was right for Soderbergh, an admitted NASCAR novice-turned-fan who suddenly has opinions on driver rosters and points systems after first imagining the sport as a backdrop for a script.
More than any other sport he could envision, Soderbergh said, racing provided a “larger canvas, a larger mosaic I could play with.”
“What I didn’t know before we started was absolutely anything about the sport itself,” Soderbergh told USA TODAY Sports while sitting in a motor coach before the Coca-Cola 600 in May.
“So, I had to do as much of a deep dive as I could. What’s below the surface of the race I see on TV? The good news for me is there’s a lot below the surface. And so we shot here a year ago, the race.
“It’s just sort of my job to make sure we capture as much of the experience of the Coca-Cola 600 as we could and, to me, that’s a combination of two things: One is giving you a sense of the scale of the event and also giving you a sense of the granular detail of the things that are going on prior to and during the race. So you get this macro/micro sort of lens to see it through. So, that was really our job and I’m really happy with what we got.”
The film, whose track scenes were shot at Charlotte and Atlanta Motor Speedway, features an ensemble cast including four-time James Bond lead Daniel Craig (who this week committed to a fifth), Tatum of the Magic Mike movies, two-time Academy Award best actress Hilary Swank and Adam Driver, who played Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
A heist movie in the spirit of Soderbergh’s Ocean's franchise, he admits, with Charlotte Motor Speedway replacing a casino as a backdrop and plot element, the story has Jimmy Logan (Tatum) enlisting his brother Clyde (Driver), sister Mellie (Riley Keough) and demolitions man Joe Bang (Craig) to rob CMS during the Coca-Cola 600.
Six NASCAR drivers, including Team Penske’s Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano — who Soderbegh said “did a very good job of emulating the inflated sense of power a lot of unarmed security guards can express” — made cameos likely to provide a welcome inside joke to race fans.
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Critical reception has been warm, with USA TODAY awarding 3 stars for the “chicken-fried treat akin to Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run, with a little Blues Brothers tossed in” and Rolling Stone awarding 3½ stars to what it deemed a “redneck Ocean’s Eleven”.
Logan Lucky and Cars 3 — which was released in June and features voiceovers by NASCAR drivers Ryan Blaney, Chase Elliott, Daniel Suarez and Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr. — represented a mainstream return for NASCAR, which opened an LA entertainment division in 2001 under the direction of then-series vice president and current chairman Brian France.
Cars and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, comprised the last such boost in 2006. Such a reprise could benefit the sport as it continues to deal with survival issues, including mediocre attendance and television ratings and an aging fanbase. Soderbergh is unsure if NASCAR is experiencing a pop renaissance, but believes his film “landed at a moment that is auspicious.”
“It’s hard to say when these kind of ebbs and flows happen,” he said. “I’m sure for everyone involved, it’s hard to tell if you’re going through a cyclical change or you’re going through a secular change. Clearly, I think this is a really interesting time — now that I’ve gotten to know it a little bit — for NASCAR, in the sense that they’ve got this great crop of young drivers coming up who are very, very skilled and the introduction this year of the stage racing format is fantastic.
“I look at that and that seems like an upswing to me, but I am not the person that looks at the data to determine if I’m imagining things or not.”
Kyle Larson, who has a bit part in Logan Lucky as a chauffeur driver, said NASCAR is presented in a way to appeal to current fans while possibly attracting new ones.
“I thought they did a good job with it,” Larson told USA TODAY Sports. “It’s been a while since we got a NASCAR movie. So, it was good they got another one out there.”
Tatum’s father, Glenn, was a fan of Harry Gant and Channing wore his No. 33 while playing high school football. But despite being born in Alabama and raised in Mississippi and Florida, Tatum says “a working knowledge is about as deep as I would like to go” in describing his understanding of NASCAR before filming. Though he had no scenes with drivers, Tatum said he wasn’t surprised at how well they fared in the film.
“(Saturday Night Live producer) Lorne (Michaels) says athletes always do the best because they deal in high-stress, high-adrenaline and these guys are as cool as you could ever imagine,” he told USA TODAY Sports as he prepared to give drivers the command to start their engines in the Coca-Cola 600. “These guys, they’re pros. They’re like, 'Where do you want it?'"
Soderbegh considers Logan Lucky “a sweet movie the family can see,” not cynical, and not the type of biting humor that underscored the last major release to use NASCAR as a major plot device, the Will Ferrell comedy Talladega Nights.
NASCAR director of film, television and music Sarah Nettinga drew an executive producer credit in that film as Stoddard does in Logan Lucky, but series executives were sensitive this time, Stoddard said, “that if it’s a comedy, we’ve got to be on the inside of the joke, which some might argue was not the case with Talladega Nights.”
“It’s polar,” Stoddard said. “There are some that think that any publicity is good publicity and there are those that think (Talladega Nights) perpetuated stereotypes even though it was a fun movie. I think most people think that it is. What was important was we had a partnership (on Logan Lucky) with someone we could trust and Steven made it really easy.”
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