On this edition of SNAPSHOTS, Muzzle: City of Wolves, the sequel to the 2023 action-thriller will hit the screens this Friday. Haunted ex-K-9 officer Jake’s peaceful life is shattered when a gang brutally attacks his family. With new K-9 partner Argos, he uncovers a drug ring.
I recently sat down with Director/Co-producer John Stalberg Jr. to get the details on the movie!
Muzzle: City of Wolves was a good film to watch and this is a sequel to Muzzle. Hopefully we can see a third film.
I would love that. I mean, we were just talking about that. We have a really great idea for the third one that Aaron and I are excited about. So, if all things work out, if enough people see this film in theaters on November 14, then then we’ll give it to him, we’ll finish this indeed.
So how did you come up with the concept with the second Muzzle film, that’s going to be released next week?
We’d always kind of had this, this idea in mind, but I wanted to create an odyssey, right? That’s why the dog’s name is Argos. That’s Odysseus’ dog in “The Odyssey”. So can we make a modern-day Odyssey about a man trying to get home to protect his wife and his child. Can we just do a simple kind of one day? It all happens in one day, where he’s just trying to get across a city, and it’s a city like in a current state of you know what it is, which is fascinatingly interesting and apocalyptic at the same time. It’s my hometown, okay? So, that’s the idea, a real simple idea. Then it’s like, how do you make that work?
Well, what’s the level up in Muzzle one. He’s really, really messed up this Skid Row drug gang, a gang that’s effectively distributing products to their customers, 52 square blocks in downtown LA. So, how do we level that up? Well, the drug producers, the guys who are taking the drug from China, the cartels and are smuggling that up through the border to then have their distributors sell it. Well, they wouldn’t quite like that. This dude messed up one of their distributors, one of many, but it’s still a major hub. It’s Los Angeles, they wouldn’t be too happy about it. Well, what would they do?
So, it starts to raise questions that Jacob King and I, the writer, started asking. It just sorts of logically led to the conclusion of they might come after him. Well, how would they do that? What levers would they pull against this guy? And this guy’s no slouch. He’s a former Marine, a former LAPD canine handler. He’s a very complex, morally ambiguous character who’s willing to do anything. He’s willing to go way outside the laws and way outside the legality lines to do what he thinks is right, to protect his family, protect his dogs and get the bad guys. It’s like taking this guy through this journey, through L.A. and giving him all kinds of obstacles, one after the other, and seeing just like how far this guy’s desire to go was the idea. And then we just ran with it.
And it’s a great idea. And how did you convince Aaron Eckhart to come back?
It’s one of those things where you could have left Muzzle alone. But there is this thing that is dangling, which at the end of Muzzle he goes on a suicide mission. Basically, he’s going to go execute all these guys who took his dog. He’s gonna get his dog back and kill them all. He doesn’t care if he lives or dies. In fact, he drops his shotgun at the scene of the crime. He’s not wearing gloves like he doesn’t care about being caught at that point. He never thought he’d walk out of there alive. And he does get out of there alive at the end of Muzzle one. And so, we ended that movie on this note. The reporters are talking about how they’ve unearthed all of these bodies that clearly, he and Officer Hernandez from the first movie have dumped in a landfill. Months later, the bodies are found, and there’s an investigation. That’s what we end Muzzle one. Jake has a clean conscience.
We realize, “Wow, he really is a dark anti-hero”, like Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson in “Death Wish”, or Steve McQueen in “The Getaway”. These are very, morally ambiguous guys, and we want to be unapologetic by showing that this is an action movie, but it’s a very complex action movie. You have a guy that you’re subjectively aligned with, but shit, “are you okay with what he’s doing” and the lengths that he’s willing to go to fight back with violence against these guys who are fighting against him. We really wanted to explore all that, and Aaron was down. We sort of picked up those threads. I think he wanted, as much as I did, to answer those questions, like, “Well, what happens to that investigation? Are they do him? Are his fingerprints on that gun?” There were certain things which led us to the whole threat of Detective Thorn and the investigation into what happened in Muzzle one. You can’t just leave that alone, like he’s killed people, you know?
Yeah, it’s very interesting. I understand that there were two dogs used to play Argos, and from what I heard that it only they only respond to Aaron’s commands. Is that correct?
Well, Aaron is playing a dog trainer, right? He’s a method actor, so he’s super into this thing. In Muzzle, we had all these dog trainers, and they were great. But in Muzzle, the dog trainers had to be over his shoulders, controlling the dog. They had a good point. Their point was, there’s certain scenes where the dog has to disobey him, and if we have the dog totally keyed into Aaron, the dog won’t disobey him in the scenes where we need the dog to not be listening. That was maybe a little bit bigger in Muzzle than it is in Muzzle 2, because Muzzle to this dog’s supposed to almost have finished his training.
He’s Luke Skywalker in “Return of the Jedi”. If Aaron is Obi-Wan Kenobi training him, he’s just about got the force down, but he didn’t. “Oh yeah, he’s not a Jedi yet”, but he’s almost got it. Aaron is a method actor, so why not let him actually control the animal? We don’t need people over his shoulder giving noise and squeaking toys, food and all this stuff. So, Aaron just trained the dog, and in German. These dogs have German and sometimes Dutch commands they’re trained. So, Aaron knows all that stuff. He’s training the dog and it’s fascinating. And to me, it was so much more interesting because I could pull way back so you see, it’s just Aaron and the dog. There are no trainers around. You see him commanding the dog. And it’s so real. He’s really commanding this killer dog.
Now, even though the film takes place in Los Angeles, I understand it was filmed in South Africa. What are some of the advantages of filming in South Africa versus Los Angeles?
Well for both movies, I didn’t shoot either in L.A. Even though I’m from L.A., I shot a unit in Los Angeles. It’s important to me to really shoot scenes in L.A., to place them in L.A. I needed to find a place that could double for L.A. and that was South Africa. I was the fourth movie in a row to shoot L.A. for South Africa after Gore Verbinski. Their suburbs look like L.A. There are palm trees and a beach, it looks like Santa Monica.
To capture some of the grit of East L.A., by the freeway in the city of Vernon, I just said “take me to the worst slums in Cape Town”. We went there, and it wasn’t bad enough. So, I needed to bring more tents and more trash. Imagine that I’m going to a slum in South Africa, and it’s not as gritty as L.A. So you get a great incentive there. The crews are amazing. I had an incredible line producer, Kyle Ambrose, and a great crew. It’s cheap to shoot there. If I were to shoot this in the States, I would have gotten 18 days to shoot it in South Africa. I got 30 days. So do the math.
Muzzle: City of Wolves takes a bite out of the movie screens this Friday – November 14th by RLJE Films
Until next time, See You… Out There!
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