Emile Hirsch had been asked to play a bad guy. The action movie Pursuit was a quick money gig: fast shooting, three days of work, one of which would be spent with John Cusack as a crime boss who conducts his business around an outdoor barbecue. His own character wasn’t all that interesting – a fugitive murderer whose family has been kidnapped. But Hirsch, best known for playing the titular Speed Racer in the cult 2008 actioner and the tragic American nomad Chris McCandless in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007), still wanted to have some fun with it. “I thought: ‘OK, I’ll just do an Elon Musk impression for the whole movie,’” the 38-year-old laughs, as if it was the most obvious idea in the world. “In fairness, it’s probably not even a good Elon Musk impression. Because I don’t think anybody actually got it.” He grins, sighs and holds his hands up in mock regret.
Pursuit, which is available for digital download now, is an incredibly stupid movie that gets by on its relentless insanity. Hirsch’s Rick is erratic, noisy and covered in face tattoos, and if his dialogue seems particularly free-wheeling and nonsensical, that’s pretty much because it was made up on the fly. “Our director, he was like, ‘yeah, don’t worry about the script – just improvise your lines the whole time if you want.’ So there are whole scenes where I’m just, like, saying anything on camera.”
