‘Eraser’ at 30: Director Chuck Russell Explains How ‘Mission: Impossible’ Triggered a Major Rewrite Mid-Shoot

Eraser director Chuck Russell had a major problem on the 1995 set of his Arnold Schwarzenegger-led actioner. He and his team caught wind of the fact that their third-act set piece had just been pulled off by Tom Cruise and Brian De Palma on the recently wrapped Mission: Impossible. With Eraser scheduled to release a month after the first installment in Cruise’s now-signature action franchise, Russell and co. pivoted on the fly. 

“The CIA heist scene where Tom Cruise drops in on wires, I had Arnold doing almost exactly the same thing to get a disc out of the CIA, and we had to rewrite it to instead have Arnold get into the enemy company, Cyrez, another way,” Russell tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of Eraser’s 30th anniversary 4K release. “I at least changed that much. I didn’t want to have exactly the same scene.”

Written by Tony Puryear and Walon Green, Eraser chronicles Schwarzenegger’s U.S. Marshal character, John “Eraser” Kruger, who serves as the last line of defense for witnesses who’ve been compromised while in Witness Protection (WITSEC). From staging their deaths to erasing their identities, he goes the extra mile. Vanessa Williams’ Lee Cullen then presents him with his most dangerous case yet, as she uncovers that her employer, Cyrez, is planning to sell electromagnetic rail guns to terrorists on the black market.

Oddly enough, the name of that defense contractor, Cyrez, nearly derailed Eraser’s release date in June of ‘96. Russell shot the movie with the company branded as Cyrex, but during post-production, the eleventh-hour discovery of a company called Cyrix forced a mad scramble.

“Warners offered the company some money, but they said, ‘Look, we really do this. There’s no [amount of] money you can offer us.’ So at the last minute, we had to change the letters in at least 70 shots,” Russell recalls. “We went out to every effects company because they all had to be done very quickly within a week. So that was breathtaking, especially in those days when we had to deliver physical film. We almost missed the delivery ahead of our big opening.”

Below, during a conversation with THR, Russell also discusses another coincidence involving Schwarzenegger’s character name, as well as The Mask’s role in him landing the directorial job.

As painful as it is to say, happy 30th anniversary of Eraser.

(Laughs.) I appreciate the irony. I’m honored that it has a new audience and demand for it, but 30 years? Really!?

I remember seeing TV spots for Eraser, but at the time, I never connected the dots that it was the same director as The Mask. One would think that you’d keep riding the comedy wave or that the industry would insist on it. So how did Eraser become your next move?

I’ve jumped genres. People have mentioned that about my career. I started with horror, and I didn’t want to get stuck with horror. The original intention was for The Mask to be a horror film, so I worked hard to turn it into a comedy. New Line, thankfully, believed in me and let me go that way with both Jim [Carrey] and Cameron [Diaz], who were still new at the time. But I love action movies, and I had a jones to do an action movie. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger was at the peak of his powers in 1995. True Lies had come out a year earlier. How much wining and dining did you have to do to get him on board?

Schwarzenegger approached me; it wasn’t the other way around. He loved The Mask, and I saw the opportunity to do a big studio movie with all the bells and whistles. The Mask looks like [a studio film]. We all worked hard to make it look absolutely great, but it was an independent film that picked up studio distribution. New Line eventually became a part of Warners. So Eraser was an opportunity to work with the whole studio system and see what making a movie on that scale was like. I had an idea, but you’re really kind of a ringmaster with hundreds of crew members and dozens of trucks. And in the case of Eraser, there were a lot of pyrotechnics and action sequences to carefully design.

Arnold and Sly Stallone were often in the mix for the same roles. If one said no, the other said yes. Was that actually the case here?

I don’t know both sides of the story, but there was a friendly competition. Arnold is a very competitive guy, which is part of his charm. He was competitive, with a sense of humor, regarding Sly. I’ve met Sly before, and he’s also a great guy. So it was a healthy competition. [Writer’s Note: The internet rumor has long been that Stallone said no to Eraser, but I later found a quote in which co-writer Tony Puryear denied the claim, noting that Warners originally backed the project with Arnold in mind because they hadn’t worked with him yet.]

Considering you directed A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors featuring Freddy Krueger, were you responsible for Arnold’s character being named Kruger? 

No, that was weird. I intended to change it, but never did. It just seemed to stick. You’re the first person who’s mentioned this to me, and I thought it was an odd coincidence at the time. But it was not done by me. I came onto the movie after there had been a couple of drafts of the screenplay, and then I did my own director’s polish.

Apparently, there were a lot of rewrites mid-production. How stressful was it to change plans at the last minute?

In this case, I was deeply engaged in it. [Russell questions whether he should tell the following story.] Mission: Impossible shot just prior to us, and it had gotten back to us that there was an action scene that was almost exactly the same as one of ours. The CIA heist scene where Tom Cruise drops in on wires, I had Arnold doing almost exactly the same thing to get a disc out of the CIA, and we had to rewrite it to instead have Arnold get into the enemy company, Cyrez, another way. I at least changed that much. I didn’t want to have exactly the same scene. 

These things are bizarre. They’re very likely a coincidence, but when they happen, you’ve got to respond on your feet. And frankly, it gets my adrenaline up. It was like, “Okay, we’re going to do an even better scene, but we’ve got to write it tonight. We have to get a move on it.” It brings a certain momentum to a film. No one wants this kind of thing, but it wasn’t the end of us. I have a competitive side too, and I wanted to do our best with our team as well. So that was the nature of that rewrite. There weren’t any new pages because of an actor’s performance. The performances were wonderful. I cast it purposefully to raise Arnold’s game and had him play against Jimmy Caan and Vanessa Williams.

I knew that Eraser and the first Mission: Impossible came out within a month of each other, and the Vanessa Williams sequence where she covertly downloads sensitive information onto an optical disc was the one that actually reminded me of that Mission wire heist where Ethan Hunt (Cruise) transfers data onto an optical disc.

The Arnold scene that was too similar was the one rewrote. That [Vanessa Williams] scene doesn’t particularly bother me because our movie had its own tone and everything. But whatever, I’m a Tom Cruise fan. I love him. I’ve worked with him. I executive produced Collateral. So it’s all good, and there was room for both films, for sure.

You had various advisers from the CIA and the U.S. Marshals’ WITSEC [Witness Security] program. Did their insight add anything interesting?

Yes, as a matter of fact. What’s fun is when you get that level of expert advice and one guy from WITSEC and one guy from the CIA disagree on how an op would be handled. I wanted the film to be fun entertainment, but also have a level of authenticity to it. So we engaged those guys. I kept telling the CIA that they’re not the good guys in this story and to not be upset with me. But I made sure they read the script, and they were cool with it. It’s wonderful collaborating with agencies like WITSEC and the CIA. It was a big deal for me.

Eraser’s electromagnetic rail guns seem like a sci-fi invention, but they do exist in a much larger, real-life form, just not the handheld version in the movie.

That was my whole take. It was the other thing that was new to the script. In the original script, everyone was running around for a disc. Thank God we changed that because that’s what Mission: Impossible did in that first episode. I said, “Look, I don’t want to [just] do a disc. I’ve seen it a million times. There’s such a thing as a rail gun. Let me tell you about it.” I happened to be familiar with the tech, and I knew it would be brutal if they were able to miniaturize it into a long rifle size.