NASCAR returns to the big screen with Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Logan Lucky’
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.
Trailer: ‘Logan Lucky’
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.
