Taken And Liam Neeson’s Unexpected Action Star Makeover

The story starts with Luc Besson, director of “The Fifth Element” and “Leon: The Professional,” who cooked up the idea for “Taken” and went on to write the screenplay with Robert Mark Kamen. When it came time to choose a director, he went to a longtime collaborator: Pierre Morel, who had worked with him behind the camera on both movies and commercials previously. At that point Besson pretty much handed the reigns over to Morel, who then had to figure out how to bring to life this tale of a father with “a particular set of skills” attempting to save his kidnapped daughter from a sex trafficking ring in Europe.

One interesting tidbit is that it was originally none other than The Dude himself, Jeff Bridges, who was supposed to play the lead role of Bryan Mills. Ultimately, he had to drop out and it fell to Liam Neeson — who, up to that point, had been known primarily as a dramatic actor, having appeared in Oscar-winners such as “Schindler’s List.” Yes, he had flexed his action muscles in movies like “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” and “Batman Begins,” but this was different. It was a more physically demanding role and it was a pure action flick, through and through. There wasn’t much to hide behind. You don’t have Batman or lightsabers there to bail you out if it doesn’t all totally work.

But Neeson had an itch he wanted to scratch and threw himself into the role, dedicating months to prep time and training. This, despite the fact that he didn’t actually have a ton of faith in the movie. Speaking with GQ in 2014, Neesons explained that he thought the movie was destined for the bargain bin and its success truly caught him off guard.

“I wanted to do more physical stuff. I really thought it would be kind of a little side road from my so-called career. Really thought it would go straight to video. But it just got great word of mouth. I was stunned.”

Morel and Neeson were deliberate about the brand of action they were crafting with this film. Speaking to ComingSoon.net ahead of the film’s U.S. release, Morel explained that they tapered the style of action to make sense for the character being portrayed.

“The agent that he’s supposed to be, he just goes for the essentials. He’s not fighting for the fun of making nice shots. He’s just there to kill people, so we wanted to make it very, very fast, very realistic, very aggressive and have moves that a guy of his age would be able to do and would look real. There’s no way he was going to do some Jackie Chan stuff or some Jet Li stuff, so we really planned and choreographed the fights accordingly to his very specific point of view and his capacity.”

It all clicked. It found its way to theaters firing on all cylinders (for audiences anyhow) and proved to be a gigantic, unexpected success that transformed both Neeson’s career and the landscape of action movies in Hollywood for the foreseeable future.