Remember when action movies didn't require superheroes, multiverses or the fate of the entire planet? The action movies of the 1980s and 90s reflected a simpler time, when all you needed was a mismatched pair of people, a ticking clock, and one very important package that absolutely had to get from point A to point B.
If you grew up watching these movies and you're feeling nostalgic right now, you're going to love Runner, the new action-comedy starring Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson and directed by Scott Waugh.
Written by Miles Hubley and Tommy White, whose screenplay landed on the 2023 Black List, Runner follows delivery man Hank Malone (Ritchson), who must transport a healthy liver to a desperately ill young girl while escorting Ben Bishop (Wilson), the man overseeing the donation process. Unfortunately, a group of mercenaries has other plans for that liver.
It's a throwback to the action movies Hubley and White grew up loving and wanted to reignite after years of unsuccessfully writing smaller, less commercial scripts.
"We were writing a lot of cerebral indie dramas, which are great. I love them. I'd love to have one of them made and win an Oscar," says White. "They were not paying the bills."
Their manager eventually suggested they take the character-writing skills they had developed and apply them to something that would appeal to a wider audience. When he asked what kinds of movies they loved growing up, they said 80s and 90s action movies, and that realization set their writing journey in a new direction.
"It became about taking what we've been doing in the smaller stories and inserting it onto a bigger canvas that has that nostalgic 90s flair," White says.
It turned out to be exactly the kind of movie director Scott Waugh was looking for.
Waugh had spent years working in large-scale action but wanted to return to the grounded action filmmaking he associated with directors like Tony Scott, one of his filmmaking idols. What attracted him to Runner was that everything in the movie is ultimately about saving a dying seven-year-old girl.
"What sets apart the 80s and 90s from the current action is the groundedness of the stakes," he says, pointing to movies like Lethal Weapon, 48 Hrs. and Speed. Their circumstances may become extreme, but the people and their motivations remain relatable. "The stakes were so high, but they were real," Waugh says.
Let Location Dictate the Action
One challenge of writing an action movie is scripting fight or car-chase scenes on the page. Hubley and White admit it's something they still wrestle with.
"When writing a spec you want to make the action fun, readable and just literary enough that you lean into it like you might lean into a novel."
But getting too detailed with the action can take up a lot of the page. Surprisingly, Waugh says he ignores action descriptions altogether when reading a script. "I always find it's interesting with my writers when I tell them I don't read any of your action," he says.
His reasoning has less to do with writing than with the shooting location. Waugh says action is enormously dependent on location. A writer can invent the perfect cliff, staircase, gas station, or stretch of highway, but if the production can't find or use that location, much of that beautifully written choreography becomes irrelevant.
Waugh's secret to great action scenes is to find the location and then design the action around the actual physical environment. On Runner, he began scouting early enough that roughly four months before filming he could send Hubley and White photographs of locations.
"Here's the gas station that we're going to shoot in. Here's what the back looks like, here's the front," Waugh told the writers. White found the process enormously helpful. "I always can write better when I understand the architecture of the space," he says.
Even when writers don't have a director sending scouting photographs, White recommends finding visual references. Google Images and Street View can turn an abstract location into a concrete environment. Suddenly the writer can see where a character might run, hide, crash, or hear something happening around the corner.
A Ticking Clock
From a writer's perspective, one of the most interesting things in the movie is how the life-saving liver becomes a character in the story, causing its own conflict. To keep the organ viable en route to the hospital, they transport it in a temperature-controlled cooler. "It's almost more important than anybody's life because it's the life of the little girl," Hubley says.
Waugh took that concept even further visually, continually reminding the audience where the case is during fights and chases. "It's all about the case, man," Waugh says. "We've got to keep track of where it is and what they're fighting for at all times."
As the story intensifies, the organ suddenly comes into jeopardy when the bad guys shoot holes in the cooler. It causes the alarm in the cooler to go off, creating a ticking clock and adding to the multiple problems that our main characters are dealing with. For Hubley, that build-up is what makes the third act work.
"How many balls can we be juggling?" he says. The goal is to make everything feel like it's falling apart, then force the characters to accomplish the impossible anyway.
White reduces the lesson to one of the oldest devices in screenwriting: "Anytime you can have a ticking clock, have a ticking clock."
Action Still Comes Back to Character
For all the explosions, chases, and fights, Waugh believes the real lesson of the action movies that inspired Runner has little to do with spectacle and everything to do with the characters' humanity. Audiences crave accessible characters who let ordinary people imagine themselves in extraordinary circumstances. That applies to villains, too.
"You can't write [your villains as] cliché; you've got to write with humanity, because every person in the script thinks they're doing the right thing," Waugh says. "The bad guy doesn't think he's bad. He thinks he's doing what's right."
That complexity is ultimately what makes the action matter.
Runner opens in theaters Sept. 11.