One of the greatest things that Christoph Waltz experienced while making the new Quibi show, “Most Dangerous Game,” was that it was shot very much like a feature film and not like a scaled-down version of a feature. “This is not a scaled down version of anything. If anything at all, on the contrary, it’s a new format and that needs to be fathomed and used and put to its best and proper purpose,” Waltz tells us in our recent webchat (watch the video above). Waltz likened the process of putting everything together to that of putting individual pearls on a gold chain and then seeing it together in all it’s splendor. “The production was a top-notch production and everybody on it was an accomplished professional. This is exactly how you should work and I wish I had done a lot of features that I did in my career on that level.”
“Most Dangerous Game,” which is available to stream on Quibi, is an action series that also stars Liam Hemsworth, who plays a down-on-his-luck real estate developer who gets diagnosed with terminal cancer while his wife is expecting their first child. That’s when he meets Miles Sellers, who offers him an immense amount of money if he can survive being hunted for 24 hours by several competitors within the Detroit city limits.
Over the past decade, Waltz has gone from being virtually unknown in the United States to an instantly recognizable figure. This has been mainly in part to writer/director Quentin Tarantino, who cast Waltz in his breakout role as Col. Hans Landa in “Inglourious Basterds” in 2009 and Dr. King Schultz in “Django Unchained” in 2012. Both roles netted him a slew of awards including the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in each of those years.
The meteoric rise that Waltz has seen his career take over the past 11 years has been completely surreal for him. He describes the attitude he had during the run of “Basterds” using a story that the recently deceased performer, Michel Piccoli, told about coming to fame later in his career. “He said, ‘I compare that to the Eiffel Tower. If you take an elevator up to the top, you get out and you have this splendid view and it’s overwhelming and you can’t believe Paris from above. But then you can take the stairs and you get adjusted and by the time you get to the top, you’ve acquainted yourself with the view and the individual perspectives and sights and when you get there you recognize everything there.’”
When asked about which directors he wishes he could get a chance to work for, Waltz is very frank about the fact that he doesn’t like to look backwards in terms of possible collaborators. “There’s so many really interesting directors right now and a lot of them are completely unknown because they haven’t gotten a chance for their breakthrough yet. I wonder whether there is this person lurking in the wings ready to jump out and do the next incredible thing,” he explains. That being said, Waltz did mention that he would love to work with several filmmakers, including Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Jacques Audiard and Yorgos Lanthimos.
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