Ashton Kutcher pulled double duty for his latest film, the romantic comedy/action hybrid Killers.
Not only does he star as a loving husband whose past as a CIA assassin comes back to haunt him and his clueless wife (Katherine Heigl), but he also served as producer on the film.
And while he admits they didn’t finish on time or on budget, Kutcher is more than pleased with the results.
“As a producer, I’m extremely satisfied with the film,” he says. “We set out to make a movie that was a $100–million movie for $70 million. We got very, very close. I think we were a couple days over and a couple dollars over, but we kept it pretty well close.”
Of course, it wasn’t the smoothest of rides. Weather issues plagued the production from the beginning, Kutcher says, starting in the south of France. Nice, it turned out, was not so nice.
“We got to Nice, France, and it was supposed to be sunny and beautiful, but it was freezing and windy, and we were on a yacht that was pitching,” he says.
“And then we got to Atlanta and, in the middle of the night, one of our generators got struck by lightning, so it just shut us down. And it rained and rained and rained. We got fogged out one night. Every single time one of those things happened, we just had to completely re-jigger what we were doing, in order to make the movie, make it on time and make it on budget.”
As much as he’s seen living the Hollywood lifestyle — and twittering about it — Kutcher’s producing work keeps his schedule pretty full.
“People are most shocked and most in disbelief that I go to the office every day. I have a job,” he says. “When I’m not acting on a movie, I go to work, first thing in the morning. I’m at work at eight o’clock in the morning, and I get home from work at seven o’clock at night.”
Of course, the acting still comes first, and playing a trained assassin in Killers meant a decent amount of stunt work. While Kutcher did rely on a stuntman for much of the film — “I’m not as awesome as Tom Cruise,” he says. “I don’t jump through glass” — he still wanted to be prepared.
“I did some fight training. I learned Krav Maga, Muay Thai and Kali, which is a Filipino knife fighting,” he says. “And then I realized that I should have learned how to movie fight because on the first fight scene, I knocked out a stunt guy. I felt really bad about that. And then I kicked [co-star] Rob [Riggle] in the face. I hurt a lot of people. I should have just let the stunt guy do everything.”
