‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F’ Director Talks to Eddie Murphy and How to Make an ’80s-Style Action Movie
Director Mark Molloy said that once Eddie Murphy appeared on the set of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, the esteemed actor instantly became the Axel Foley audiences know and love from the 1984 action comedy classic.
In fact, Murphy looked so young that Molloy forgot that he was directing a 63-year-old star, not the 23-year-old from the original film.
“Because he looked so good, I just pretended he hadn’t aged. I just said, ‘Okay, Eddie, run down that flight of stairs!’ I asked him to do physical exercise because he looked very good,” Molloy recalled, laughing, in a recent Zoom conversation. “Then Eddie looked at me and said, ‘Hey, man, are you trying to kill me here?’ What’s going on?”I really tried Eddie in this one.”
New to Netflix on Wednesday, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, is notable because the film not only marks Murphy’s return to his iconic Axel Foley role that he established four decades ago but is also Molloy’s directorial debut feature film.
Beverly Hills Cop producer Jerry Bruckheimer passes the franchise torch
Grateful that legendary “Beverly Hills Cop” producer Jerry Bruckheimer entrusted him with the keys to the franchise, the Australian filmmaker said he tried not to think about the fact that Axel F was not only his first film but also the first “Beverly Hills Cop” movie in 30 years. After the release of the third film in the franchise in 1994.
“I tried to get over that and get to work because you can let the expectations and the scale of what you’re doing get the better of you,” Molloy said. “The good thing is that I had a very clear vision for the movie from the moment I read the script, that [screenwriter] Will [Beall] had done a good job writing. The story was very confident in what it needed to be for a Beverly Hills Cop movie. When I read the script I said, “This could be great, but I want to do it a certain way.”
Once Molloy presented his idea for Axel F to Bruckheimer, Murphy, and Netflix trusted his vision, the process of filming the first Beverly Hills Cop movie in three decades became much less daunting.
Perhaps the most important thing Molloy remembers emphasizing in his first meeting with Bruckheimer was his intention to create exactly the same tone as the first two Beverly Hills Cop films from 1984 and 1987. Molloy knew it was a risk worth taking, He had to follow in the great footsteps of Martin Brest and Tony Scott, who directed Beverly Hills Cop and its first sequel, respectively.
Plus, Molloy added, if he was going to make “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F” an ’80s-style action comedy, he needed to use ’80s-style filmmaking techniques, meaning not rely on computer-generated visual effects. Also read – BTS’s Jimin and Jung Kook to star in Disney+ Travel Reality Series
Molly rejects Brucheimer’s project without hesitation
However, although Molloy initially said yes to the idea of doing a Bruckheimer project without hesitation, he surprisingly followed up with a series of no’s.
“My agent called me one day and said, ‘Jerry Bruckheimer wants to talk to you on the phone.’ And I said, ‘I want to talk to Jerry Bruckheimer on the phone.’ I love doing a movie together,” Molloy said. “Then he sent me quite a few scripts and I said no to all of them. They just didn’t seem right, but then he sent me Beverly Hills: Police: Axel F. And after 20 pages, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m in this'”.
Molloy has no qualms about wanting to embrace audiences’ nostalgia for the action comedy franchise led by Eddie Murphy. Filmmakers are sometimes hesitant to admit that they wanted to “play the hits” in their legacy sequels, but Molloy has no qualms about it, to the point that he did it on set.
“While we were filming, I played the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack,” Molloy says. “During a long pan, he would play the music and say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s going to work,’ or, ‘Can we pan a little slower?’ ] in my head all the time.”
In preparation, Molloy focused on Martin Brest’s 1984 franchise launch, Scott’s 1987 sequel, and other action films from the ’70s and ’80s, but deliberately stayed away from CBS’ unreleased 2013 pilot and 1994’s Beverly Hills Cop III. In the case of the latter, Molloy helped deal a gentle blow to the franchise’s least popular instalment, as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Detective Bobby Abbott commented to Axel: “It’s not your best moment”, about his 1994 escapades.