“I’m not a cinephile like my peers,” admits director F. Gary Gray, nestled in a chair anchored deep behind black velvet drapes at longtime Atlanta haunt 5Church Midtown, as he promotes his latest film Lift from Netflix. Surprisingly Gray, whose debut film Friday turns 30 next year, credits LEGO as the introductory spark to it all.
“The advertisers would advertise all these amazing toys to kids,” he explains. “And when I was a kid, we couldn’t afford most of them, but my mother could afford these small boxes of LEGOs and I would never create what was intended on the cover.” Instead, he built fast cars and lots of other things he fancied out of his suitcase of LEGO pieces.
Yet it wasn’t until later in life that Gray, who grew up in Los Angeles, which then felt like a million miles away from Hollywood, says he even realized how building his own worlds with LEGO connected to the worlds he’d go on to build throughout the illustrious filmmaking career he launched directing music videos. “I wanted to create [what] I wanted to watch,” he now notes. Lift, his latest, is one of those creations.
No stranger to heist movies, Gray scored his first $100 million hit with The Italian Job, starring Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Jason Statham, and Yasiin Bey, 21 years ago this May. But still Lift doesn’t just have the requisite impossible heist – stealing $500 million worth of gold from a plane at 40,000 feet in the air per the insistence of global policing organization Interpol – it also has another critical twist with Kevin Hart starring in an unexpected role that’s more George Clooney, Brad Pitt, or Wahlberg.
In Lift, Hart has left a lot of the comedic antics that define his other films behind as Cyrus Whitaker, the mastermind behind a multiracial collective of sophisticated thieves with unparalleled skill sets. The film starts with an intricate heist of lifting an NFT created by a mysterious masked superstar artist at a snooty art auction in Italy, Venice no less, that culminates in high-speed boat chases to prove just how high-end Cyrus’s level of criminality is. On top of that, there is a budding love story with Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Abby Gladwell who, of course, is a high-ranking Interpol agent.
Intrigued by the challenge Hart presented with Lift, the Straight Outta Compton and Fate of the Furious director, whose films have grossed over $2.25 billion in box office receipts, was eager to sign on. “When I met with Kevin and he expressed interest in really transitioning from the comedic roles that he was playing into the more grounded dramatic action realm, and we talked about this project and the possibilities and the opportunities and the potential, I was like ‘I’m in.’ I love this challenge, and I love the optics because a lot of times we are comic relief and not the masterminds.
“I felt like this is a very cool story and I’d love to see someone like a Kevin Hart in this role and Gugu Mbatha-Raw because it’s not what you would traditionally see. It’s not necessarily the reason I said yes, but it was definitely one of the things that struck me as a plus,” he explains.
Gray, who filmed Lift in Northern Ireland, Italy, and London, says he’s pleased with the results, particularly with the cast that includes Spanish actress Úrsula Corberó of Money Heist fame as dope pilot Camila; Billy Magnussen of Game Night and the Bond film No Time To Die as master safecracker Magnus; Korean actress and former K-Pop singer Yun-Jee Kim as genius hacker Mi-Sun; Vincent D’Onofrio whose many credits include Echo, Dumb Money, and The Godfather of Harlem, as a man of disguise Denton; and British-Indian actor Viveik Kalra from the 2021 film Voyagers as the super engineer Luke.
“I love this group of people,” Gray beams. “I love the bond and the friendship and to experience them work through these challenges in dramatic fashion [with] the suspense, the twists and turns, I’d like to see them do it again whether I do it or not.”
