First Alcatraz, then Iraq: how The Rock became Michael Bay’s weapon of mass destruction

When The Rock was released in June 1996, nobody held out any great expectations for its success. Not only did its storyline, about a mismatched pair of heroes sent to Alcatraz to defeat a renegade general holding the island hostage, seem to be little more than yet another Die Hard clone, but its cast and crew seemed either untested or past their peak.

Its director Michael Bay was best known for his work in music videos and advertising, and had only one film, the Will Smith and Martin Lawrence vehicle Bad Boys, to his name. Its producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer had been responsible for hits such as Top Gun and Crimson Tide, but Simpson’s hard-living existence saw him die of drug-related heart failure in January 1996, months before the film was finished. Bruckheimer was left to shoulder the responsibilities of completing it alone.

And its stars Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage were hardly box-office titans. Connery had not had a significant hit since 1990’s Tom Clancy adaptation The Hunt for Red October and Cage, who had won an Oscar for his role in Leaving Las Vegas earlier that year, was a quirky character actor best known for his work with auteurs such as David Lynch and Francis Ford Coppola. The hit films that summer were expected to be Independence Day, Mission: Impossible and Twister. The Rock had the air of an also-ran.

Yet it became an enormous success, grossing more than four times its $75 million budget. It launched Cage into an unexpected vocation as an offbeat action star, gave Connery’s flagging career a boost and showed Bruckheimer that he could, indeed, cut it as a solo producer, without the looming shadow of Simpson. And it established Bay as Hollywood’s go-to director of military-themed action epics, which have since included everything from Pearl Harbor to 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Yet perhaps its strangest legacy of all was that, in part, it would inspire MI6 to sanction the Iraq War.

The Rock was based on an original script by the writers David Weisberg and Douglas Cook, but was extensively rewritten. As Bay later said, with characteristic bluntness, “Weisberg and Cook had a cool idea, but if you took either draft, it would have been a bad movie…Weisberg and Cook had the idea I set out to do, but not the movie I made.” He instead hired a revolving cast of A-list screenwriters, chiefly Die Hard with a Vengeance’s Jonathan Hensleigh, but also Aaron Sorkin and Quentin Tarantino.

Sorkin contributed witty and satirical dialogue about the political and military infrastructure that the storyline involves, prefiguring his work on both The West Wing and such films as Charlie Wilson’s War. It seems appropriate to his cynical worldview that one of the film’s heroes, Connery’s MI5 agent John Mason – a kind of superannuated James Bond – has been held under a form of rendition by the FBI indefinitely after stealing many of the country’s most closely guarded secrets and refusing to return them.

And Tarantino, the enfant terrible toast of Hollywood, offered situations rather than memorable dialogue. A tense Mexican stand-off between the antagonists owes more than a small debt to the conclusion of Reservoir Dogs, and a crucial scene in which the protagonist must inject himself in the heart with a hypodermic needle is a clear allusion to Uma Thurman’s similar predicament in Pulp Fiction.

Once Connery came on board, he brought along two of his favourite writers, the British duo Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement, to polish his character’s bon mots. Few could argue that they did not earn their keep. At one point, when asked whether he is having fun amidst the mayhem, Mason quips “it’s certainly more enjoyable than my average day –reading philosophy, avoiding gang rape in the washrooms – though, it's less of a problem these days. Maybe I’m losing my sex appeal.”

Once the script was deemed acceptable, filming began in San Francisco. It proved to be anything but untroubled. Bay fought with both Bruckheimer and the studio throughout production, over everything from the excessive number of helicopters in the film to the budget. At one point, Connery, who was also serving as one of the film’s executive producers, noticed that Bay seemed uncharacteristically miserable, and asked him what the problem was. ‘The Disney folks are here to kick my butt for being two days over schedule,” Bay replied.

Connery, with a sly expression, asked “You want me to help?” Accordingly, when Bay met the Disney executives for lunch in what he described as “a third grade classroom, sitting at tiny tables and chairs”, Connery entered dressed in golfing attire. To the open-mouthed executives’ astonishment, he shouted “This boy is doing a good job, and you’re living in your Disney f______ Ivory Tower and we need more f______ money!!” Their response was simply to ask “How much?”

Yet even with the enhanced budget, Bay – hardly known for his spendthrift approach to putting money on screen – was still occasionally defeated. One major set-piece, intended to show Connery and Cage’s “chemical weapons superfreak” Stanley Goodspeed escaping through the bowels of Alcatraz on monorails, was pared back into an Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom-esque cart pursuit. The abandoned set can still be briefly glimpsed in the film, but the reduced scope of the scene meant that, with a comparatively small 150 foot-long track, Bay had to stage a major action scene by the ingenious means of filming his actors heading up and down the track over and over again.

Location filming was also problematic. Given the film’s setting, it was obligatory to film on Alcatraz Island in the abandoned prison, but the crew found themselves competing with visiting tour parties at inopportune moments. While most of the explosive action scenes were staged at the MGM studio lot in Culver City, Bay was keen to film as much as they could within the real-life Alcatraz, necessitating shuttling the cast and crew between the island and the city for each day of filming. Connery was so annoyed by the necessity of the daily commute that he asked for a cabin to be built on Alcatraz for him. His wish was granted, and the actor thus became the first temporary resident of the island since its closure as a prison in 1963.

Back in San Francisco, the filmmakers found that their centrepiece action scene would be no easier to capture. Although the city has long been associated with car chases, ever since the Steve McQueen vehicle Bullitt featured one of cinema’s most memorable, The Rock’s memorable pursuit between the Connery character, attempting to escape from custody, and the FBI and Goodspeed proved a nightmare to stage. To shut down the two blocks that the scene needed, the filmmakers had to obtain five thousand signatures from local residents giving their assent.

The homeowners drove a hard bargain, asking for everything from valet parking to dry cleaning before they would consent to the filming. Yet despite all this, the moment where John Spencer’s duplicitous FBI director Womack is dangled off the Fairmont hotel by Connery attracted dozens of calls to the police from concerned locals, all of whom feared that someone’s life was in danger.

Despite these issues, and others, which included an (appropriately?) disenchanted Ed Harris as the film’s conflicted antagonist Brigadier General Hummell – “They pay American,” he morosely commented to one journalist when asked why he took the role – the film was eventually premiered in the former recreation area of Alcatraz. It received good reviews, and is to this day Bay’s sole film as director to be “certified fresh“ on Rotten Tomatoes. Even a squabble about the screenwriting credits, in which Bay took out an advert in the trade papers to say "This result is a sham, a travesty. It embarrasses me. No objective person could read Mr. Hensleigh’s shooting draft, compare it to the previous writers’ drafts and come to this conclusion" could not dent the film’s success.

And then, bizarrely, The Rock found unexpected resonance life six years after its release. In September 2002, an enterprising MI6 agent, billed as “a new source on trial with direct access”, sent confidential intelligence to “a small number of very senior readers” including the Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. This information detailed the frightening-sounding news that Saddam Hussein’s administration had perfected the production of deadly chemical and biological agents, which could be transported in glass vials. It was yet another reason why the Iraq war had to be pursued, the source implicitly claimed.

It did not take very long for a senior figure in MI6 to note the similarities between the source’s intelligence and the events depicted within The Rock. As the Chilcot report drily noted, “It was pointed out that glass containers were not typically used in chemical munitions; and that a popular movie has inaccurately depicted nerve agents being carried in glass beads or spheres.”

Further investigations were made, and by October 2002, MI6 began to wonder if their source was as useful as they had hoped. The report stated that “The questions about the use of glass containers for chemical agents and the similarity of the description to those portrayed in The Rock had been recognised by SIS. There were some precedents for the use of glass containers but the points would be pursued when further material became available.”

By the end of 2002, the information that MI6 had been given had been rubbished. Chilcot’s report decided that “By 6 December, questions were being asked within SIS about whether there was any further reporting. It was suggested that that meant “a health warning” on material from SIS’s source. Following further contacts, doubts were expressed on December 9 within SIS about the reliability of the source and whether he had ‘made up all or part of the account of his dealings’ with the sub-source.’

Bay, Bruckheimer and the film’s cast have never publicly commented on the association, but the film’s original screenwriter David Weisberg despairingly said “anybody in the poison gas community would immediately know that this was total bulls-t – such obvious bullsh-t” and that MI6 “didn’t do apparently the most basic fact-checking or vetting of the information. If you’d just asked a chemical weapons expert, it would have been immediately obvious it was ludicrous.”

Weisberg’s research had shown that depicting deadly chemical gas on screen was visually uninteresting, as it would simply be two colourless substances mixing with one another. The filmmakers therefore came up with the visually striking image of the gas being contained in green glass capsules, to move away from the “invisible and boring” mundanities of real-life. Weisberg was horrified that his inventions ended up becoming part of the stated intelligence that led to the Iraq war. As he said, “it’s not a nice legacy for the film… it’s tragic that we went to war.”

It is in keeping with the cheerfully absurd world created by the film that such a development does not feel especially unlikely. The Sorkin-assisted paranoia regarding the nefarious workings of the government and military has proved to be justified by further events. It is just a shame that we shall not see a continuation of them. Although Bay talked occasionally about a sequel that would follow Goodspeed on the run from the government after becoming privy to Mason’s stolen national secrets, not least the true identity of JFK’s assassin, Connery’s retirement and death put paid to such a project.

This remains a pity. The chemistry between him and Cage is sufficiently lively to make viewers wish that they had collaborated more than once. Still, we must be grateful for this unwittingly prescient slice of pulp grandiosity, with a winningly healthy sense of its own ridiculousness. As Connery remarks at one point, “I’ve been in jail for longer than Nelson Mandela. Perhaps you want me to run for president.”