'Shoot 'Em Up,' Mr. Director

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Writer-director (and Rockville native) Michael Davis is 46 years old and, especially with his gray hair and small round eyeglasses, looks like a younger Steven Spielberg. But he has the energy and enthusiasm of a teenager and acts like a girl who just met Prince Charming at her first ball.

"I feel like a Cinderella story," the director excitedly says, sitting in the Ritz-Carlton Georgetown earlier this week.

Most of Mr. Davis' films, such as "100 Girls" and "100 Women," have been straight-to-home-video releases, but "Shoot 'Em Up," which opens in theaters today, is a high-profile action flick starring one of today's most sought-after actors, Clive Owen.

After 17 years of struggle, Mr. Davis is both enjoying his new-found fame and feeling apprehensive about it. "I worry about blowing it or staying at this level because it's so fun to work with people of this caliber," he says.

Mr. Davis, with his background in independent teen comedies, might seem like an odd choice to make the action flick to end all action flicks. Clive Owen plays Mr. Smith, a mysterious squatter who gets caught in the middle of a shootout and ends up delivering a baby and protecting it from a group of goons headed by Paul Giamatti. The film is 90 minutes of nearly nonstop action, with almost all the back story and character development revealed during shootouts.

It's an action film and an over-the-top sendup of an action film that's funny and violent in equal measure.

So it seems odd that it was written and directed by the same mind behind the 1997 Keri Russell romcom "Eight Days a Week."

"I would love to try to take the action movie but add that indie film voice/spirit," he says. "The great thing about the action movie is if you give everybody the candy that they want, you can sneak in the other odd stuff and the movie won't suffer. It'll actually be better."

In fact, "Shoot 'Em Up" turns out to be a very personal film.

"I just went with my gut; this is me," Mr. Davis says. "There's definitely a crude side to me. I like telling dirty jokes. I'm not a classy guy. I don't look good in a suit. But there's also a side of me that's kind of smart."

That came through even in his "raunchy, R-rated teen movies," he says. One critic said "Eight Days a Week" felt like Woody Allen-meets-"American Pie."

Mr. Davis is the kind of guy whose wife tells him not to tell that joke at the dinner table, but one with an artsy side he tries to subvert "because I don't want to sound too pretentious."

No matter what kind of film he's working on, one constant remains: He always throws himself into the script. Like Mr. Smith in "Shoot 'Em Up," for example, he hates older men in ponytails. (Mr. Smith shoots one right off a villain's head.)

"If you can put those little truths about yourself in the movie, a movie that's so larger than life that it is a genre movie, you find it more truthful because you've put little bits of yourself into it," he says. "I learned in these little movies to try to have an identity, to try to have a voice. To be more specific to reflect you as a filmmaker. Good or bad, it ultimately makes the films more interesting."

After graduating high school in Rockville, Mr. Davis majored in illustration at New York's prestigious Parsons School of Design. "I had a teacher that said our mistakes are our style," he recalls. "You look at Woody Allen's movies, they're not very cinematic, they're not very cutty, there's not much camera movement, there's no cinema to those movies. Is it a mistake or is it a style?"

"Shoot 'Em Up" may be a genre flick, but it's also one of the most original films of the year. So it's no surprise to hear Mr. Davis referencing such singular filmmakers as Mr. Allen.

"Maybe you can't categorize the tone," he says of his genre-bending film, "but ultimately that's a good thing. When you see a Wes Anderson movie, it's a Wes Anderson movie. It's not a Fellini movie, it's not Woody Allen, it's a Wes Anderson movie. That's always what I strive for, even in my little indie teen romantic comedies. If you have a voice and a movie is reflective of a person's personality, that's better than doing a studio formula movie."

Mr. Davis returned to the District after he graduated from Parsons a semester early to work for the stop-motion animation company Broadcast Arts, which designed the early MTV logos. But he left for good to attend the University of Southern California film school soon afterward.

That doesn't mean he hasn't kept his connections to the city, though. His brother runs the big District firm Davis Construction, which his father founded. And he makes regular visits to a Redskins bar in Los Angeles, "where they sing 'Hail to the Redskins' every time they score."