Philly-based film hits its targets - in Vancouver

BEVERLY HILLS - There's an early scene in the film "Shooter" when a rookie FBI agent (played by Michael Pena) looks up at the Broad Street offices of the

Daily News

and Inquirer, then heads inside to check out the site of a possible crime scene.

The next time you see him, he's in Vancouver, poking around an abandoned upstairs loft.

Save for a pivotal scene in front of Independence Hall, most of the street and interior scenes in the film, which opens today, were shot in British Columbia, though the story takes place in Philadelphia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Washington, D.C. and the Horn of Africa.

Logistics and staying within budget were the biggest challenges of bringing the story of Bob Lee Swagger from the pages of a bestselling novel to the big screen, says director Antoine Fuqua. Besides working within a $60 million budget - relatively small for an action-packed thriller - Fuqua had to juggle multiple film crews and shoot a major scene on top of a frozen glacier. He also had to convince the National Park Service to let him stage an attempted presidential assassination in front of Independence Hall.

"That didn't go over well," the director of "Training Day" said with a chuckle. "They didn't want us to shoot there." He credits the local FBI offices with helping make it happen.

"I can't tell you how amazing the FBI in Philadelphia was," he said. "They never said 'no' to me. They actually hung out on set with me sometimes, they showed me how to lay out the Secret Service scene. They let me fly helicopters in between buildings."

Starring Mark Wahlberg and based on the Stephen Hunter novel "Point of Impact," the film centers on a top military sniper who comes out of retirement to help prevent a presidential assassination only to find himself framed as the one who pulled the trigger. The large cast includes Danny Glover as a retired colonel, Ned Beatty as a corrupt senator and Kate Mara, who played Heath Ledger's daughter in "Brokeback Mountain," as the widow of Swagger's spotter and best friend.

Wahlberg, fresh off his Oscar-nominated performance in Martin Scorsese's "The Departed," likes to compare Bob Lee Swagger to a character from another Scorsese film - Travis Bickle of "Taxi Driver."

"Doing this one was a no-brainer in my opinion," the actor said during an interview with reporters in early March at a Beverly Hills hotel. "It was much more like Travis Bickle than it was 'The Terminator.' It's kind of like 'The Fugitive,' it's kind of like 'Three Days of the Condor,' it's kind of like 'Rambo.' These are the kinds of movies that I love watching, that I grew up watching."

A lot of other actors apparently felt the same way. According to producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the film was in development for years, with Robert Redford, Sylvester Stallone, Tommy Lee Jones, Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves each attached to star at one point.

Di Bonaventura, who got his MBA from Wharton in 1986, took up its case when he landed at Paramount a couple of years ago and then-president Sherry Lansing asked him if there were any projects he wanted to tackle.

"I told her I know how to do this one," said di Bonaventura, who's also producing the big-budget "Transformers" movie due out this summer. "Bob Lee is one of these great characters with his own internal sense of what's right and what's wrong, and that's appealing to everyone."

The film also marks Wahlberg's first film release after his Academy Award nomination. Long known as a hard-working actor, the former rapper and underwear model threw himself into the role of Swagger with extra fervor, learning how to shoot targets spot-on from a distance of 1,000 yards and memorizing not only his lines but that of his co-stars.

"I always felt like I kind of snuck into this business, just tiptoed my way through and the next thing I know I found myself having a career," Wahlberg said. On the "Shooter" set, he continued, "I never wanted to show up and not know exactly what was going on, that was a fear of mine. I just had so much dialogue, so I learned it like a play. I would literally take the script and read it every day, read my lines out loud and have somebody read it with me."

Though he has reportedly agreed to do another project with Scorsese, an HBO film set in Atlantic City, Wahlberg insists that the Oscar attention won't influence the way he chooses his future projects.

"People are always asking if I expected [the nomination]. Why would I expect it? It never happened before," he said. "They think now I'm only going to do movies I can be nominated for. That's just not how you make your decisions." *