And if you believe the director it was intentional: http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/05/08/the-filmcast-after-dark-ep-98-the- making-of-torque-and-the-imagery-of-kick-ass-guest-joseph-kahn-directo r-of-torque/
Edit: Or you can read the transcript I've typed up below.
Here's a piece of the first 4.5 minutes of the interview with the director, Joseph Kahn, that the /filmcast had. David Chen, and Devindra Hardawar are two of the interviewers.
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Chen: So Torque is generally regarded as one of the best-worst action films of all time, in my opinion anyway. I have a feeling that this designation doesn't bother you too much. Can you talk about what you were trying to do, when you were creating Torque.
Kahn: Well you know what, it doesn't bother me, and I can completely understand where that's coming from, cause it was kind of my intention. It wasn't exactly the movie I wanted to make, but I think it's like 75% of the movie I wanted to make. Believe it or not, it's kinda crazy what I wanted to make. Usually I think I'm pretty good at marketing, cause I come from a music video/ commercial background, and in my head when I got this film, I turned it down a couple times, but finally in my head I just suddenly thought, I hate these *beep* Fast and Furious films, I just hate them with a passion. I think they're shot terribly, they're lit terribly, the actors are *beep* wack. There's just this whole pseudo-cool homo-eroticism going through the whole thing -
Hardawar: You don't live your life a quarter mile... a second? (Ed. note: this is an apparently botched reference to a quote from Torque, Ford says, "I live my life a quarter mile at a time," and Shane responds, "that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard." This quote itself is a parody of a line from The Fast and the Furious.)
Kahn: No, I definitely don't live my life a quarter mile a second. The other thing is, I'm an Asian dude, and I'm not really a part of that whole biker culture thing. So I don't really look at it like that's an aspirational model for my life. Also, I know there are Asians that are into that stuff, but I'm not one of those guys that drives around in my Honda Prelude with a giant *beep* speaker in the back. I watch science-fiction films. So the only thing that registered to me, maybe I could do something that's like, in my head I wanted to do with these Fast and Furious movies like what Evil Dead 2 did with horror films. The pisstake version of it. It's gotta be funny, these are stupid *ss movies, but what if I made one that was really *beep* stupid? These people are supposed to be good looking, why don't I cast it really *beep* good looking? These stunts are supposed to be impossible, why don't I make them reeeally impossible? Why don't we just do everything balls to the wall, and let's make it really *beep* short, and really fast. So in my head I made this weird Japanese.. animation.. slash Ice Cube.. *beep* *laughs* -
Hardawar: Oh yeah, it's very anime.
Kahn: Oh and also, this is the other thing, I wanted to put product placement, they always have product placement, so why don't I just keep repeating that, over and over again, and make a joke out of it. So I made this movie, and I remember the studio, when we finally screened it, the marketing person goes -
Chen: I wanna be in that room, by the way -
Hardawar: This is the best movie ever! (clearly comically quoting the studio)
Kahn: *laughs* The marketing person goes, "I get it, you're making a cult movie, I get it, I don't think anyone else is going to get it." And guess what, nobody else got it. *laughs* So what the *beep* was I doing? What was in my head when I decided to make a movie like that in the first place? Because, who is the audience for a movie like that? It entertains the sh*t out of me, but I don't think it really entertained that many other people, I think it turned into this sort of.. it just flew over people's heads. If you look at my music video work at the time, I mean I was putting Wu Tang Clan with dinosaurs, I made a Chemical Brothers video where I animated everybody's lips, I was just really into funny surreal stuff. I just thought, ya know what, if I get to make my first movie, and they're going to give me 30 million dollars, I'm going to go balls to the wall, and try to do as many *beep* crazy things as I can, and see what happens. *laughs*
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I'm a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar.
Get Him to The Greek: 7/10
How to Train Your Dragon 8.5/10
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