Dillon as cop with different mold

MANILA, Philippines - His searing performance as a racist officer in the Oscar-winning Crash earned Matt Dillon an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. In Columbia Pictures’ new action-thriller Takers, Dillon plays another cop but of an entirely different mold.

“No, he’s not like the guy in Crash at all. Although if you are going to play a cop, I would prefer to play one who is messed up,” he laughs. “What I mean is, I prefer to play a character who is human, with flaws. Mostly in movies, criminals are more interesting than cops but in the case of Takers, the character is as interesting as the bad guys. He’s got flaws and I like that. He’s divorced, he’s got a daughter and he’s an adrenaline junkie who is very caught up in his work.”

Dillon’s character, Welles, may be a flawed man but he is also a brilliant detective, dogged in pursuit of a young crew — played by Paul Walker, Hayden Christensen and Idris Elba — who specialise in spectacular heists and are planning a $20-M bank robbery.

“I really liked those guys,” says Dillon of his young co-stars. “And I think they work really well in these roles — they have a lot of style, in fact, I think the movie has a lot of style and with a genre like this, it fits together perfectly. It’s ambitious and there are a lot of characters in the film so it’s a big ensemble cast but I think it works.”

“But I didn’t really get a lot of opportunities to work with them as much as I would have liked — you see them planning their heist and I’m trying to catch them, so for a lot of the film we’re really acting in two separate stories. ”

Director John Luessenhop used multi-camera set ups to film Takers and Dillon found the technique produced great results. “John handled the film really well,” he says. “It’s the only film I’ve done where they had so many cameras going at once.”

Opening today across the Philippines, Takers is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International.