Autobahn is a love story with a twist that lacks originality

Felicity Jones and Nicholas Hoult in Autobahn. Courtesy Italia Film

British actors Nicholas Hoult and Felicity Jones have starred in three of Hollywood's biggest franchises. He was in Mad Max: Fury Road and the recent X-Men prequels, playing Beast. She just took the lead in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, as the intrepid Jyn Erso, who steals the plans for the Death Star. Now they're together in the rather more home-grown – though no less pulsating – affair, Eran Creevy's thriller Autobahn.

A love story with a twist, Hoult plays Casey, a young American drug dealer working the nightclub scene in Cologne, who gives up his lucrative profession to be with his new girlfriend Juliette (Jones). But when he discovers she’s terminally ill, needing money for a kidney transplant, he returns to the only life he knows to help her.

“He’s a nutcase,” laughs Jones. Hoult, however, sympathises. “If you’re in love with someone…and someone said: ‘There’s a chance’, then of course you would take it.”

The touchstone here appears to be action films from the late 1980s and 1990s. "Eran's a big fan of Tony Scott, that era of movies," says 27-year-old Hoult. "He wanted to make something along those lines." In particular, Scott's 1993 lovers-on-the-run classic True Romance, which starred Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette.

"I loved True Romance and it felt like there's a bit of a homage to that film in the work we do [here]," says 33-year-old Jones.

Certainly, those old-school movies featured larger-than-life performances (remember Christopher Walken in True Romance?), and Autobahn is no different, with "the Sirs", as Hoult calls them – Sir Ben Kingsley and Sir Anthony Hopkins – both chewing the scenery. Kingsley plays the flamboyant Turkish gangster Casey works for; Hopkins is the drugs kingpin he later steals from (if you've ever wanted to see the Welsh legend do an impression of Sylvester Stallone, this is the film for you).

“There’s a scene towards the end of the film where it is the four of us, and that was a pretty extraordinary day, where you have these two greats literally going head-to-head in a scene,” recalls Jones.

“What’s fascinating about them is they have very different acting styles, but…they never rest of their laurels. They never take it for granted and even from take to take, you don’t know quite what they’re going to do at any one moment.”

What really impresses, however, are the driving sequences. Creevy already proved his mettle on his 2013 movie Welcome to the Punch, another British-made action-thriller with all the chutzpah of a Hollywood studio movie. And it was the lure of high-velocity stunts that drew his leading man in.

"I grew up loving cars and action movies," admits Hoult, who knows a thing or two about stunt driving after starring in the Mad Max: Fury Road.

On Autobahn, the stunt team were "very inclusive", he says, in letting him perform some of the behind-the-wheel scenes. With scenes shot on a yet-to-open section of autobahn in Germany, Hoult reports that on the very first day he was careering around the set, leaving the real drivers impressed. "They said they could tell I was fairly capable or stupid, depending how you look at it."

For the more dangerous stunts, Hoult’s car had a “pod” on the roof, with a stunt driver controlling the actions of the vehicle and the actor simply miming the driving. “It’s like being on a rollercoaster without the rails – you’re not sure what’s going to go next,” he says.

“Then there would be other times when it was me flying along, weaving in and out of cars – living the dream for every boy essentially.”

He didn’t even get a speeding ticket.

• Autobahn opens in cinemas tomorrow