We here at Premiere love Joe Carnahan. After he directed the blistering cop drama Narc, we picked him as part of our New Power class of 2004 and we weren't the only ones who were impressed. Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford both wanted him to direct their next projects, Mission: Impossible III and A Walk Among the Tombstones, respectively. But a funny thing happened to Carnahan on his way to the A-list. He quit Mission: Impossible III halfway through pre-production over creative differences and left Ford amongst those tombstones.

Now, he's back with Smokin' Aces, an action comedy that plays like The Usual Suspects as directed by Quentin Tarantino, complete with a diverse cast that reads like Towering Inferno '06 with everyone from Alicia Keys and Ryan Reynolds to Ben Affleck and Jeremy Piven. But as much as we'd like to see Carnahan direct an actual disaster film, we're just happy to see the guy making a movie again his way and we were equally excited to sit down to talk with him about his latest.

PREMIERE: What is Smokin' Aces about?

Jeremy Piven in Smokin' Aces. Click here to see the trailer for Smokin' Aces.

JOE CARNAHAN: You're basically picking up the last 48 hours of this guy's life before he's entering the witness protection program. He's essentially going to snitch out what's left of the deteriorated state that is the mafia. And I based him kind of on the Sinatra model of this entertainer/bag man/we were never sure, but this idea that if Sinatra decided I'm going to parlay how much juice I have in the entertainment world into like a criminal venue, what would happen? And I think you'd wind up tracking mud all over the place, which is what happens in this movie. So you're really picking up where Buddy is, or with Jeremy Piven's character, in those last 48 hours. It's kind of desperate time where deals could be make or break and so you have this kind of proliferation of assassins and ne'er-do-wells kind of descending on the Lake Tahoe region and trying to take him out.

When did you write this thing?

God, I started writing this thing like ten years ago. It was like '93 when I started to mess with this idea because I just read this big thing on Sinatra. And I was really into him at that time, for whatever reason. I had all the Capitol recordings and I was really listening to him. And I had read this thing about him running bag to Cuba for Lucky Luciano and I thought, God, that's fascinating. I actually wrote a script for Warner Bros like four or five years later called Miami and I used a professional ballplayer running — this idea that we're never going to search a star. You can run, you can walk, or you carry on bags to take all this money.

Alicia Keys in Smokin' Aces.

How many guns did you use in this movie?

Good God. We had a Barrett 50 caliber sniper and we had street sweepers. We had nine millimeters, we had pistols, we have shotguns, we had...

And boxes and boxes of bullets.

Boxes and boxes of bullets. That was a lot. A lot.

You mentioned the cinematic influences on this movie and they were unusual choices.

Barton Fink [and Raising Arizona], both Coen Brothers' films, because I think when you're talking about this, the kind of the zeppelin that is Tarantino and kind of looms over this whole genre, and I was never really that influenced by Tarantino. Those guys as filmmakers and just their tone, I've always been deeply influenced by.

In terms of the cast, this is like The Towering Inferno of shoot-'em-up movies. How were you able to cast such a big ensemble of stars?

Right. I got my Shelley Winters, my Red Buttons, they're all in there. (laughs) I think at the end of the day, the script was the script and I think a lot of people, even somebody like Matt Fox, I told him there was nothing left, and they said Matt really wants to do something in the film. And I had been a fan of Matt. I used to watch Party of Five. I think I was one of like four straight men that actually watched Party of Five. But when I talked to him, he said he wants to play Bill [a smaller part in the film].

I think what it was was individually, even as the scenes, the scenes were entertaining and really good. And I think that we're at a point now, man, where there's not a lot of really great screenplays. And I'm not saying Smokin' Aces is a great screenplay. I'm saying it's endlessly entertaining, you know what I mean? And even if you feel like it's like this traveling caravan of nuts, it's like it's still fun to be part of that. And if you know you can get in and get out in a couple of days, why not?