It’s been a while since Kurt Russell’s “Escape from New York” and “Backdraft” days, but the veteran actor proves he still has what it takes to command a presence on the big screen.

Kurt Russell stars in Wolfgang Petersen’s “Poseidon,” the action thriller opening this weekend. “Poseidon” co-stars Josh Lucas, Richard Dreyfuss, Emmy Rossum, and Mia Maestro in this story about a group of cruise ship passengers who find themselves in a race for survival after a rogue wave tips the entire boat over. Russell plays Robert Ramsey, a former mayor of New York City whose goal is to save his daughter (Rossum) from peril.

Below, Kurt talks about the action feature in the interview below.

Q: So you guys got pretty wet…

KURT: Yeah! (laughs)

Q: We understand that a lot of the film was shot on a soundstage and so did that give it a feel of old Hollywood by not doing everything via computer imagery?

KURT: Yeah. It was really a risk on their part, the risk being a controlled environment costs a lot more. It costs a lot of money to do it. It’s very difficult to do it live action as opposed to on a computer.

What’s interesting was that the sets we were on – I think the most difficult part about them was that we all got sick. We all got very sick at one time or another. It was the most difficult movie I was involved with in terms of illness. I had H. influenza, which I didn’t know for a while so I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I also got pneumonia. Fortunately, the way my schedule worked out, when I got pneumonia, I was able to get 10 days off so I got healthy again. And [also], some physical injuries. I think everybody though at one time or another got sick.

Q: The action in this movie starts almost immediately and we don’t get too much backstory in regards to your character and your character’s daughter. Was it intentional to make this more of an action feature rather than character?

KURT: I think one of the interesting things about it is one of the things you can look at and say you have lots of questions about these people. They don’t know anything about each other, really. Some of them don’t even know their names. That struck me as interesting as I was reading the script because I think it can often be true in our lives that the four or five most critical hours of our life could be spent with people you don’t know at all. You could be entirely dependent on them to save your life at some point and you don’t know anything about them. You just know little things here and there. I didn’t think it was entirely critical that you knew everything about them.

Q: So how would you describe your character’s relationship to his daughter?

KURT: I think he has a simple overprotective relationship with his daughter. He’s just overprotective and in this journey, she obviously becomes someone who is aware of the fact that he was overprotective. At the very end, he remains true to that person.

Q: You have a lot of scenes with young Jimmy Bennett. Being somebody who worked as a child actor, did you feel like you were a mentor to him at all?

KURT: No, I don’t. I never looked at things that way really. Just because someone has done something for a long time doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily aware of what they are doing, let alone maybe that they’re not very good at it. Usually, when you do it for a long period of time, you get good at it. I find that as I go along, I like to look to the other actor in any scene to spur me on and I like watching people. I have a tendency to look at them and see what I like. That makes me feel like a good area to go to.

Q: How much suspension of disbelief do you have to give up when you watch a film like this? It’s really easy to nitpick different situations and scenarios…

KURT: Totally. I think these movies are built on that. For instance, a movie to me that is pretty flawless, and a movie I had a lot to do with, with the director and as a writer, was “Breakdown.” That’s the kind of movie in my estimation that you get everything right. You get it right because I want that audience to do that. I want the audience to finally, at the end of the day, say, “I’m run out man. At this point, I’ve thought of everything I can think of and I can feel just like this guy.” In this movie, I like that you can have 20 choices. You always have these choices to make and you make them and move on. I actually think in real life, if you were in this situation, it’s going to be a lot more like that. You won’t have time to think of the right thing to do. You’re only going to think about something where you see a way out and you go. The big decision.

"Poseidon" opens in theaters this Friday.