Tom: …when you've stared at a movie for so long in rough cut, and as you know we didn't preview this film [Superman], we didn't have time.
D: I believe only Newsweek and Time had seen the picture, in August.
Tom: Yeah. Every movie that you do, and if you've got a composer that's any good, when you get on to the stage, all of a sudden the picture just comes alive.
  How do you think Superman would've turned out if Guy Hamilton had stayed onboard?
Tom: I'm extremely fond of Guy who did three James Bond movies, I know him very, very well. He was very loyal to me. I think Guy would've been a disastrous choice for Superman; he's very sophisticated and a very cynical man.
Dick Donner really believes in the myth and if you're going to write these things properly, the ones that work like Spider-man, or the first Batman, you have to get inside the material, you have to believe it, and if you stand outside it and make it campy or comment on it, it doesn't work. Conversely, Dick wouldn't be right for James Bond.
  I'm not sure of that…
Tom: No, no, what Dick completely lacks is the cynicism of Bond, the one line wit, that kind of thing. Dick can do action as well as any other director whoever did it but Guy's attitude to life, and the sophistication made him ideally suited for Bond but not for this.
D: Non-Brits can't do Bond?
  Oh sure. Who's the guy who did Zorro? Isn't he an American?
  Martin Campbell? [NOISE -- Tom didn't hear me]
Tom: Harry Saltzman tried twice to hire an American as Bond.
It was a complete accident that Guy didn't direct the picture when they decided to move it from Italy to England. Guy couldn't go because he was a tax exile. A lot of people back then were. The British rate was up to 90%. Somebody I know very well who loved England more than life itself: Michael Caine moved over here because he couldn't afford to live there anymore. He likes to do two pictures a year, actually four pictures here if he could. After the first film he said he was giving 92% to the British taxman, and it's absolutely insane. If you worked for an American production…you became an illegal foreign resident and didn't pay taxes.
D: How did you first meet Donner and first worked together?
Tom: You know the famous story, and it's true; he called me at five in the morning and said I'm doing Superman and so are you and the girl's coming around to your house with the scripts, and I said no. The next day, I went over to his house, and he was dressed in the Superman outfit. He came running at me across the lawn and said if you put the suit on you'll do it, just put the suit on and you'll do it. That's what I mean about Dick being right for the material.

There was a time when we were, and I think it was a couple of months before shooting that Dick and I were at the studio very late at night. He had a couple of joints and I had a third of Jack Daniels and we were driving back into London. We had a driver. Anyway, Dick says, "What are you thinking?" I said, "I'm thinking we don't have a Superman; we don't have a Lois; I'm thinking we are presiding over the greatest financial disaster in the history of film that's what I'm thinking."
Anyway, the driver lets Dick out on Flood Street, (where I moved in later with him) and Eddie, our driver, took me back to the car lot. I get out and I say to him, "Eddie, would you give the two men who were just sat in the backseat of your car 40 million to do two films?"

And he said, "No, sir, no I wouldn't."

I called Dick and said "Even Eddie wouldn't give us the money".
D: Did you read Puzo's script?
Tom: Never read them. Bob Benton who was one of the later writers along with the Newmans and is a very good friend of mine said, "Don't bother."
D: I think Lois was a weather girl.
Tom: I don't know. It was very transparent and a very good idea by the Salkinds, because they were trying to raise money; to take a James Bond director, even though I think he was miscast, and Mario Puzo, and give a heck of a lot of money to Brando and Hackman so they could go to the 'Cannes film festival' and get people to invest.

 


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