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GENERAL/MEDIA Cinefantastique Vol.8 No.4 Summer 1979 RICHARD DONNER ON SUPERMAN Interview by Don Shay After five years of concerted effort and investor arm-twisting by producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the long-awaited film version of SUPERMAN burst onto the screen last December. Fortunately for the producers, its boxoffice legs survived the post-Christmas slump and proceeds on the multi-million dollar film have long since soared into the nine-digit figures. Much of SUPERMAN's success must be laid at the feet of its director, Richard Donner, a long-time television veteran whose phenomenally successful thriller, THE OMEN, prompted his hiring by the Salkinds. Donner was called in to do the ill-prepared SUPERMAN on short notice when the previously signed director, Guy Hamilton, backed out. With only eleven weeks to prepare, Donner supervised an entire rewrite on the script, hired a new art director, scouted locations, and selected an actor to play the lead role. Two years later, last-minute changes were still being made as the world premiere loomed heavy on the horizon. The following interview took place in Donner's home in January, as the director endeavored to recuperate from the exhausting ordeal. Two years ago, you had just completed THE OMEN and were working on a proposal for a sequel. Then, about two weeks later, it was announced that you'd been signed to direct SUPERMAN. How did that come about? I got a call one day from a European voice that said, "This
is Alexander Salkind. You know who I am?" And I said, "No."
And he said, "I produced THE THREE MUSKETEERS. We're doing SUPERMAN
now, and we've just seen THE OMEN-would you like to do it?" So I
said, "That's flattering, but I'd like to read it first." And
his reaction was, "You don't have to read it. Everybody likes it."
But I said, "Well, I'd feel better if I read it." He was calling
from Europe, but there was a copy of the script over here which they had
sent over-and twenty minutes later I was reading it. I mean, literally,
that's how fast it was here. I called him back later and said that I would
be interested if I could rewrite and bring in a new writer. But they said
they were very happy with the screenplay, and everybody liked it; so I
said, "We had better just forget about it." Meanwhile, though,
they were negotiating with my agent, and my agent called and said, "Boy,
have I got you a deal." I told him I didn't want it. Anyway, it went
on, back and forth, and finally they agreed. So I flew over to Paris and
made the deal. What were your basic objections to the original script? It was a well-written script, quite honestly. But it was a ridiculous
script. For one thing, here was this producer, a guy named Pierre Spengler,
who was going to supervise making this film for the Salkinds, and he had
a 550-page screenplay. Well, number one, I said, "You can't shoot
this screenplay, because you'll be shooting for five years." And
he said "Oh, no. It's fine." I said, "That's totally asinine,"
but that was literally a shooting script and they planned to shoot all
550 pages. You know, 110 pages is plenty for a script, so even for two
features, that was way too much. So they pretty much gave you a free hand to rework the script? They questioned some things, and we fought about things; but I always ended up being the winner. The Salkinds were the only ones involved with the quote-unquote creative end. Spengler was just involved with the finance, or the lack thereof. Since you only had eleven weeks lead time, was the script pretty much in flux during production, or did you have it set? Well, in eleven weeks we shot Brando's Krypton scenes. Then we took a hiatus of three weeks. During that period, we worked on the script, and I went out and scouted locations in the States and Canada and prepared England for the balance. By then, the screenplay was just about finished. There were little things left that I'd call Tom on, or bring him over for-or we'd just improvise it ourselves. Once the relationship developed between Margot Kidder, Christopher Reeve and myself, it became quite easy to improvise within the characterizations. Did DC Comics have much control over the script? They never had total control, contractually. I'll never
forget-one time we got a memo from them with a long list of things you
couldn't do, all from the screenplay. And most of them were silly things,
quite honestly. I mean, you couldn't say "damn" or "hell"-things
like that. How they could have accepted the other screenplay, I
don't know, because that would have been the demise of Superman. Sometimes
I just don't understand this business. I understand that you and Spengler did not get along at all. Why was that? Spengler was the liaison to Alexander Salkind, and he supposedly
had this knowledge of production-but my God, I've been in this business
long enough to know what a producer is, and it was ridiculous for him
to have taken this job. As far as I was concerned, he didn't have any
knowledge at all about producing a film like that. If he'd been smart,
he'd have just laid back and let us do it; but instead, he tried to impose
himself. So, not only did we end up producing it, in a sense, but we also
had to counter-produce what he was doing. It was very difficult.
A number of the press releases indicated you had something like a thousand people and eleven units working for you at one time. Your experience prior to SUPERMAN was primarily in television and relatively small features. How was it, trying to pull all this together? It was a nightmare. And it was a very lonely position to be in,
because I didn't have the back-up team I would have had if I were in America,
like an associate producer, a production manager, and whatnot. In England,
most of the people in those capacities are hired by the producer; so all
those responsibilities really fell on my little office, which was just
myself and later my assistant, Mike Duthie. And of course, Stuart Baird,
my editor, who's a genius, and who also did THE OMEN for me. Were you ever worried about the possibility that today's audiences would just reject the whole concept of Superman as being kind of silly? Every fucking day. Oh, sure. My biggest responsibility to the project, I felt, was somehow having to find some sort of objectivity in visualizing Superman, because everybody has seen him in their own way - either in the reality of a drawing or in the fantasy of their own mind. So I had this tremendous responsibility of trying to find some sort of middle road. Also of jumping the time lap from 1938 to 1978. That was the most difficult flight of them all: not just making him fly, but making him fly through that time warp to be accepted today. And boy, it did my heart good when I saw an audience react the first time. Was there any consideration given to doing it as a period piece? There was at first. But nobody knew what they wanted, really. There's no way I would have done it period. We could have gotten away with a lot more, and it would have been a lot easier, but I don't think it would have done half of what it's doing today. When Superman says, "I'm here to fight for truth, justice, and the American way," usually there's such a laugh that you don't hear Lois say, "You're going to fight every elected politician in this country." I mean, that's it for me - that's why the film has to be "today." You're looking at a former arch-liberal who is finding himself becoming totally conservative as time goes on, because nothing seems to work out there and I'm getting a little fed up. You said you went through many months before
accepting any of the flying scenes. What sorts of things did you try and
then throw out? What do you mean "float them?" We could hang the projector and camera from what we would call a sky hook or an "S" pin, and move them around. Superman wasn't flying, obviously. He had to be in a solid position, so whatever movement we got out of him was limited to a great degree. The camera had to give you the movement of flight. We also used some traveling mattes - blue backing - which I was never happy with. We even did some real flying - flying him on cranes from ridiculous heights. Most of that didn't work. We tried flying a stuntman from a 300-foot crane behind the Golden Gate Bridge miniature. And since the bridge was only about sixty feet long, we had to have him behind the model several hundred feet, and we'd swing him from this crane in a long, sweeping arc. That didn't work. We did some night flying on cranes, though. It was dangerous, and we never should have done it; but thank God, we were lucky. Anyway, those were the modes. We didn't use any back projection at all. We played with it some, but we were never able to pull it off. Is the front projection system you mentioned the Zoptic system? Yes. Zoran Perisic developed it. It has a lot of handicaps and
liabilities, but it far surpasses anything else because of its weight.
Using that, we could zoom either in coordination with the camera or without
- zoom both together, or individually. What we were working on for SUPERMAN
II is a lot more light out of this operation, because we could never get
the proper amount of light. Poor Denys Coop, director of process photography,
would scream and struggle to get an exposure; and he did genius things
with the amount of light we had. But Zoran is aware of this problem, and
we have people working very diligently now, to lick it. What did you use to suspend Christopher Reeve in front of your front projection or blue screens? All kinds of things - anything from wires and cables hung from overhead rigs and stage cranes to what we call pole arms - rigs that came only knee-high, or hydraulic arms that came out of the screen zero degrees from the lens. I understand you had problems with Superman's cape. Yeah, that cape was a bitch. I guess you can't anticipate everything.
We spent months getting our first flying shot, and then we looked at it
and something wasn't right. It was the cape; it didn't move right. So
we had to build all kinds of gimmicks and little things to go under the
cape. We tried electronic movements, bottled air, everything. And
finally Les Bowie came up with the idea of wiring the cape inside like
an umbrella, which we could control with little gears to give a feeling
of flight. But even that was good only from certain angles. Other times
we had to add air and stuff. We had about fifty capes in different weights
and sizes for different lenses and perspective changes. It was endless.
I'd like to throw out half the things I see on the screen now because
I hate the costumes. Of course, only audiences that go three or four times
and study it are ever going to notice. But I see it, and I hate it. I
swear that we could have had a costume that was seamless but, again, that
was a major pre-production decision, before I came on, so we didn't change
it. Sheer stupidity. There were so many things I wanted to do right, but
I couldn't do right then. They had wasted a year's worth of preproduction
work, as far as I was concerned. Boots - I threw out the boots and redesigned
boots, but then finally I had to go with what I had. They were awful.
I had to keep changing them. Sometimes I had the zipper on the side, sometimes
on the back, sometimes on the front, depending on how he was standing.
Those sorts of things were so easily anticipated, but nobody did it. Which of the miniatures was he responsible for? Well, he was responsible for Boulder Dam, but not the reverse end of Boulder Dam, where the little town gets wiped out. He was responsible for the destruction of Krypton models, Air Force One, and a lot in picture two. The backside of Boulder Dam is one of the things you're unhappy with? Yes, very. No fault of anybody, except it's just that the people who were doing it were rushed. I had to have it, and it just wasn't their selling point. Derek should have been doing it. And I didn't have him. That was a tremendous compromise for me. There were rumors during the production, right up to a week before the release, that you were having trouble with the flying effects - that wires were showing and you were throwing away a lot of stuff. Bullshit. I mean, sure, if I wasn't happy, we'd re-do it. I heard all kinds of things about how we were delayed in delivering the picture because you could see the wires. Any filmmaker knows that's stupid. If you see the wires, you rephotograph it. If you rephotograph it and you still see the wires, you paint them out - it can be done. I will say that right up until the time we had to turn it over for printing, we were still out in optical houses for re-dos. I wish I had another six months; I would have perfected a lot of things. But at some point you've got to turn the picture over. Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman were signed before you, weren't they? Yes. You were in on the selection process for Superman? Oh, yes. There was quite a lot of press coverage at the time over who was the latest candidate for the role, ranging all the way from Robert Redford to Bruce Jenner. That was before I came on the picture. It all preceded me. How did you cast Christopher Reeve?
So you were pleased with him? Oh, yeah. And he's a really good actor. I'm not going to say that there's nobody who could have played that part; but as far as I am concerned, there's nobody else who could have. Time Magazine reported that Marlon Brando showed up on the set and wanted to play Jor-El as a "green suitcase." Is that true, or was he putting you on? Marlon's the kind of man that if he can collect his money and not do his deed, he'd be only too happy to do so. I was warned by a good friend of his, Jay Kanter, who is head of production for Fox, that Marlon wanted to play it as a green suitcase, and I said "You're kidding!" Then I spoke to Francis Ford Coppola, because he had just finished a second film with Marlon. He gave me a little hint on how to handle Marlon: "Let him talk, and he'll give you your own answer." So when he came in and said, "You know, maybe I shouldn't like people on Krypton; maybe I ought to look like a bagel" - well, I had already heard about the green suitcase, so I was pretty well set. But the producer almost fainted. Eventually, Marlon talked himself out of it by telling me a story about a child and then relating back to it later. Brando's been known to have some eccentric on-the-set behavior. Did you have any problems with him? I was prepared, but Marlon turned out to be a love. I really enjoyed him totally. He was disciplined and wonderful to be with as the day was long. So all my preparation in that area was totally wasted. The moment he walked on the set he went over and said hello to every guy on the crew. He was never late; he had a good sense of humor; and he worked under trying conditions. He had a touch of the flu, was jetlagged and tired. The set was over 105 degrees, the costume he wore weighed about thirty pounds, and he had a wig which was really uncomfortable - that son-of-a-bitch was really terrific. He never even complained. But one day he said, "I feel terrible. I've got a cold, I've got jet-lag - I'd like to go home." And I said, "I can't stop you, but it's going to cost me a lot of time and money." So he said, "I'll give you a free day." With $3.7 million for two weeks' work, that was damned decent of him. Well, it was, really. Listen, those people bought him for a reason. They didn't buy Marlon Brando the actor; they bought Marlon Brando the name. They bought him to back up their investment, and once he agreed to do the picture, they were able to raise the money on his name. So I don't begrudge the man, not at all. He's totally entitled to that. I should have seen the handwriting on the wall that day, because when I told Spengler about the free day, he said, "Did you get that in writing?" I understand the budget was a secret from everyone, including you. Right. I was never told. Do you have any idea how much the picture cost? I'd say, at this point, you're probably talking $50 to $55 million for both films. Richard Lester reportedly came on the production to mediate between you and the producers. How did that come about? This is really bizarre. Richard Lester had been suing the Salkinds
for his money on THREE and FOUR MUSKETEERS, which he had never gotten.
He told me he's won a lot of his lawsuits, but each time he sued them
in one country, they'd move to another - from Costa Rica to Panama to
Switzerland. So when I took the picture, Richard Lester took me aside
and said, "Don't do it. Don't work for them. I was told not to, but
I did it. Now I'm telling you not to, but you'll probably do it and end
up telling the next guy." Anyway, when I was having so much trouble
with Spengler, the old man [Alexander Salkind] brought Lester in to be
the go-between. Now, I didn't trust Lester, and I told him so. But he
said, "Believe me, I'm only doing it because they're paying me the
money that they owe me from the lawsuit. I'll never come onto your set
unless you ask me; I'll never go to your dailies. I'm just here. I have
to come in a certain number of hours each day. If I can help you in any
way, call me." They tried - many times. But by then, Warners had gotten involved in distribution and one thing they had was the right of director approval. And there were only four names on their list. It was me, Friedkin and Spielberg and maybe someone else. It was just this misplaced loyalty they had toward Pierre, that was their mistake. Monies just flushed away - totally wasted. And that was heartbreaking to me. I hate to see money thrown away when it should've been up there on the screen. None of it was wasted flamboyantly, you know. Nobody lived big or did ridiculous things with it. It was just a total lack of knowledge, that's all. If I were arranging a picture like this, instead of hiring people that were more stupid than I was, so I'd look bright, I'd have hired the brightest people in the whole goddamned world - if for no other reason than to just save me. And he did just the opposite. I can imagine that, in your readings of the script, there must have been a lot of "how-are-we-going-to-do-this" stuff? All the time. Were there any major segments of the script that you had to throw out because you just couldn't do them? No. Just the opposite, really. I added a lot of stuff. We did make concessions, though. I don't recall what they were now, but I remember a lot of times something just couldn't be beaten one way so I would change it. Despite your special Oscar for visual effects, SUPERMAN went largely unrecognized in the Academy Awards nominations this year. I'm just totally disgusted, despondent and have the greatest possible
disrespect for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Not for
me. But how dare this select club of 3800 people look past Geoffrey Unsworth?
If you look at the pictures that were nominated for best cinematography,
it's a fucking sin that his name wasn't up there because his work far
surpasses anything I've seen this year. How dare they treat him
with such disdain and disrespect when that photography outclasses a hundred
times over half the shit they have seen? What a genius of a motion picture
cameraman he was; he was the master. And he didn't even get a goddamned
nomination! I don't believe it. And art direction. They put up pictures
like CALIFORNIA SUITE - duplications of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Big
deal! Just look at what John Barry did for SUPERMAN!
And he wasn't nominated either. At one point, not long before the release, it was reported that you were going to end SUPERMAN I in a cliffhanger. I was, but then I finally decided, "Hey, if SUPERMAN I is a success, they're going to do a sequel. If it ain't a success, a cliffhanger ain't going to bring them to see SUPERMAN II." We'd done what we set out to do, and there was no real way of capping it. And I felt it would hurt the love scene between Lois and Superman in the end if I went on and did that, so I just said the hell with it. How were you going to lead into the second film? Superman was going to leave Hackman and Beatty in the prison, fly up past the camera just as he does, and then I was going to pan up into the sky and pick up the rocket that he had left tumbling. You see it shut off, and you see the Zone of Silence with the three villains in it; then, all of a sudden, the rocket goes past them and there's an atomic explosion, and it blows up the Zone of Silence, freeing Terence Stamp, Jack O'Halloran and Sarah Douglas. Then you see them going to the moon, where they destroy a moon mission - which we've already shot, and it's fantastic. Then they go to Earth and start breaking up the White House and such. But the I figured it was just too much like television -tune in next week, you know - so we chopped it. Aside from what you've mentioned, what else can we look forward to? The three villains come to Earth, and since they have the same molecular strength as Superman, it's therefore three against one. And there's the possibility that Lex Luthor is going to be smart enough to become their agent and represent them. And that Lois may outwit Superman and find out who he is. And he may fall in love with her. And they may make love. What do the DC Comics people have to say about that? They've approved it already. It's done so beautifully. And Superman destroys his father, Jor-El, for the love of a woman. I won't go on from there. How does he destroy his father? By using all the energy from the crystals for another purpose - the crystals in the Fortress of Solitude. SUPERMAN II's going to be a helluva film. There's not a whole lot left to do on it, but what's left could take months - like a major aerial battle between Superman and the three villains, and the destruction of Metropolis. And then there are two or three pivotal scenes with Superman and Lois that are written and ready to go. Not too much, but enough. Is it your best guess that you'll be finishing it up? I'd like to think I'm going to be. I'd be very disappointed if I weren't. Are you going to have to work with Pierre Spengler again? I'd work with him again, but only on my terms. As long as he has nothing to say as the producer, and is just liaison between Mr. Salkind and his money, that's fine. As long as he doesn't interfere in any way, because I just won't go through that again. If they don't want it on those terms, then they've got to go out and find another director - it sure as shit ain't going to be me. Richard Donner argued eloquently for the need to recommence work
on SUPERMAN II by the end of February. Major special effects sequences
had yet to be completed, they were on the verge of losing some of their
prime technicians to other projects, and the sequel's release was locked
in for the summer of 1980. But February came and went without event. Weary
of waiting for the uncommitted sequel, Christopher Reeve signed to star
in Richard Matheson's SOMEWHERE IN TIME for Universal, scheduled to begin
shooting in late May. This action prompted a lawsuit by the Salkinds which
was ultimately settled with the agreement that Reeve would report to Pinewood
for SUPERMAN II by the end of July.
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