Richard Donner
Directing is Believing
A veteran filmmaker adds his touch of tender realism to a beautiful tale of medieval fantasy, the love story of a heroic knight wolf and his lovely Ladyhawke
By LEE GOLDBERG
 Etienne Navarre is a dashing knight and Isabeau of Anjou is his breathtakingly beautiful lover—and boy, do they have problems. She's cursed to be a hawk by day and he, a wolf by night. The only time they ever see each other is during that split second of transformation at sunrise and sunset.
It puts a real strain on their relationship. It also presents the kind of bizarre situation that legends are made of—and movies. Director Richard (Superman) Donner, ably assisted by Rutger (Blade Runner) Hauer and Michelle (Scarface) Pfeiffer and Matthew ( WarGames) Broderick, has turned that "high concept" into Ladyhawke, a medieval fantasy the director has championed through three years of rewriting, false starts, and casting snags.
In December, Donner was simultaneously supervising the final editing of Ladyhawke and hurriedly directing Goonies, a secrecyshrouded children's adventure tale conceived by Steven Spielberg, written by Chris (Gremlins) Columbus (STARLOG #86) and targeted for a summer premiere.
"I'm utterly exhausted," groans Donner, clad in faded jeans, battered Nikes and an American High sweatshirt. His office, Steven Spielberg's old digs at the Burbank Studios, is cluttered with kid stuff—toy race cars, a pinball machine, a Pluto clock, airplanes, rubber balls, Superman dolls and candy.
"I have never been so tired in my life," Donner says, running his fingers through his greying hair, "but boy, I'm a happy son-of-a-bitch. "
While shooting Ladyhawke, he fell in love with the producer, Lauren (Mr. Mom) Shuler, who "discovered" the Ladyhawke project and, Donner says, "didn't let up on me about the film, she persevered. And, six months into the making of Ladyhawke, instead of fighting with my producer, I fell in love with her."
More than three years ago, Shuler and the Ladd Company sent Donner three scriptstwo comedies and Ladyhawke, written by first-timer Edward Khmara (who has since written Wolfgang Petersen's Enemy Mine). Sean Connery and Dustin Hoffman were interested in the fantasy, but progress had slowed. It needed work. And it needed a catalyst—a strong director to take it over.
"I didn't think it was a very good script, but it was a good idea. There was a passage in it, when the monk [eventually played by Leo McKern] explains the story of the cursed lovers. I started crying because it was the most beautiful story of unrequited love," Donner recalls. "So, I got excited about Ladyhawke, called Laddy, [Alan Ladd, Jr., head of the Ladd Company, STARLOG #55] and I said, 'Yes, I'll do it, but it needs a major rewrite first.' "
The problem with the original script was that Donner didn't believe it. As a director, he can't do a film unless he can convince himself that, no matter how improbable the concept, the story is true.
"The original script had lots of monsters in it," he observes. "If you can believe your story, you can make your audience believe it. I didn't believe the story with all these monsters and things. I believed the impossible love angle. I mean the curse itself crosses the line of believability. I felt if you really got to be moved by the story and caught up in it, you had to believe in it. Seeing the monsters and the horrible things which live beneath the earth, it crossed the line, it broke the word 'verisimilitude,' which is a word I love. Superman was made on the word verisimilitude and Goonies is being made on the same word."
Donner hired David (Blade Runner) Peoples (STARLOG #58) and Michael (The Hunger) Thomas to recraft Khmara's story, which chronicles the efforts of the lovers, teamed with a young thief, to punish the evil bishop who placed the curse upon them and then, somehow, to break it.
The Peoples/Thomas script was "a smashing job, a very good job," but not good enough. Peoples dropped out and Thomas penned another version. Donner was still dissatisfied and coaxed Tom (Diamonds are Forever) Mankiewicz (STARLOG #69), whom he had worked with polishing the scripts for Superman I & II to take a shot at Ladyhawke.
"Tom is a dear friend and he snapped some of the story back where we got carried away. We had been too close to it. He also gave us the humor and enhanced the loving pan of the relationship between Navarre and Isabeau," Donner says. "Then, the Ladd Company decided not to make the movie. They were going through some bad problems at the time."
Casting "Ladyhawke"
So, Donner set Ladyhawke aside and tackled The Toy, a comedy which starred Richard Pryor and Jackie Gleason, an experience "I did not enjoy," he says. "But I learned a valuable lesson: never give up final cut. The picture you see is not the picture I made. But, I'm glad it made money and everybody is happy."
The Toy behind him, he dusted off Ladyhawke.
"Laddy is a dear friend and he let the project fall back into our hands," Donner explains. "We started working with Tom again and realized we had a good thing going. The script was falling into shape beautifully and we decided to shoot it in Italy."
The film they were going to make hardly resembled the screenplay with which Shuler had enticed Donner several years before.
"It was totally different. I feel sorry for Khmara. I think he's a good writer and he obviously came up with a wonderful idea. It's too bad somebody didn't go out and make his movie. But, if I was going to make a movie, that wasn't what I wanted to make," he says. "I'm sure he's not happy, I haven't heard from him, but I don't think he likes it. He's a good writer, he's going to be a major talent and I wish him a lot of luck. But, just the fact that we brought in other people to rewrite his material has got to hurt him."
Donner and Shuler, armed with a "believable" screenplay, began scouting for actors.
"Before I got involved, Sean Connery and Dustin Hoffman were going to do this movie together," Donner explains. "Sean would have been Navarre and Dustin wanted to play Phillipe, the con-man. They would have been wonderful, but there was no way I could get the two of them," Donner says. "It would have changed the budget profile tremendously. It's a small budget, but when you say $15 million dollars is small, it almost makes you sick to your stomach. Anyway, Connery was going to do that Bond thing [Never Say Never Again, which Donner had declined because he didn't want to direct a 'big, major action piece'] and I couldn't get an answer from Dustin."
Hoffman wasn't certain whether he wanted to do Ladyhawke or not and, finally, "We were right down to the wire with him, talking day and night for weeks, when I finally just gave up," Donner remembers. "But, it ended up for the best. We cast Matthew (WarGames) Broderick. I'm thrilled because I don't think anyone could have played it as well as Matthew.
"My sister was the first one to mention him to me. She said, `He's wonderful but too young.' Then, I went to see him in Brighton Beach Memoirs. He just destroyed me. I said, `He's going to change the whole story, but it will make it so much richer, cleaner, fresher.' He brought a very fresh, naive approach to the role whereas Dustin would have probably played it a few steps back. Dustin still would have been a hustler and street urchin, but he would have been a man, his life would have been exposed to him already."
Rutger Hauer seemed, to Donner, a natural choice for the role of Navarre. "Think," Donner says. "How many actors are there around who could play that romantic, macho, ballsy hero riding a black horse and carrying a sword—and make it believable?"
Michelle Pfeiffer—now starring in John Landis' Into the Night—won her part as Isabeau with some inspired cleverness during the screen test.
"I saw some film on Michelle, Grease II or something," Donner recalls. "I thought she was very pretty and did a fairly good job. I don't think anyone gave her much support in doing that particular part. I was back in Europe. We had a wonderful casting lady here and whenever she had anybody interesting, she would tape them, not a reading, though. Talking. Interviewing. Rapping.
"To me, I can learn more about an actress or actor from just talking with them than having them do a scene. So, the casting lady sent a tape over and Michelle had prepared a little scene.
"And at its very end, Michelle said, 'By the way, this is my impression of Ladyhawke' and she had this little parakeet that she had brought in and they cut to a close-up of the bird. She had us on the floor in hysterics. She had prepared, she did something interesting, she was energetic. So, we said terrific, let's go with her. She's a wonderful actress and breathtakingly beautiful. She has an unbelievable career ahead of her. She's a real Carole Lombard type.
Sequelizing "Ladyhawke"
Now that Ladyhawke is behind him and in release this month, Donner is worried about how it will fare against other spring releases. It's got a built-in failing—it's a difficult film to classify and, therefore, a difficult film for which to create an advertising campaign.
"Selling the picture is the biggest problem we're having," he says. "I don't know how to sell it, I really don't. It isn't sword and sorcery. It isn't comedy. It's a medieval, action-adventure love story with humor. It encompasses so many things."
It's also predictable, from the opening frame to the closing titles. And Donner knows it.
"I always make predictable movies," he announces. "I think a love story is unpredictable if they die at the end or they don't get together. The hell with it—I don't want to make a movie like that. I like predictable movies. Superman is predictable. Inside Moves is predictable. The Toy is predictable. Ladyhawke is predictable. I get a tremendous charge out of the happiness at the picture's end. For me, happiness at a film's end is terribly predictable and I love it. I like to walk out of a movie being up and elated and a happy son-of-a-bitch. I can't stand going to a movie and coming out depressed and annoyed and saying the picture didn't really have an ending or why did they have to kill them? I couldn't handle a movie like Testament where you leave the theater and cry for two days."
Even The Omen, Donner's first big-screen hit about a sinister child who may or may not be the Anti-Christ, had a happy ending.
"Sure, it had an up ending," he explains. "There's that little funny face staring into the camera giving you a big smile. It's scary, but it was an up. When I first read it, The Omen had cloven-hoofed people and devil-gods and I said, 'Lees treat this story like it's real.' Take somebody and have all these terrible coincidences happen to him, driving him [Gregory Peck] insane, and end on a note where everybody dies. Then, the little kid turns and looks into the camera.
"I love that little boy, Harvey Stephens. He was the funniest little guy and he had never acted before. So, I did a second take and just before he turned, I said, 'Look severe, look angry, and DON'T YOU LAUGH,' " Donner elaborates. "And he kept fighting the laugh and we ended up with this wonderful smile. I said, `That's it!' And everybody said, 'Don't do that, you'll ruin the movie. He's laughing at the movie.' Everybody fought me. I felt what the smiling boy was saying was, Is this all true? Has this been a big put-on? Am I the Devil?' At the first screening, when he turned, they all gasped, because he was alive. And then, he smiled, and they began screaming and cheering. It was perfect for me."
It must have been perfect for a great many other people as well. The Omen was an enormous hit and led to Donner being hired to helm Superman. Both those films have inspired pairs of sequels, something Donner has mixed feelings about.
"If the sequels mean they like my work enough to copy it, I'm thrilled. I've never seen a good sequel to my films, but maybe that's ego. The only thing I saw good in any sequel was in Superman II, and that was the twothirds of it that I did and not the bomb that Richard Lester made out of it, as far as I'm concerned," Donner says. "We made Superman I and II at the same time. We did all the Gene Hackman stuff. I would love to have finished it. The Omens—my partner [Harvey Bernhard] made them—I wish they had been made differently. But at that point, The Omen had turned my career around and I didn't want to go back and do another Omen."
And what about the possibility of a Ladyhawke follow-up?
"If they wanted to make a sequel to Ladyhawke," Donner comments, "I would probably want to executive-produce it and find some super young director to bring something fresh to it. I don't think I could bring anything fresh to it and I don't think it would be a smart thing to do. And for me, every picture is such an individual challenge because it becomes a part of your psyche and personality and you run with it and start to put things in it that are you. Once it's done, it's done. It's boro. It has gone to college."
Designing "Ladyhawke"
Donner got his moviemaking education in TV, helming classic episodes of The Twilight Zone and other series, even working on shows like Gilligan's Island.
"I reshot the pilot for them," Donner says without a hint of reticence. He also admits, minus the slightest trace of embarrassment, to directing many of the subsequent episodes of Gilligan's Island. "I'm not embarrassed about anything I ever did in my life except a girl I knew in Detroit once," he laughs.
"They were wonderful shows when I was doing them. Every once in awhile, if you really sit there and analyze Gilligan's Island, there's some interesting stuff going on behind them. There was a lot of sociology snuck into those shows. It was very profound in a very silly, stupid way. The producer could have been a great propagandist during the war."
He continued in TV, directing such diverse fare as Kojak and Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic. "I was very happy, I was thrilled to be working in TV," Donner says. "I was selling pilots like crazy, doing movies of the week and specials. I was one happy son-of-abitch. I was amazed I was doing them. When the opportunity came along to do movies, I was in the position to capitalize on it."
He was applying the finishing touches to Ladyhawke when Spielberg called up, and "said he had this wonderful story [Goonies] and would I please, please read it?
"Well, I went home and read it. I was laying in bed laughing and I thought it was so cute, so charming, it's going to be really easy, too. Just a couple of kids, I can knock this off, have a wonderful time doing it, and relax," the director explains. "What I thought would be a snap has turned out to be, including Superman, the most difficult film I've ever been involved with. At times, I just want to go through the roof. I can't tell you much about the plot, only that it's about a bunch of wonderful kids in a small town. There are a number of wonderful physical effects, not opticals.
"Goonies is also the best-designed picture I have ever worked on," he adds. "I'm working with a genius, a designer named Michael Riva."
Donner discovered Riva's work in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, a film the director says he "absolutely loves.
"I saw Riva's work in Buckaroo Banzai and I said, 'I want that guy.' God, I loved that film! It was great!" Donner exclaims. "I think that 20th Century Fox shit on it. It should have gone through the roof. It should be playing in every theater in the country. I saw it in Westwood and I thought it would be the biggest picture of the year, I mean the kids will fine up for this one. It's a classic. I just don't think it was sold properly; I don't think it was introduced to the world in the right way. I still love it.
"I laughed, cheered, jumped. At first, I didn't know what I was seeing. It took me a few minutes to get into the film. It wasn't until Lizardo sucked electricity and remembered the past that I got caught up. I said, `They've really taken me down the road, wow!' I started to cheer. I was just having the best time. I just loved it. W.D. Richter is a wonderful director and writer. And anybody who could have conceived that story [screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch] and execute it deserves all kinds of credits and kudos."
Donner's prodution staff includes another acknowledged genius, a guy who's turning out to be a handy second unit directorSteven Spielberg. Although Spielberg's presence is keeply felt, the two directors aren't clashing on the set.
"I like Steven. Sometimes I want to kick him, but we have the kind of relationship that allows that. He loves Goonies, it was his idea that he gave to Chris Columbus to write," Donner says. "He's a very involved producer so, every once in awhile, he'll come over and see him talking to one of the kids and I'll grab him by the seat of his pants and tell him: `Don't mess with my cast.' We start to laugh and have a ball.
"It's not only a good relationship; it's a relationship I need because l've brought him in now to shoot second unit for me because I'm tired. Things that I can't shoot, where I would have to shoot into the night to continue, he'll go off and knock it out for me. It's been one of the better relationships l've had with anybody. I hope it continues."
It will. Donner has agreed to direct an episode of Amazing Stories, Spielberg's new NBC-SF anthology series, and there's a good chance Goonies will be back.
"I think just the fact that the kids are alive and well and living on the planet Earth at the film's end leaves it open for a sequel," Richard Donner says. "I assume there will be sequels. God willing, if the picture is a success. I would like to see it for the kids, I would like to see it for Steven, and I would like to see it for myself.
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