Lauren Shuler
Producing LADYHAWKE
From first draft to final cut, it's a love story on screen and behind-the-scenes—as a novice producer realizes a dream, making the movie she always wanted to make.
By WILLIAM RABKIN
Love makes people do funny things. Although Etienne of Navarre turns into a wolf at night and Isabeau of Anjou a hawk by day, they travel together. Although they can never be human at the same time, love keeps them together.
And it's love which brought their story to the screen. Ladyhawke is the culmination of producer Lauren Shuler's five-year love affair with the concept. To see the film made the way she wanted it, Shuler had to go through three studios, four writers and "millions" of endings.
And in the end, she got her movie. Ironically, Shuler came across Ladyhawke by accident.
"In 1980, I was looking for a writer for a project I was developing," she says. "One executive thought Ed Khmara was right for the job and gave me a copy of his Ladyhawke script as a writing sample."
It was love at first sight.
"As soon as I saw the script, I said, 'I want to make this movie,' " Shuler says.
Living Words
Some people in Shuler's position might have shied away from a film which promised to be as Iogistically difficult as Ladyhawke. This was, after all, her first feature.
Shuler began as an assistant film editor, then became a camerawoman. She quickly rose to associate producer status on ABC's Wide World of Entertainment.
"I really wanted to cross over into production," she explains. "I was laid up for a while after a major car accident, and thought this was a good time to start writing. It tumed out I was only an OK writer, but a great collaborator."
Shuler worked for a time at Motown Productions, then left to produce the TV movie Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill. And in 1980, she found Ladyhawke.
"Ladyhawke was the first property I optioned," the producer reveals. "As soon as I read it, I thought 'This is it!' It was the most interesting, original idea I had ever come across.
"But in 1980, when I optioned the script, they weren't doing this kind of movie. The only movie around at that time with people with swords in it was Excalibur. That film was a failure, but it had a big audience on opening weekend, which proved to me audiences want that kind of movie. Excalibur's failure had nothing to do with genres; it failed on its own merits.
"People kept telling me I was crazy, and I should work on other projects. But I was in love with this movie, this was the movie I was going to make."
Maybe. Neither Shuler nor the Ladd Company executives she was dealing with was entirely happy with Ed Khmara's script.
"The story's core was the same in Ed's draft," Shuler explains, "but it was too diffused. There were too many things happening at the same time, and the romance, the most important part for me, tended to get lost.
"One problem with the original script was that there wasn't one strong villain. In addition to the bishop, who is the film's primary villain, and the commander of the guards, there was also a monster which lived under the dungeons. The bishop fed people he didn't like to the monster."
Shuler didn't like the monster. She fed it to the garbage can.
"Monsters are very difficult to portray in movies," the producer maintains. "They're always scarier in your mind than on screen. I wouldn't have minded if we could have done the monster the way they did it in ALIEN-only show it in bits and pieces. But there was a scene in which Phillipe climbs on the monster's back to kill it, and there was no way we could get away with that without showing the whole thing. I was afraid it would look like a man in a rat suit, so we killed the scene. Khmara's script not only had too many villains, but also too many lovers.
"Phillipe had a girl friend in the dungeons he wanted to go back and rescue. This second love story undercut the romance between Etienne and Isabeau," Shuler says.
When the time came to rewrite Ladyhawke, Shuler chose not to bring Khmara back. "It was probably a mistake," she admits. "Ed's an incredibly imaginative writer and I've stayed in touch with him all along. But at the time, the studio wanted to take the script in a different direction, and they thought someone else should do the rewrite. I agreed. What can I say? We were all young back then. It's certainly no reflection on Ed's talent."
Shuler began looking for a new writer. Her first choice was David (Blade Runner) Peoples (STARLOG #58). But he was quickly ruled out for quite pragmatic reasons. "We were about to start the rewrite in 1981," the producer explains. "But just as David Peoples and I started talking about working on the film, the Writers' Guild went out on strike and he couldn't work on the project."
Unwilling to wait for the strike to end, Shuler traveled to England and found Ladyhawke's second-to-last writer, Michael (The Hunger) Thomas. At first glance, he might seem an unusual choice, considering that The Hunger's script was universally panned. But, Shuler explains, that film had nothing to do with his selection.
"I hired Michael on the basis of his unproduced screenplay, Fire on the Mountain," she says. "I thought it was terrific."
In Thomas' Ladyhawke script, Shuler saw the film she wanted to make take form.
"Michael's script was much more romantic than Ed's," she says. "It was more about Navarre's journey to defeat the bishop, and Phillipe becoming an unlikely hero."
Thomas made one other very important change.
"In Ed's script, the wolf and the hawk were almost like people," the producer says. "When Navarre and Isabeau changed, they retained most of their human personalities. I felt that the curse was much worse if the animals were animals in spirit as well as in form."
Ladyhawke was now in its proper form, but the style wasn't quite right. So, Shuler brought in one Iast writer.
"The script was good before, but Tom (Superman) Mankiewicz [STARLOG #69] really streamlined the film and pulled it all together," she explains. "Mank gave the film its humor. In Michael's draft, Phillipe was already like the Artful Dodger, but it was Mankiewicz who gave him all those great lines and really brought him to life."
Realistic images
About the time Shuler was looking for the film's first rewriter, she was also searching for a director. She had only one man in mind.
"Richard Donner," Shuler says firmly. "I wanted a director who filled many shoes, who could direct adventure and action, and yet who had a heart and a sense of humor at the same time. Based on The Ornen, Superman and Inside Moves, I felt he embodied all those characteristics."
While Michael Thomas labored on the script, Shuler and Donner (STARLOG #93) began working on two other crucial elements of Ladyhawke: casting and locationscouting.
"Richard and I spent months scouting locations, first in Czechoslovakia, then in Italy," the producer says. "There are many locations in the film, and each one must be convincingly 13th Century. We decided to shoot the film in Italy because there were more suitable locations there."
Ladyhawke's script required a very specific site. "For the city of Aquila, we needed a walled city with a castle cathedral on a mountain surrounded by a beautiful landscape and no hint of modern civilization," Shuler remembers.
"But if we found a city that came near our specifications, inevitably something was wrong with it. Usually there were too many signs of civilization—maybe not 20th century civilization, but 17th or 18th century."
Shuler's answer was to use pieces of different cities for different parts of Aquila.
"The bishop's castle is actually three different locations: The castle tower is at Castle Arquato, the interior at Torrechiara, and the city's interior at Soncino Castle," she explains. "For the cathedral interior, we built a set."
To convince the audience that these different sections were all one community, Shuler needed a long shot of Aquila. "I considered using a matte painting or a miniture," she says. "We had someone design a miniature and he started to built it. But finally we found an actual location for the shot. It looks incredible, but it's real."
At the same time, Shuler and Donner were looking at actors. For the lead roles of the knight Navarre and the thief Phillipe, they considered—and decided against—one of the most exciting and bankable casting combinations imaginable: Sean Connery and Dustin Hoffman.
"When I first optioned Ed's script," the producer recalls, "I heard rumors that Hoffman was interested. Further down the road, we very seriously considered him. But we felt he wasn't going to work out. If we had cast him, there would have been a long delay while we had to make changes in the script for him. I had already waited three years to make this movie, and I didn't want to wait any longer."
With Hoffman out of the running, Shuler decided to "go younger overall on the casting. I had always wanted Connery. We had always needed someone like him—foreboding, strong and ruggedly good lookingfor Navarre. But we felt we needed someone younger. Don't get me wrong, he's certainly not too old to be James Bond, and I think he's terrific. But our film was going in a different direction."
The Dutch actor Rutger Hauer (STARLOG #63), whom Shuler had loved as the villainous replicant in Blade Runner, fit Navarre perfectly. Now, there were only two important roles to be filled: Navarre's lover Isabeau, and Phillipe. Isabeau was a breeze. Shuler got her first choice.
"I knew about Michelle Pfeiffer from Grease 2," Shuler says. "She seemed to fill all our requirements: she is breathtakingly beautiful, and at the same time, she has spunk, strength and a sense of humor. It was her sense of humor that won us over completely." At first, Pfeiffer wasn't interested.
"When we first went to Michelle, she was involved in Scarface and wasn't interested in thinking about her next project," the producer explains. "We looked all around and didn't find anyone we liked as much. We went back to Michelle. By this time, she had finished Scarface and was wondering what to do next. She read the script and accepted [see accompanying interview]."
There was only one bit of casting Ieft: Phillipe. Although Richard Donner claims that Matthew (WarGames) Broderick was brought in just before shooting, Shuler had the young actor in mind for a long time.
"Matthew Broderick was not a last-minute choice for me," Shuler says. "But casting is the director's decision. Richard likes to make the best choice possible, and he delayed the final casting to make sure. I hounded Richard a long time to cast Matthew before he did.
"Matthew can be both wise and innocent at the same time. And he's always intriguing to watch.
"But poor Matthew. During the making of this movie, he was always getting dumped in water or rained on. He was terrific about it, though. He always had lots of enthusiasm. He's a professional."
Troublesome Animals
With the script, cast and Iocations finally set, Shuler got the go-ahead to start shooting. And three years after the first option on the script Shuler loved, the Ladyhawke team began production.
At Ieast, most of the Ladyhawke team.
The Ladd Company, which had bankrolled much of the pre-production, was feeling the beginnings of its financial problems and dropped out.
"I was disappointed at seeing The Ladd Company leave the project," Shuler says. "They were with us for years. I knew the project would be picked up by another studioit was too good not to be—but there's a scary moment before you can set it up again when you wonder if it will all fall apart.
"When Ladd dropped out, we went over to 20th Century Fox. They were immediately interested. Then, Warners, with first refusal rights to Ladd's films, said they wanted to read the script. After they read it, they wanted it. Fox suggested the two studios share the project."
As any producer will tell you, there are always problems when you work with one studio. Working with two studios could have doubled the problems.
"We were aware of those potential problems," Shuler comments. "It's always a little more difficult with yet another volee coming in. To make things easier, we asked the executives to select one studio for us to answer to. They decided on Warners."
Ladyhawke began lensing in Italy in early 1984. It was, as Shuler says, a "tough shoot.
"We were scheduled for four months of shooting," the producer elaborates. "There was a lot to film. Of course, when you have many action scenes, that slows things down. We were working with an Italian, so there was miscommunication. We had a large unit to move all around the country. Our cinematographer Vittorio (Apocalypse Now) Storaro is a slow lighter and a slow shooter. And then, of course, there were the animals."
Oh, yes. The animals.
Since Isabeau spends most of her time in the film in the form of a hawk, and Navarre spends a good deal of his screen time as a wolf, the animals played a very important part in the shooting.
"The animals were easier to work with than some stories I had heard indicated," Shuler says, "but there were problems. We used four Siberian wolves, and the wolves were difficult, in that wolves are difficult. Wolves don't always do what you want them to do, and they don't always hit their mark. They tend to be nervous. If you want them to attack a man, they might do it, but they get distracted very easily. If they hear a noise at the wrong time, they get nervous and decide not to do it."
One scene the wolves were decidedly opposed to was the one in which Phillipe rescues the wolf Navarre from drowning in ice water.
"Most of that was done on a soundstage in warm water," Shuler explains. "It would have been impossible to keep anyone in real ice water as long as we needed. Still, the wolf objected to the water. We got him used to it as much as possible, and did it as quickly as we could in short intervals. We had extra cameras on the scene to cut down the number of takes. But the wolf was definitely not happy about the whole thing."
The hawks were slightly easier to work with, if only because a hawk doesn't stand six feet tall on its hind legs.
"We didn't have any major problems with the hawks. They were pretty good overall, but they were noisy. Sometimes, they would destroy a shot by opening a wing in Rutger's face or flying off in the wrong direction. There was one time a hawk was supposed to take off and land on Rutger's arm. Instead, it landed on the boom mike."
The last of the animal stars was the black beauty playing Navarre's horse.
"It's a big, beautiful animal like a circus horse," Shuler notes. "The woman who owns him rides him for show. He was trained for shows, not for movies. It was difficult enough because the horse was made nervous by all the activity. The horse was trained to rise up, dance, or prance by the reins—if you pull the reins one way, he'll rise up; pull them another, he'll prance. When Rutger, who is a very good horseman, pulled the reins the way he's used to doing, the horse would start dancing around."
Simple Endings
Not all of Ladyhawke's difficult moments were due to animals. The low point, Shuler says, was shooting the scene in which Phillipe escapes the Bishop's dungeons by swimming through the castle's sewers.
"They're huge, ancient sewers that are now used as mushroom farms. We filled the sewers with water, and it looked great, because there were natural stalagmites there and we didn't have to build anything. But it was horrible down there. There was a terrible stench. We just wanted filming to be over. At times like that, you just have to keep reminding yourself how much you love the project."
There was one major question which had to be answered before shooting was completed: how should Ladyhawke end?
"We went through millions of endings," Shuler reveals. "Well, at least five or 10. When we were shooting, we had a scene where you saw Isabeau and Navarre walking out of the cathedral where their final conflict with the Bishop takes place. As they walked out, you saw that Imperius (Leo McKern) had now become bishop. Navarre and Isabeau walked out among the cheering crowd, then rode off together into the sunset on his horse. We dropped that because it seemed redundant. Once you've seen the lovers united, that's the end. That's what you've been waiting for."
But in order to arrive at this simple ending, Shuler and Donner went through many more complex ones.
"Many drafts ago, we had an ending in which Imperius turns the Bishop into a rat, then turns himself into an owl," she explains. "There was one in which the Bishop blows up. That had something to do with his ring.
"It's true that the ending we have now seems like the most natural thing in the world. I guess it's always that way; you must try other avenues in order to see that the one you chose is right."
The film Shuler worked on for five years out of love for the project is finally done. Shuler has a new love now, Ladyhawke director Richard Donner.
"Richard and I are involved," she says. "It came towards the middle of filming. After we had worked together for so long on business, a relationship came together."
Meanwhile, Shuler's first love is now in national release. She has little doubt that it will be a success.
"Ladyhawke is different from other films. It's not sword and sorcery. It's a romance," Lauren Shuler says. "I love this movie."
Michelle Pfeiffer:
The Lovely Ladyhawke
There are easier roles to play than a woman who spends half her time as a hawk—and there's always the risk that you'll be upstaged by the bird.
That didn't bother Michelle Pfeiffer. At first. After all, she got to lounge around Italy and snuggle with Rutger Hauer. She was even paid as if she was also playing the bird. And Ladyhawke seemed like a charming addition to her already eclectic resume, which includes a mobster's moll in Scarface and a singing biker in Grease 2.
Then came the tower scene. All she had to do was fall off and, before hitting the ground, change into a hawk. And all director Richard (Superman) Donner asked her to do was stand in front of a blue wall, "look scared, look like you're falling and, ah, look like you're turning into a bird."
Easy, right?
"I felt like a complete idiot," Pfeiffer recalls. "The Ladyhawke blue-screen stuff was a major acting exercise in humiliation. What is the emotional state of falling off a tower and turning into a bird? I felt so stupid. I mean, I asked myself is this what l've studied acting for? It was just awful.
"We did that scene in three different pieces. We had a mock tower in Italy and a stunt girl jumped off it. Then, on a soundstage, we did my close-ups and rigged a camera which went around me in circles. I had to pretend I was falling, waving my arms around and looking scared as I be-came a bird. They gave me these two contact lenses, a hawkeye and a plain black one. They were so strange looking. It was all pretty weird."
So was her audition for the role.
Because Donner was leaving for Rome right away, the producers didn't have time for Pfeiffer to meet the director and do a screen test. Instead, they wanted her to film a videotape.
"My ego got really bent out of shape," she explains. "I had many questions to ask Donner that now I wouldn't get answered. I made such a big stink about it."
But then she realized she could manipulate the test to her advantage.
"It was one of the braver things I've ever done," she says. "I went to a pet shop the morning of the test and wandered around for a half-hour before I got the nerve to go ahead with my plan. I bought a parakeet and took it with me to the interview. I did the scene I was supposed to do and then had them fade out on me. When they faded back in, the parakeet was sitting on the chair. Supposedly, I had turned into this bird. It did the rest of the scene."
She got the part.
"Yeah, but I think it had nothing to with any talent I have," she jokes. "It was the parakeet."
Pfeiffer was emerging from the Scarface bloodbath searching for something tame to clean up her image again. Ladyhawke was perfect.
"My character in Scarface was so tough that I thought it would be nice to play someone who was a bit more humane," she says. "Ladyhawke is a very sweet idea, a real fairy tale that's also unique and entertaining. I knew you don't get many chances in a career to do a fairy tale like this—maybe once, probably never, and I realized if I was going to do a film like this one, now was the time to do it."
The brutal response that director Brian De Palma's Scarface received from critics was far more violent than anything in the film.
"Many people missed the whole point of Scarface," Pfeiffer observes. "There were, however, a few critics who did get it, who got the film's sophistication and understood that its violence and profanity was exactly what Brian De Palma wanted.
"It's pretty hard to shock people anymore. This world is shocking, it really is, and that was the film's point. To make the film shocking, to get an impact, you must go pretty far with it, which is what Brian did. Most people didn't understand that.
"I'm glad Scarface was so controversial. If you liked the characters, the whole film would have been a waste. The audience was intentionally robbed of any sentimentality."
Not in Ladyhawke. The audience can drown in sentimentality. That's the whole idea.
"It's such a harmless movie. It's not an artistic kind of film," she says. "With something like Scarface, I can have all kinds of snobby, intellectual conversations and that does feel good. But there's a place for movies like Ladyhawke and Grease 2."
Grease 2 found its place. Far below Grease on the box-office charts.
"When you do a major motion picture, especially a sequel like Grease 2, there is so much hype that goes with it," Pfeiffer admits. "It was all very new and strange to me. If you are brave, you do it. It either comes out well or it doesn't. It came out well for me. Many people don't like Grease 2, but when I talk to younger kids, they've seen it six times and love it. I'm happy with Grease 2."
Naturally, she hopes Ladyhawke fares better, but, she concedes, it won't be an easy film to sell.
"You really don't know where it fits in. Ladyhawke is not really a fantasy, a sorcery movie, or a romance," she says. "It has a unique feeling. I certainly wouldn't want to figure out which audience it will attract."
Because she shared her starring role as Isabeau of Anjou with a trained hawk, Pfeiffer's screen time is scant. She didn't have a whole lot to do.
"Because of the story's nature, Rutger and I really didn't work together until the end. I don't want to come across badly, but yes, you would always like to have more to do. That's the bottom line, especially when you don't have many scenes, you're in a foreign country and you're away from home for five months," she says. "You really go a little bananas. Sure, I would have liked to have had more to do, but, in every film, you're not always the star."
Star status is something new to Pfeiffer. She began her acting career "as a character with no name, just a body in tight clothes," in the flop sitcom Delta House, ABC's TV series continuation of the movie Animal House. From there, she segued into another ABC disaster, BAD Cats, "a Starsky and Hutch with a girl in the middle. I was the girl." Parts in two forgettable flicks, Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen and Hollywood Knights, and in a string of TV movies followed before she won a nationwide talent search and the lead in Grease 2.
"Everybody has work they aren't proud of," she says, "and I have those two series. But they gave me money to put in the bank. The fact that they were short-lived didn't hurt me. I knew I was doing terrible work and there was nothing I could do about it. It's really hard to do good work with bad material."
Still, even with good material, Pfeiffer isn't convinced she's doing good work. "I'm getting more relaxed with my work and it's getting better," she says. "But no matter how famous or how good you are, an actor always thinks this is his last job and for me, after any film I do, I go through such paranoia. I think I was so bad that I had better get a job before the film comes out, to prove I can really act."
After Ladyhawke, she quickly snagged a role in Into the Night, director John (Twilight Zone) Landis' Hitchcockian tale starring Jeff (Buckaroo Banzai) Goldblum (STARLOG #85). She also appeared in an ABC Afterschool Special about teenage alcoholism, One Too Many, directed by her husband, actor Peter (TV's Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) Horton.
"I really don't like having him on the set of a film I'm working on because it makes me so self-conscious," Michelle Pfeiffer says. "But with this project, it really wasn't strange at all... except when I had to kiss another actor in front of him. He was so busy worrying about the shot that my kissing someone else was really the least of his worries."
—Lee Goldberg
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