Alex Godfrey
“Hey kid, how you doing,” said Richard Donner at the beginning of our conversation last December. I guess everyone’s ‘kid’ when you’re 90, but I imagine he’d been calling people that for decades. He exuded warmth, affection and familiarity, despite the fact that he didn’t really know me. He was a gruff teddy bear. One of the truly good guys.
I’d loved his films my whole life – as a kid there was 1978’s Superman, of course – still the gold standard for superhero films – but also I’d seen 1976’s The Omen when I was way too young, absolutely thrilled by it, and as I got older I was in awe of how the same man made both in short succession. And both are perfect, keen character studies wrapped in genre. Donner’s films were imbued with huge humanity, and when you spoke to him, that all made sense.
Last December I reached out to him because I’d just seen Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 and it was so clearly in debt to Donner’s Superman films – the character in thrall to truth and honesty, the film so hopeful and nostalgic. I wanted to get his take on it all, although also, having interviewed him a couple of times a few years earlier, I just loved talking to him. Why, at 90 years old, was he up for an hour-long chat, despite having nothing to plug, nothing to gain? He seemed to really enjoy reminiscing. And I think he was just kind.
He was hilarious, all the time, a real life Yoda, cracking jokes while dispensing invaluable wisdom. He had a warm heart and a voice to match. A kindly grandpa, gently teaching you about life while making you laugh. A man who couldn’t believe his luck, so genuinely grateful for all of his experiences, with all his verve intact. “Okay kid,” he said as we wrapped up in December. I thanked him for it all. “Stay healthy,” he said.
Here is the interview, as it ran on December 29, 2020:
Everything you ask Richard Donner about his 1978 Superman film gets a story. He talks about living next door to the then Leader of the Opposition Margaret Thatcher on Flood Street, Chelsea, while he made the film here, bumping into her “a couple of times. She was very cordial. And because she was there, there was always a copper in our back alley, and I felt very safe leaving my car on the street. Ha!”
Then there were the death threats after Superman came out, when some took umbrage at the vague religious allegory, of Superman’s father Jor-El (Marlon Brando) sending his only son to Earth. “They threatened my life… One woman wrote a letter saying how dare I compare Brando to God and Christopher Reeve to Jesus. She said my blood would run in the streets. I guess you make a good movie, somebody takes it as a reality.”
Donner has made many good movies, among them The Omen, Superman, The Goonies and Lethal Weapon. Astoundingly, at 90 years old, he’s even making one now, developing a fifth Lethal Weapon, confirming that, incredibly, he’s producing anddirecting it: “This is the final one,” he says, at home in Los Angeles. “It's both my privilege and duty to put it to bed. It's exciting, actually.” It is exciting that Donner – who will likely be 91 when it shoots – is directing another film. “Hahaha! It's the last one, I'll promise you that.”
Talking to him, it seems less surprising by the second. He is incredibly switched on, cracking jokes from the off, enthusing about his regular naps (“Naps are extraordinary. It's like a rebirth. Oh my god, they're amazing”), reminiscing about stuff from over 40 years ago. And how things have changed. Today, superhero films dominate cinema, but Donner’s 1978 classic is still the yardstick. Christopher Nolan said that he wanted to do for Batman what Donner did for Superman, while Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige has said the film is still “the archetype of the perfect superhero film origin story.”
Last week, Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman 1984 was released in UK cinemas – at least, in the few that are actually open – and critics immediately drew comparisons to Donner’s film. As the super-powered Diana Prince, Gal Gadot exudes goodness, honesty and optimism, just as Reeve did – an entirely uncynical outlook that stands out in a smorgasbord of more troubled heroes. Jenkins speaks often of how influential Donner’s film was on her life, emphasising that she wanted 2017’s Wonder Woman to hit “the same buttons that Christopher Reeve did".
Producer Ilya Salkind conceived the Superman film, setting it up with his father Alexander and their partner Pierre Spengler. They hired The Godfather’s Mario Puzo to write it and bagged Brando and Gene Hackman (as villain Lex Luthor). Donner was hired fresh off 1976’s brilliant suspense horror The Omen; they paid him a million dollars to make Superman and Superman II back to back. He was hungover on the toilet when he got the call, and was dazzled by the idea, the cast and the cash. But there was a long way to go.
Donner grew up reading Superman comics in the early 1940s and loved the character – to him he was apple-pie Americana, a beacon of light and hope. He didn’t like the screenplay he’d been sent, already rewritten from Puzo’s draft – to him it was camp, a parody, and disrespectful to what Superman was all about, so he asked his friend Tom Mankiewicz, who’d written some Bond films, to rewrite it. Mankiewicz wasn’t enthused. To persuade him, Donner asked him to drive over, then put on the Superman outfit the producers had sent him, running over to Mankiewicz as he arrived.
“I’m sitting right now in my living room looking right out where I hid behind the fence here and came out as Tom got out of his car,” says Donner. Not many directors would have put that costume on and run around like that. “If you had smoked a little weed you would’ve,” he laughs. Weed figures quite a bit in his stories. He’d certainly taken on a big job.
With Mankiewicz persuaded, Donner began turning the film into what he wanted it to be. “The whole thing was to save an image of what I thought Superman should be, and what he meant to me as a kid, what I respected in the character’s creators, and what I hoped the public, especially the kids, would latch onto,” he explains. “It seems stupid to say I wanted to save Superman, but from the direction it was going before Tom and I got on, I think we did to a degree save it.”
The next challenge was finding the right man to play the dual role of Superman and his awkward alter ego Clark Kent. Big names were suggested – Robert Redford, Paul Newman and Burt Reynolds turned it down. But Donner was determined to go with an unknown, convinced that nobody would believe an A-lister was flying. Casting director Lynn Stalmaster found Christopher Reeve, and Donner, watching him in an off-Broadway play and then meeting him, was spellbound. “He was convinced that he could play Superman,” he remembers of Reeve. “And about the character – about his truth, justice and the American way. He was Superman the moment he said 'I can do it.'”
At 6ft5 and 170 pounds, Reeve was scrawny – he said himself that he was known as The Human Stringbean – but had been athletic at school, and promised he could bulk up. To get him there, Donner hired British bodybuilder Dave Prowse, fresh from his stint as Darth Vader in Star Wars. They had six weeks before cameras rolled. After their first session, the actor threw up. But Prowse was relentless. “If Chris wasn't such a dedicated actor, I think he would have thrown him off the set,” says Donner. “He was always there! And he built him up.”
Meanwhile, Donner had to deal with Brando, who was seemingly doing all he could to squirrel out of even appearing on screen, despite being paid $3.7m upfront and 11.75 per centof the film’s gross profits. He’d suggested voicing the role and being represented in physical form as a green suitcase. Donner went to his house to meet him, hellbent on persuading him otherwise; Brando then suggested that Jor-El could be a bagel, that maybe everyone on Krypton looked like bagels. Donner talked him out of it.
He gushes about working with him, even if Brando wouldn’t learn his lines, instead reading from cue cards all over the set. Yet he is stunning in the role, emanating gravitas, sincerity and heart. What was it like directing him, getting that performance out of him? “Haha, I didn't direct him, and I didn't have to get the performance – it comes with the man,” says Donner. “He was just enthralling. And he had the ability to be telling a story, have you in hysterics, and when it was time to act, the word 'Action' created a schizophrenic human being, because he just went bang, into the character. Marlon was a treat. A total treat.”
Achieving the illusion of a man flying was another hurdle, and it meant a lot to Donner on a personal level. “Flying was important to me,” he says. “I was a pilot. And I loved flying very much. The danger of flying for me was that I would be almost transfixed into a mood that was quite magical. And I wanted to bring that into it. We didn't have computers or anything. It was all by guess and by golly.”
For months and months, every technique, every test, had been disastrous. Men lying on boards with fans blowing their hair, skies projected behind them. They finally got there thanks to a newly invented front projection system and the help of esteemed cinematographer Denys Coop, hired for those sequences alone. “It was close to a year before we saw a screentest of the flying movements,” remembers Donner. “We saw it at lunchtime. There were tears. There was silence. We were so excited that we had finally, finally got a chance to prove we could do it.”
Donner speaks highly of the British crew (“quite amazing”), and had a good time here. He would have been here longer, but things soured with the producers during the production, with quarrels over budgets and schedules. He was told to stop work on Superman II and complete the first film, which was then released to much praise and box-office success. After months of disagreements, a build-up of bad blood, the producers then fired him, hiring director Richard Lester to film the sequel, reshooting many of Donner’s scenes and rewriting more. Lester had been a friend of Donner’s. They didn’t speak again.
The cast, though, were devastated. Most of them stayed on, although Hackman, who had shot many of his sequel scenes already with Donner, refused to return, and Lester had to diminish his role and hire a body double for the rest. Terence Stamp, who played General Zod in both films, said they were all “crazy in love” with Donner. And today Donner speaks of them with such feeling, his voice, his memories, inflected with sadness. So many are gone. At 90, Donner has outlived them all. And he misses them all.
Reeve, who died in 2004, was a “wonderful friend, wonderful person,” he says. “A great loss.” They’d stayed in touch, as had he and Margot Kidder – the film’s fantastically charismatic Lois Lane – she died in 2018. “She was the perfect living ditz,” he remembers. “From losing her keys to her contact lenses to not remembering names of the people working on the film. I just fell in love with Margot for what a wonderful, off the wall, brilliant, loving person she was. She was one in a million.”
The feeling was mutual. In a 2009 interview, Kidder gushed about her experiences on Superman. “I love Dick Donner with my heart and my soul and I always will,” she said. Donner is audibly moved when he hears this. “Ahhhh!” he says, taken aback. “Oh wow. I never read that. That's beautiful. Beautiful. Wow.”
It’s rare to hear a bad word about Donner. Bill Murray had a bad time with him on 1988’s Scrooged, due to a multitude of creative clashes, and the two have not been shy of detailing it. But Donner is a sweetheart. His Superman recollections are flooded with love. He still has as much affection for the character as ever. He was heartbroken not to have been able to complete Superman 2 – he moved on, to great success during the 1980s and ‘90s, but returned to the film in 2006, reinstating the footage he shot for a DVD release that hinted at what his version could have been.
History is repeating itself somewhat today, as Zack Snyder, who recently rebooted Superman on the big screen in three films, is putting together his own cut of one of them, 2017’s Justice League, which was taken over by Joss Whedon after Snyder had to quit following the death of his daughter. Donner isn’t aware of any of this – he doesn’t know who Snyder is, he says – but thinks it’s “wonderful” that the director is getting another chance.
He’s also pleased to hear that with Wonder Woman 1984, Patty Jenkins is still paying tribute to Donner, not just with the character’s intrinsic goodness, but with the film’s paean to flight itself – a couple of the flying sequences, full of wonder and awe, recall Donner’s work. “It just means she's got good taste!”, he laughs. He liked that 2017’s Wonder Woman had “the same feeling of emotions” as his film. “There are so many people that make superheroes so cynical, it's depressing. When they're dark and bleak and angry with themselves and the world, I don't find it entertaining. I think there's enough reality going on for that. We just got over four years of that [he’s not a Trump fan]. I think we crave the opposite.”
It must be staggering for him to see where we are today, with superhero films overrunning the multiplexes. “It is,” he says. “When you see it done right, by my standards, it's so fulfilling. I'm very happy and proud when I see them. When it's done wrong, it's such a disappointment.”
He’s amused by Martin Scorsese’s opinion that the superhero films he’s seen are more like theme park rides than films. “Well, I'd like to be able to make one of those theme park rides!” he says before agreeing, to a point. “The problem is, a lot of times, we see in our industry that when the technical lens becomes readily available, it's totally misused. But at the same time, every once in a while you really see quite a wonderful story with one of these films.”
We certainly saw one with his.