Few people had seen it in the days before the internet made even the most inflammable material available for public consumption, but it was said to be 1. The screenplay had a one- word title, Greystoke, but everyone knew that this was the story of Tarzan, lord of the apes, adapted from the 1. Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was the masterwork of Robert Towne, who had already created such classics as 1. The Last Detail, 1.
Chinatown and 1. 97. Shampoo. No one had any doubts about Towne’s skill. But there were serious questions about his ability to finish the script.
Ida movie reviews & Metacritic score: Poland, 1962. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), an eighteen-year-old novitiate nun is on the verge of taking her vows when sh. There was a time, not too long ago, when filmmakers and entertainers went to extreme lengths to preserve the secrets we'd all find out sooner or later anyway -- even.
He was known to write slowly, even laboriously, and Greystoke only followed its protagonist halfway through his story. What would happen when he left the jungle for England? How many more pages would it take to reach the climax of the tale? He had sketched out the rest of the screenplay and may even have written a rough draft of it that no one else had seen, but he was keeping the secret to himself — or at least until someone was willing to greenlight this expensive picture, which would require exceptional casting, real- life apes (or gifted mimics), a jungle shoot and aristocratic British settings.
Towne came close to getting his green light when Bob Daly was named chairman of Warner Bros. In that pre- tentpole, pre- franchise era, the job of a studio chief, above all, was to pick the best material.
Daly and Semel knew how good Greystoke was and were determined to make it one of their first pictures. There was one problem as far as Towne was concerned: He needed money to complete his directorial debut, the 1. Personal Best. In exchange for the studio’s financial support, he gave up his rights to Greystoke.
When Personal Best tanked, the studio looked elsewhere for a director. The man it turned to was Hugh Hudson, a newcomer to the movie world who had directed only one feature film, 1. Chariots of Fire. Daly and Semel had come to know Hudson when Warners bought the domestic rights to Chariots for all of $1.
The Secrets Behind That Other Tarzan Movie — The One That Earned a Dog a Screenwriting Oscar Nomination. Why Did I Get Married? Brando kept Wally Cox’ s ashes in an urn in his bedroom for the rest of his life. That says volumes about their relationship whether sexual or not. Filmspectrum.org - The Film Spectrum. It’s what it was really like.
Ladd Company), then carried the little- engine- that- could all the way to a best picture Oscar. Hudson was no neophyte. While today’s top executives often prefer to hire relatively untested (and easily manipulated) helmers for their biggest projects, Warners wanted the best, and Hudson had already had years in the trenches as one of England’s top commercials directors.
He was among a rarefied group that included Ridley Scott, Alan Parker and Adrian Lyne, all of whom would become feature directors around the same time. They wanted another contract with me, really. I read a lot of stuff that they had and I chose Greystoke, although it was only half- written. It was half a screenplay when I received it. The first half was written quite comprehensively, though it was very long, and the second half was only sketched. Robert Towne was a wonderful writer, but he had agreed to give up Greystoke for the extra money for Personal Best. Tarzan had been made 2.
Greystoke was so interesting, . If he’d stayed, he would have continued to do it more or less in the direction that I took. I briefly went to see him, just out of politeness, and he was reasonably courteous. He was staying at a hotel, the Sunset Marquis or one of those places on Sunset. He didn’t want any more to do with it. I was interested in the duality of the piece.
And of course, I was the ideal person to do the English side. That kind of upper- middle- class or aristocratic world, I understand perfectly. My family were landowners. I was a rebel to my family. I just didn’t like elitists.
I used to work for the Labour Party. That’s what I loved in the story: There was a rebelliousness running underneath it. He rejects his background. Half of him is the Earl of Greystoke and the other half is wild. I worked with a writer called Michael Austin, and worked very, very closely on the restructuring of the piece. It took a long time because, first of all, it was 1.
Directed by Robert Michael Lewis. With Gerald McRaney, Heather Locklear, Terence Knox, Peter Mark Richman. An attractive young girl is being watched closely by her ex.
How do you cut that down by 5. We didn’t want to make a film that ran more than two and a half hours, so it was cut down a bit.
I was given nine months to do the screenplay; find the place to shoot . I insisted on this time and they agreed.
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They were wonderful to work with, Semel and Daly. It was their first production, and it was $3. We went around the equatorial world looking for locations. We looked in Borneo, Sarawak, Northern Australia, the American tropics, Miami, but that didn’t work and in the end we came back to where the story actually takes place, in Africa. The film was made at a time when there wasn’t any type of CGI work. There are only three shots that are in any way .
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He did the opening shot and one shot where there’s a volcano — they were all landscapes, basically. Photo: Hugh Hudson. The challenge was how to make the apes work. Towne had already done a lot of experiments with chimpanzees, I think, on an island somewhere.
He had some sort of encampment so that apes couldn’t escape, but I discarded that idea . We’d have taken hours and hours trying to make it work. We decided to build the apes and put them on small people’s bodies — mostly dancers and mostly female. We had a height limit of 5- foot- 3.
We had a factory in London with about 8. Thread- by- thread they sewed these extraordinary suits for about six or eight months. And then they had to produce mechanical hands that had five or six movements in the fingers, and heads with movements in the mouth and the eyebrows and the ears. Then we had to train the . They had to learn how to treat each other like a family.
We had help from Roger Fouts, who was an expert on chimpanzees; he trained chimpanzees to speak a language. A Space Odyssey did the same thing about 1. But they were slightly different.
When you look at Stanley Kubrick. They’re nearer to humans.
I was trying to get more animal- like. I had a couple of conversations with Kubrick.
I got to know him quite well. Real apes can be violent. She reverted to an animal and started snarling — and he ran away into another carriage. We had to find Tarzan. I wanted somebody unknown and Warners allowed me to do that. My theory was: If you have unknowns, they don’t come with any baggage, and then you surround them with really brilliant actors. We went to several countries to find actors and tested four people: Viggo Mortensen and Julian Sands and a Danish ballet dancer and Christopher Lambert.
It came down to Viggo and Christopher. We built a set to test them on and . In the end, I just felt that Christopher was the right person. He had this strange quality — somehow, because he was myopic, when he took his glasses off, he couldn’t really see properly so he would seem to look through you into the distance. I found Andie Mac.
Dowell on the cover of a magazine and we tracked her down and she had the right look. I didn’t want her to be blonde because every Jane is blonde. But I didn’t really want to have a Southern accent, and she wasn’t a trained actress.
Later, I had the unenviable task of telling her we were going to re- voice her . Oh, a terrible blow it was. But as a result she went and took acting lessons. And she became who she became. I was going to be in partnership with . I think he felt he had lost control because it was a studio picture set up by Semel and Daly and they wanted to deal directly with me, and he had this other film going, The Killing Fields, that he probably wanted to do more. There’s an ivory station and a whole village in the swamp on the edge of the water in Cameroon, and we built a tree house.
There were terrible problems when we shot in the jungle because we had to take the . They came with families and food and utensils to perform in the film. We managed to find somebody who spoke their language and the local Cameroon language, so we found a way to communicate. They worked very well, they loved it. But one evening, they just disappeared.
They went back into the forest, and we had to find them and bring them back. But they were very amenable.
Then we had these fishermen from the area and they went on strike and wanted more money. We were using guns in this part of Cameroon, near the coast, and all the fisherman suddenly came to us and said, . We’re losing our income, so you have to pay us more.’Once, we had to cut a tree on the river and the . The rubber on their suits melted. But we had a doctor and nurses. It was very well planned.
It was a long shoot that went on for months, and the studio got very nervous because it was a very expensive film and it was a long way away from them, and the executives didn’t want to come to Africa. They were very wary of the diseases, even before AIDS. We couldn’t even see dailies. We didn’t see a single one.
The film was sent back to our editor, Anne Coates. It was very hard to shoot in the jungle because there’s no light. So we decided to build a jungle set for all the close stuff.
We came to London and built it in the vast Elstree studio, on what was called the Star Wars stage at the time. We filled the set with plants and trees — fake trees and real trees. We could light it then and have a whole rain system, and we grew the plants over a period of nine months.
It was an amazing endeavor. We were able to fence off an area and have leopards and a panther. You couldn’t control them in the wild. Trees of vast size and growing equatorial plants, a water course and a lake where baby hippos wallowed and a family of leopards came to drink. Into this we introduced the human ape family of 2.
One day there was a strange creature lurking in the far end of the set- jungle, hidden by the jungle leaves. I approached with caution to find it was Sir Ralph Richardson, the eminent actor who played Tarzan’s grandfather, aged 8. It was a day on which he was not on call, but he had arrived on his BMW motorcycle for the afternoon. Accompanied by his pet white rat, .
We had an original cut of three hours, and it was at its best at two hours and 4. The world of an ape is a violent world. And the studio was very nervous about that. It was his baby to begin with, but he sold his baby, to put it that way.