The Omen. Superman. Ladyhawke. The Goonies. Lethal Weapon. With a list of credits like that, you’d think Richard Donner would be one of the most famous directors of all time. These films aren’t just popular or good, they are iconic to entire generations of moviegoers.
Maybe that’s part of the problem. The Omen is so famous for its central idea (so often imitated, rarely with any success) that it seems to be more of a concept than an actual movie, much less one with a director. With Lethal Weapon, the charm of the actors and their characters is so intense that it almost seems like no-one directed those movies at all. And with Superman… well, it’s Superman.
We humans do this all too easily: as soon as something has attained mythic status, we often forget that there was someone who actually created it. From the Bible to traditional oral storytelling, we tend to assume that those things were just there. But in doing so we ignore one of the most significant truths of all: that these masterpieces of art were written by one of us.
The director is one of the most important parts of the filmmaking process; he or she is the unifying force of the film, the visionary who takes everyone on a journey to the lands of dream. It takes more than a good director to make a good film, but it’s hard to make a good film without a good director. In that sense, the fact that Richard Donner has made half a dozen iconic films should tell us something about his abilities as a director, as an artist working in the medium of film.
We recently rewatched the Lethal Weapon movies, and I was glad to see that they haven’t lost any of their power. Sadly, they are mostly remembered in terms of action scenes and buddy movie clichés – which is entirely unfair. Watch Cop Out and Lethal Weapon back to back, and you’ll see two movies that are universes apart. Riggs and Murtaugh are such likeable and iconic characters because they feel so real; because they have a dignity that the shrill characters of so many newer films, with their generic personalities and factory-produced issues, never achieve.
Part of it, certainly, is the writing, and the way it skillfully weaves action and comedy into a setting and story that feel real and dramatic. But it takes a truly talented director to turn such a script into a movie that strikes the right tone, that allows its characters enough dignity and presence to be both funny and tragic. Otherwise we simply wouldn’t care in the slightest about what happens to the characters. (See Cop Out for a demonstration.)
Special mention must go to Lethal Weapon 2. Between gleeful (and hilarious) racist-bashing, a sweet love story, and some truly gutwrenching drama, it’s an action movie with depth both of character and of politics. (No, it doesn’t delve deeply into the politics of Apartheid. But it doesn’t need to. Note the word “gleeful.”) Few action movies these days can be compared to Lethal Weapon 2 in the seriousness of their intent or in the quality of their drama and/or comedy.
Donner directs Lethal Weapon and its sequels with skill, confidence and artistic intent. He shows a remarkable talent for capturing a sense of place – the heat and dust of L.A. feels almost palpable. And he does this without needing to colour the lense, or impress us with technical tricks. He shoots his actors at the right distances: enough to give them context, to give us a sense of people being in a place, while also capturing their (incredibly strong) performances. Donner pays attention to details, to a sense of reality – just have a look at the evolving Murtaugh household over the course of four movies.
But all this still sounds like that often-repeated cliché of Richard Donner the technically competent but not particularly artistic director. To which are two simple answers:
a) Since when does how a movie looks not count? That sense of reality is not merely a technical issue – it’s essential to grounding the narrative, to giving it context and weight.
b) Have you seen these performances?
Mel Gibson’s performance as Riggs is arguably one of the best of his career, and the quality and intensity (both dramatic and comedic) doesn’t let up. Lethal Weapon 2 may be the best of the four films, but every single one of them contains powerful and memorable scenes. And Danny Glover’s performance as Murtaugh, alternately funny, dignified, and sad, is almost as underrated as Donner himself. Some may have trouble accepting that such performances are possible in an action movie, but they are not worth being answered.
Let us turn to some other movies Richard Donner made. Take Scrooged, for example, possibly the funniest take ever on A Christmas Carol. It’s manic, sarcastic, over-the-top… and yet somehow quite grounded, thanks to funny but quite real scenes between Bill Murray and Karen Allen. It would be easy for the movie to become infantile, the characters unbelievable, and the darkness of the story superficial. But precisely because Donner takes all of the elements seriously, the result is a movie chock-full of laughs and atmosphere. And if the gleefully insane taxi driver that is the Ghost of Christmas Past isn’t a great performance, I don’t know what is. (That Bill Murray is perfect is basically a given, right?) There’s also Bobcat Goldthwait in a part that is funny and properly handled. That, too, takes some artistic talent.
Or what about Maverick, that seminally underrated comedic Western? Apart from having one of the funniest scenes about Native Americans ever committed to film, it is also full of beautifully-shot scenes with witty dialogue and probably my favourite of Jodie Foster’s many great performances. Unlike so many recent remakes, Maverick bubbles with energy and delight while functioning both as a Western and as a comedy.
Maybe there are those who think that only drama is great art, or that it’s easy to make people laugh. Nothing could be further away from the truth. The world is full of tragedies, but there’s not that many great jokes – and we all know plenty of people who could kill any joke just by being in the room with it. Humour and romance and wit are as much essential parts of the human experience as sadness and loneliness and loss, and ultimately Maverick is as much about real life as Magnolia.
Then there’s Conspiracy Theory, another Mel Gibson-starring little gem. This one also mixes comedy with drama, but it has a much darker feel to it – shadows and darkness are prevalent, fitting the somewhat insane state of mind of our protagonist. And thanks to the work done by Donner and Gibson, Jerry Fletcher is not Martin Riggs: he is a figure in his own right, with his own kind of dignity and vulnerability, as well as a large dose of paranoia.
The very fact that Donner has done so many movies with Mel Gibson, and yet all of Gibson’s characters are quite different from each other, shows what a talented director Donner is. He knows how to get complex, layered performances out of people, and if you listen to his interviews or commentaries, you will notice just how much he always emphasizes his work with the actors. Understandable, since he believes that plot and action proceed from characters.
The Goonies is another example of Donner’s ability to work with actors and to create atmosphere. In this case, it’s not just actors, but child actors – a whole group of them. People sometimes treat The Goonies as if it was a Spielberg movie, and surely he had some influence on the film, but it would be entirely disingenuous to pretend that Richard Donner did not direct it; he did, and created a film full of adventure and fun and a sense of wonder. Has it aged badly? I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I do know what it meant to a great many people when they first saw it.
We also shouldn’t forget Ladyhawke, a beautiful fairytale that is also one of Rutger Hauer’s few good movies (there should be so many more; the man is talented). A lot of people consider the music to be dreadfully dated, and they may be right, but the movie itself still has a great deal to offer: romance and wit and adventure and beauty and, of course, imagination. What is art and storytelling about, if not these things?
It’s not all action-adventure, either. Donner also directed Inside Moves, a small character drama dealing with the lives of handicapped individuals, starring John Savage. Diana Scarvid got an Oscar nomination for her performance, and the movie also features a young actor that Richard Donner discovered – David Morse. It was critically successful, but the distributors messed up the release so badly that it was a complete financial failure. And even though many people have found it to be a profoundly affecting film, and one of the few that treats handicapped people as real people, it was only released on DVD in 2009.
Finally, there’s Superman, the movie which changed the way superhero movies were made. Donner fought hard to make a movie that took its imaginary subject seriously, throwing out a terrible, campy script and going against the producers’ wishes to cast Christopher Reeve instead of someone more well-known. He took a character that is very hard to relate to and made him likeable and memorable – something which no Superman movie since has achieved. He made sure the film stayed true to its iconic source material while putting a great deal of thought into making the story and world feel real.
Are there less successful movies in Richard Donner’s oeuvre? Of course there are. Few artists succeed perfectly at every one of their projects. But the key word here is artist. It is high time that the idea that Donner is just some old director who does action blockbusters with skill but without vision be abolished.
Richard Donner has given us a long list of film masterpieces. Some critics have claimed that Donner is lacking in vision because his films don’t share some kind of “artist’s signature,” something which makes it obvious that what you’re watching is a Richard Donner film. This is both misguided and misleading. Since when is it necessary for every artist to impose their ego on the work? What about the principle (to which Donner subscribes) of the artist serving the story, of style following from content rather than being forced onto it? Why should a story feel like the work of the storyteller, rather than as a thing of its own? Not every filmmaker needs to spend his or her time screaming “look at me! look at me! look at what I’m doing!” We don’t need another Quentin Tarantino.
And yet there are elements and themes that run through much of Donner’s work. An emphasis on character, on giving a sense of reality to what we’re seeing, but also a deep humanism: Donner’s films are marked by their sympathy for the little man, their opposition to racism and Apartheid and all forms of oppression, as well as by their down-to-earth humour and wit. That Donner has refrained from strutting his ego, that he has let his actors and his stories take centre stage, should not keep us from recognizing and celebrating the work of this quiet visionary.
I love to come out of a movie and feel good. There are so many movies on the market today, and at the theaters, that are so fucking depressing, so miserable and so unhappy. Yes, they may be well written, but I don’t want to sit in the theater and go through all kinds of depression. I mean, god almighty, we’ve got enough of it! So that has been me for as long as I can remember. I love coming out of a theater feeling well, feeling good, feeling up, feeling like I was taken down a very interesting road, but there was a nice light at the end of it.
- Richard Donner
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