John Badham: The Hollywood Interview

Director John Badham.

John Badham's Tides of War
By Alex Simon

John Badham has drawn critical praise and box office success during a career distinguished by its range and diversity. Badham rose to the forefront of the film world in the summer of 1983 with the release of Blue Thunder and WarGames, two of the season's biggest hits, which were nominated for four Academy Awards. WarGames, a coming-of-age thriller, stars Matthew Broderick as a precocious teen computer hacker who manages to hack into the NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) computer, and almost kicks off WW III with the Russians! The film has just been re-released on DVD in a new, 25th anniversary edition from MGM/Fox.

Born August 25, 1939 in Luton, Bedfordshire, England, the son of an American Army General and an English actress, Badham grew up in Alabama, and attended college at Yale. He initially cut his teeth on episodic television in the late ‘60s, earning an associate producer spot on Rod Serling’s legendary swan song Night Gallery, where he directed six episodes between 1971-73. Badham made his first feature film, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, in 1976, which teamed James Earl Jones, Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor. In 1977, Badham guided John Travolta to worldwide fame in Saturday Night Fever, which went on to become one of the top grossing films of all time, and to usher in the era of disco music and fashion.

Following Saturday Night Fever, Badham received recognition for his vivid adaptations of two Broadway plays; Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981), starring Richard Dreyfuss, and the stylized Dracula, with Frank Langella and Laurence Olivier which swept the Grand Prizes at the Paris International Science Fiction Festival and the U.S. Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Awards. He then directed Kevin Costner in the cycling action-drama American Flyers (1985), followed by the delightful comedy Short Circuit, featuring Ally Sheedy, Steve Guttenberg and the very human antics of Robot Number Five.

In 1989, Badham directed Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn in the action/comedy Bird On A Wire. Both Stakeout and Bird On A Wire were filmed on location in Vancouver, British Columbia, and rank among the top-ten grossing movies of their respective years. His film Point of No Return (1992), propelled Bridget Fonda to stardom, as a government created assassin. Another Stakeout (1993), reunited Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez as the pair of undercover cops from the original hit Stakeout. In 1994, Drop Zone took Wesley Snipes into the high adrenaline world of skydiving to catch a group of killers. Nick of Time (1995), starred Johnny Depp as a ordinary father who is forced into a plot to assassinate the Governor of California when his young daughter is kidnapped.

Badham did undergraduate work at Yale in philosophy, then earned his Master’s Degree from the Yale School of Drama. Inspired by his sister Mary’s early Hollywood success as the young protagonist Scout in the classic To Kill a Mockingbird, he moved to Los Angeles and landed a job in the mailroom at Universal Studios, where he moved up through the ranks learning casting, cutting trailers and eventually directing episodic television.

Badham has earned the reputation of being an “actor’s director” through a career impressive in its range and diversity. In 1977, he guided a then-unknown Travolta to worldwide fame with Saturday Night Fever (a cultural milestone that launched the disco era and went on to become one of the top-grossing films of all time). His career hit another high point in 1983, when two films he directed that year, Blue Thunder and WarGames, received four Academy Award nominations. Since then he’s collaborated with such luminaries as Laurence Olivier, Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, Johnny Depp and James Garner in films that have won both critical praise and box office success. Other films Badham has helmed include Point of No Return (1993), Short Circuit (1986), Bird On A Wire (1990), Stakeout (1987), Another Stakeout (1993), American Flyers (1985), Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981) and the stylized Dracula (1979).

Badham is also a prominent television producer and director. Currently directing episodes of the hit series "Heroes" and "Crossing Jordan" he served as an executive producer and director for the Steven Bochco drama Blind Justice (2005). He’s also directed The Shield (2003), Standoff (2006), Just Legal (2005) Night Gallery (1972) and received two Emmy nominations for his work on the ‘70s series The Senator and The Law. His telefilm Floating Away (1998), starring Paul Hogan and Roseanna Arquette, won the Prism award for its portrayal of alcohol abuse. Other projects include HBO’s The Jack Bull (1999), Showtime’s The Last Debate (2000), Lifetime’s Obsessed (2002) and CBS’s Footsteps (2003).

Professor John Badham leads the Graduate Directing Program at the Dodge College of Film and Media at Chapman University. In addition, his innovative computer program, ShotMaster, which creates
Storyboards for people who cannot draw, is available to DGA members on their website.

John Badham spoke to us recently about WarGames’ 25th anniversary, and his remarkable career.


When I first saw WarGames, it was entertaining, and scary, at the same time. Let’s begin by talking about how timely it was, since there will be a lot of people seeing the film for the first time who didn’t live through the Cold War.
John Badham: That’s true. The Cold War was winding down at that point, not like it was in the ‘50s, but we certainly touched on how stupid war was, and the fact that we’d gotten ourselves into this paranoid position.

But Reagan was still rattling the saber pretty enthusiastically at that point.
Absolutely! He saw this movie as a guide to what you could do. He thought it was realistic. (laughs) I heard this through a guy named Larry Lasker, who co-wrote WarGames, and it’s also in the famous Reagan book that one of Reagan’s staff wrote. At one point, they’re discussing the various missile defense systems, and Reagan starts talking about something like Star Wars, to which his staff replied that that sort of thing wasn’t possible with the present technology. Reagan said “Well yes it is. Mommy and I saw it the other night, this movie called WarGames.” The reason I really believe it is that Larry Lasker’s parents were good friends with the Reagans. Larry and (co-writer) Walter (Parkes) had gained access to NORAD through the White House. If you’re a VIP of some sort, you can go down into the mountain and get a tour of the facility.

The 25th anniversary DVD of WarGames.

You came into the production quite last-minute, replacing Martin Brest, who’d done 2-3 weeks of work on the film.
He’d been on it quite a while in preparation. Then after shooting about 2 weeks worth of film in Seattle, he’d come back to Los Angeles to continue shooting. I was in the process of a painfully long sound mix on Blue Thunder, which took ten weeks, and I got a call from my agent saying “They’re in trouble over at United Artists with this film. I told them you wouldn’t be interested, but I wanted to let you know about it.” And I said ‘Lee, what if the film’s good? We should read it anyway.’ And the script was just fabulous. You just got caught up in this young guy who’s in over his head. First there’s a sense of fun, then there’s a sense of adventure and danger, then it becomes really chilling. From what I could tell out of what Marty was shooting, he’d taken a somewhat dark approach to the story, and saw Matthew’s character as someone who was rebelling against his parents, and who was just kind of stewing inside. There was that tone to it. I said ‘If I was 16 and could get on a computer and change my grades or my girlfriend’s grades, I would be peeing in my pants with excitement!’ And the way it was shot, it was like they were doing some Nazi undercover thing. So it was my job to make it seem like they were having fun, and that it was exciting, but it wasn’t this dark rebellion.

From a directorial point of view, was it tough to come in and take over someone’s vision?
Well, first you have to get the confidence of the crew, and I walked into the production office, which is a huge open space with 20 desks and some offices surrounding the perimeter. They said “Here’s your office.” It had been Marty Brest’s office, and there was a big sign on the door that said “Do Not Enter Without Knocking.” I grabbed a magic marker, turned the piece of paper over and wrote “Come on in anytime.” (laughs) I knew I was going to have to talk to these people really fast and get a lot done, because they gave me two weeks to prepare, then after three days they nudged me so much we were shooting on the fourth day. So I made friends with the crew, and let them know I wasn’t a threat, and the actors Matthew and Ally, are terrified that they’re going to get fired. So these two kids are coming on the stage stiff as boards. They had Marty’s vision in their heads, plus “This is the end of the line for us, too.” The first shot I did with them was about 12-14 takes, which for me is a lot! If I do 5 takes, I’m irritated with myself for not getting it right. But the job was to loosen them up, get them goofy, and be relaxed.

How do you do that, put actors at ease?
Your personality is going to help a lot, by being upbeat, encouraging and maybe adding things to the scene that might make it a little more fun. For example, Matthew’s character had a chest of drawers where he kept his clothes, so I grabbed some underpants, hung them on a lampshade, and messed up the room, so that when Matthew came in, he had to straighten things up, hide the underpants, and so on, from this girl, who’d never been in his room. At one point, I said ‘We’ve done a lot of takes here, and your mind gets kind of locked into one thing. Let’s just have a race around the stage outside, and the last person in has to sing a song to the crew.” They looked at me like I’d lost my mind, but out we went, and had a race around the stage. They both were 20 years younger than me, so you can guess who lost that one! Then I sang the silliest song I could think of in front of the crew, which was “The Happy Wanderer,” which is one of those yodeling songs.

Is there any film of this?
(laughs) No! Of course not! So we went on and began to have a lot of fun, and two takes later, that’s what you see in the movie. But it took a while, and after that they were in good shape because they knew they had someone they could trust, that they could have fun with, and who wasn’t going to yell at them.

Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy in WarGames (1983).

This was the breakout movie for both Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. What was it like working with them at that point, when they were still pretty green?
Matthew was actually a very confident actor at that point. He’d had a lot of experience, and the genes of his father, James Broderick, who was a fabulous actor and had been on a wonderful show Mike Nichols created, called “Family.” So Matthew had all of those genes. Ally had done one movie, Bad Boys, she was very green at that point. It took a lot of nurturing, and being patient with her until she got some confidence in what she was doing. So much of acting is about being relaxed and being confident, which is easy for me to say and really hard to do!

While watching the film again, it struck me that WarGames is a very timely film now for entirely different reasons than in was in ’83.
How so?

First of all, if you look at the way technology has grown since then—my cell phone has more memory than the computer Matthew Broderick was using—one has to wonder if it would be even easier for a terrorist hacker to break into NORAD today, and also it struck me how this film is a more serious cousin to Dr. Strangelove in many respects.
I’m sure that I unconsciously borrowed a lot from Dr. Strangelove in the tone, because it’s one of my favorite movies, and the other movie that was out at that time was Fail-Safe, which I didn’t like at all. It was very similar, but the silly part of me just delighted in Dr. Strangelove. So certainly the character of the General that Barry Corbin plays has some echoes coming out of there.

I thought it was also interesting that Walter Parkes said he wrote the part of Dr. Falken with John Lennon in mind.
Wow, you know he never told me that. That’s a new one on me, but it makes sense. At one point. Walter told me that he wrote it as a model of Stephen Hawking, who’s confined to a wheelchair, and then everybody starting saying “That’s too much like Dr. Strangelove!” So we went with an ambulatory character instead.

The original theatrical trailer for WarGames.

Let’s talk about your background. When did you know that you were creatively inclined?
Probably just having fun making stuff up since I was little. My mom was an actress who had attended RADA before the war, so I probably got some of her genes. My sister certainly got some of her genes. I started acting in the first grade and then realized in college that I was an okay actor, but not good enough to make a career out of it. My friend Sam Waterston was getting all the big leads, and you just knew that Sam was going to be big, and would always be big, and that turned out to be the truth.

Did you get to spend time on the set of To Kill a Mockingbird with your sister?
No, I was busy in college and there was no way I could break away, but I wish I had. I did get to come out later and watch her be in a Twilight Zone episode, which was really exciting for me to be on a set, and watch Rod Serling, and see how movies were shot. That was my first time on a set.

And the TV series that really helped launch you was Serling’s Night Gallery, a decade later.
That’s right. I did get to know Serling, and had several conversations with him, and had the frightening prospect of having to rewrite him! (laughs) The pilot for Night Gallery, which was the two hour pilot where Steven Spielberg directed the segment with Joan Crawford, Serling had this long, long introductory speech in the beginning. My boss, the show’s producer, said to me “This is kind of long.” I said ‘Yeah, it’s going to time out at 2-3 minutes.’ He said “Well, call Serling and tell him to cut it down.” I said ‘You want ME to call Rod Serling and tell him to cut it down?!’ He said “Yeah, I don’t have time.” Click. (laughs) He hangs up. So before I called him, I thought ‘I’d better have something ready.’ So I got him on the phone and told him, and he began to bitch and moan and carry on, and you’d have thought I asked him for his first-born child! (laughs) “They don’t pay me enough to do this kind of stuff!” So I said ‘Well sir, I took the liberty of making a few cuts and if you like them, great, if not, you don’t have to use them.’ He said “Okay, okay. Let’s hear it.” So I told him the cuts and he said “That’s fine.” (laughs) I hang up the phone. I’m dripping with sweat after this confrontation with this amazing, iconic writer. Re-writes were just not his thing.

Did you get to know him well enough where you got a sense of him as a person?
Not that well. I remember him saying to us one night that he no longer understood the business. This is 1969 or ’70, that it had changed and he just didn’t get it anymore. And I’ve witnessed that so many times since then, because the business is constantly changing and morphing and it’s all you can do to keep up with what people are doing.

Have you had any similar epiphanies?
I just watch the way films are being made nowadays. Studios are making nothing but big cartoons that they can make franchises out of. They don’t want to make anything that smacks of just being a one-off. Nobody wants to make the Robert Altman-type films, like the films of the ‘70s, where you make one of them, and they’re great and everybody’d love it. But now, if you can’t look forward to making four or five, they don’t want to do it.

You were lucky enough to come up at the end of the auteur decade, so you got to make some of those films yourself, beginning with Bingo Long, but especially Saturday Night Fever, which cemented your career and John Travolta’s, and created an entirely new cultural touchstone. Let’s being with how a boy from Alabama managed to make this gritty, kitchen sink drama that was reminiscent of the work of Tony Richardson and John Osborne from the early ‘60s.
Interestingly enough, Bingo Long was a favorite of (producer) Robert Stigwood, and his people, so they were making a picture that was eventually called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They flew me to New York in secret, to talk about making Sgt. Pepper. And I read the script and said ‘I don’t understand a bloody word of this thing! What am I going to do?’ So I have a meeting them, and I’m not very positive about it. Stigwood is trying to get me to stay in New York to work on the script, and I have to make up a tale about how it’s my daughter’s birthday, and I have to fly back to LA, because I no more want to stay in town and work on this thing than I wanted to have my prostate examined! (laughs) So I go home, and I don’t hear anything more from them. About two weeks later, they fire John Avildsen (Rocky) from Saturday Night Fever. Now the good part is that what I’d been working on during that time was the musical adaptation of The Wiz. I’d worked on the adaptation of the script and was with my partner Rob Cohen at Universal. We were in a go mode, except for one, nasty thing: they kept insisting they wanted Diana Ross to play Dorothy. I kept saying ‘Dorothy is six years-old. Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s books is a little child.’ But that’s tough to do in the movies with a little child, which is why Judy Garland was 15 when she did it, and they strapped her breasts down. Over the years, all the girls who’d played the part were 14-15, which would’ve been fine with me. But to have 30 year-old play Dorothy, who believed in cowardly lions and tin men, that was just neurotic! They kept insisting, and finally one day I said ‘I can’t do this. I’ve got to get out of this.’ Rob said “If you quit, you’re not going to get paid.” And he was right: I’d worked on it for six months and hadn’t seen a nickel, and I was literally on unemployment at that time. So I knew I had to figure out a way to get fired. So I’m in a meeting with the head of Universal and four or five of his honchos. I said ‘You know, I love Diana Ross. I think this is the best idea for this musical…There is this problem with her age, but I know how to solve it.’ So they all looked at me, and they all thought I’d figured out some devious way to save face. I said ‘The other night, I saw on late night TV this wonderful, old Robert Montgomery film called Lady in the Lake, which is all shot from Montgomery’s POV, and you never actually see him, unless he’s looking in a mirror or something. That’s what we’re going to do with Dorothy! Won’t it be great!’ (laughs)

John Travolta in Badham's hit Saturday Night Fever (1977).

That’s brilliant. You got into Yale for a good reason.
Well it took me about four months to come up with that, because this drama with Diana Ross went on for that long (Editor’s note: Sidney Lumet went on to direct the picture, which was a notorious flop). I had gone through anger, denial, all those things you’re supposed to go through about death…But during that entire process, I’d been watching one musical a day to familiarize myself with the genre, everything from Buzby Berkeley to Bob Fosse, I watched it. So when I got Saturday Night Fever, I was primed and ready to go. I knew how to do those dance sequences, and I also understood the psychology of those kids, because even growing up in Alabama, the psychology was very similar.

Was there any feeling while you were making Fever that it was going to be the phenomenon that it was, or did you think you were making this small, slice-of-life picture?
I looked at it that way. I looked at it as Mean Streets, which was really the model for me. It was a $3 million picture. It was meant by Paramount as a way to give John Travolta something to do while they were waiting to start Grease. Robert Stigwood wanted to do it, and they said “Fine, Robert. You pay for it, and we’ll distribute it.” But Paramount really didn’t want to make it. When they saw it, they were horrified by the language and the sexuality, all of which Robert was very insistent about keeping. Every time I would suggest softening it, Robert would say “No! Keep it as it is.” Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, who were running Paramount at the time, were just in shock. And then when the movie opened big, Barry Diller was heard yelling—these were the days when to find out what the theater grosses were, you had to call into this number, and they’d read you the figures—“No, no. There’s too many zeroes. There’s too many zeroes! This can’t be right!” (laughs) But they were.

One reason the film holds up so well today is that you shot it very neo-realist style.
Yeah, I almost tried to pretend like I was an English documentarian who’d come to Brooklyn to shoot a study of these kids and this subculture. I just tried to observe, and listen to people, and not try to impose my vision on it, because what do I know about Brooklyn?

So what was it like going from unemployment to being the hottest director in town?
Certainly difficult in terms of deciding what to do next. I just thought I should make pictures I would enjoy making, which was tough because a lot of people were after me, throwing dozens of scripts at me. So every choice I made was kind of painful. I had fun doing the movies that I picked, though.

You followed Fever with two stage adaptations: Dracula and Whose Life is it Anyway? What was it like opening up material that was originally written for the stage, and making it cinematic?
With Dracula it was pretty easy, because we just went back to Bram Stoker’s book, and paid no attention to the Broadway show. What we tried to keep from the show was Frank Langella’s sexuality. They were emphasizing the more campy aspects, and we decided to play it straight. With Whose Life, I worked with Reginald Rose, who’d written 12 Angry Men, and told him to open up the hospital, since the play really just took place in one room. We actually took the play up to the Williamstown Theater Festival one summer so we could familiarize ourselves with the material. I had a wonderful cast in addition to Richard Dreyfuss: Blythe Danner, Ed Herrmann, Celeste Holm. Then we started shooting afterward, right away.

You worked with the great John Cassavetes in that film. What was he like?
Oh, he was wonderful. He had kind of an angry, gruff exterior, but he really committed to what he was doing. John was so used to doing improvisational stuff, that on the very first day of shooting, he’s got to walk over to order some Valium for Dreyfuss’ character to calm him down. The line was “Nurse, prepare 10 milligrams of Valium for Mr. Harrison.” And John said “I can’t say this. It’s too doctor-like.” I said ‘John, you’re a doctor.’ He said “Why can’t I just say ‘Give this asshole a shot!’” I said ‘Because if you’re not specific about the amount, you could kill him. Doctors have to be precise.’ “Oh, okay, okay. Kid, I’m doing things for you I wouldn’t do for myself.” (laughs) He was so funny. We’d do five or six takes, and he’d say “Okay, those were for you now I’m going to do one for myself.” And we said ‘Fine, do what you want. We’ll follow you.’ And he’d do another take, and it would be exactly the same. But I knew he felt better, just kind of getting his rocks off. He was really the kindest man, and so generous underneath that gruff exterior. He was really a wonderful guy.

I understand you also shot a version in black & white?
We shot the whole thing in black & white! MGM said that we had to shoot it on color stock, which was their safety margin, because they didn’t want to do it in black & white. So to please me, they let us shoot on color stock, and then we developed it in black & white, and made a lovely black & white print. I thought if we made a widescreen, Panavision print, which we did, in a gorgeous black & white like something out of the ‘40s, that it would be something really special. We ran it at a few previews, and people loved it, but David Begleman, who ran MGM at that time, said “Well, I can tell from how people are reacting that it’s going to need to be in color.” I said ‘Uh, I didn’t get that at all. I don’t understand.’ So it went out in color, and I drained as much of the color out in the color mixing as I could to keep it subdued. We’d protected ourselves during the shoot a little bit by making sure all the sets were black, white or grey, and the costumes were, as well.

Warren Oates and Roy Scheider in Blue Thunder (1983).

Let’s talk about Blue Thunder and the late, great Roy Scheider and Warren Oates.
They were two of the most terrific professionals. They came to work, knew their jobs, and were just exceptional human beings. Warren was a wild man, and part of The Wild Bunch! (laughs) He had a great history there, and his stories of nightly tequila parties as the sun went down in Mexico with mariachi bands playing, that was kind of how Warren lived his life: really wild and crazy. But he’d come to the set, and was so focused on his job, and would try anything. One time, we had rear projection plates going on behind his office set, to simulate downtown LA at night. The rear projection kept screwing up and I went up to him and apologized and he said “Ah, don’t worry. I could do this all day long! I love this!” That kind of spirit, just loving the work, and being willing to try things, was what was so great about him. And Roy Scheider came from a totally different background: New York guy, more Method-trained and everything, more serious about his work, but somebody who knew how to have a lot of fun, too. I suspect Roy is the guy in Jaws who wrote the line “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” (laughs) Roy would do that, he’d come up with these little one-liner ad-libs at the end of scenes. When I showed the film to Spielberg, he said “You gotta cut these lines out that Scheider does at the end of scenes. He’s always doing it. I hate it!” I said ‘Well, I think they’re kind of funny, Steve.’ But it’s a shame we lost him, because he was a wonderful guy.

You’ve written a very well-received book called I’ll be in my Trailer. How was the book born?
The book was born after I was speaking at AFI one night, and somebody asked me a question about how do deal with difficult actors. I said ‘I don’t have enough time to answer that, because it’s really hard.’ And I noticed that the whole class that I had there, 30-40 people, had suddenly sat up, stopped writing in their notebooks, started paying attention, and I realized that there was a subject people were really interested in. So I went with my friend Craig Moderno, who’s a journalist, and we interviewed as many directors and actors as we could get our hands on over a period of 3-4 years: Sydney Pollack, Michael Mann, Mark Rydell, Steven Soderbergh, Michael Ritchie, Oliver Stone…anybody I could get to sit down with me, and would ask ‘How do you work with actors?’ And I’d ask the actors ‘What do you want from a director, and what pisses you off about a director?’ I learned so much from that, and that book is a reflection from all of those things.

Badham lines up a shot.

In recent years you’ve come full circle and have returned to doing television work. What’s it been like going back to TV?
It’s interesting because it’s like going to the gym to work out. I’m going to Chicago next week to do a TV show called The Beast, with Patrick Swayze, and I’ll be there for three weeks, and then I’m gone. In that time, I’ve got to do the best I can with the script that I’m given, which is a really good exercise. That’s opposed to a movie I’m working on right now that I’ll be on for a year and a half. It’s a long, slow process. It’s certainly not a director’s medium, television, whereas film is. In TV, it’s kind of like being a short order cook at McDonald’s. They’ve got a picture of that Big Mac, and that’s the way that Big Mac has got to be made. You don’t go screwing around and moving that pickle from one side of the bun to the other! (laughs) That’s how producers would like television to be done. Part of the challenge of being the director is to introduce stuff in there that maybe they haven’t thought of, and that a little creativity is a good thing. The biggest challenge is to stay fresh, and you do that by keeping busy. I like keeping busy.