Milius
Joey Figueroa, Zak Knutson (2013)
I began the afternoon watching Tell Me Lies, a film about anti-Vietnam War protest, and ended the evening watching a documentary about John Milius, whose asthma prevented his fighting in Vietnam in what he regarded as ‘his’ war. A fictional movie about an impassioned militarist might well use a thwarted ambition to bear arms for his country to explain the character. Can Milius – who, although he calls himself a ‘Zen anarchist’, has seemed comfortable aligning himself with more conventional right-wing views – be understood in the same way? I went to see the film expecting to find his politics objectionable and I quickly took a dislike to the man himself in the interview footage that Joey Figueroa and Zak Knutson use: Milius is assertively self-satisfied. The actor Sam Elliott announces at the outset that Milius ‘doesn’t write for pussies and he doesn’t write for women. He writes for men, because he’s a man’. (This thick non sequitur got the first of many smugly approving laughs from the man in front of me in NFT2.) But I was genuinely keen for the film to explain, and convince me of, his greatness as a screenwriter, if not as a director. Milius belongs to a celebrated generation of American film-makers that includes Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg (all of whom are interviewed here) and he’s a famous name in his own right. But when Milius began, with ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ accompanying the opening titles, it prompts the question: what has he done apart from the screenplay (with Coppola) for Apocalypse Now? The answer turns out to be plenty but Figueroa and Knutson, although their portrait of Milius is almost entirely admiring, didn’t persuade me that much of it was good.
Early on in Milius its subject is described by Spielberg as a great ‘storyteller’ but the film goes on to suggest only that he’s a gifted writer of dialogue. It doesn’t help, in claiming greatness for him in that more limited sense, that it’s always Kilgore’s line in Apocalypse Now, ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’, that is cited as the example of Milius’s facility for brilliant one-liners. His other best-known line – ‘Go ahead, make my day’ from Dirty Harry (although his contribution to the screenplay was uncredited) – is essentially a slogan. I learned from this documentary that he was brought in to gussy up the script for The Hunt for Red October and for a particular scene in Jaws. His screenplays for films directed by others include The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and the second Dirty Harry movie Magnum Force (1973). His work as a writer-director includes Dillinger (1973), The Wind and the Lion (1975), Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Red Dawn (1984). (He’s also written a good deal for television.) Some of these movies were culturally significant but they don’t stand comparison with the oeuvre of Milius’s better-known contemporaries. And his range of themes and preoccupations seems narrow.
The greatness of Apocalypse Now is taken as read and Coppola generously says that virtually everything of originality in the film is thanks to Milius, although the evidence of greatness presented by Figueroa and Knutson is mostly a series of images and their accompanying sounds – in which Coppola, Vittorio Storaro and Walter Murch (the most charming of Milius’s fellow USC film school alumni interviewed here) must have had a hand. I hadn’t realised that ‘Apocalypse Now’ was Milius’s sarcastic reworking of the ‘Nirvana Now’ badges of the hippie era: he designed his own badge with a V52 bomber replacing the peace sign. Milius has one or two other interesting things to say: he admits his relative lack of interest in making beautiful or technically complex films and that he wanted to direct largely out of ‘self-defence’ (that is, to protect what he’d written). As might be expected, there’s not much female testimony to his qualities but his daughter Amanda (we hear much more from her brother Ethan) registers when she describes her father as innately ‘oppositional’. The producer Kathleen Kennedy and the actress Lea Thompson are just about the only other women in evidence. Among the many male interviewees, Spielberg and George Lucas seem almost guilty about the huge fame and fortune they’ve enjoyed and to imply that Milius deserved it more; Coppola and Scorsese, although mostly admiring of Milius, don’t have the same sheepishness. By the end of the film I hadn’t warmed to Milius but I was struck by the affection and respect he inspired in more likeable and, the evidence suggests, more gifted film-makers. The late Sydney Pollack, who directed and discusses Jeremiah Johnson, also comes into this category. Oliver Stone, with less room to talk than any of these others, is the director most (amiably) critical of Milius. Elvis Mitchell, a fan, is the only critic to feature.
The chronology of Milius is occasionally confusing. I’d never heard of Big Wednesday – a project which drew on his love of surfing and Kurosawa and was especially dear to Milius’s heart. Big Wednesday came and went in 1978 but Figueroa’s and Knutson’s description of its development and box-office failure follows on from the Apocalypse Now section. Knowing that Milius is still alive, I didn’t understand why the most recent interview with him shown in the film was several years old: for a man with a high opinion of himself, his absence from the present day line-up in this near-hagiography was puzzling. I hadn’t known that he suffered a very bad stroke in 2010, which robbed him of his speech. As Steven Spielberg says, this was a peculiarly terrible fate for a man of words but Milius is slowly but steadily recovering and is now once again very active as a writer. It seemed to me a hideous irony that Milius, a big name in the NRA and a vocal opponent of gun control, was able to resume shooting before he was speaking again. It’s beyond me that people in the audience (not only the man in front) cracked up to hear anecdotes about Milius pulling a gun to seal a film deal or on Martin Sheen to encourage him to do the voiceover in Apocalypse Now in the way Milius thought it needed doing. Do they see John Milius as a character in one of his own screenplays?
20 October 2013