Darkman
| Darkman | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster by John Alvin | |
| Directed by | Sam Raimi |
| Screenplay by |
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| Story by | Sam Raimi |
| Produced by | Robert Tapert |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Bill Pope |
| Edited by |
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| Music by | Danny Elfman |
Production companies |
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| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
Release date |
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Running time | 96 minutes[2] |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $14 million[3] |
| Box office | $48.8 million[4] |
Darkman is a 1990 American superhero film[5][6][7] directed and co-written by Sam Raimi. The film stars Liam Neeson as scientist Peyton Westlake, who is brutally attacked, disfigured, and left for dead by ruthless mobster Robert Durant (Larry Drake), after his girlfriend, attorney Julie Hastings (Frances McDormand), runs afoul of corrupt developer Louis Strack Jr. (Colin Friels). An experimental treatment gives Westlake super-human strength and resilience, with the unintended side-effect of rendering him mentally unstable and borderline psychotic. Consumed with vengeance, Westlake continues his research with the new goal of hunting down those who disfigured him.
After Raimi's initial desire to adapt The Shadow was turned down by Universal Studios, Raimi instead chose to create an original superhero based on a short story he wrote that paid homage to Universal's horror films of the 1930s. It was produced by Robert Tapert, and was written by Raimi, his brother Ivan, Chuck Pfarrer, and brothers Daniel and Joshua Goldin. Artist Tony Gardner designed and created the elaborate makeup effects required to turn Neeson into Darkman.
Neeson's first action film in the main role, Darkman received generally positive reviews by critics and was commercially successful, grossing $48 million, above its $14 million budget. This financial success spawned two direct-to-video sequels (without Neeson or Raimi) – The Return of Durant and Die Darkman Die – as well as adaptations including novels, comic books, and video games.
Plot
[edit]Dr. Peyton Westlake is a scientist developing a prototype for a new "synthetic skin" to help burn-victims, but he cannot overcome a flaw that causes the skin to disintegrate after 99 minutes. His girlfriend Julie Hastings discovers an incriminating document called the "Bellasarious Memorandum" which proves that her boss, real estate developer Louis Strack Jr., has been bribing members of the zoning commission. When she confronts Strack, he confesses to the bribery because it aided in his plans for designing a new city and creating countless jobs. He warns her that the document could be sought after by high-ranking criminals for its value.
Westlake realizes that the synthetic skin is photosensitive and light causes the material to break down. However, vicious crime-boss Robert G. Durant and his armed thugs invade Westlake's lab searching for the Bellasarious Memorandum, which Julie had left behind. Westlake is tortured, while his lab-assistant Yakitito is murdered. Durant rigs the lab to explode and escapes with the document; Westlake is horrifyingly disfigured by the blast and thrown from the building.
As a John Doe, he is brought to a hospital and subjected to an experimental nerve procedure to eliminate the pain from his burns. However, as a side effect, his emotions are amplified, triggering an adrenal overload that gives him enhanced strength. Westlake awakens from a coma, escapes from the hospital, and discovers his plight. Realizing that Julie believes he's dead, he re-establishes his lab in an abandoned building, hoping to perfect his synthetic skin to fix his scarred face and body.
Overcome with anger at his circumstances, Westlake decides to seek revenge against Durant and his thugs. He finds and tortures Durant's associate Rick for information before murdering him. Westlake begins using his synthetic skin to create masks of Durant's associates while developing a talent for impressionism. He poses as the various criminals, creating distrust amongst one-another that leads them to killing one of their own, Pauly.
Westlake recreates his own face as a mask and goes to Julie. He convinces her that he was in a coma and keeps his disfigurement from her, making up excuses to leave before the synthetic skin breaks down. However, during a date at a carnival with Julie, he loses his temper and assaults a worker before fleeing. Julie follows him to the abandoned building and realizes that his face was only a mask. After tearfully confessing that she still loves him, she leaves.
While talking to Strack, Julie reveals that Westlake is still alive. She then discovers the Bellasarious Memorandum on his desk and realizes he was in league with Durant the entire time. When Julie leaves, Strack tells Durant to deal with her and Westlake. Durant kidnaps Julie and chases Westlake with his helicopter, trying to hit him with a special gun equipped with explosive bullets. Durant's cohorts storm Westlake's new laboratory. Westlake takes them out, blowing up his own lab to murder the final thug. Durant flees in the helicopter with Westlake dangling from an attached cable. After a long flight, Westlake attaches the cable to a semi-trailer, which pulls the helicopter into an explosive collision, seemingly killing Durant.
Impersonating Durant, Westlake meets up with Strack and a captive Julie at the top of an unfinished building. Strack sees through Westlake's ruse and pulls his mask off, revealing his disfigured face to Julie. A brawl breaks out, and though injured, Westlake gains the upper hand and drops Strack to his death. Julie tries to convince Westlake that he can return to his old life, but he refuses, changed by his quest for revenge and new vicious nature. He slips away from Julie, pulling on a mask and running into a crowd of pedestrians. As Julie searches for him, a disguised Westlake watches her for a moment before walking away. In his mind, he declares himself to be "Darkman".
Cast
[edit]- Liam Neeson as Dr. Peyton Westlake / Darkman, a brilliant scientist working to develop synthetic skin. After being burned alive and left for dead, Westlake adopts the identity of Darkman to seek revenge on those who disfigured him.
- Bruce Campbell portrays a disguised Darkman in the final scene of the film (credited as "Final Shemp"). Campbell additionally provided ADR for Darkman and other characters in post-production.[7]
- Frances McDormand as Julie Hastings, an attorney and Westlake's love interest.
- Colin Friels as Louis Strack Jr., a corrupt and haughty billionaire developer set on completing an ambitious construction project (the "City of the Future") by any means possible.
- Larry Drake as Robert G. Durant, a ruthless and sadistic mob boss who works under the payroll of Strack.
Ted Raimi, Dan Hicks, (both returning from Evil Dead 2), Nicholas Worth, Dan Bell, and Rafael H. Robledo portray Rick Anderson, Skip Altwater, Pauly Mazzuchelli, Sam "Smiley" Rogers and Rudy Guzman respectively, members of Durant's gang. Jessie Lawrence Ferguson and Arsenio "Sonny" Trinidad play rival crime bosses Eddie Black and Hung Fat respectively. Nelson Mashita plays Yakitito, Westlake's lab assistant.
Additionally, Raimi's brother Ivan and director John Landis have cameos as hospital staff, with Jenny Agutter as the doctor treating Westlake's burns. Other appearances include Joel and Ethan Coen as the driver and passenger in an Oldsmobile,[8] Professor Toru Tanaka and Nathan Jung as Hung Fat's Chinese Warriors, William Dear as the limo driver and Julius Harris as the gravedigger. Bridget Hoffman appears as the voice of Westlake's computer system.
Production
[edit]Development and origins
[edit]Sam Raimi had long desired to make a movie about pulp hero The Shadow, but Universal Pictures (who had been developing their adaptation since the early 1980s) would not give him the rights to the character.[7][9] Raimi then decided to create his own superhero, with the idea for "Darkman" developing from a short story he had written about a man who could change his face to become other people. As the short story evolved into a 40-page treatment, the focus expanded to become about a man who had lost his own face, exploring how he would use a newfound face-changing ability to battle criminals as well as how relationships from before his disfigurement would be affected. The story drew elements from other works — the scarred face and doomed love of The Phantom of the Opera, the tragedy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and pulp figures like The Shadow.[10][11][12] Comparison was also drawn to Batman, with Darkman described as "a non-superpowered man who is a hideous thing who fights crime."[12] Raimi was also inspired by the Universal horror films of the 1930s and 1940s because "they made me fear the hideous nature of the hero and at the same time drew me to him. I went back to that idea of the man who is noble and turns into a monster."[13] Despite the grotesque appearance of the title character, Raimi did not consider Darkman to be a horror story:[7] "it's more a tragedy than anything else. Sure, he looks terrible, he looks hideous [...] but really, what the movie turns out to be is the story of a man trying to recapture his lost love."[11]
In 1987,[citation needed] Raimi submitted the treatment to Universal Pictures; the film was greenlit with a budget in the range of $8–12 million.[11]
Pre-production
[edit]Writing
[edit]I decided to explore a man's soul. In the beginning, a sympathetic, sincere man. In the middle, a vengeful man committing heinous acts against his enemies. And in the end, a man full of self-hatred for what he's become, who must drift off into the night, into a world apart from everyone he knows and all the things he loves.
The process of developing the treatment into a screenplay was difficult. The Coen brothers helped Raimi with the initial structure of the script,[7] though they never contributed a full draft. Raimi initially hired ex-Navy SEAL Chuck Pfarrer based on his work on Navy SEALs.[15] Pfarrer's first draft was followed up by drafts cowritten by Raimi and his brother Ivan;[11] Ivan, a doctor, was able to add authenticity to medical aspects and scientific elements of the story.[14]
As Raimi and producing partner Robert Tapert progressed through various drafts, they realized they had a potential franchise on their hands. Universal brought in screenwriting brothers Daniel and Joshua Goldin to work on the script's fifth draft. According to Daniel, they were presented with various drafts and "lots of little story documents. There was just material everywhere; drafts seemed to go in many directions."[12] Goldin focused on "pulling together a way of making the story work,"[16] with the brothers adding new lines of dialogue, new characters and bits of action. The Raimi brothers followed up with additional drafts, with the twelfth total draft becoming the shooting script that satisfied the studio.[14]
Durant's finger collection developed over the Pfarrer and Raimi brothers' drafts. The director wanted a specific trademark for the character – one that hinted at a military background.[17] Tapert later recalled Pfarrer was especially skilled at writing the script's villains.[7]
Casting
[edit]
For the lead role of Darkman, Raimi was looking for someone who could suggest "a monster with the soul of a man," and could portray such emotional depth while wearing complex makeup.[18] Initially, Raimi's longtime friend and collaborator Bruce Campbell was planned to play Darkman, but the studio did not consider him well known enough to carry the film.[16] Actors including Bill Paxton[7] and Gary Oldman[16] were considered before Liam Neeson was cast; Raimi liked Neeson's "old Gary Cooper charisma",[18] while casting director Nancy Nayor recalled his "haunted eyes."[7] Neeson was drawn to the operatic nature of the story and the inner turmoil of the character.[18] To research for the role, Neeson contacted the Phoenix Society for Burn Survivors, an organization that supports the emotional and social healing of burn survivors.[18]
For Julie Hastings, Westlake's love interest, Universal had been pushing to cast Julia Roberts. Roberts and Neeson had briefly dated and broken up – after an emotional audition, Roberts' agent requested she be withdrawn from consideration.[7] Demi Moore and Bridget Fonda were also considered.[16] Frances McDormand eventually landed the part, beating out second-choice Kelly Lynch; McDormand, Joel Coen (her husband), Ethan Coen, and Sam Raimi were all living together at the time of the production, which had led to her getting the audition.[7] McDormand candidly referred to the character as a "bimbo", describing her decision to take the role of the ingénue love interest as an attempt to break out of being typecast as a character actress due to her history of supporting roles in dramatic movies.[19] McDormand and Neeson demonstrated strong chemistry in auditions and worked closely in rehearsals, rewriting the three love scenes they had together after Westlake becomes Darkman. They got through these scenes, according to the actress, by depending on "each other's knowledge, of theater and each other".[18]
Larry Drake was cast as the villainous mob boss Robert G. Durant. Drake's approach to the character was to underplay his sinister nature, "quiet and careful, yet intense". Raimi remarked that Drake reminded him of Edward G. Robinson: "He looked so mean, so domineering, yet he had this urban wit about him. I thought, 'My God, this guy is not only threatening-looking, he has a good physical presence – what a perfect adversary for the Darkman!'"[17] At the time, Drake was primarily known for his portrayal of the sympathetic character of Benny on L.A. Law, making his turn as a ruthless villain a dramatic departure.[7]
Filming
[edit]Principal photography began on April 19, 1989, and wrapped on August 10, 1989;[citation needed] the film was shot on location in Los Angeles and Toronto, Ontario, and at Santa Clarita Studios in Santa Clarita, California.[20][21]
Working with Universal meant a significant budgetary increase for Raimi – $14 million in final – allowing him to design and build a laboratory set for Darkman and afford helicopters and professional stuntmen to film the climactic helicopter chase through the city.[22] Universal did not want Darkman to look too much like the Evil Dead films,[7] a notion Raimi agreed with as he desired to portray the characters "as real human beings in extraordinary circumstances".[11] Bill Pope was brought on as director of photography, by recommendation from Barry Sonnenfeld;[7] Darkman was Pope's feature debut, and he would re-team with Raimi for Army of Darkness, Spider-Man 2, and Spider-Man 3. Visually, the filmmaker was interested in paying homage to Universal horror films of the 1930s. Production designer Randy Ser remarked, "if you look at Darkman's lab that he moves into, which is an old warehouse, what was on my mind was Dr. Frankenstein. There were a number of references visually to what we were thinking about in regards to those films."[16]
The shooting was "exhausting" for Neeson, whose makeup took up to five hours to apply;[7] he wore the ten-piece prosthetic makeup for up to 18 hours.[13] Neeson was also preparing for a role as a boxer in The Big Man, and would awake as early as 3 AM to train for his subsequent role before beginning the day's work on Darkman.[7][23] He saw the lengthy time spent in extensive makeup as a challenge and liked "the idea of working behind a mask on camera, and just exploring the possibilities of what that entailed".[18] He and makeup effects designer Tony Gardner did tests using specific glues, foams, and bandage coverings. They also timed how fast they could apply the prosthetic makeup and put the costume on. Neeson worked with the costume designer on his outfit, including aspects like the cloak.