John Milius - Guerilla Filmmaker

The great man on Red Dawn, the film that pitted Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen against the USSR.

Long before he fell ill and back when that dire remake was but a desperately bad idea, I chatted to Hollywood’s self-styled 'Zen anarchist' about masterminding the Soviet invasion of the United States.

How did Red Dawn come into being?
To a certain degree, it came from every movie I'd made up until that point being pissed on by the critics. Red Dawn was my fifth film as director. I'd made [gangster biopic] Dillinger, which got some mixed reviews, I'd shot [period action drama] The Wind And The Lion which the critics said made Teddy Roosevelt look ridiculous, I'd made my surf movie Big Wednesday which was dismissed as being pretentious. And then I made Conan The Barbarian which got the worst reviews any filmmaker's ever received. So I just thought, "Fuck you! I'm gonna make the movie I want and you guys can go shit in your hands and clap."

And more immediately?
It came from me and Kevin Reynolds [who went on to direct Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves and Waterwold] wanting to write about the biggest issue of the time, which was the threat posed to America by the Soviet Union. You couldn't open a paper back in the early '80s without someone asking what we would do if the Russians crossed the Bering Strait. I just thought we should take that thinking to its logical conclusion and write about a band of young Americans trying to defend their country from the Soviet menace.