Kiefer Sutherland On Almost Losing Out On The Lost Boys
It's the movie most people want to talk to Donald's little lad about. So how come he almost left the project halfway through?
Kiefer Sutherland sighs and shakes his head. “You know, I’ve made a lot of films over the years and I’ve been in plenty of TV shows. All those seasons of 24, A Few Good Men with Tom Cruise, A Time To Kill with Sandra Bullock and Matthew McConaughey, I’ve played Paul Gauguin, I was in the Twin Peaks movie, Young Guns, Stand By Me, I’ve won a Golden Globe – I’ve done all of that and still the thing people stop me in the street to talk about is The Lost Boys.”
Not that Donald’s little lad minds discussing the 1987 smash. “I think it was a really important movie. 1987 was a very good year for vampire films. Together with Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, I think that The Lost Boys demonstrated that there was more to the genre than Universal and Bela Lugosi and Hammer and Christopher Lee, great though their movies were.
“Did what we did pave the way for Buffy and True Blood? It’s hard to say but The Lost Boys certainly proved that there was an audience for contemporary vampire stories.”
Centering on a pair of brothers (Jason Patric and Corey Haim) and their discovery that the town they’ve moved to has certain undead issues, The Lost Boys was originally going to be shot by its executive producer Richard Donner. Then after he had to drop out when the Lethal Weapon shoot overran, Mary Lambert was hired and fired in quick succession. In the end, the responsibility fell to Joel Schumacher, the costume designer-turned-director who’d made such Brat Pack movies as St Elmo’s Fire, Flatliners and Dying Young.
“A lot of the Pack were on that movie,” says Sutherland with a smile. “Me, Jason, the two Coreys, Feldman and Haim, Jamie Gertz, Alex Winter from the Bill And Ted movies – it was a cool little gang.”
But as awesome a vampire hoodlum as our man made, it’s incredible to think how close he came to missing out on the roll of a lifetime. “In the movie, my character David rides motorcycles. I love motorcycles so even when we weren’t filming, I was there riding around. Everything was cool until I fell off and broke my arm. I think if we hadn’t been so deep into the shoot, I would probably have been replaced.
“In the end it was decided to camouflage the injury which is why, whenever you see David, he’s wearing a pair of leather riding gloves. Originally, the idea was that I’d only wear the gloves when I was on the bike. Then Joel figured out that the gloves would be a good way of covering up my cast and so I ended up wearing them through the entire movie. Lucky for me, they looked really cool.”