Milius

I'm not a pure filmmaker.

I don't sit there and say...

"Oh, the juxtaposition of images and color and graphics."

I don't give a damn about that stuff.

So, my whole concept of what I do...

goes back to the old theme of telling the story...

of the Homeric thing of being able to tell the tale of the Trojan Wars...

again and again and passed down until finally, you know, it's written down by somebody.

Nobody knows who Homer was, you know.

We'll come in low out of the rising sun.

At about a mile out, we'll put on the music.

Music?

Yeah, I use Wagner. Scares the hell out of the slopes. My boys love it.

( "FLIGHT OF THE VALKYRIES" PLAYING )

I'm John Milius, I'm a filmmaker, an historian and a storyteller.

John Milius had more movies made...

than any writer in the history of Hollywood.

He was really one of the first guys who said, "Hey, this is how people talk."

Do I feel lucky?

Well, do ya', punk?

He doesn't write for pussies and he doesn't write for women.

He writes for men, because he's a man.

He's not one of those directors that just goes from one movie to the next and he's a hired gun.

It has to be in him.

He made the most defining films of those decades.

This man participated in or directly wrote and directed...

these great films with these great parts in it.

It's pretty staggering to-- to realize the journey he took to get there.

What's interesting about John is he has a personality that is bigger than the movies.

John is such an interesting person, and such a great storyteller, just in life.

Francis couldn't tell a story like John.

George is a great storyteller. He couldn't tell a story like John. None of us.

I mean, he's a poet from the top of his head to the bottom of his toes.

He likes to blow it up, bigger than life.

And then he's created this... persona.

I've heard that he referred to himself as a Zen anarchist.

This gun-toting kind of Wild Bill character--

I hear Milius pulled a gun on some executive.

I like John, because he says what he thinks...

although I sometimes worry that he doesn't think.

He's the Teddy bear with an AK-47.

He wanted to make himself into a legend.

I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.

It was a nice, Midwestern kind of life, you know?

Everything was normal, you know, it snowed in the winter.

My family was okay, they were pretty dysfunctional.

All three children usually were trying to kill each other.

My dad's father, my grandfather.

had a shoe company called Milius Shoe Company.

And he had basically retired when my dad was young.

My father was quite a bit old, he was 58 when he sired me.

So I really came from more of a different generation.

My heroes, when I was a little kid...

were the incomparable Gene Autry, Roy Rogers.

John Wayne was an equal influence.

Oddly enough, Chuck Yeager...

because he broke the sound barrier and he was the greatest test pilot.

We'd stayed in St. Louis, you know, until I was seven.

We'd moved to California.

It was right around the Bel-Air Country Club.

My dad was becoming, you know...

a teenager and he really rebelled.

I think he didn't like that kind of country club sort of society.

And I don't think it likes him.

There's something about his personality that is sort of oppositional.

If the counter-culture was going left, he was gonna go right...

to be the opposite of the counter-culture.

He was trying to be as controversial in a way as possible.

So for everything he did, he was going to push off in a different direction.

You know, the day would come when I'd been in school long enough and I'd be, you know...

drafted or enlist and go to Vietnam and probably never come back.

Matter of fact, I didn't plan on coming back.

I was gonna be a Naval aviator...

and I planned that I probably wouldn't live past 26, because I didn't see any point in it.

You know, he came from a generation that had an education...

that espoused learning about the Classics.

It was his way of living through those characters...

that he was exercising that sort of deep-seeded issue within himself...

to be that guy who goes into the military and sacrifices his life...

or is willing to sacrifice his life.

He couldn't do those things.

Then he had this moment...

where he was kind of aware of his lack of importance in the world...

and that he hadn't done anything of meaning.

And I wandered into a theater, and they were playing a week of Kurosawa films.

I saw just about everything he made.

It never occurred to me what a director was.

And after seeing those Kurosawa films...

I realized that the idea of making films or writing films or something like that...

and though I wanted a military career...

I never was able to have a military career, because I had asthma.

Um, you know, being a director is about the next best thing.

And I ended up at USC. SC is the West Point of Hollywood.

I think at that time there were only three film schools in the United States.

It's hard to imagine that today...

but it was NYU in New York, USC and UCLA.

What USC is now is very different than what it was then.

They were working out of these small shacks--

Which had been converted into classrooms and a production stage.

Now it's harder to get into the film school than med school.

There's thousands and thousands of students trying to be directors today.

Back then, there was just a handful of us.

Sort of the pack at USC, there was a group of us.

I don't know, probably a dozen or so who really loved movies.

Really were aggressive and were very consumed by making movies...

and we were part of that group.

Now, John, on the other hand, was this big, burly guy that was a complete Californian...

who was a big surfer...

and just had this huge, sort of dominant physical presence.

I met John in the dark.

It was at a screening of some student films from the previous year.

After one film, this voice from the back, which I came to recognize as John's voice...

said, "This film doesn't have enough moxie!"

I remember John came in once, I'll never forget.

He's probably forgotten this.

He came in, he had a huge sombrero on, and he came in looking like a Mexican bandito.

And he was a very intimidating figure like that.

You gotta remember this was college in the 60's...

and John's point of view was considerably different...

than most people's point of view at the school there.

Draft card burnings became common...

and the chant of "Hell no, we won't go!" was the theme of the protest generation.

Hippies used to wear buttons that said "Nirvana Now"...

and they had a piece sign on them.

And it was like Nirvana Now, you know?

And so I took one of those buttons and modified it...

so that the peace sign looked like a B-52... and put Apocalypse Now.

And then I put one with just a mushroom cloud, you know, let's get it over with!

Talking once and he said, "You know, I'm really a hippie.

People think that I'm right-wing, but I'm really a hippie.

It's just that the hippies wouldn't elect me king and I want to be king."

There's a story that I believe to be true...

because I was there, that I've heard has been denied.

When I did my five-week project...

we did a wide-screen color movie with lots of extras and things.

Come to the Five-Week screening, they wouldn't show it.

It was all finished and everything.

And the instructor said...

"Well, we don't want to show it, because none of the other students are finished...

and this would be an embarrassment to them."

So, John got really mad at the teacher and punched him.

John was on one of the opposing crews.

Even though we were on opposing teams, he would still stand up for you.

Esprit de corps was very important to him.

He looks up to John as a big brother figure.

Obviously there's real loyalty and friendship between the two of them and a lot of history.

I'm not sure it's a big brother or a crazy uncle.

It was George and John, it was just a group that all the names were kind of bunched up.

And always orbiting around the student film festivals that they would have every year.

So, I saw his short film before I ever saw John.

"Marcello I'm So Bored".

That was a fabled film, as John was working on it...

because he was saying, "This will be the greatest film ever seen."

One of the characters, I think it's the Marcello character, says...

"I'm gonna be big, really big! I want to be really, really big"...

and it was obvious that this was a guy with an enormous talent for dialogue.

And that was my first exposure to what a John Milius was.

That and THX basically papered the walls.

We won a lot of stuff with those films.

If you went to film school...

the chances of going in the film industry were still pretty slim.

Forget it, you're never gonna work.

Don't try to make films that you think will appeal to Hollywood, because it's not gonna work.

Any of us had as much of a chance of getting in...

as the proverbial snowball in hell.

Even though there was no future, this was a great moment...

where you could actually make as many movies as you could possibly get away with.

When he was coming up, of all of them...

John was considered the shining star.

John was considered the most talented and the one that was gonna be the great director.

Willard Huyck got me a job immediately the summer I got out...

working at American International Pictures, AIP.

We were known as King of the B Movie.

We make exploitation films here.

We make things like "Rape Squad" or "White Mama, Black Mama".

I hired two young men, hot-shot graduates from SC Film School...

a surly rascal named Willard Huyck...

and the other a bombastic big guy and darty little eyes...

lot of fire and bullshit, his name was John Milius.

I was fired for insubordination...

and Willard was fired for surliness.

And then we were re-hired the next Monday to write a script.

I had an idea for a movie...

it was kind of something stolen from The Dirty Dozen.

But they didn't have enough money for a full dozen...

so it's called "The Devil's 8".

All right, they're coming your way. Let me take it.

Wait a second! This thing's going to explode!

One thing about you, Burl, you bluff easy, but you make damn, good whiskey.

It was so bad.

There's a kind of a changing of the guard that happened...

and John was at the forefront of getting into Hollywood...

because his name was in the Hollywood Reporter.

And we all went, "Wow, look! John's name is in the Hollywood Reporter!"

Because nobody from any film school had ever gotten into the business.

And this was like cracking into it.

Nothing was working about Hollywood...

and the audience had basically abandoned the movie business.

The star system had broken down...

and all the studios were basically going under.