Richard Donner
The director of The Omen (and many other films) talks about casting the Antichrist, throttling studio executives, "the curse of The Omen," and more
by KURT SAYENGA
Director/producer Richard Donner started in television, then gradually edged his way into features. His first major success was The Omen, the tale of a distinguished diplomat (played by Gregory Peck) and his wife (played by Lee Remick) who begin to suspect their adopted child is the Antichrist. This interview was conducted in 2018. Donner died in 2021. Presumably his death had nothing to do with “the curse of The Omen.”
POTENTIALLY A GREAT, GREAT SCRIPT
KURT: How did the script for The Omen come to you and what did you think when you first read it?
DONNER: The Omen project came to me on a Friday night from a friend of mine who was working for a management company, and he called me and he said there’s a...what he felt was a great script called The Antichrist. It was at Warner Brothers and about to be in turnaround on Monday. He said, “It’s been turned down by every studio in town and now it’s being turned down by Warners.” He said, “Really read it.” I said, “Okay.” So he dropped it off at my house. And by coincidence, I was going to a dinner party at the actor Ian McShane’s house, and Alan Ladd Jr., who was a good friend of ours, was going to be there with his wife Patty. And he was then running Fox. So I went to take a shower, got out of the shower, smoked a little weed, and there was that script laying there on my sink. I stopped everything and I just picked up this script and I started reading it and I couldn’t put it down. And I was late getting there because I had done this, and when I got there, I got a hold of Laddy, Alan Ladd Jr., and I said, “Laddy, I just finished reading this script, it’s gonna turnaround Monday. You guys owned it once at Fox but put it in turnaround. It’s really, potentially, a great, great script.” So, he says, “Well, okay…” I said, “No, you gotta read it, because it’s in turnaround Monday, somebody’s going to suck it up.”
So his wife was there and they were going Saturday morning to visit their kids in some camp in the country, it was just about summertime, and I said, “Patty, make him read this.” She said, “Oh, I’ll try.” So on the way there, he drove. And, for me, she read the script. And she said, “Laddy, this looks pretty good.” So on the way back, he read the script. And he picked up the phone and he called me when they got back to LA.
Alan Ladd Jr. is a genius. He was probably one of the best studio executives and producers around. He’s very cautious with his words. And he said, “What are you going to do with this?” I said, “Make it into a movie!” He said, “No, what are you going to do with this?” I said, “Well...the thing I really would like to do is kind of eliminate the obvious. The cloven hoofs, the devil gods, the covenants, anything to do with demonic.” He said, “Tell the producer to call me, you got a deal.” So, I’m doing a TV series at the time. I knew the producer. You want all this stuff?
KURT: Yes. Particularly how you turned it from the obvious to not knowing if the kid was Satanic.
DONNER: Hey, I’m there with you, that’s it. So, the producers went in, they made the deal, and there was a wonderful writer [David Seltzer], but what we were going to do in eliminating the obvious was we were going to take what was being sold all this time as a horror film, and turn it into a mystery/suspense thriller. And there is a deviation in that point. They’ve got to find their own honesty in those characters, that life, in those surroundings. Why would you think that a woman could...have an affair…with the beast that they find in the grave, and from that animal a demonic being came, and that was her son? Can’t be. We treated it as, he was a true adoption. Everything that happened in their lives from the moment that child came in just built until a final day, which was the kind of a day you go home and say, “You’re not going to believe what happened today. Just the worst day of my life.” Everything accrued. Everything went wrong. And I felt that we drove it to that point ‘till Gregory Peck’s character was driven insane by it. I could explain every death as coincidental, in my mind and to the actors. How else could a man take a knife to a child to kill him unless he’s insane? And how else would I have gotten Gregory Peck to play the role? He was not going to do anything that didn’t have a sense of class to him. When I sold it to him, and we pitched him, “Greg, it’s a strong mystery, the suspense is incredible. And on top of it, it’s a thriller.” And he bought it.
KURT: Did that help get everybody else on board?
DONNER: We had, honestly, approached other actors at the time. For one reason or another, you’ll never get the truth from an actor when he turns down a script. And we were getting to the point where we had nobody. Gregory Peck’s agent called, and the producer who was doing the film [Harvey Bernhard] knew him. And he explained to us that Peck was going through a terrible time in his life. His son was found dead, grown son, outside some university. They called it suicide. Greg insisted he was murdered. But he was so devastated, and his agent said, “I gotta get him out, I gotta get him up on his feet. I gotta get him working.” So in a strange way, our movie was the opportune time for him and for us. And in a little bit, I had a great relationship with him, and he did a wonderful job on the film and it did take his mind off all of it.
There are fortuitous moments in everything in life, but when it comes to casting and something like that happens, it validates that. We already had Lee Remick. We already had Billie Whitelaw, who played the nanny, and, uh...
KURT: David Warner?
DONNER: I think we got David when we moved to London. And I loved him in Morgan [Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, 1966]. It’s one of my favorite films, actually. And we got David. This whole thing fell together so beautifully.
A SLOW ESCAPE FROM TELEVISION
KURT: Was this your first feature film?
DONNER: No, it wasn’t. When I first started, I was directing was Steve McQueen in the TV show Wanted: Dead or Alive. And some guy came over to visit on the set, became my friend, he was a producer, and he said, “I’m doing this movie, would you like to direct?” I’m just, “Sure!” Turned out to be a picture called The X-15. Which was with Charlie Bronson and Mary Tyler Moore. And it was “the first aircraft that went into space.” I must say I did a pretty good job on it, but it put me right back in television.
DONNER: Shortly thereafter, like a year or two, I was doing [an episode of the TV series] The Wild Wild West with Sammy Davis and Peter Lawford, and we kind of hit it off. They said, “Hey kid, you want to do a picture?” And I said sure, so we hired this wonderful writer, Michael Pertwee, he’s English. He wrote A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and he wrote a script called Salt and Pepper. Sammy is Pepper and Lawford was salt. And it was a silly comedy, shot in London. It was good enough that it had a sequel shot by Jerry Lewis, but I wasn’t brought back for the sequel. So I went back to television. And then there was a picture called Twinky, with Charlie Bronson and a young English actress named Susan George. Thirty-eight year old writer, living in London, has an affair with a 16-year-old girl and marries her – that would make all the headlines today. And that put me back in television. But The Omen didn’t. The Omen kept me going. Out of The Omen came Superman.
FINDING THE ANTICHRIST
KURT: What was the casting process like for the boy who plays Damien?
DONNER: Casting that child, Damien...it took us forever to find a kid that really had 666 growing out of the back of his head. And when we found him, we just hired him. No, how did we...I read every professional kid that age in London and it just didn’t feel right. I couldn’t find anybody. And so we went to the local schools and, lo and behold, there was this kid and there was something about him that was just...a little strange, a little off-beat. And so we brought him in and read him. And he did really good. And then we did one scene where I told him, “I’m gonna grab you and you want to get away and you gotta do everything you can to get out of my hands.” And so I grabbed this kid and we’re rolling and he’s screaming, “Let go, let go!” And I’m holding on, and he kicked me in my privates so hard that I just threw my hands up and said, “Cut! Hire him.” And that was it. The problem was, he had blonde hair. So we dyed his hair, and I think we put contact lenses in him to give him the darker eyes. But he turned out to be just wonderful. Damien. The search for Damien. I can’t tell you how many people thereafter who told me they looked on the back of their kid’s head for the 666.
SHOOTING THE OMEN
KURT: What led you to go with Gil Taylor as your Director of Photography?
DONNER: There were two cameramen that I wanted at the time. One was Geoffrey Unsworth. I called Geoff and I told him I was doing this little film and I wanted to do it really kind of first person, and he said, “Gee, Richard, thank you very much, but I’m moving on to do a new film.” I said, “Oh. Thanks.” He said, “But you know, there’s a wonderful cameraman named Gil Taylor.” I knew his name because he had also done some great films. Geoff said, “He’s retired. And he lives on a farm and milks cows all day and mucks barns. But he’s kind of got the attitude in life that matches the script”– cuz he had read the script. “Why don’t you give him a call?” Gil was in retirement for probably five years. And I called him and he said, “I don’t want to work anymore.” I said, “Well Gil, it’s a very kind of subjective film, and I really want to do a lot of handheld.” He said, “They’ll let you do that?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” “Well, that’s interesting. Are you going to shoot 2.3.5 or 1.8.5?” And I said, “It’s intimate, it’s mostly the story of two people, so I’m shooting 1.8.5.” He said, “You know, if you use that lens right, if you use a 2.3.5, you can make it really personal and force perspective with a diopter…” This guy’s talking and I’m falling in love with him. I said, “Well, I don’t know about that.” He said, “Hell, what are you doing Saturday?” “Not much.” So he drove into London, had a little Arri with a probably like a 35 [millimeter lens] or something, but he had it marked up with 2.3.5 instead of 1.8.5. And we went around London and just shot things, stopped people and did shot them, or I put him in the foreground and I shot half and he shot half. We saw dailies Tuesday morning, and it was so great. The whole perspective changed. I was lucky I hired Gil. And then, George Lucas was prepping Star Wars, so he called me and he said, “Who are you using, who did you get?” I said, “I got Gil Taylor.” He said, “Oh, he’s one of the old guys.” I said, “He’s great. He’s an innovator.” So George ended up hiring him to shoot Star Wars. And then Gil called me and he said, “These crazy kids, they don’t know what they’re doing! They got monsters walking around with beards and…” He really thought he had made a mistake, and it turned out he made the best picture of the year.
KURT: The Omen’s visual style is so compelling – it’s widescreen but still feels claustrophobic.
DONNER: Yes. You have forced perspectives and bringing them…He had a diopter that we put on the front of an 18.5, we made it like a nine for one of the things with the dog. Totally distorted. And then he had split diopters, so that when we had this 2.3.5, you could have that person in the front focus, and you can carry the whole background really sharp at the split. I learned so much from him.
KURT: How did you get the baboons to attack the car?
DONNER: You got time for a really long story?
KURT: Sure, why not?
DONNER: How did I get them to do it? I just walked up, had a megaphone, and said “Action!” and those baboons were great, all young actors, and they went crazy. Actually, we tried everything. We smeared bananas and they’d go running and attack, grab a banana, then eat it….which took all the threat away. We tried everything. And finally one of the trainers at the Safari Park that we were shooting in came to us and said, “You know, if you want them to attack your car, the thing we’ll do is, we have an older male who’s kind of the leader of the pack, who was bitten badly, and he’s been in the veterinary, and he’s coming back. And we’re going to release him. If you put him in that car, and hold him up so the pack can see him, they’ll try everything to get at him.” I said, “Fantastic!” So it was Lee Remick in the front of the car, it was a right-hand drive, and Damien was on the left, and I had the baboon, which had been anesthetized. And I’m holding him up with one hand, my left hand, and I’m shooting the Arri with my right. And I don’t put him into the lens but I’ve got him right there, and we start driving and they’re coming down towards the car and they see him. And they go crazy! And what I don’t see is, this baboon is coming to. And he’s grabbing Lee Remick’s hair, and Lee Remick looks around and sees the face of the baboon and he’s pulling her hair and she screams into the camera, and these baboons just attacked the car and pounded it and almost broke the glass. To get to this baboon.
KURT: Was Lee traumatized by this?
DONNER: Well, for the moment. I mean, an actress…and she hopefully knew that I was not gonna let anything happen to her. I think I was more traumatized by the son of the bitch coming to life in my hand. And you know, they have teeth like this and...and he looked me in the face, and we must have had something symbiotic because he just closed his eyes went back to sleep. But it was terrifying for her. You notice the kid in that? ‘Cuz I would just go like this [back and forth] between the two, and the kid was gleeful. He was laughing! You look at her screaming, you look at the kid, and then – it was a great little scene.
THE “CURSE OF THE OMEN”
DONNER: You know, if you make a comedy, anything that happens funny on the set, everybody loves. And it becomes a nice story about the movie and what happened on the set. And we were making this – you want to call it a horror film, I call it a mystery/suspense thriller. Anything that happened, if it had happened on a comedy, nobody would pay any attention to it. But if it happened on this type of film, it became an incident. Starting with David Seltzer, the writer, a wonderful writer, was coming over on TWA and his plane got hit by lightning. “Oh, God, the Devil’s doing it! They don’t want the film made!” Made newspaper headlines, especially in England. Then Gregory Peck was calling me over the phone – his plane was hit by lightning. Oh, big headlines. “The Omen, dangerous film, creating danger.” Then [executive producer] Mace Neufeld’s plane, going back to LA, hit by lightning. It was just...things were happening.
KURT: This is the supposed “curse of The Omen.”
DONNER: “The curse of The Omen.” But if it was a comedy, you wouldn’t even remember. Just, things happen. Oh God, one day we were scheduled to shoot a scene in a cabin of an aircraft, and the cheapest way for us was to rent an aircraft that was at an airport and not going out. We’d rent it for the stable time, no flying time. And the day before we were to shoot it, we got a call from the rental company that owned the airplane. And they said, “Hey, we’ve got an opportunity to rent that plane out for three days flying time and it’s a lot of money to us. If you could give us a break and not shoot on that day, we’ll give you a big break on the rental.” This whole picture cost two million dollars, including Peck and [locations in] three European countries. So, we said of course! That day, that plane took off, hit a flock of birds, lost its power, crashed at the end of the runway into a surrounding road, hit a station wagon, and killed the woman and child in the car. And they were the children of the pilot. Oh my God, it made every paper, and everybody picked up on it. “This was an omen, this was a terrible curse!” It was a horrible thing that happened, but it was just an incident. It was coincidental. But it really started to reverberate. I wouldn’t allow myself to believe it, but...
KURT: Were people in the production freaked out by it?
DONNER: Well, yeah, partially. And you can look this all up ‘cuz these are true stories. We shot in Safari Park, outside London, when we did the baboons. But we also did a scene with tigers where they’re just driving through it. The tigers all become very attentive to what’s in this car. We didn’t use the footage ‘cuz we had plenty in scenes that we shot. But as we drove out of Safari Park, the trainer who was handling the sequence with the lions went into his little protective office building, right where the animals were, and he left the door open and two tigers came in and killed him, as we left. So, I mean we had all these things and it really started to build up and people would talk about it. I was saying, “For God sakes, it’s coincidental! That’s what the script’s about! That’s what the story’s about!” But it was very strange.
FAMOUS SET PIECES
KURT: One of the intentional fatal accidents was the famous decapitation scene with David Warner.
DONNER: We were all set, there was something that was supposed to fall and this truck was in the yard. I was rolling, just to show David what would happen, and he was down on his knees, and this freaking truck went and hit – stop! And the glass came off and...thank God we were rolling. I loved David, he was a good guy who was a friend of mine, and so sorry he ended his life in my movie.
No, the way it started, it was written in the script that they were in Jerusalem, and they were passing through a construction site and supposedly a piece of glass broke loose and came down like a guillotine and decapitated him. Well, I had a very great special effects man named John Richardson, who went on to do every movie I did. And he’d call me out to the back lot where we were experimenting with how to shoot it. And the damn thing never worked because, when you let it- if you put wires on it, in those days there weren’t computers. Couldn’t take them out, really. And if we let it go, it would go, but shortly thereafter it would start to leaf. It would catch the wind. And oh my God, we must have dropped twenty sheets of glass till we realized we couldn’t do it. Glass trucks don’t carry their glass flat, they carry it vertical. But John came up with the idea: let’s do it this way. Break, comes loose on the truck, and it slides down a hill. I had six cameras rolling on it. In those days it was cheaper than doing it six times. Plus the fact, you never know what you’re going to get. It may be great just one time. And so we rolled with six cameras. Stuart Baird was the editor, and he made that one instant look like 10 hits. And the blood in the head, when the glass cut it, that was a wine bottle. The prop man had put red wine in it and when it hit that, it looked like blood. So in these high speed cameras, all of a sudden the blood started. But it wasn’t blood, it was red wine. It was all, again, fortuitous. Great it all worked out. Pretty amazing. Pretty amazing.
KURT: Another famous set piece was Lee Remick’s fall from the balcony.
DONNER: Lee Remick, in this scene where she falls from the balcony…God rest her, she was a very professional, wonderful actress and a great person, but...I had planned that scene with John and with everybody else, saying the kid would hit the stool and she would fall over, up to the edge of the balcony, and then we’d have stunt people come in and rig her. I was going to put her on the arm of a boom, and put a camera with her, and travel down to the floor. And so John Richardson went to her house, and I’m shooting this the next day. But he just went to measure her for this outfit to strap her into the boom, and he calls me and he says, “We got a problem.” I said, “What?” He said, “She’s not gonna do this.” “What do you mean?” He said, “She doesn’t want to get hurt.” “Let me talk to her.”
So I said, “Lee, you’re not going to get hurt, it’s fine, I mean I’m telling you, I would do it.” She said “Well, you do it. Because my husband’s the assistant director, and he says there is a danger, something could happen with that boom. So I’m not doing it.” I said, “I’m shooting it tomorrow.” And she said – and this quote has come up in my life so many times – she said, “You’re the director.” And so that night, we all sat around my office trying to figure out how we’re gonna shoot this. We had no time, we had no money, and we had to shoot it the next day.
And John came up with this wonderful idea. As the kid rides the tricycle, just before she climbs up on the stool to trim the plant, she takes this fishbowl and puts the fishbowl on the edge of the balustrade and then the kid comes along, hits her stool, she starts to fall and actually falls, she hits the bowl, and then I shot the bowl at, I forget how many frames a second, straight down, but with sardines painted red. I wouldn’t kill the fish. And that thing hits the floor at a high speed, blows up in slow motion. It was beautiful.
Then, we took the floor and brought it vertical, put plastic water where the water had gone, and we glued the shards of glass on that, glued the rug on, and there was also a palm plant which we’d put against the wall and wired the fronds up so that they would defy gravity. And we would put that on the wall, and then brought Lee to the edge on top where she was totally safe. And then I got a shot of her holding on and behind her you could see the floor and all that. And then, we put her on a dolly, so she’s standing on a dolly, here’s the wall, dolly starts here and she starts here and she’s looking that up and screaming, “Help, help, help!” And then her hand slipped past the lens and the dolly starts to move and we put a turntable on the dolly. And as she hits the floor, it was totally controlled at speed, and it looked totally like she had fallen off. I mean, it was just magic. All these things. The crews, the crews make your movie.
KURT: Making it believable. That’s your hardest problem.
DONNER: Oh boy, oh boy.
KURT: For instance, the memorable finish to the decapitation scene is the head rolling off. Did you get any static about that?
DONNER: I got no static. No static. You know, if you work for a good studio…Alan Ladd looked at that sequence, and he said, “Fantastic.” The only static I got was, David Warner was driving, he usually left the lot about the same time, we all did – actually it wasn’t a lot, it was somebody’s house, a Guinness estate we were shooting in. And I took his head in the car with me, and my driver’s driving me home, and his driver was driving him home, and as we passed him on the motorway David looked over and waved. And I held his head up. And he totally went into a state of anger and shock. I mean, he was…I had to pull the cars over. I had that head in my home for a long time. [Now makeup effects king Greg Nicotero has it.]
SMALL CREW, BIG MOVIE
KURT: I gather The Omen had a relatively small crew for a major studio film.
DONNER: It was a pleasure because it was a very intimate group. It wasn’t a great big crew. There was a scene where Gregory Peck and the priest are traveling and they stop at a little road side café out in the country. And they stop for lunch, stop for something to eat. We made that into a scene instead of just watching them driving. And in the morning, I got a call from the producers. They said, “We’ve been struck.” I said, “What do you mean? You know, we were shooting in Italy and if one crew member does something or complains to the union, they strike. And so they struck us that morning. So I drove to the location and we were sitting down trying to decide what to do and the chief grip came over to say, “Listen, guys,” he was Italian, he said, “I can’t go against the union. But if you guys want to do the work, I’ll tell you what to do.” And it was a small enough group of people that the producer did something, I did something, the associate producer, the assistant director, and we shot the way they told us to. Laid the dolly the way we were supposed to and shot. So it was a small, wonderfully intimate crew that I loved dearly.
John Richardson, who devised all these scenes and the decapitation, at the end of the movie he was taking a vacation. And he was on a highway in Belgium and there was an automobile crash. He and his fiancée was decapitated. That’s another one of those things you go, “Oh my God, what is this?” And that was well before the picture was released. So all these things, you didn’t want to go in the theater. I mean, I don’t know what’s gonna happen at the theater! That’s another true story.
KURT: Where did the idea of having each killing in a photo come from?
DONNER: It’s called an omen. Something is foretold, and in this case foreseen. It’s an omen and until you realize it’s an omen and then go back and look, it really makes the mystery work. Again, is this a demonic incident or is this another horrible coincidence? That was good writing on David Seltzer’s part. Especially when it foretells your own demise as it does with the actor.
KURT: David Warner?
DONNER: David Warner. He’s the photographer, he’s seeing and explaining to Peck and the priest, “Everybody look, this is foretelling the death of these people!” And then he calls them in and he says, “Look!” and it’s him. Could you imagine what that actor, what he was playing, what he had to do? “When is this going to happen to me? And how do I keep it from happening to me?” But it does happen.
A HELPFUL NOTE FROM A STUDIO HEAD
KURT: Were there any last-minute changes to the film?
DONNER: We did that whole movie for I think it was $2,005,000, and even in those days that was an extraordinarily small amount of money to do what we did, where we did it, how did it, and to pay the actors that we had in it. And when I showed the picture to Alan Ladd, Jr. in London, two things happened. At dinner, having just seen my picture, all through dinner, he never discusses it, never. I tried to bring it up and he’s very quiet. I’m thinking, “Oh my God, he doesn’t like it, or something’s going to come out of this.” And as we’re leaving the restaurant to go to our cars, he just turned to me and he said, “You think the kid could live?” He talks very low. I said, “What?” He said, “Do you think the kid could live?” Because the end of the movie originally was when Peck is in the church and he’s going to kill the child and the cops come in, the gun goes off, and you go to the funeral, and at the funeral you would have seen not only Peck’s coffin but you would also have seen the child’s coffin, because Peck had finished killing the kid. The kid was dead. And Laddy said, “Do you think the kid could live?” And I thought about it, I thought, “Oh my God, that answers horror, mystery, suspense, thriller, what is all this?” So I said, “Sure!” And he gave me another two thousand dollars to do that and we shot it. There was a little short crane and we see the Ambassador of the United States there. He walks towards this woman as we drop the camera, and it reveals the back of the kid. He’s still alive. And then the kid, Henry Stephens, I said, “Hey, look at me!” I was where you are right behind the camera. And the kid turned and looked at me. And he and I, we had a great relationship, and he had this severe face on and I said, “Don’t you smile. Don’t you dare smile!” And he started to fight the smile and then he couldn’t fight it anymore and he kinda lit up. And it was like Blow Up. The end of the movie. Was this real? Am I really the devil, did this really happen, or are you seeing a movie? Yes, you’re entitled to laugh if you don’t like it. And it changed the whole movie.
KURT: What was the other important thing that happened that night?
DONNER: I said, “We have an opportunity for the composer Jerry Goldsmith.” He said, “That’s great.” I said, “Yeah, but it’s $25,000.” In those days, to get a composer like that – and we don’t have the money. Laddy said, “You got it, I’ll give it to you.” So out of nowhere Laddy gave us the money for Jerry Goldsmith. Jerry came over and we showed him the film on our little Moviola bubble head. We spot it – spotting means marking the areas where the director, the editor, and the composer think this is or is not a good place for music. And if it is, this is the thought of the music. We were doing that and Jerry was going [Hums “Ave Satani”]. And when we were spotted, he said, “I’d like to have a choral group, a medieval choir.” I said, “Well, well…okay, let’s see.” But it just sounded so wrong to me.
We did some scoring of the picture, and we got to this one scene where the Rottweiler was coming across the balcony on top of the home. And it was kinda back lit and it was slightly high speed. So we were in the studio with the orchestra, and they would perform the music to picture. And Jerry was out there conducting the orchestra and we get to this scene where the dog comes across the balcony and I see this choral group coming in. And then the picture goes back, runs again as the choral group is being settled in.
I said, “What the…!” and Jerry said, “Okay, we’re ready for a take.” And I’m just sitting there and the dog comes in and this choral group starts with “Shhhhhh, Antichristo, Antichristo” and then there were ten voices or four voices and six and eight and ten and twelve. All doing this “Antichristo, Antichristo.” I got the chills that went right up my back! And I screwed up the take because I ran in yelling, “It’s fantastic! Fantastic!” That was Jerry Goldsmith. It was beautiful. Twenty-five thousand dollars.
PEOPLE WERE REALLY ANGRY AT ME
KURT: What was the audience response when the film was released?
DONNER: Oh, we had a screening in London – and I lived on and off in London with the first picture I told you about, the first two. So I had a lot of friends in London. I said, “Look, I’m going to screen a movie that I made, so come on over, Fox Theater in Soho Square.” And a lot of them brought their kids. I didn’t think about saying, “Don’t bring your kids!” I didn’t even think about it. And the movie starts and things are going and people start to scream, yell and scream, and kids start crying, and parents are getting up and breaking up the mood of the thing and getting…you know. When it was all over, people were really angry at me. And I realized what we had. I mean, if it got everybody that wound up, then case closed, this is it. We’ve got a movie!
KURT: Even the movie’s release date was clever.
DONNER: Another Alan Ladd genius stroke. Six Six Six – the sign, 666, was the sign of the devil. We were opening the picture in June, and June is the sixth month, and it was 1976. We were going to open the movie on the 8th, I think, June 8th, 1976. And Laddy called me one night and he says, “Dick, you want to open the movie a couple days early?” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, if you do, it’s a 6/6/6.” So I said, “Oh my god.” So what we did, in every theater, as the people came out of the theater, placards were set up in the lobby that said, “You’ve just seen this on the sixth day of the sixth month of June on the sixth day of 1976. Six six six.” And it went out like, people’s reactions, everybody, it was fantastic.
KURT: What was the movie about for you? Was it just a thrill machine or did it have a deeper meaning?
DONNER: Well, when you make a movie you make it about characters, about people. This was a story about a condemned love, of Peck and Remick and their desire to have a child and how much it meant to them. This was a relationship film. And out of that, and your love or interest for the characters, all these things start to happen to them. And that’s why I treated it like a mystery, a mystery/suspense thriller. It was these people that you cared about. So it was really a story about those two people and what happened to them in their lives that brings about their deaths. A strange experience that nobody else is gonna – nobody knows about that kid, his history. It all died with them in a strange way. Until Omen 2.
KURT: Some people feel it’s about parenting and your kid not turning out how you hoped they would.
DONNER: It may be because I never had children. [Laughing] They scare the hell out of me. I mean, this is not the Devil’s child. What was the beast in the movie and in the Bible? A jackal. “For the jackal that has sex with a woman creates the Antichrist.” In real life you don’t have the Antichrist, but a lot of people have children they think are the Antichrist. Others, maybe Christ. You perpetrate this procedure of creating life and don’t know what you’re creating. How do you keep these kids straight? I don’t know. I really didn’t want children because I didn’t think I was able to handle them or bring them up. Was it because if The Omen? I don’t know.
KURT: Did you put any of that anxiety into The Omen?
DONNER: Listen, it’s there, of course. When Remick starts to see this kid being strange, Peck says, “I don’t believe that something’s wrong.” I mean I haven’t seen the movie in 20 years, but their relationship as a couple was focused on their child. And something’s wrong.
KURT: Children can put a strain on a marriage.
DONNER: I’m sure. I’ve too many friends that have kids, and the percentage that turned out great versus the percentage that turned out problematic…I’ve never delved into and I don’t want to. But I have a listening ear.
KURT: That must have been difficult for Gregory Peck given what he had just gone through with his son.
DONNER: Very difficult. Very difficult. And I was very careful that an insinuation of any sort would never go in that direction. But I am sure as a director and an actor that Peck had this somewhere deep in his mind, and would push it away.
DIRECTING GREGORY PECK
KURT: So did you keep your directing of Peck more technical than emotional?
DONNER: An actor’s an actor, a director’s a director, and you’ve got two minds that hopefully are simpatico and going in the same direction. At times they go astray, and as a director you’ve got to listen to their idea and if it works better in the film’s process than yours does, you go with it. If it doesn’t, you have a job to do. Your job is to convince them in some way that your idea is right – not that it’s right or wrong, but it’s better for the film, better for the characters. And we did have some experiences.
DONNER: There was a scene when he finds out that his wife has died and he’s in this hotel in Italy. David Warner’s been out, comes back, and Peck tells him that she’s dead and that he wants the child to die. And I had it, we never rehearsed but we had talked about a lot of it. I had in my mind that when you came into that room, it was the aftermath of his knowledge, and that he was almost comatose. Just laying there with a thought. And David came in and wherever he was, it brought him back to reality. He very quietly tells him “She’s dead, I want the child to die.” It’s a very strong scene. Again, the night before that scene was to be shot, Gregory got hold of the prop man and said, “Listen, I want you to get some breakaway lamps and bottles and some furniture and this and that,” and the prop man listened to him and he came up to me after Peck had gone to his dressing room. He said, “Mr. Peck wants all these things.” “What did he say what he wants?” “He says he wants to go berserk, wants to break everything.” So I brought Greg out on the stage. I said, before he went home, I said, “Greg, here’s what we’re going to do,” and I explained my shot. He was laying on the bed in profile, his arm all bandaged from the fight at the cemetery, and it was going to be a very slow creeping in on a dolly right into a big close up of him. You’d see David just before you closed, in the distance, and Peck would have his moment and say she’s dead. He said, “No, no, I’ve got to express myself.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I’ve got to get that phone call on film, on camera, and I just gotta go berserk and just let this all out of my system.” I said, “It’s after you did that. All this time after you’ve been laying there thinking. You may have done all those things, but don’t do them on camera. Take your expressions afterwards, let that all come out in a very quiet, very definite, very positive, affirmative way in your mind.” And he said no and we got into this terrible argument, and I’m not giving, and I’m thinking, this is Gregory Fuckin’ Peck and you’re a punk kid and how are you getting away with this? But finally, at the end of it, I said, “Greg, that’s the way it is, that’s what we’re shooting tomorrow.” And he stormed out saying, “Okay, you’re the director!” And I’m thinking, “Oh my God, was I right? Am I right, should I do it this way? It’s Gregory Peck, who am I to tell Gregory Peck what to do?”
That night I rehearsed with the crew, especially the focus puller, on how to carry it away from this wide into Peck’s eyebrows and Adam’s apple. I mean we did it and did it and did it. And this kid, the focus puller, he was sweating. I said, “Everybody ready? Okay, leave it, that’s the set up.” Next morning, Peck came in said, “What do you want me to do?” I said, “Just lay down here, Greg,” and he said, “And then what?” and I said, “Do the thing, we’ll come in, I’ll cue you when you hear the door.” He said alright. I said, “We ready?” Everybody said yeah. I said, “Okay, lock it up and roll it!”
So we rolled it, and I’m looking at the kid more than Peck ‘cuz there’s the big [focus] knob, and he had it on a little extension line, and just as we get into the end I see – in those days there weren’t any monitors, there was a view finder on the side which was sharing right eye with the operator and left eye with the focus puller – and I see them stop and I cue it back. Everything worked great. David walks in does the cue. “Cut!” Everybody looks. I said, “Okay, thank you, Greg.” He said, “What do you mean, thank you?” I said, “Well, that’s it.” He said, “No, I want to do another.” And I said, “No, you don’t have to do another.” He said, “Yes, I do.” I said, “No. You got it. You were very angry at me when you did this and it shows. Let’s just say it’s there. If you don’t like it, I’ll redo it.” We finished up with the day. And the next day, I always have the cast and crew if they want come to watch dailies at lunch time and we supply lunch and we talk about it. And Peck showed up with his wife Veronique. First time he ever came to dailies. And when the lights went down and we ran the scene, he stood up and he said, “Stop the projector!” I’m going, “Oh shit, I’m outta here, I’m on an airplane.” And he turned and said, “I want to apologize to Richard Donner. He said I could not have done that take any better. And the scene couldn’t be more perfect. I thank you.” And he walked out and it was like, oh my God. It was a defining moment in my life. So yeah, when you really believe in it, you gotta fight for your rights. You gotta fight for your point of view. It comes up a lot on making movies.
THE OMEN IS NOT A HORROR MOVIE?
KURT: Is horror considered a pejorative term in Hollywood?
DONNER: Yeah, I think so. At the same time I also think some of it is magnificent. I’ve seen some horror films that scared the daylights out of me. If you ask me what they were, I wouldn’t remember, but I remember in my lifetime I have. People could look at The Omen and say that was a horror film because to them, that’s what it was. It becomes very personal. But to the director who made that film, he wasn’t seeing it as a horror film. He was seeing it as a film, as you’ve asked me in your questions, as a film about two people in a horrible situation that turns their life around and things happen. For me they happen out of a reality and out of a truly given situation.
I think horror films give you much more leeway to be excessive in the ways you want to scare or horrify people. It’s a definition that’s very difficult to define.
KURT: Whether something is labelled “horror” or “thriller” seems to be determined by marketing departments.
DONNER: I’ll tell you, horror came up…when we finished the film and it was so wonderfully received and we were getting ready to market it and put it out there, the head of marketing at Fox at the time presented Harvey Bernhard, who was my producer, and myself with the program they were going to market the film with. It was a cheap horror film pitch with parts of bodies. And we went to Alan Ladd and said, Alan, this is not what the film’s about. And he says, go tell the marketing people. I mean that’s the kinda guy he was. And we had a meeting with them. We walked in and Harvey and I said, “Listen, guys, you gotta start from scratch. This is a terrible approach. This is not the way we want to sell it. You don’t sell Gregory Peck and Lee Remick on a quote unquote “horror” film. This is a mystery.” And the guy turns to me and he says, “That’s all it is. It’s a horror film.” And Harvey Bernhard was over his desk in a matter in seconds and had this head of marketing by the throat, literally, and his assistant was on my back ‘cuz I was coming in to take the other guy. We’re going to have this terrible fight at Fox Studios with these executives. But it came down to that, because when we left, we back to Ladd and said, “If you do this we’re not going to publicize.” He said, “No, no, don’t get so upset!” And he allowed us to bring in an outside marketing man who came up with the whole idea of, “You have been warned. The Omen, The Omen’s coming.” He turned the whole thing around.
KURT: That’s a classier pitch.
DONNER: But that’s it, to the marketing executives at Fox it was just a horror, a little horror film.
KURT: Exploitation was big around that time.
DONNER: Oh boy was it. So, the same process that we had when we made the film was the process that we wanted to sell it in. It goes all the way until you graduate.
KURT: But then again, Jaws was indisputably a horror film.
DONNER: Yeah, but it’s anything but a horror film in a strange way because it’s so personal. Everybody in that, how we get into it, it’s one on one, it’s characters…it’s Steven. Well, Steven’s a genius at that.
THE TWILIGHT ZONE
KURT: Going back to your television work, you directed one of the all-time great Twilight Zone episodes, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Did you know it would be an instant classic?
DONNER: If you knew that, life would be in a whole different place. No, I had no idea. That was a well-written script.
KURT: Did Richard Matheson write that one?
DONNER: Yes, Richard Matheson. And I was thrilled to do it. Those were half hour shows, and we were in our second day of a three day production, and I was at MGM [Studios]. There happened to be an aircraft that MGM had on a stage, so we could have rain and water. And at the end of the day, the producer came in and said, “Dick, you’re going to have to finish tonight.” I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “The studio came to us and they have a feature coming in here tomorrow and they’ve got to have the plane and start setting its backgrounds and everything.” I said, “We can’t, this is a three day shoot, this is only the second day!” And the studio said, “Before the sun comes up you guys gotta be done.” We had to do it, and it was a bitch. It was really difficult. But everybody…again, it was a great crew. Bill Shatner was great. A great crew, great cast. And everybody pitched in and we were all young and we delivered on time. Did we know we had made a half hour TV show that people would talk about for a lot of years to come? No, no idea. It was just, we had a good show, couldn’t wait to cut it, couldn’t wait to see it, and couldn’t wait to get the reaction.
KURT: Did you work directly with [creator and showrunner] Rod Serling?
DONNER: I think I did five or six or seven with him. He was involved in every one to this degree: when he came on MGM’s lot to go into your preproduction, you met with Rod and he talked about the script and what your approach was and what his approach was. And your approach became his approach if you wanted to do another one. But he was very good, as were the individual producers and writers. Great, great writers, great producers. It was really a big honor. I came late in the show’s life, the last year or last two years of the show, but they were a delight. You never knew what you had. You looked at some of [the stories] and then you realized that, “Wow, oh wait a minute, this is God!” This one is suspenseful, this one is kinda chilling. You’d go out of your way to put your own moniker on the individual show you did, and then at the end of the show Rod would come in and we would do a little trailer, kind of a lead in. It would be a goodbye to your show, a lead in to the next one, and that would go on every show that you did. Fascinating man.
KURT: What was your involvement in Tales From the Crypt?
DONNER: I had a producer who I brought on as a favor to somebody and after we got a relationship on a couple of pictures, he said to me, “I need money, I need money.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, did you ever read Tales from the Crypt?” I said of course. I mean that was a comic book I loved. He said, “Well, I got the rights, I got the rights, but I need $25,000 or I lose them.” His partners were two great writers. So I came up with $25,000, because I love the idea. And I became a partner in the ownership of it and producing it.
KURT: Was the Crypt Keeper difficult to work with?
DONNER: No. Working with the Crypt Keeper was a snap. He was kind of a very skinny, funny-looking Rod Sterling. ■
Small portions of this interview were featured in the AMC-TV series Eli Roth’s History of Horror; our conversation appears here in its entirety for the first time.