BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III
We hot-wire the DeLorean for a trip to 1990… and beyond.
PART III WAS THE MOST FUN of the three movies to make because I got to wear a cowboy hat every day to work,” chuckles screenwriter Bob Gale, recalling the laborious yet liberating shoot for Back To The Future’s guns-blazing trilogy ending. Marty and the Doc may need a DeLorean to travel back in time – but not Gale. The memories he holds of the often-testing shoot for the franchise’s climactic third instalment remain as fresh as the film’s picture-postcard cinematography, despite three decades having lapsed since its 1990 debut. “We wanted it to be iconic,” Gale tells SFX during a brief pocket of downtime amid rehearsals for West End hot ticket show Back To The Future: The Musical. “It was a beautiful environment. The air was fresh and we got to shoot in Monument Valley where John Ford and John Wayne made all those great Westerns,” he beams. “It was such a thrill.” The fact that Gale – writer of all three instalments of director Robert Zemeckis’s time-travelling trilogy – has such a fond sense of nostalgia for his stint in the Old West almost defies logic. By all accounts, rounding out Marty and Doc Brown’s adventure through time from 1985 to 1955, over to 2015, 1885 and back again was far from a walk in the park. Following the mammoth success of the original, the powers-that-be swiftly decided they wanted a sequel – and sharpish. However,
when Gale and Zemeckis sat down to set the DeLorean’s time circuits for another trip, they soon discovered they had big plans and not enough time. Ironic, eh? “While we were developing Back to the Future Part II I came up with this idea of going to the Old West, because Bob and I love Westerns,” remembers Gale. “We incorporated it into a fourth act, but the script didn’t work because we started introducing all these new characters in the last 35 minutes that you hadn’t seen before. I said to Bob, ‘This needs to be two movies. Let me write the whole thing out and see what we end up with.’” Fortunately, Universal had already made deals with stars Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd to reprise their roles as Marty and Doc Brown for not one but two sequels, which worked in Gale and Zemeckis’s favour when they returned to present their over-ambitious plans. “We went to the studio and said, ‘We have good news and bad news. The bad news is we won’t have Back To The Future Part II in theatres by summer 1989. The good news is we’ll have it by Christmas, and we’ll have Back To The Future Part III in theatres by the following summer.’” A quick budget shuffle showed that Zemeckis and his crew could save money by shooting Part II and III back-to-back, so the duo were finally able to let their cast know when they’d be ending their journey. “They loved it,” recalls Gale. “Christopher Lloyd had starred in Westerns previously and Michael was excited – the rest of the cast too. Everybody was overjoyed.”
TRADING PLACES
For its big finish, Back To The Future’s final story flipped the Doc and Marty’s relationship on its head, all in the name of love. “Marty is the wise man and Doc is the fool in love,” says Gale of Doc Brown’s infatuation with Mary Steenburgen’s Southern belle Clara Clayton, a relationship that almost costs the duo their future. “There’s the scene where Doc says ‘Heavy’ and Marty says ‘Great Scott!’ and in that moment the two have dramatically changed places. Marty’s the Doc and the Doc’s Marty.” The storyline also allowed Gale to immerse himself in a mixture of Wild West mythology and historical fact to create a stylised version of Hill Valley circa 1885. “There’s lots of little things in there that I love, like when Marty’s eating the rabbit at his ancestor’s house and he spits out the shot, or when he pours a glass of water and it’s dirty,” smiles Gale. “That’s what it would have been like back then, and you never see that in a Western.”
The two have dramatically changed places. Marty’s the Doc and the Doc’s Marty
Back To The Future Part III saw a turn-of-thecentury redesign of the series’ iconic time machine. “The Time Train was something that came about when Bob and I were hashing out what we were going to do to pay this thing off, and that just seemed like the perfect, crazy, wonderful way to end it,” says Gale. “We gave the concept to our production artists with the rule, ‘Think of Jules Verne’s Nautilus submarine as depicted in Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.’ That was the look we wanted.”
It was half real train, half Industrial Light & Magic wizardry, and when the time finally arrived to shoot on their giant steampunk creation for the film’s epilogue, everyone on set was excited to see it in action. “All little boys love trains, right?” says Gale. “It was so amazing to be able to shoot with this 100-year-old thing that still worked.” Members of the crew were able to pitch in to help make things as real as possible: “There were these guys whose stock-intrade were Westerns, and because so few were being made in Hollywood back then we had all the best stunt guys and horse people training our cast,” reveals Gale. “When [outlaw] Buford gets manure on him, our head wrangler said, ‘You know, these guys are around horses all day and would get manure on them all the time. That wouldn’t faze him a bit.’ “We asked what would, and he said, ‘If Buford got spit on him, that’d really piss him off’ – so we did that,” he laughs, recalling the story behind Mad Dog Tannen’s unfortunate run-in with a spitoon and a moonwalking Marty. “Tom Wilson took quick-draw lessons,” he continues, detailing the work put in by the real-life alter-ego of Biff’s ancestor. “When we see him doing the fancy gunwork during the showdown scene, he was really doing that. He practised day in, day out.”
WORKING OVERTIME
The task of shooting two films simultaneously brought with it a gruelling schedule for Zemeckis, who had to supervise the edit of Part II while still shooting Part III on location in Sonora, Northern California. “The editors were with us on location while we were shooting Part III, so when we wrapped production for the day Bob would go to work in the cutting room on the second movie. That was all pretty manageable, but then it came to a time where we were still shooting Part III while we had to finish Part II on the dub stage with the scoring. “After he’d wrapped shooting, Bob would jump on a private plane and fly down to Burbank,” Gale continues. “There’d be a car to take him to Universal. We’d have dinner waiting for him on the dub stage and we’d play back the stuff we’d mixed. He’d make notes, we’d make the revisions he wanted and he’d go to sleep at the motel next to the studio. He’d get up at 6.00am the next morning, get on a plane back up to Northern California and shoot another day’s work on Part III. He did that for two weeks…” To make matters worse, Part III’s Western motif brought with it a number of tricky scenes that often contained an element of real-life danger. During an early sequence where Marty is hanged by Tannen and his posse following his first trip into Hill Valley, a timing miscalculation reportedly left Fox hanging and unconscious for nearly 30 seconds before anyone noticed – an incident the actor first revealed in his 2002 memoir Lucky Man. “There was a little bit of danger to it, but we took all the precautions,” Gale assures us. “There’s danger whenever you do any kind of stunt. He had a harness on, and I don’t know if it was any more dangerous than any of the other crazy stunts we did. Running around on the top of a train? That’s pretty dangerous, and he did that!” Back To The Future Part III hit cinemas on 11 July 1990, marking the end of a six month wait for audiences desperate to find out what happened to Marty after Part II left him stranded in 1955. For some, the final moments of 1989’s futuristic sequel remain one of cinema’s finest examples of cliffhanger ambiguity. However, if Gale could jump in the DeLorean and do it again, things would be different. “When Back To The Future Part II came out, nobody [in the audience] knew there was going to be a Part III. I said to the heads of the studio that we needed to promote this as part two of the trilogy and they said, ‘No, we don’t want to talk about the third movie.’ I wish I’d fought harder on that, because I think audiences were disappointed that the movie didn’t end. This is something that’s not an issue any more because everybody knows there’s three movies, so when you see Part II today, the ending doesn’t bother you,” suggests Gale. “Audiences are more conditioned to that, but back in 1989, they were not.” A short trailer during the end credits did go some way towards hinting as to where the Doc and Marty were headed next, and despite Gale’s minor gripes, this issue didn’t taint his time spent rounding out one of the most popular – and enduring – movie franchises of all time. “I think Part III is the perfect way to end the trilogy,” he smiles. “As I’ve always said, we’re not ever going to do a Part IV, as there’s no place to go. We’ve said what we needed to say about these characters. “Both Marty and the Doc are better people at the end of the trilogy than they were at the beginning and we think the audience is very satisfied with that. We’re certainly satisfied, and that’s why it says The End!”
Back To The Future: The Musical is due to open in London’s West End later in 2020. For more details visit backtothefuturemusical.com.