THE GOONIES (1985)
Donner’s previous experience with child actors had largely extended to him unleashing a five-year-old Antichrist on the world. But that didn’t prevent Steven Spielberg from hand-picking him to direct The Goonies, about an unruly mob of youngsters racing to excavate pirate booty. “Steven was absolutely right about one thing, which is that Dick was a kid at heart,” says Chris Columbus, the film’s writer. “And that was infectious. He had the energy and the humour of a teenager, and those kids really fed off of that.”
Where Donner’s previous movies had been precisely choreographed, The Goonies was relative anarchy, thanks to an uncontrollable young cast — Sean Astin, Kerri Green, Ke Quan, Martha Plimpton, Corey Feldman, Jeff Cohen and Josh Brolin. Donner, rather than battling the chaos, embraced it. “None of the kids in the film feel like TV sitcom kids,” Columbus says. “He had this almost Altman-esque style of directing, where everybody was speaking over everyone else. And it just felt real to kids who saw it at the time, and who continue to watch it.” There’s swearing, insults, raunch, mentions of cocaine and heroin. “We got away with murder in that film!” laughs Columbus. “It wouldn’t be made now. Or if it was made, it would be rated R.”
But it also has a huge heart, and the kind of chemistry that can’t be faked. Donner and Spielberg turned the studio into a virtual summer camp, providing the youngsters with an Indiana Jones arcade game to play (which must have been a bit surreal for Quan, who had just starred in Temple Of Doom), and inviting people such as Tim Burton, Dan Aykroyd and the actual Indy, Harrison Ford, to hang out with them. On set, meanwhile, Donner wouldn’t let them see the movie’s iconic pirate ship until the cameras were rolling on their reactions. “I was there that day,” recalls Columbus, “and I remember seeing their performances and thinking, ‘Oh, that’s pretty brilliant.’”
Talk of a sequel persisted, but it never came to pass. Columbus, who cites his happy experience working with Donner on the film as inspiring him to make such kids’ classics as Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire, remembers getting his final phone call from the director a few years back. “He called me and said, ‘You know what we should do? We’re gonna get on my boat, smoke pot for three days and we’ll come up with an idea for “Goonies 2”.’”
Columbus laughs at the memory. “I said to Dick, ‘Well, first of all, I don’t smoke pot. But maybe if I come down, we’ll have a couple of drinks together and sit on the boat.’ It never happened. And I regret that. Because I would drop everything to do that right now.”