LADYHAWKE (1985)
Ladyhawke came out the same year as The Groonie but unlike that Richard Donner movie, did not become a smash hit. It spawned zero catchphrases; there was no tie-in music video. This might be because it’s a far quieter, more earnest, really quite peculiar film — a medieval fantasy about the devotion between a woman who becomes a hawk in daylight (Michelle Pfeiffer) and a man who changes into a wolf at night (Rutger Hauer). But its strange power lingers on, entrancing those who fall for it. Including, by the way, George R.R. Martin, who once called it “not only one of the greatest fantasy films ever made… but one of the great romances as well”.
Screenwriter Edward Khmara did not at first appreciate what Donner wanted to do to his story. “Originally, it was much darker,” he says. “An almost Bergman-esque fairy tale set in a real historical time, where wolves would come along the frozen river and eat the corpses that were hanging on gibbets. He changed that tone. That was difficult for me.”
Instead of Dustin Hoffman, whom Khmara had hoped for, Donner cast Matthew Broderick as wise-cracking thief Mouse. He lightened the original script’s gloomy mood. And he suggested that the sword duel at the end be replaced with a fistfight, though Khmara won that battle. “I urged him to reconsider that, and he did,” the writer says. “What was interesting is that if you look at Lethal Weapon,
the fight between Mel Gibson and Gary Busey was, in my memory, exactly the scene he had rewritten for the end of Ladyhawke. I was kind of tickled by that.”
A period piece with magic and a love-stricken bird of prey, the film was way out of Donner’s comfort zone. But it works. “I had had mixed feelings about it,” says Khmara. “But when I saw it with an audience, I thought, ‘Okay, it’s a different movie, but it’s a great movie. If it hooks the audience, I’m satisfied.’”
And it’s still hooking them. New Zealand musician Ladyhawke borrowed the film’s title in tribute, while George R.R. Martin put on a screening of it in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a few years back. Khmara was there. “One woman came up to me and said she had an illness requiring serious surgery, and said, ‘I watched Ladyhawke every day when I was healing. It made me stronger every time I saw it,’” he recalls. “I don’t hear things like that every day. But when I do, I really feel good.”