Dennis Hopper was not happy.
It was the summer of 1992, a few weeks into shooting Super Mario Bros: The Motion Picture and the atmosphere on set was febrile. Endless rewrites and script splices had scrambled the story and dialogue. Producers, writers and investors were all working at cross purposes with the directors, the British couple Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton. On set, there were 300 extras waiting to film the next scene. The lines Hopper was about to deliver had been changed at the last moment, and not for the first time. He was dressed as a humanoid dinosaur, heavily made up in the sweltering North Carolina heat, his hair gelled into a weird row of reptilian spikes.
“We’re in the bedroom of King Koopa’s skyscraper; it’s a big set,” recalls actor and co-star Richard Edson. “Dennis comes in and he’s looking pissed off. He’s mumbling to himself, he won’t look at anyone. So the directors ask, ‘What’s up Dennis?’”
Something was about to go horribly wrong.
The incendiary actor-director, who had unapologetically told everyone he had taken the role for money alone, stood amid the grandeur of his character’s penthouse suite and exploded. “He just starts screaming at Annabel and Rocky,” recalls Edson. “He’s telling them they’re completely unprofessional, that he’s never seen anything like this. Rocky says ‘Dennis, what is it?’ And he yells: ‘You rewrote my lines! You call this writing? This is shit! It’s shit! And the fact you’d do it without asking me?’ He went on and on. He couldn’t control himself.
“This went on for 45 minutes. The producers were looking at their watches, Rocky and Annabel were looking at each other, like, what the fuck can we do? The actors were like, oh my God, this is amazing, this is better than the movie. Finally, they say: let’s go to lunch – but lunch turns out to be another two hours of Dennis screaming at the directors and producers about the state of movie making. Meanwhile, there are 300 extras waiting for the next scene. Rocky and Annabel start begging him – they’re like, Dennis, please tell us what you want, we’ll do anything.
“But he wasn’t through yelling at them. People were knocking at the door, producers were going out trying to tell people what the fuck was going on. Finally, Rocky and Annabel said, ‘Look, you rewrite the scene, or we’ll go back to the original, whatever you want.’ And finally he goes: ‘OK, we’ll do the scene the way it’s written now.’ Everyone sighs, we go back three and a half hours after it was meant to be done, we do the scene exactly the way it was written when he started.”
This anecdote reveals a lot about the making of the Super Mario Bros movie, which has slipped into cinematic legend for all the wrong reasons. But though it was a disaster in several different ways, it was not the creative washout that it could have been. The film’s strange cyberpunk tone, its epic dystopian sets and combination of computer-generated effects and traditional animatronics were groundbreaking and remain visually arresting – but none of it had very much to do with Super Mario.
In 1990, the director Roland Joffé, fresh from making the critically acclaimed The Killing Fields and The Mission, wanted to get into film production. Pinpointing the massively successful Super Mario Bros video games as ripe for cinematic translation, he teamed up with Jake Eberts, an executive producer on Chariots of Fire, and flew to Japan to meet Nintendo’s then president, Hiroshi Yamauchi.
There were bigger studios sniffing around the licence, and Joffé had only raised a paltry $500,000 for the rights – but he put in a good pitch and, crucially, was offering all the merchandising profits to Nintendo. A deal was struck at $2m. “They looked at the movie as some sort of strange creature, [intrigued] to see if it could walk or not,” said Joffé at the time.
Very quickly, the creature started staggering. An experienced director, Greg Beeman, was brought on and then dropped, possibly because his picture Mom and Dad Save the World was picking up negative press in Hollywood. Harold Ramis and Danny DeVito were both approached to take the helm – the latter to direct and star – and both demurred. Arnold Schwarzenegger turned down the role as the turtle-like antagonist, Bowser, while Tom Hanks was briefly attached to play Luigi.
But the script was the big problem. Joffé had told Nintendo he wouldn’t do “a sweet little lovey-dovey story” – he wanted a wider audience than kids. “Joffé wanted to do with Super Mario Bros what Burton had done for superheroes with Batman,” says Steven Applebaum of the website Super Mario Bros: The Movie Archive. “He wanted to redefine the characters for young adults.”
The first writer to attempt a script was Barry Morrow, who’d won an Oscar for Rain Man. He wrote a kind of existential road trip with Mario as a smart older brother and Luigi as his naive savant sibling. It sounded so familiar that production staff nicknamed it “Drain Man”. Next came Jim Jennewein and Tom S Parker, who’d worked together on The Flintstones and Ri¢hie Ri¢h. Theirs was a bubblegum-bright fantasy flick set squarely in the familiar Nintendo universe. It was at least in the right ball park.
Meanwhile, with no directors forthcoming, Joffé turned to Jankel and Morton, who had only made one Hollywood movie: the obscure Dennis Quaid vehicle DOA. Morton and Jankel were pioneers in the use of computer graphics. Emerging from the punk arts scene of the late 70s, they had directed cutting-edge music videos and made big commercials, including the first entirely CGI advert (for Pirelli tyres). Most importantly, they created Max Headroom for Channel 4, the faux-CG personality who fronted a late-night music video show and then became the protagonist in Morton and Jankel’s dark, witty cyberpunk television movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future.
Joffé felt their cool, inventive and cynical approach to technology would work for Super Mario and signed them up. But the couple rejected the Jennewein/Parker script, wanting to move away from the light tone of Nintendo’s series. Their idea was to depict villainous King Koopa – better known as Bowser – as the corrupt president in an alternative dimension where humans had evolved from dinosaurs. His power base would be Dinohattan, a ravaged dystopia, low on natural resources and falling into anarchy. “I wanted the film to be more sophisticated,” Morton told Game Informer in 2011. “At that time, there was a lot of anti-video-game sentiment. I wanted to make a film that would open it up and get parents interested in video games.”
Morton and Jankel put this concept to screenwriters Parker Bennett and Terry Runte, who’d worked together on the early Ethan Hawke movie Mystery Date, and brought in veteran British writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais to flesh out the story and characters. They’d worked on Porridge and The Likely Lads, and provided the screenplay for Alan Parker’s hit, The Commitments. It was this script that started bringing actors on board, including Bob Hoskins and Fiona Shaw.
With these heavyweights attached, others followed. “My agent said I should take a look, that it was going to be a $50m movie, which for 1992 was an extraordinary sum of money,” says Samantha Mathis, who plays Princess Daisy. “The script had issues, but the casting was so impressive it seemed it would elevate the material.”
In 1992, production cranked into gear, and the costs ramped up. The crew began constructing a huge, elaborate set at the Ideal Cement Factory in Castle Hayne, North Carolina, a five-storey mega-complex previously used as a backdrop in Terminator 2 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Production designer David L Snyder, who’d worked on Blade Runner, planned an intricate multi-level future city, dominated by neon signs and metal walkways. The set designers imagined Dinohattan as a gritty cyberpunk metropolis populated by tattooed bikers, gangsters and strippers. The costume designers dressed the huge cast in leather fetish gear, fishnet tights and trenchcoats. At this point, the film was as far from Nintendo’s Super Mario aesthetic as was possible.
Seeking funds, the producers started approaching potential investors and distributors, including Disney. But here the problems really started. The money men balked at the darker tone – this wasn’t the kids’ movie they were expecting. Panicked, Joffé scrambled to arrange another, more humorous rewrite. He called veteran scriptwriter Ed Solomon, who co-wrote Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
“My agent told me Roland Joffé wanted to meet,” Solomon says. “He’d just made The Mission. I was like, ‘What? He wants to meet me?’ My agent said he was doing a project with the people who made Max Headroom. I thought, this sounds amazing. When I met with him he said, ‘This is going to sound really weird but we have the rights to Super Mario Bros. We have a script, it’s been through several rewrites and it’s not working.’ So they hired me to do a two-week rewrite.”
Except that, the directors hadn’t been told. “Right before Rocky and Annabel started on principal photography, they were handed the new script and told to go shoot it; they had already storyboarded the whole movie and planned the sets and everything and the new script blew all that out of the water,” says Ryan Hoss, founder of Super Mario Bros: The Movie Archive. “I think Rocky took the storyboards out on to the lot and set fire to them. They were on the verge of quitting right there.”
There were now a variety of forces acting on the film – the producers, the directors, the distributors – and they all had slightly different visions of what it had to be. The screenplay remained in flux. “I don’t know what draft I got, but by the time we started shooting it had completely changed,” says Edson. “And not only that, but they had the writers there, constantly rewriting it. Their basic approached seemed to be: how dumb can we make this? It didn’t make sense to me or any of the other actors – it had no spirit or energy. It was hard to get behind it.”
It got to the point where Edson and his co-star Fisher Stevens, who were playing Koopa’s comedy henchmen, decided to take matters into their own hands. “The first scene we shot was from the beginning of the movie,” he says. “We were following Daisy and we were in the car, we had a little bit of dialogue, and it really sucked. So I had this idea, let’s create our own. The writers couldn’t care less; if we could improve the script, they were more than happy. So we did our own [dialogue] and they loved it – from that moment on, they let Fisher and [me] do all our own dialogue. That made it a lot more fun for us.”
Two weeks into the shoot, Solomon got another call. “I had done as much as I could do [with the script] and felt like it was at least coherent,” he said. “It had cohesive characters and an interesting story. When I got down there, Rocky had cut it up with a bunch of other stuff he liked from other drafts and a bunch of new stuff – literally chopped it into pieces and taped it together. There was no through line. On set, there was also a sense that nothing was certain. The production designers and special FX people didn’t know what they were building, the actors had arrived and they didn’t know what they were playing. There was just a general sense of ‘What the fuck is going on?’”
Mathis felt it, too. “I had a fondness for both Rocky and Annabel, I just felt like the production was so much bigger than anything they’d done before,” she says. She’d made a couple of small movies before, but she still felt quite new to the game. She kept her head down and got on with it. But she saw frustration brewing with other cast members, especially Hopper and Hoskins.
“I don’t think it’s any secret that it was a troubled shoot,” she says. “I would say Bob didn’t suffer fools gladly – he was an artist, he could see the chaos swirling around the set, and the lack of clarity. I think it’s a rare thing to have two people directing a movie together well – I certainly haven’t experienced it. The production just took on a life of its own.”
A little while into the planned 10-week shoot, the LA Times sent journalist Richard Stayton to write a set report. It was the first indication to the wider industry that things were going awry. He found a cast and crew simmering with resentment over rewrites and production changes. They had nicknamed Jankel and Morton The Hydra, because there were so many heads giving orders, according to Stayton. Hoskins was cruelly dismissive. “All these rewrites get frustrating so I don’t do too much research,” the article said. “My seven-year-old son is quite depressed about my playing Mario. He knows I can’t even program a VCR, let alone play the game. How do I prepare for the role? I’m the right shape. I’ve got a moustache.”
With the production deteriorating and endless chaos on set, the actors did what they could to unwind. In his autobiography, John Leguizamo, who played Luigi, admittedly to drinking whisky between takes with Hoskins, a habit that may have contributed to Hoskins breaking a finger during a driving stunt.
“It was summer,” says Edson, “it was a beach resort town, they had gotten each of us our own houses – mine had a boat and a basketball court. My family came down and visited. I mean, it wasn’t that demanding – we were getting paid all this money and it was great fun, but in a way it corrupts you as an actor, as an artist – you’re just sucking in the money, doing this bullshit.”
Edson struck up friendships with others working on the film during its production. “We would hang out a lot and get stoned. Bob [Hoskins] would never hang out – he had a mansion somewhere down the beach. But then one night, we were talking about getting high and Bob was like, ‘You guys have pot? You’ve been smoking reefer?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah’, and he yelled, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?! I’ve been sitting alone in my mansion!’ We really looked up to him.”
Toward the end of the allotted 10-week shoot, it was clear there was still a lot more work required, but money was running out. A planned finale on the Brooklyn Bridge, laden with special effects, would have to be scuppered. “We were supposed to wrap the movie, but our producers determined that we still had two and a half to three weeks of shooting to do,” says Mathis. “The directors were thanked and told: ‘You can leave now, we’re going to make the rest of the movie without you.’ At that point, it was abundantly clear things had gotten out of control.”
In interviews since the production, Morton has expressed frustration about the film, and about the changes forced on him and Jankel. “It’s very hard to remake a movie as you’re filming, and that’s what caused a lot of the problems,” he told Nintendo Life. And when asked about his abiding memory of the production he answered with one word: “humiliation”.
Super Mario Bros premiered on 28 May 1993, a year dominated by box-office giants Jurassic Park and Mrs Doubtfire. It grossed around $20m, half of what it cost to make. Morton and Jankel never made another Hollywood movie, and returned to commercials and independent projects. Annabel Jankel has just directed upcoming drama Tell It to the Bees, an adaptation of the Fiona Shaw novel. Joffé continued to direct and produce, but never with the same critical impact as his pre-Super Mario Bros projects. Speaking about the movie to Wired in 2014, he was sanguine about the film: “It’s not that I defend the movie, it’s just that, in its own extraordinary way, it was an interesting and rich artefact and has earned its place. It has strange cult status.”
In many ways it really was an innovative endeavour. Super Mario Bros was the first movie to employ the soon-to-be pervasive CGI software Autodesk Flame, then still in beta, and helped to shape the direction of computer special effects. “A lot of the crew we’ve spoken to are proud of the work they did,” says Applebaum. “A major advocate is Christopher Woods, who supervised the film’s visual effects. He’s talked about how innovative the work they were doing was” Hoss and Applebaum have helped Second Sight to release a Blu-ray of the movie, producing a making-of documentary for the disc. Now Woods is assisting them with a 4K-resolution transfer.
“He’s talked about looking into storage to see if he still has the original visual effects on 35mm, which would allow us to complete scenes they didn’t have the budget to finish,” says Applebaum. “We’re hoping that with his support, we can get out a new release that may include deleted scenes.”
Scriptwriter Solomon never ended up seeing the film, but is quaintly protective of it. “I did everything I could to help that movie,” he says. “I don’t think anyone who worked on it felt anything other than ‘this is a giant swirling kaleidoscope and we have no idea if any of these fragments will form a cohesive picture’. I don’t think they did, but there were really interesting elements within that kaleidoscope.”
Edson claims not to recall whether he ever saw the movie, but feels he never escaped it. “When you’re involved with such a big disaster, the stench of it sort of stays with everybody,” he says. “There was work I hoped for in Hollywood, but it never really happened for me after that. You have to be careful. If you’re going to sell your soul, you’d better be getting more than just money out of it.”
Mathis saw it once – “That was enough,” she laughs. “I will say we had an extraordinary press junket in Japan. They sent John Leguizamo, Bob Hoskins and myself. It must have been hosted partly by Nintendo. We were there for over two weeks. I remember being in an old temple in Tokyo with Bob and John, and there were Buddhist monks praying for the success of the film. We all looked at each other when we realised what was going on; we thought: ‘This is sacrilegious – these priests should not be praying for our crazy movie!’”
Roland Joffé, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel were approached for interviews. Joffé and Morton did not respond. Jankel was too busy to comment.
• This article was amended on 22 March 2018. An earlier version said that after Super Mario Bros, Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton never made another movie. This has been corrected to say another Hollywood movie.
