WALKER

The beginning is an assault in every way. Violent, loud, the music jarring against the picture as we lurch across the battlefield to Walker’s riotous trial, to the crowd gathered outside Ellen Martin’s house. Within, Ellen’s home is no less an assault: a ghastly scraping duo of violin and tuneless piano, presided over by a grim paterfamilias, plays loudly as a fat, mutton-chopped racist shouts over the music to compensate for a beautiful woman’s deafness: ‘I am sure the little lady will agree . . .’ The location is an assault, as well. Victorian bric-a-brac and clutter everywhere, walls jammed with paintings in heavy frames. The costumes are assaultive: everyone wears a high, uncomfortable collar, the men’s coats have tails.

There’s something stylistically old-fashioned about this opening – the conservative framing, the static, tripod-based cinematography. The soundtrack racket never ends. Then, suddenly, all changes. We’re in another room of Ellen’s house, the one Walker has filled with the stuff he’s brought back from his expeditions: his maps, his books, his framed spider and frog collections.

Ellen slaps Walker’s face and tells him she’s dumping him. And the man of iron, the grey-eyed man of destiny, as his supporters have arranged to have him called, begs his girlfriend not to kick him out. This is my favourite moment in the film. Suddenly, after the trumpets and blood and shouting, a most beautiful piece of score kicks in: music by Strummer. Ed Harris’ intense, desperate performance is matched by Marlee Matlin’s calm, determined confidence. Rudy’s dialogue is acted almost entirely via hand-signs, with subtitles.

Here lighting, acting, script, and music all work in harmony. Strummer’s strings take the scene to a rare level of romance, warmth, and sexiness. It’s the most successful love scene I’ve directed – completely sincere, and not devoid of politics. As the lovers embrace, Walker is tempted by the shouts of the crowd outside. This was my contribution: the presence of the unseen crowd, chanting Walker’s name outside. ‘You’re about to embrace Ellen, pull her to you, prove you’re going to stay with her forever,’ I told him, ‘and then the crowd starts up again, chanting “Walker, Walker, Walker” right under the window. And you just listen to them for a moment. And then you kiss her.’

As they played the scene, I whispered ‘Walker, Walker, Walker’ – the worm in the apple, the skull beneath the skin. The sidelong glances of Ed and Marlee, like the signed scene, which preceded it, are acting of a high order. Of a classic kind.

Script – acting – lighting – music, all in harmony. This makes effective films.

BACKGROUND

Walker is my best, my most expensive, and my least-seen film. It’s the biopic of William Walker, an American mercenary who had himself made president of Nicaragua in the mid-nineteenth century. In the US, Walker was an anti-slavery liberal; in Nicaragua he instituted slavery. He’s almost unknown in the US today, but in the 1850s Walker was fantastically popular. The newspapers wrote more about him than they did about Presidents Pierce or Buchanan.

All the characters in the film existed, though they aren’t all accurate portraits, and there’s no evidence, say, that Walker and his financier, Vanderbilt, ever met. Most of what happens in the film is part of some historical record, but it’s a drama, and the bricks of truth are mortared with fiction.

I first went to Nicaragua in 1984, with Peter McCarthy – on one of those leftist tours where you meet nuns and trade unionists and representatives of cooperatives. It was the week of the presidential election, which the FSLN – the Sandinistas – won. We were impressed by the revolution, by the beauty of the countryside, by the changes and the optimism in the air. In León, on election day, two young Sandinistas egged us on to bring to Nicaragua a big Hollywood movie that would communicate something about Nicaragua to the Americans, and spend dollars there.

Fair enough – Nicaragua was a poor country, under continuous terrorist attack.1 The Sandinistas were their elected representatives, who’d led the overthrow of the dictator, Somoza, in 1979. Not that this meant much in Hollywood. To get serious money for a Sandinista feature, it would need an American protagonist: step forward, William Walker.

What I read about Walker convinced me that this was a person who wanted to get himself killed. He managed in the end, being shot by a firing squad in Honduras. But many, many others had to die first. In that way the story of Walker reminded me of a film I’d seen about a pair of death-fixated hero-types, who provoked untold destruction: Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid. I wrote a long letter to Rudy Wurlitzer, asking him if he would consider writing the script for a feature about Walker. Fortunately, that letter is lost now: it was filled with grandiosity and impossibly revolutionary cinematic hopes. In spite of it, Rudy agreed.

He flew to London, where he stayed at my place in Bermondsey and began writing. However, he hated it there, just as I did, and soon went back to New York. Before he left, we discussed our approach to the story we called ‘Ride to Glory’. Hollywood, we thought, would have made a ‘Walker’ movie from the viewpoint of a sympathetic, humane journalist; we felt there were no ‘good’ journalists, especially in Walker’s entourage. Rudy saw Walker’s men as pirates, gangsters, would-be slave-owners; his Nicaraguan supporters were equally villainous. Nothing had changed in the 130 years between Walker’s genocidal campaign and that of Oliver North and the current crop of war criminals in the White House. The anachronisms that Rudy placed in the script became an essential part of the project – to show things as they were now.

Over Christmas and New Year 1985/6 I went to Nicaragua on a location scout with Lorenzo O’Brien and Cecilia Montiel. At this point, Lorenzo was already the producer. We’d made a policy decision that everyone involved in the production would fly economy, including the principal actors. This saved us a substantial amount of cash. It’s thanks to Lorenzo that so many dollars got spent in Nicaragua, and that a film was made. As producer, he had to manage the logistics of four different crews – Nicaraguan, Mexican, British, and American – in various languages; deal with industrial unrest, weather damage, three-camera shoots involving the Nicaraguan Army, the attempted cancellation of the completion bond, whining journalists, drowning actors, and car crashes, while feeding and paying all those involved.

On that first location scout, we visited Corinto, León, Rivas, and San Juan del Sur. We met representatives of Instituto Nicaraguense de Cine (INCINE), the tiny Nicaraguan film bureaucracy in Managua. We spent a few days in Granada, the most colonial of cities: many streets looked as they must have when Walker was there. Walker boasted of burning the city to the ground, but it’s hard to see how a fire could destroy Granada. Almost all the buildings were of thick-walled stone, with tiled roofs and interior courtyards – like the old houses in Granada, Spain. We took a boat to the islands of Lake Nicaragua, the largest lake in the Americas, and the only one with freshwater sharks.

In Granada we went to the cinema. Television was everywhere, but VCRs were still a luxury, so the country had the second-highest cinema attendances in Latin America: only Mexicans went to the pictures more. It was a huge, barn-like auditorium with broken speakers and a dim bulb. The film was Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country. Even the battered, pink-and-blue print couldn’t disguise a great tale. How many other Peckinpah films were circulating round Nicaragua’s 125 cinemas? Recent American films were unavailable, as a result of the US government’s embargo, so instead Nicaraguans paid a few cordobas to watch classic American cinema on a huge screen.

This, and other experiences in these local cinemas, convinced me that Walker should have a mono soundtrack. If you played a recent, stereo print (Sid & Nancy, say) on one of these old mono systems, it sounded terrible. The projector missed the edges of both optical tracks, and the result was muddy and indistinct, whereas a mono print, one optical track, always sounded great.

Lorenzo and I waited for Rudy’s script. We knew it wasn’t going to be the screenplay of a cheap film, since we’d encouraged Rudy to leave nothing out of it. When the script came, it was called ‘King of the World’.

This screenplay is very like the finished film, plus a couple of significant scenes. After he finds his beloved Ellen Martin dead of cholera, Walker goes on the rampage, overturning a couple riding in a cart and challenging the driver to a duel. In the pistols-at-dawn scene that follows, Walker fires into the air and is wounded in the shoulder. Suicidal, he insists upon another round – only to be over-ruled by his second, Dr Jones.

The climax is a $500-a-plate ‘Benefit the Freedom Fighters’ dinner in the Miami Sheraton, where Walker is the keynote speaker. Outside the Sheraton, the ragged, surviving Immortals stage an anti-war protest. We dropped both scenes, the duel one because it required additional locations, and the Miami one because I thought its point was already made. While avoiding the ‘good narrator’ trap, Rudy’s script, from this very first draft, pulled in two directions: 1) Walker’s own story; and 2) that of his troops, and Nicaraguan camp followers.

Rudy titled his second draft ‘Immortals’. While the central action remained the same, there were more troops, and there was more for them to do. We kept meeting interesting actors who wanted to go to Nicaragua, many of them for solidarity reasons. It made sense to have them populate Walker’s army.

Lorenzo and I went looking for an executive producer. This would be a more expensive film than either of us had made before. We needed someone to visit the studios and the banks for us. An American producer, Ed Pressman, expressed an interest.

Pressman’s credits included Badlands and Masters of the Universe. Among his many projects were some politically risky ones. He did an amazing thing on Walker: managing to raise American money for a very radical, anti-imperialist feature film – a film shot in Nicaragua, a country with which the United States was de facto at war. And he raised the budget from a US studio!

At the same time, Ed’s first idea for finding finance was a bit alarming: he wanted to take the project to Universal. This sounded like the Return to Hell, but Ed insisted – there had been another regime change at the studio, and the new boss didn’t want to be thought of in the same light as his thuggish forbears. Bad former execs had suppressed films like Repo Man. The good current execs wanted to extend the hand of friendship and support to talent whom the previous bad execs had wronged. Maybe. Our game plan was to raise half of the budget via an advance on foreign sales, selling the other half in the US. This is the way independent films were made at that time – the international sales market hadn’t yet collapsed. So we were only looking for half the budget from the US. Ed knew we planned to shoot in Nicaragua, but he didn’t think that would necessarily be a problem. The three of us also discussed the fallback position of shooting in Mexico. Lorenzo and I planned to shoot in Nicaragua, of course, but we couldn’t insist on this to potential insurers, to whom we had to present an image of flexibility rather than fanaticism.

We began working out of an office in Culver City: me; Lorenzo; Debbie Diaz, production coordinator; Vicky Thomas, casting director; and, intermittently, J. Rae Fox, Linda Burbank, and Cecilia Montiel, art department. Pam Tait, back in England, was to do the costumes; Bob Richardson was to shoot it. Bob and I took several location trips south, while Lorenzo looked for a Mexican partner who could help us crew the film.

You might ask why, as we were filming in Nicaragua, we didn’t use a Nicaraguan crew. We worked with a Nicaraguan cameraman, Frank Pineda, and there were many ‘Nica’s in the construction, art, and costume departments. But Nicaragua is a very small country: three and a half million inhabitants when we lived there, maybe three million now. Film-making hadn’t been encouraged by the Somozas or by the US Marine occupations. There was a small film community, and most of it was already working on INCINE’s first feature, El Espectro de la Guerra. There was no Nicaraguan crew to spare.

(Two foreign features had been made in Nicaragua since the 1979 revolution: Miguel Littin’s Alsino and the Condor, and Haskell Wexler’s Latino. Both used foreign crews, though Littin’s was a co-production that provided Nicaraguans with production experience and a spirited debate about the finished picture. There was little local film production beyond short documentaries and newsreels called Noticieros.2)

During one of the casting sessions in LA, Lorenzo introduced me to a Mexican director/producer, Luis Mandoki. Lorenzo had worked with him and thought he would be the right partner for us. Luis ran his operation out of a small office at Churubusco Studios. He was an independent filmmaker with feature credits, who kept his expenses to a minimum. It was exactly our style, and I was convinced Lorenzo was right. Lorenzo invited Ed to meet Luis and another producer, Angel Flores. Ed seemed more impressed by Angel, who’d done no features, but a number of commercials. He had a office in a big, two-storey house with a vast, sweeping staircase. I found our executive producer standing at the bottom of that staircase on our first Walker visit to Mexico. ‘Impressive offices’, he remarked. Indeed they were. Ed wanted to go with Angel.

Our difficulties getting a completion bond surprised me. I’d already spoken to Lee Katz, whose company had bonded Sid & Nancy and Straight to Hell. Lee had told me he had no problems with the Walker project. Finally, he took me out to lunch and said that while the Completion Bond Company (CBC) had no objection to bonding Rudy’s script, or a film in Nicaragua, they’d previously had a problem with one of the producers on the film, and had a policy of not working with him again.

Lee didn’t mean Lorenzo, he meant Ed. What the cause was, Lee didn’t say. Pressman didn’t tell me either; as he observed, there were other bond companies. He set us up instead with a smaller outfit, with which he said he’d had no problem: Film Finances.

Pre-production didn’t exactly accelerate when I left for Spain to direct Straight to Hell. In my absence, Lorenzo met more actors, made more budgets, and waited for news of Pressman’s negotiations with Universal. Our provisional crew – unpaid and uncontracted – began to drift away: when I got back from Hell, I found Bob Richardson had left the picture, to work for Oliver Stone.

Bob told me Wall Street’s producer had assured him Walker wouldn’t be happening any time soon, and had offered him a $10,000 advance to jump ship. I thought this outrageous – I wanted to know who this producer was, who had such insight into my film. Bob told me it was Ed Pressman.

How could such a thing occur – especially in an honourable place like Hollywood? As you can imagine, I was shocked. To replace Bob, I contacted David Bridges, who’d worked on Sid & Nancy. He was big, strong, and an excellent operator.

I didn’t anticipate the quality of lighting Dave would bring. He had a system of aiming his lamps up into white boxes that diffused the light on the actors. I think this was his invention: I’d seen no one else do it. The result, involving the hanging of these white boxes over the actors, wasn’t quickly achieved, but it looked great, particularly in close-ups of beauties such as Marlee Matlin, Blanca Guerra (the Mexican actor who played Walker’s Nicaraguan lover Doña Yrena), and Pedro Armendáriz Jr.

In contrast to a somewhat uptight Mexico City office, things at our Nicaraguan headquarters went better than we could have hoped. Nicaragua was another world: a far more viable, agreeable, and practical world, from our viewpoint. A world forced into a war, a world of uniforms and contradictions, but also one where to be a poet was considered normal. The assistant production coordinator came into work sad one day. When I asked what was wrong, she said someone she knew had been killed by Contras. I offered my condolences, and she thanked me, and asked me if I would like to hear the poem she had written about it. Producing dramatic films might be a new thing, but poetry was like blood: everyone had it in them.

One day, we were stopped in traffic in Managua, and a newspaper seller approached our car. He was selling La Prensa, the right-wing paper, which we all knew received CIA funding. He waved a copy at Cecilia, who told the guy, in Spanish, that we didn’t take the reactionary rag. The guy immediately got on her case. This was an old newspaper boy in the middle of a busy intersection, and he shouted at us: ‘What the hell do you know about reactionaries? You are foreigners! You have no right to criticise, or have an opinion about anything yet! Buy La Prensa, and learn what Nicaraguans think!’

The traffic moved, the car rolled on. We didn’t buy a paper. There were three national newspapers: La Prensa (which was indeed a reactionary rag); Barricada, the Sandinista paper; and El Nuevo Diario, written by journalists who had left La Prensa. Each of these newspapers was published and edited by a Chamorro: the Chamorro family, right wing and left wing, had a monopoly on journalism in Nicaragua.

In Mexico, Lorenzo and I met a prop master, Ron Downing: he was one of those obsessive English prop guys who are determined that everything be authentic and quirky at the same time, and he contributed enormously to the detail of the film. Angel introduced me to a first assistant director, Miguel Lima, who modestly pretended he was a second assistant; and to an eagle-eyed special effects master, Marcelino Pacheco. We received notes from the Mexican censor, who at that stage reviewed every script that might be shot there. The censor told us to lose references to drunks in the city of Granada, and to the Mayor of Granada being forced to kneel before Walker’s men. He pointed out that the idol Walker encountered in the jungle wasn’t a Mayan one, but a Nahua artefact. Due to ‘official’ Mexico’s fear of offending the US, he also instructed us not to refer to a CIA man at the end of the script, but to call him a ‘company’ man instead. The censor didn’t limit himself to what was actually in the script: he also said we should improve the characters of Corral and Doña Yrena in the next draft. These notes were good ones, and although we didn’t plan to shoot in Mexico, Rudy incorporated them into his next draft.

Of all the cast, Walker was key: it was his story, and it had potential to attract a ‘movie star’. In London, Strummer told me he’d seen a picture of the actor Sean Penn, ‘And he looked just like Walker. Same age, same shape of face, same expression in his eyes. When you’re out in LA, you have to see him. The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny.’ Pressman agreed with Joe. His preferences were for Sean or for Warren Beatty. I didn’t think Beatty was right for Walker – he was older, physically very different, but he could make a powerful Vanderbilt. Thus began a series of phone calls from me to the New York hotel in whose penthouse Beatty resided.

Beatty liked to talk. He knew a bit of history, and he knew Walker was the better role. I kept trying to impress him on the sheer power and charisma that Vanderbilt would project: qualities that very few actors were able to project as effectively as Mr Beatty. He remarked that I seemed very enthusiastic. I said I was. ‘Why? What are you – a coker?’ I asked him what he meant. ‘You know, coke, are you all wound up on coke right now?’ Nope, I said, I was wound up with the thrilling energy of the Walker project, of which I hoped he’d soon be a major part, etc.

Our conversations petered out when Beatty’s father died. Discussions with Penn persisted. Sean and I met, and in terms of physical appearance, Strummer was spot on. Penn looked like Walker aged around 30, before the Nicaraguan mission took its toll on him. He seemed very young. Could this handsome, even delicate, young man convince an audience and an army of actors that he was its leader? I hoped he’d audition for the part. At our meeting, he said he would, but his agents told Pressman he wouldn’t. This hadn’t been an issue in the past: whenever I’d asked an actor to read they’d done it, LA or London. Walker was bumping up against the ‘star’ system, with its strange rules and demands. ‘Stars’ are different from actors. ‘Stars’ marry other stars. ‘Stars’ do not read. Sean’s agents felt that for him to audition would be to lower his status within a larger structure. Perhaps they were right. However, it meant I had no way of knowing what Sean might be like in the Walker role. I had no instinctive feeling, based on our one meeting, as to whether this little, somewhat shrimpy, guy could play the role. When he refused to read, we moved on.

Into the equation stepped another actor, whom I had known vaguely back in UCLA days: the star of Ed Harker’s The Dream Players, Ed Harris. Harris is a striking character: his grey eyes and the pronounced bone structure of his face draw your attention. His qualities were the antithesis of Penn’s: he looked older and a little less like Walker, but he projected a force of personality that could clearly dominate a throng of filibusters circa 1853, or a throng of actors circa 1987. And he was willing to read. Ed had been a football player at college and presented himself as devoid of bullshit. In due course, Vicky and I flew up to Portland, Oregon, where Ed was shooting a film, and he auditioned. In his production condo, Ed buttoned up his shirt collar, pulled his sleeves down and fastened them, sat bolt upright, and suddenly he seemed uncannily like William Walker as he read Rudy’s lines.

After the reading we had a beer, and Vicky and Ed played a game involving throwing a ball and catching it. Then she and I flew back to LAX; we didn’t talk much about the reading – we knew the part was Ed’s.

Directing the Colonel.
Photo: René Auberjonois.

At the beginning of 1987, we received the new version from Rudy, now titled ‘Walker’. It was the best draft yet, ending with Walker refusing to board the helicopter, as in the finished film. Still nothing had yet fallen into place financially: Universal wouldn’t provide any written commitments, and there was still no foreign sales partner.

The production design issue remained unresolved. Fox and Burbank were brilliant, but neither was a Spanish speaker. Cecilia was talented enough to do the job, but she would be a hard sell to the bond company. Then, out of the blue, a new candidate walked through our door: Bruno Rubeo. Bruno was a former model maker for the special effects designer Carlo Rambaldi. He spoke Spanish fluently and seemed a creative chap. To his credit, Bruno recognised Cecilia’s talent and knowledge of the project: he hired her as his art director.

In our ongoing effort to placate the insurers and bond company, Lorenzo and I continued scouting the same falling-down Mexican movie locations we’d already seen. We showed Bruno John Wayne’s movie ranch, La Joya. Nearby was the ranch that Peckinpah used as Old Fort Sumner in Pat Garrett, which we also visited repeatedly. We talked about using it for the San Jacinto battle, but we had no real plan to shoot there – how could we recycle the main location of another of Rudy’s films?

Lorenzo stayed in Mexico for meetings with potential crew. While still trying to be a lean and mean film-making machine, we were hiring a union crew from Churubusco Studios, which entailed a lot of people and much paperwork. Bruno and I headed south, from the snowy Sierra Madre to the tropic heat of Nicaragua. We stayed briefly in Managua at the Intercontinental – a hotel built to resemble a pyramid or ziggurat – which had survived the 1972 earthquake. The Intercontinental was the sort of place where you put journalists and actors; the rooms had phones, so they could call their agents, and the food was suitably bland.

The hotel had something of a history: supposedly it had been built for Howard Hughes, who blacked out all the penthouse windows. The fugitive Hughes had been invited to Nicaragua by the American ambassador, Turner Shelton, formerly a croupier in one of Hughes’ casinos. After the revolution, it had briefly been headquarters for Daniel Ortega and Tomás Borge.

Our Managuan meetings done, Bruno and I drove south, via Rivas, to San Juan del Sur. We stayed at the Hotel Estrella, close to the beach. San Juan looked very like the illustrations from Walker’s day: two-storey wooden structures with one big room per floor. It was the kind of place you’d see on a tourist guide to undiscovered paradises.

The bedrooms at the Estrella were demarcated by flimsy partitions, with doors protected by a tiny padlock, or no lock at all. Yet no one was ever robbed there. Many of the foreign crew and cast liked the Estrella, but its lack of amenities and proper locks made our new designer ill at ease. We left our bags at the hotel and went out to reconnoitre. When we returned, Bruno insisted someone had been in our room going through our luggage; he was certain his bags had been searched. I asked him who he thought had searched them; he told me Sandinista intelligence or the local police. At the time, I thought this was paranoia on Bruno’s part: I’d stayed here before and had never had this problem. But perhaps Bruno was onto something, as far as his bags were concerned.

PRODUCTION

By 1987 Nicaragua wasn’t quite the happy, optimistic place I’d encountered four years earlier. The US government was spending at least 80 million dollars a year to fund Contra atrocities. Too many young doctors and teachers had been murdered; inflation was out of control, and life was noticeably harder. Most people said they still supported the Sandinistas, but they were hostile to conscription, and in the two years that I worked there, increasingly worn down by the stream of injured and dead soldiers, and the news of people’s relatives being murdered on their farms.

Our Mexican crew was held up for a week at the Guatemalan border, with all of their gear. By this time the American actors had all arrived. Their wardrobe had been flown in, or manufactured in Nicaragua, and so we had the cast, in costume, raring to begin. Meanwhile, to my dismay, the last foreign sales company dropped out of negotiations with Pressman. Instead, Ed received an offer from Universal for foreign rights, as well as US domestic. That meant handing the entire package over to the studio, while we still had nothing in writing as to their distribution plans.

Lorenzo and I wanted to make a radical film. We wanted to make it in collaboration with the Sandinistas, and to spend dollars in Nicaragua. To do this, we needed those dollars. At the outset, an English investor, Martin Bedford, and I had funded the film. But now Pressman was paying its running costs, and with offices and crews in Nicaragua, Mexico, and LA, this was a substantial amount of cash. We had to make the film. If Ed said that Universal was the only possible financier, so be it – we had to make it with Universal. Was Walker doomed from that moment on? Probably. But what was our alternative?

Angel told Lorenzo some long and complicated story about how the convoy had been held up by bandits in Guatemala. The reality was less exotic. The crew had been delayed by the Guatemalan authorities who were, as ever, under orders from, and eager to please, the Americans. Our trucks were searched repeatedly; bits of gear were impounded; days went by. When the vehicles finally got rolling, there was a road accident and somebody was killed. It was stupid stuff, possibly preventable, and it didn’t become less stupid by glossing it over with tales of highway banditry.

Suddenly we were a week behind schedule. Because we were filming in what the insurers considered a war zone, we hadn’t been able to get coverage for ‘Acts of God’. Predictably, the insurance company considered this border hold-up to be one of God’s actions. There was no spare money to pay for the week’s delay, so Ed Pressman and I kicked our salaries back into the budget. This almost funded the extra week of idleness; to make up the balance, Ed Harris gave half his wages back as well. Now this was extraordinary: it doesn’t normally happen on a film, even a good one. Of course, it had to do with the Nicaraguan revolution: each of us felt some moral obligation to make the film.

Harris, in character, led all of the actors on a forced march, to get them in the spirit of the film. Ed’s forced march was a bonding exercise: it got the entire cast on a walk that was pretty excessive for most of them – eight miles or so, which if you’re from LA or London can seem like the Bataan Death March. It took us on winding dirt roads through lush countryside. We stopped in the poorest of villages, where houses didn’t have glass in their windows (though the little store usually had a television!), drank cola out of plastic bags (bottles were always too valuable to be taken away), and generally behaved like starry-eyed gringos and Mexicans on a political nature tour. My assistant, Abbie Fields, had worried we’d run into problems because there were military installations (Nicaragua’s only radar battery) nearby. But we went without minders – only our INCINE producer, Carlos Alvarez – and encountered no obstacles. That day spent marching in disorderly ranks behind Ed, through the real Nicaragua, more than compensated for the absence of work.

At last, the trucks arrived. The shoot started the next day, 14 March 1987, at a tiny village not far from the radar base. It was a half-day shoot, after a long convoy out of Managua into the mountains, to catch the gorgeous afternoon light for the scenes in which Walker’s troops reached town. I don’t know if the handful of houses had a name: in the script, we called it Realejo. The art department had whitewashed all the buildings, fixed up the roofs, added a couple of walls and built a chapel. It was only a temporary movie chapel, with three sides, but this suited the locals, who had plans for the wood.

Our first shot was a low angle on the steep road to Realejo, looking up towards the town. Dave Bridges and I puzzled over the composition for several minutes. We wanted it to be visually impressive, so we’d be excited by our first look at the rushes. But we couldn’t stop thinking in terms of horizontals and verticals. Finally Steve Fierberg, whom I’d hired to shoot second camera and second unit, suggested that we move the camera a few metres to the left. Now the narrow road created a diagonal. The right image popped out immediately.

We didn’t need to rehearse 50 men going up a hill, I thought. We rolled camera, I called action, and off they went – Walker in the lead, of course, flanked by Byron Cole, the romantic journalist, and Dr Jones, the black-clad opium eater. After them came the soldiers, Hornsby, Henningson, and co., and 30-odd extras. After the extras came the mule-skinner Wiley Marshall and then the chuck wagon, which, having no mule, was pushed by the two cooks, Washburn (Joe Strummer) and Faucet (Dick Rude). However, the chuck wagon barely moved an inch. Dick, dressed in a ‘fat suit’, strained in the traces; Joe, clad in rags, face hidden by long, curly locks, ran at the wagon and tried to budge it. The gap between chuck wagon and army widened. The wagon slid sideways, into a ditch.

After we cut, Joe and Dick descended on me. Their cart, it seemed, was realistically laden with provisions, ironware, and heavy goods. It was near impossible to push uphill. Joe thought I was playing some kind of joke on him, and threatened to quit. Aghast, I asked Ron, the prop master, if he could possibly remove some of the fantastically authentic but very heavy items from the cook wagon. He nodded; his assistants were already in the process of stripping it. This was the only time in three films that I saw Joe get pissed off or offer to resign.

Walker was supposed to be a political film, and pretty much everyone involved offered to resign from it at some point, or threatened to go on strike. The previous weekend I’d been to the Realejo set with Lorenzo because the Nicaraguan construction crew had downed tools.3 This was another of those occasions where a director learns to appreciate a great producer. We needed that location ready, with the paint dry, by a certain hour on 14 March. The only person who could guarantee that this would happen was Lorenzo, thanks to his attention to detail, his negotiating skills, and his staying on the case. Without Larry’s precision, persistence, and extreme charm, there would never have been a film.

It started to get dark. The village was on a particularly scenic hilltop, with a magnificent view of the Pacific to the west. As the buses appeared to ferry the actors back to their hotels and homes, Joe proposed that rather than ride the bus back, we all camp out on set as we had done on Straight to Hell. Several actors, veterans of that film, agreed. One of the Nicaraguan crew tried to dissuade us: he indicated it wasn’t a good idea for us to sleep up there. ‘Por que?’ Joe asked, ‘Peligro?’ ‘No, no,’ the guy said, ‘Frio.’

Joe smiled, and indicated the bedroll that he and all the actors carried. Walker’s Immortals had their sleeping gear with them, courtesy of the wardrobe department: they wouldn’t be cold. I grabbed a bedroll from the costume truck before the trucks drove away.

Ecstatic Strummer en la selva.
Photo: Lynn Davis.

It got darker. The stars appeared. It was fantastically beautiful. Our small group settled down to share provisions and some Flor de Caña rum. That night we learned two things: 1) although Nicaragua is a tropical country, it gets really cold in the mountains at night; 2) you know those blankets and bedrolls cowboys and solders carry in the movies? To save money and material, the prop department make them three feet long. Instead of the balmy desert air of Andalucía in August, we encountered a cold so cold as to be unsleepable in. We polished off the food and drink, and stood or crouched in huddles on the mountaintop, shivering, singing, and staring at the eastern sky, hoping for dawn.

His experience with the overloaded chuck wagon, followed by our Night on a Bare Mountain, put paid to Joe’s interest in the Method, I think. Never again did he or any of us sleep out on the Walker locations. Strummer came to the set, waited, acted, went back to the room he’d rented, and thought about music.

Like the march, even this event had a unifying purpose, as did the absence of creature comfort. We’d brought camera trucks from Mexico, but none of the usual array of private trailers or ‘honey wagons’ for the actors. All the cast were expected to get dressed in the back of the wardrobe truck, and hang out on the street. When an American actor objected, Pam Tait pointed out that all the Mexicans, including Blanca, got changed in the truck without complaining. Thereafter, there were no objections.

The following morning we filmed Walker’s speech to his men and the ensuing riot. This is the only scene in Walker in which Ed Harris wore a wig. We’d had it specially made, and it did make him look slightly more like the historical Walker, but it was a bear to deal with: it kept flying up, or coming off, and in the rushes one hardly noticed it. Ed was cool about giving it up: he had a lot of scenes, and less time spent in hair and makeup meant more time on set.

Working with Dave and Steve, I was able to set up two scenes simultaneously: Sy clearing the cantina of ‘Immortals’, Jack Slater encountering the sheep pens. I was much enthused by being able to work like this; Dave was less excited. He said it wouldn’t work once we got into interiors, which was no doubt right.

The day ended with the execution of three Immortals who had been singled out for exemplary punishment. One of these men was an actor, Will Utay, who played Admiral Fry. (Since Walker has burned his ship he doesn’t need an admiral.) The other executees were extras who had been complaining about something: either their wages or the food. In the political climate that surrounded Nicaragua and the making of our film, Lorenzo and I tended to be a little paranoid, and anyone who made problems for the production (such as asking for better food) was regarded as a potential fifth columnist, or spy. Given Walker’s habit of executing his own men, it was easy to earmark complainers/potential spooks for the next firing squad. This doesn’t mean that all the extras who were ‘killed’ in Walker were suspected spies. The majority were dedicated, young American FSLN supporters – Sandilistas, like Lorenzo and me. We killed them, too.4

Dave and I set up the execution shots with a particular editorial effect in mind: we started close on the executees and the firing squad, moved to a wider shot, then cut to a wide landscape, just before the shots were fired: the execution became a small thing, an element on the horizon, with Walker’s troops in the foreground. Yet the troops all jumped when the shots were fired.

Lorenzo and I now encountered a new phenomenon: journalists. Today, films are part of the ‘news’ menu served up by all media, so reporters on the set, even of an independent film, are not uncommon. At the same time, the sane filmmaker makes every effort to avoid such visits. So why did we say yes to all these journalists’ requests? Why did we turn no reporter down, but welcome them all to lunch, to a guided tour of the set, to a chat about the project? Because we had a political agenda. We wanted to generate news items from Nicaragua: news items that we guessed would be positive, an antidote to the anti-Sandinista propaganda so pervasive in the US press.

Reagan had told Americans that Nicaraguan troops were massing on their borders, ‘only two days’ drive from Harlesden, Texas’. Lorenzo and I wanted to put faces on these troops, to show that most of them were teenagers, defending their homes.

After the forced march, Ed Harris became the natural representative of the actors, and, if some issue came up with them, he’d let me and Larry know. Ed was always on time, always knew his lines. Only one issue presented itself: like a lot of us young fellows, Ed liked a few beers in the evening. It might be one of the native brews, Victoria or Toña, or an import if he was back at the Intercontinental. There was nothing wrong with this: Ed could be pretty funny when drunk. But the camera doesn’t forgive. If Ed drank several beers, the skin around his eyes became puffy, and his eyes red, as if . . . as if he’d had some beers the night before.

The historical William Walker was a puritan teetotaller, who betrayed every belief he ever had, save that one. Even in the midst of a battle, or in retreat from one, Walker remained alert, bright-eyed, sober, smoke-free. He was one of those Thatcheresque politicians who can exist on two or three hours of sleep, rise, and send armies to their doom. Ed couldn’t afford to seem the least tired – he had to look like Walker. Morag Ross, the makeup chief, discussed it with me, and I spoke to Ed. The camera could see he was a bit hung-over, I explained, and makeup couldn’t hide it up so close, so the only solution . . . ‘So I can’t drink the night before we shoot?’ asked Ed. ‘That’s fine. We’re not shooting on Saturdays, right?’ Most Saturdays were ‘turnaround’ days, where we got back on a day schedule after shooting on Friday night. ‘And we’re not shooting on Sundays?’ That was definitely right.‘Well, then, it’s not a problem. I can get loaded on Saturday. And on my days off.’ We laughed at that, because Ed didn’t have any days off: Walker was in almost every scene. Ed was true to his word, and a pristine Walker resulted.

(Only when editing did I realise that the film Walker had to be about Walker, and only Walker. Many actors who’d come to Nicaragua, and acted fiercely for many weeks, almost vanished from the film – just as they have from this recounting of it. Apologies to all those actors for the double omission, but it was all about Walker.)

Lorenzo and I wanted Walker to be revolutionary in style, as well as purpose. So we’d jumped on Rudy’s anachronisms, which would drag the story into the present day. One of these was the wreckage of a downed plane – this was meant to be the Hasenfus plane, shot down a year earlier by Sandinista soldiers, disgorging a live American mercenary. This was an important piece of recent history – unfortunately the footage didn’t turn out very impressive. Shot from the ground, with the Immortals filing past, the genuine aircraft wreckage looked like bits of tin. We were able to borrow one of the Sandinista Army’s helicopters, so as to get an aerial shot of the wreckage and the troops’ descent, but the helicopter vibrated so much that our hand-held footage was useless. (Though we ditched the wreckage shots, we referred to the Hasenfus story later in the shoot, in a scene where FSLN fighters marched the bedraggled Colonel Sanders into their camp. Jack Slater, who played Sanders, had the misfortune to resemble Hasenfus.)

From my point of view, things were going well, and the footage (apart from our attempts at aerial photography) was excellent. But Dave Bridges wasn’t entirely happy: there were some aspects of Steve Fierberg’s work that he didn’t like, and he had doubts whether his and Steve’s shots would intercut properly. I felt they would; I wanted to continue with Steve. However, there was another cameraman, whom Dave preferred, and he was available.

Lorenzo and I felt we had to go with what Dave wanted; we both liked Fierberg’s work, but Bridges was the DP. If someone isn’t working out, the department head should always have the right to replace them, right? Otherwise they’re not really in charge of their department and can’t be responsible for it. I broke it to Steve that he was getting lashed. He grinned and shook his head – he’d seen it coming: ‘I realise I shouldn’t have suggested your very first shot to you guys.’ I protested that we’d been undecided, that his suggestion had been good. ‘It was. But I shouldn’t have done it. It screwed up my relationship with Dave.’

It was decent of Fierberg to let me off the hook.

On the Sunday of the first week of production, an article appeared in the New York Times about the filming of Walker in Nicaragua. It made it clear that the production was supported by the Sandinistas, and was a co-production with INCINE. The following Monday, someone from Film Finances telephoned Pressman in LA and told him they were cancelling the bond. Ed called Nicaragua and advised Lorenzo. Lorenzo came to the set and told me the story: Bruno Rubeo had apparently denounced us to the bond company, and the bond was being cancelled, which meant the film would be shut down.

It was all too ridiculous. Bruno had his complaints, but so did lots of people. I knew from his art directors that everything in his department was fine. At first Bruno denied everything: perhaps, he said, his wife had denounced the production. What to do? Neither Lorenzo nor I believed Bruno, yet we couldn’t really sack him. If he was the bond company’s source, this would confirm their worst fears. Everything being fundamentally okay, it was best to continue. By the afternoon, things had calmed down a little. Pressman sent word to Lorenzo that the bond company would be sending a representative to Nicaragua to check up on the production and evaluate the negative report they had received from persons unknown.

The bond guy showed up a few days later, as we were filming the Battle of San Jacinto. This was one of the film’s three big battle scenes. It involved most of the cast, plus Alfonso Arau as a French adventurer, Raousset, the mariachis from the Intercontinental Hotel, 30 extra-Immortals, and the Sandinista Army, which provided dozens of soldiers on horseback.

It was the largest scene I’d ever shot. There were 20-odd actors, three stuntmen, 80 or 90 extras, horses, cannon, explosions. I was dealing with stunts, special effects, highly cooperative and hard-working actors, and also actors who were apt to fret and ask questions like,‘But why would my character flee?’ Right in the middle of this, the representative of the bond company stepped forward. A single word he spoke: ‘Enhancement’.

None of us had any idea what he meant. In later years, I discovered that bureaucrats, who very often don’t understand what they’re doing, make up new terms not used in the business in question, which only they can understand. This gives them a sense of power in an environment otherwise mysterious to them. It qualifies and enables them to destroy industries, such as British Railways, or British film.

‘Enhancement’ was one of those words. It meant something to him, and to his bosses back in LA, perhaps. By uttering it, he was finding serious fault with the production. The set, he told Lorenzo, was too big. There were too many extras. We were shooting with too many cameras – three cameras. Too many cameras to shoot a battle scene? This wasn’t a remotely real issue. Even for students at UCLA, film stock costs were never significant; you shot as much film as you needed to. In the overall budget, especially of a film costing $5.67 million, film stock was a tiny part.

The guy had been told to find some contractual breach, and this was what he came up with. Now they could threaten to cancel the bond again. Whatever the reason, it made production more difficult and our circumstances less certain.

To put the situation in perspective, compare this small US‘intervention’ with the ones the Nicaraguans suffered on a daily basis. This guy was trying to stop the production of a film; in Matagalpa, and on the Costa Rican border, Nicaraguans were being killed daily by US-funded terrorists. The entire country lived in expectation of an American invasion. The draft ate families; a tough life got more difficult still.

That same day INCINE wrangled us a small plane, and lashed it to the ground adjacent to the farmhouse, so that its propellers could create a dust storm. As soon as they heard there was a problem, Maritza Castillo and another FSLN compañera asked us what the situation was. Lorenzo told them that if the bond was cancelled, Universal might stop funding the film. The women jumped on various possibilities. If Universal pulled out, to whom would the rights belong? Where could we find more cash to complete the picture? If Walker was too political for the US, maybe Eastern Europe . . . ?

During breaks in the shoot, actors began wandering up to me and asking, ‘Hey, Al, any news about when we’re going to be getting paid?’ or saying, ‘I was talking to the missus last night, and she said the cheque still hasn’t arrived . . .’ Strictly speaking, actors shouldn’t bother the director with things financial. We’re supposed to be above all that. But these guys weren’t out of order; they were asking, three weeks into the shoot, where their paycheques were.

As far as I knew, everything was fine. The contract with Universal was signed, and cashflow had begun: otherwise the Mexican crew and their trucks wouldn’t be here, and there wouldn’t be any money to buy gas, food, or pay the local costume crew and art department. Neither Lorenzo nor I, busy with the set, could say what the hold-up was. At this point, a second wave of thespians landed, including the actors playing Walker’s brothers: Gerrit Graham and Billy O’Leary.

When Gerrit heard from the other actors that no one had got paid, he gravely reported his own experience of a film called Phantom of the Paradise. In this film, also produced by Ed Pressman, Gerrit said Pressman had failed to pay the actors. It was one of those familiar stories involving the words ‘picture made millions’ and ‘never saw a penny’.

Gerrit’s tale had the effect of making many actors anxious. What if they weren’t ever paid? What if the film shut down, and they were abandoned in Nicaragua? Ed Harris wasn’t worried, but he was the official spokesman of the actors, and some of his colleagues were talking about going on strike. Ed told me and Lorenzo that if the actors went on strike he’d have to join them. I offered to go on strike too. Lorenzo was doubtful whether our contracts permitted this; he also said it didn’t matter. Now that Ed had conveyed the situation so clearly and unequivocally, Larry felt sure he could communicate it to Pressman, and that the delay in payments would end. And indeed it did.

Lorenzo was very valiant, driving 50 miles back to the Intercontinental Hotel in Managua, calling LA via the long-distance phone, and making sure the actors all got paid before they went on strike. At the end of each day’s shoot, I had the luxury of going back to the old house I’d rented in Granada, and sitting in the courtyard – watching it rain, or the moon creep across the sky. Or I might watch a video with my neighbour, Strummer – Ran, for its battle scenes, or Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, for its script and music – and strategise creative things. Lorenzo, meanwhile, would still be stuck under the fluorescent lights at the Inter, on the telephone to LA.

Predictably, the bond company told Pressman they were cancelling the bond again. It seemed a crude effort to shut down the film. My response was to go on the offensive: it seemed to me that, by threatening to cancel the bond without good cause, Film Finances were in breach of contract. This was the line Pressman’s lawyers took with them, and, since it was true, it eventually brought them around. With the example of the Nicaraguans, what could we do but try to be resolute and defiant? The Sandinistas’ motto that year was ‘Aqui No Se Rinde Nadie’ – Here, nobody gives up. It was on billboards everywhere: frayed, weather-beaten billboards with panels missing, one of which showed Hasenfus arrested by a young Sandinista soldier. Despite a constant, murderous war of attrition, Nicaragua hadn’t given up – so how could we?

Despite a lot more threatening and posturing, Film Finances never actually cancelled the bond. Lorenzo and I went on working, the crew and cast continued to show up. Only a handful of people even knew that this was happening. If any experience demonstrates how absolutely useless and unnecessary a completion bond was, this was surely it. Whereas CBC had been a benign and distant presence on Sid & Nancy, and physically absent on Straight to Hell, Film Finances were an impediment to Walker – yet despite the difficulties they caused us, we continued shooting, on schedule and on budget, while they collected their percentage.

Little by little, anxiety receded. Cashflow continued, and gradually we realised we had won.

Rivas was the first major battle of Walker’s Nicaraguan invasion. Up until that point it had all been skirmishes, meeting and shaking hands with local allies, and advancing on Granada, where he planned to have his capital. However, en route Walker picked a fight with the city of Rivas, which was barricaded and filled with Nicaraguan troops. As depicted in the film, Walker disdained tactics of any kind and simply marched his men into town. It was a completely stupid and unnecessary manoeuvre, which resulted in the decimation of Walker’s army, from 200 to 37 men, in an afternoon.

Our reconstruction took four days to shoot. To maximise possible camera angles, Dave and I had found a wide side-street in Granada, with overhanging, red-slate roofs, where the Immortals could be trapped. Once you were in it, from ground level, you were surrounded by thick-walled stone buildings that looked entirely original. One modern building had to be concealed with a hoarding, and the street covered with dirt, but when this was done it was pretty convincing, with many angles, high and low, in all directions. My plan was to have Walker’s men turn into this wide side-street, get half-way down it, then be boxed in, both front and rear, by wheeled vehicles, as riflemen appeared behind the wagons, and on the roofs.

When we began shooting the Battle of Rivas, many, many people turned up to watch. We’d anticipated this, and had managed to get the teenage Sandinista police to do crowd control on our first day there. But what if people kept coming in these numbers? What if we ended up with hundreds of unexpected extras, or spectators?

Fortunately, film-making is quite slow-moving (especially if, like the bond guy, you know nothing about it). Adults quickly got bored and walked away. The kids, however, stayed. The crew continued to have a certain fascination for children, who love to stare at adults working with machines. Jaime O’Brien, Lorenzo’s brother, had shown up and joined the ADs’ department. He was a natural assistant director, rapid and empathetic, but his work was frustrated by a fad that was sweeping Latin America: the traca-traca toy. This was a sort of rattle, which, if you kept swinging it, made a sound like a rattlesnake trapped in a rusty can. One traca-traca gave off a nerve-jangling sound, and there were hundreds of them in Granada. Every child had at least one. Waiting for them to stop was like waiting for crickets to fall silent. The traca-tracas would subside, mysteriously; we would begin shooting; then one traca-traca would start up, in the middle of the watching kids, and then 40 of them would be traca-traca-traca-traca-ing, in unison, as the scene died.

Children in ‘Realejo’ – one of Dave Bridges’ gorgeous images for Walker.

It was a wind-up worthy of Gerrit. Then, suddenly, the traca-traca phenomenon passed. By the end of the Battle of Rivas, sounds of traca-traca-traca-traca were scarcely heard. No one knew why, but it was good news for the sound department.

A more serious issue for the Granadans was the dust. Though colonial and often beautifully preserved, Granada was a modern city with asphalt roads, pavements and overhead electric cables. Like all oppressive film productions, our mission was to get rid of them. The electric wires were re-routed, the phone lines the same. But hiding tarmac and concrete meant bringing tons of dirt into the centre of the city, and dumping it in the streets.

I paid little attention to this process, which seemed so natural and sensible. I was more concerned with Cecilia’s project: hiding various modernities, including the Sandinista soldier on a giant plinth in the main plaza. To do this, she had decided to build a theatre in the dusty main plaza, where Walker might mount the works of Shakespeare, in English, for the improvement of the populace. Granada was already a beautiful city, and, as far as I could see, we were improving things. I wasn’t thinking about the actual results of dumping a load of earth and sand in the middle of a community, of the dust that would rise and swirl through town, of the discomfort, inconvenience, and respiratory consequences. It all looked great to me.

But I was wrong. Overestimating the importance of our project, I underestimated people’s willingness to put up with it. In 2004, almost 20 years later, I saw Ernesto Cardenal in Caracas. Cardenal had been Nicaraguan minister of culture, and a supporter of the film. The first thing he said to me was, ‘That film of yours – do you remember the dust, the problems you created in Granada?’ I had been playing the artist, but at what a cost to the locals? Wasn’t I acting arrogantly, like one of those Hollywood movie crews with their paid cops on Venice Beach? If Walker contained anachronisms, why couldn’t one of the anachronisms have been paved streets with parking signs? I was stupid, lacking in solidarity, not to think of this.

Late in the course of his disastrous battle, the actual William Walker took shelter in a house on the outskirts of Rivas. There was a lot of action and dialogue to cover in this interior scene, and Dave Bridges suggested that we should do it all in one take. It was an exciting idea – a proper plano secuencia, like Sid and Nancy exiting the boat. We’d just come out of a very staccato sequence – the street battle – so it would be in complete contrast to what had gone before. The shot took less than a day to get: we rehearsed it a couple of times with the camera at the end of one day, had it in the can by lunch time on the next. It’s more complicated than any of the hand-held moves of Sid & Nancy, and includes a dozen or more elements – the stabbing of Major Angus in the eye; a bullet hitting the wall adjacent to the landscape painter; Doubleday, Henningson and Hornsby arguing over military tactics; Walker playing ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’ on the piano.

I could only follow this action, given that the camera did a 360-degree move through the building, by being behind it or in front of it. If I stayed behind Dave and his focus-puller I would see nothing. Being as moustachioed and hairy as any of the Immortals, I got an extra’s costume and watched the action from the piano room. That’s me, crouching on the floor next to Eddie Tudor-Pole, clutching a musket.

Among the Nicaraguan actors in Walker are Paulino Rodriguez, Dexter Taylor, Nestor Mendez Garcia, and Alan Bolt. Our most inspired Nicaraguan actor was Roberto López Espinoza, who played Mayorga, one of Walker’s collaborators. He was a Sandinista, and he viewed Mayorga as one of those modern Nicaraguans who opposed the FSLN and admired the Americans – someone like Adolfo Calero, or Eden Pastora. He felt it was very important to explain why some of his countrymen adored the United States, and why some became Contras. Mayorga, he thought, had bought into the notion (common in many places besides Nicaragua) that culture and progress are gifts donated to us by our betters.

So Roberto wrote a speech in praise of the American intervention, celebrating Walker’s promise of ‘God, Science, and Hygiene’. In the aftermath of the battle, stained with stage blood, he staggered among the corpses and berated the surviving townspeople for misunderstanding the Americans. It’s a very good scene, which remains in the finished film, even though Rudy knew nothing of it. Roberto was a great actor, but he was also a subtle and clever thinker. Walker is an ethnocentric film about the conquerors, their fallings-out, and their fates. This is its most authentic ‘Nica’ moment.

Most of Walker was filmed in or around the city of Granada. The shoot veered from intimate moments between Walker and his lovers, Ellen Martin and Yrena, to crowd scenes involving marketplaces, floggings, executions, and, finally, the burning of the town.

Dave’s second cameraman, Dennis Crossan, arrived and we worked out a schedule where Dave and I would shoot the main scenes while Miguel and Dennis took a second unit to capture any scenes in which Walker didn’t appear. Dave, Dennis, and either Frank Pineda or Rafael Ruiz would cover the big scenes together. (Since Steve’s departure I’d given up directing two scenes simultaneously.)

After so much male energy, the scenes with Walker and the women were a joy to shoot. The actors were relaxed, and it was also a relief to film indoors, at night, with windows open onto balconies, after long days filming battles in the hot sun. Rudy’s dialogue anticipated Bush II, or Blair. ‘The American phalange will provide for national security,’ Walker stammered, as Yrena seduced him, ‘and I think we should have free elections within six months . . . if you think that’s possible.’

But everything took time. By the fifth week we were running a day behind. On a regular film, that wouldn’t matter: running late on a regular film is normal. On Walker it was evidence of communistic chaos and moral turpitude.

We’d been shooting one of the big scenes in the marketplace, a crowd scene with perhaps 200 extras and 20 principals, including René Auberjonois, whose character, Henningson, was out shopping. In addition to the marketeers, there were construction workers raising a scaffolding, horses, a stagecoach, and a couple of floggings: an average afternoon in President Walker’s capital. Dave was concerned that we hadn’t quite ‘got it’ – that we needed a bit more coverage at the end of the scene. It would be days before we saw the rushes, which would be hand-carried back from the lab in London. So Lorenzo arranged for all 200 extras to be ready again one hour before sunset the next day. We finished an interior with Ed Harris 45 minutes before sundown, and raced outside. Half an hour before sunset, the camera was on the crane again, with all the extras, foreground and background action, horses, scaffolding, carts, and Major Siegfried Henningson, ‘late of the Corsican campaign and the Balkan fiasco’, going through their moves. Two takes later, the clouds rolled over the sun, Dave gave me the thumbs up, and we wrapped, 15 minutes ahead of schedule.

As we walked away from the set, René remarked how quickly the whole complicated sequence had come together – re-created itself – at the very end of a busy day. ‘In LA that shot would have taken all day to get,’ he said, ‘and they still wouldn’t have got it.’ In Nicaragua, film-making was easier: no one knew things were impossible.

By the sixth week of production, we were two days behind, and the bond company was perturbed again. It occurred to me that while first unit was waiting for the principals to be ready with costume and makeup, Dave and I should shoot some short scenes involving the subsidiary characters, a third wave of American and British actors having recently arrived. But it was a mistake. Invariably, by the time Dave and I had lined up the first shot, Ed and Blanca would arrive on set, ready to shoot the important sequence. And the new, improvised scene would be scrapped.

It hadn’t dawned on me yet that Walker was key to everything, and that any scenes that didn’t involve him could be dropped. Instead I persisted with a vain attempt to shoot the whole script. This was understandable: it’s what I was supposed to do. But it meant shooting some unnecessary scenes, featuring subsidiary characters, on the ‘San Francisco’ waterfront.

Here, on the shore of Lake Nicaragua, the art department had built a series of false-fronted hotels and waterfront stores. Bryce Perrin and crew had managed to fit masts and sails to a couple of leaky scows, and the whole location – built on a shoestring – was tremendously cool. It appears in a long shot, a special effect by Rocco Gioffre, which, in addition to the actual waterfront, includes painted buildings, ships, and campfires burning on the hills.

Rudy’s script contained much more dock material: the farewells of the Immortals, Ephraim Squier’s drunken arrival, and the attempt by one Sheriff Purdy to arrest Walker. I shot it all; it all hit the cutting room floor. It was fun to watch Richard Masur act – he’s what some people call a technical actor. At one point, as I was looking through the camera, Masur asked Dave, ‘What lens are you using?’ Dave told him it was an 85mm lens. The actor pointed to a spot on his chest, exactly where the TV-safe frame line was. ‘Frame line’s here, right?’ he said.

Richard knew things he didn’t need to know, and there was tension in the Ellen Martin scenes. Ed was studiously learning sign language, so as to communicate better with Marlee Matlin. But Masur was already fluent in it. Marlee was happy to be working with another skilful signer, but Richard’s confidence infuriated Ed.

In the Julius Caesar scene, Rudy and Cecilia captured the pretentiousness of the enterprise, and Walker’s coming fall. As Walker watches the atrocious production, played before a background of European landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, his closest allies try to warn him – all shouting at once, of course – of lost cities, of advancing armies, and of cholera. All to no avail: Walker decides this is the moment to announce the introduction of slavery, so that ‘the South will rally to our cause’.

Walker’s men perform Julius Caesar. Fredric Neumann, Bruce White, Linda Callahan, David Martin, Sharon Barr, Ben Guillory, Richard Zobel.

Walker’s brothers were supposed to be in the scene, but only one was present: Norvell, played by Gerrit. Billy, who played Junior Walker, was laid up at the Intercontinental with food poisoning. Without level-headed Billy/Junior, there was no restraining influence to prevent Norvell and William (or Gerrit and Ed) from winding each other up. As Walker prepared to make his historic declaration, Norvell laid into him with a tirade of criticisms and insults, and led his cronies in a chant of ‘Food, Booze, Money, Justice!’

At this point in the script, Walker tells Norvell that he is stripped of his rank; he can either remain in Nicaragua as a private, or leave. In the screenplay, Norvell turns and walks away (the historic Norvell returned to the United States to make trouble for his brother, and money for himself). But in rehearsal, instead of leaving, Gerrit stood his ground, grabbed his balls and said, ‘Private this, Billy!’ This so infuriated Ed, or rather Ed’s character, Walker, that he pointed at the obstreperous Norvell and said, ‘Anderson, kill him.’ Anderson, Walker’s stalwart killer-cowboy, was played by Bruce Wright. Bruce stepped forward, aimed his pistol, and said ‘Bang’. And Norvell/Gerrit, surprised but stoic, bit the dust.

Immediately after the rehearsal, Ed asked me, ‘Can we? Or have we shot something with him later on?’ We checked with Mario Cisneros, the ‘Script Boy’. Mario told us we hadn’t yet shot any of Norvell’s later sequences; he didn’t have many, in any case. Ed, the actor, freely voiced his opinion that Walker, the character, would have spontaneously ordered his brother’s execution at this moment in the film. It was a good note, I thought. A bit of a shock to Gerrit, perhaps, but he took the news of Norvell’s death manfully, and gained a spectacular demise.

Walker’s jungle idol.
Photo: Cecilia Montiel.

To mix Shakespeare with slavery, cholera and one’s brother’s murder is surely to tempt fate. By the end of this scene, Walker must either become a god-devil, or be doomed.

The idea that Walker thought he was becoming a Central American god or devil did sometimes occur to me. It isn’t in the script, and it never really crystallises in the film, though Ed played his character as the most extreme imaginable animal. There are two moments in the film that suggest this possibility: one is in the cathedral, where he begins to feed on human flesh (really a piece of watermelon); and the other is in the jungle, where he sees the pre-Columbian statue of a demon devouring a man. Jorge Sainz, the art director, made three sketches for this: two realistic, one cartoon-like and over the top. Naturally, I went for the crazy one with a mad face and lolling tongue, grinning and chewing on a human head. In the film, Walker stares at the thing: clearly, he senses kinship. But to make the point more strongly, I should have had him order Washburn and Faucet to carry the statue to Granada on the chuck wagon, and install it in the presidential suite.

Before the burning of Granada, much additional set building was needed, and so the cast and crew headed south for a two-day shoot in San Juan del Sur. To get from Rivas to San Juan, there were two routes: the main highway, which was paved, and El Chocolate, a wide dirt road that ran through farms and forests. There was less traffic on the Chocolate, and so the convoy took that. En route, our trucks passed a boy riding a horse, and the horse took fright. The boy was thrown, and one of our trucks killed him.

Lorenzo and I, riding in my pickup, reached the end of the stalled convoy. I went back to the main road, and took the longer route to the hotel; Lorenzo stayed on the Chocolate. I prepared for the next day’s shoot; Lorenzo dealt with the driver, the police, and ambulance. I had a beer with the actors; Lorenzo visited the boy’s family.

The next day, as we were getting ready to shoot, Lorenzo came to me and said, ‘We have a choice here – we can take the day off and go to this boy’s funeral, or we can keep shooting. What do you want to do?’ I thought about the bond company, and their reaction if we deliberately fell behind. What if they threatened to shut us down again? So I opted to keep working. I was completely wrong – a half-day off, to pay our respects, was totally affordable.

Instead Dave and I filmed some undistinguished stuff: the Immortals, wounded and battered after Rivas, shooting at a sloop anchored off shore. Most of it wasn’t used. It isn’t easy, doing good work with a guilty conscience, on a balmy shore.

Lorenzo and Carlos, from INCINE, attended the funeral.

During our location scouts, Lorenzo and I had found a secluded beach north of San Juan, where some striking rocks emerged from the surf. There was no road to it, so we’d agreed to ferry the actors by boat, as we’d scouted the location. The day before the shoot, Carlos showed me and Lorenzo a surprise, courtesy of the local military: a five-kilometre road, dug through the rain forest, from the Chocolate to the beach. The army had done a thorough job, cutting a wide swath through ancient trees, devastating the pristine forest. Lorenzo and I felt like fucking ghosts: we hadn’t asked for this, it wasn’t necessary for an afternoon’s shoot involving 30 actors, who had agreed to travel by boat anyway.

Why such insane desecration of the forest? There had to be a reason. It couldn’t really be ‘for the movie’, could it? A Sandinista friend wondered if there was a military need for it: we were close to the Costa Rican border, and sometimes the Contras attacked by sea. Perhaps it was an access road for the army, passed off as a favour to filmmakers, paid for by us as well. Almost 20 years later, some Nicaraguans in London told me the road had been built on the orders of the local comandante, so that his relatives could develop the beach. Now there are cabañas and a restaurant there, owned by the former comandante and his partners.

Is this what the revolution was fought for? Is this what Walker was about? It seemed as if, on the Chocolate, all my attempts at proper actions were being revealed as destructive, bogus. A forest had been destroyed; a boy killed. Was there anything worse than a pompous English filmmaker, trying to be useful to the Revolution?

In the 1850s, Managua barely existed, and its religious buildings, such as they were, were modest affairs. By the late 1980s, there was a huge cathedral in Managua – but it was a roofless, windowless, concrete shell. In Nicaragua, where the parishioners were seriously poor, the largest religious building had been written off by the church, following the earthquake. Stark and symbolic, it was a magnet for filmmakers looking for a location.5

After laying waste Granada, Walker had retreated to the city’s cathedral. Lorenzo naturally approached the diocese of Managua for permission to shoot in the ruined building. Thanks to his diplomatic skills, permission was granted for us to shoot not only in the cathedral, but in a church-owned building in Granada overlooking the main square: Walker’s office.

In the cathedral our most extreme scenes of Walker occurred: Walker operating on a wounded man on the altar; eating his liver; and his last address to his men. When we turned the cameras to face the watching Immortals and prisoners, Ed had an idea. He wanted, he told me, to explain to them what this film was about. I thought they knew, but Ed wanted to make it clear to them. So, Ed, off-camera, read a speech he’d written for them. Few of them could understand his English words. This is what he said:

You all might think that there will come a day when America will leave Nicaragua alone. Well, I am here to tell you that day will never happen. Because it is our duty to be here. It is our duty to control you people. So no matter what you do – no matter how hard you fight – we’ll be back – time after time – forever.

We’ll be back. That improvised speech stretched from Nicaragua to Vietnam, to Iraq and beyond. Ed knew exactly what Walker was about, and what US policy was about: power and control, and an empire that must keep expanding, endlessly, or die.

After Ed made his speech, he led his troops outside for the evacuation scene. I didn’t imagine we’d use the improvised dialogue, but Peter Glossop recorded it, just in case.

A misunderstanding occurred. We’d arranged to borrow two troop-transport helicopters from the Sandinista Army to film the evacuation scene. No problem had been foreseen. But since then, the Contra war had gone into overdrive.6 The government was ferrying a lot of troops to the border with Honduras, and bringing many wounded back.

On the first evening we’d planned to film them, the helicopters were cancelled. We had a fallback – the cathedral interior. Next evening, the Sandinistas told us they could only afford to send us one helicopter. We said this was fine, and waited for it. When it arrived, and the doors opened, we found wooden benches installed for the passengers, and fresh blood on the floor.

We gave the floor a scrub before the actors got on board. The rehearsal went well. The ‘company’ man vetted the departing Immortals, and the non-American ones were shot, or shooed away. Walker, as president of Nicaragua, refused to leave. The marines shut the doors.

We went over the plan one last time: pilot, ADs, cameramen. With the chopper on the ground, we’d film the sequence up until the actors got aboard and the doors were closed. At that point I’d call cut. We’d shoot the same scene again, a couple of times maybe. The actors would get out, the set would be cleared of extras, and then the helicopter would take off.

The steps of the cathedral were covered with Nicas, playing corpses. The plan was to get them off the steps, and the actors out of the helicopter, before it was airborne. We’d film the takeoff with the National Palace as a backdrop, and the empty steps out of shot. The FSLN guys said fine: the helicopter pilot didn’t want to take off with all the actors on board anyway. So we completely understood each other, just as we had completely understood the stunt coordinator, in the LA River, on Repo Man.

The craft was parked on the ground, doors open. It started its rotors. Three cameras rolled, and I called action. The actors performed a thrilling version of the scene. Walker was left behind, staring at the helicopter, as the doors closed.

I called cut. Nobody heard me. It didn’t matter: this was the planned cutting point, as we’d all agreed. The noise was deafening. The doors remained closed; the rotors turned, faster. The helicopter rose.

Why did the helicopter take off? There had been a breakdown in communication. Somehow, in spite of all our plans and agreements, the pilot didn’t know he was supposed to stay on the ground. Or he forgot. Actors aboard, doors closed, up he went.

Now, as the helicopter rose, a wind came off the Lake and hit it, blowing it off its vertical course, and towards the cathedral. I was standing on the cathedral steps, clad in an extra’s costume, a few feet behind Ed. The chopper drifted towards us. Ed didn’t break character for a moment. He knew the cameras were still rolling, and he remained stock still: Walker on the steps, observing the huge machine. The chopper struggled to rise: the racket of its engines grew louder. It drifted closer to the stone columns of the cathedral. Soon the rotors would hit one of the columns, shatter, the helicopter would spin out of control, and everyone aboard it, and on the ground beneath it, would be killed.

The actors and the extras on the ground figured this out at the same time. They gave up acting, and ran for it. Ed Harris remained. The helicopter was almost above us. Ed, stalwart, still in character, gazed fearlessly up. We were the only people left on the steps. He looked back, saw me, and winked. Then he stepped behind one of the pillars.

I didn’t move. What was the point? The helicopter was about to hit the cathedral. This way, I would be killed quickly. Let poor Lorenzo, my best friend, deal with it. Rather him than me. I closed my eyes.

Gradually the vast, roaring sound lessened. I opened my eyes and saw the chopper, higher now, having cleared the cathedral façade, circling the square and coming back in to land.

After this near-disaster, a visit from the bond company was no big deal. I visited the bondsman in his room at the Inter. He didn’t mention ‘enhancement’. Instead he said he was concerned that we would be late delivering the picture. I said I didn’t think he needed to worry: delivery of the film was several months away, and we were due to wrap the shoot in just a few days’ time. We hadn’t over-spent: there was still money for effects, music, and titles.

I swore to him, on the hotel Bible and the black flag of Anarchy, that Lorenzo and I would deliver the film on time. The bondsman still looked preoccupied: maybe he knew that true Anarchists really swear on the black book of Anarchy, and that the black flag thing was just a feint.

The burning of Granada followed. We shot simultaneous scenes, Sando directing the second unit. For a week, Dave and I would be filming in one place, Miguel and Dennis in another. Once, we shot a 24-hour day. The first unit began work at 5 or 6 p.m. with a battle scene in the main square in Granada. This involved long tracking shots with Walker and his men. There was a major lighting setup; diesel bombs were going off in the background. Ed Harris led a posse of filibusters, including his brother, through the flames. Tonight Junior was killed: seemingly by a stray bullet (later, during the editing, I discovered it was Hornsby, Walker’s faithful aide-decamp, who pulled the trigger).

Billy O’Leary had come to Nicaragua a rosy-cheeked, fresh-faced American actor. He looks that way in the early scenes, when he gets off the coach with brother Norvell. Ironically, all the cast who stayed at private houses in Granada remained in excellent health, while those who resided at the Intercontinental in Managua came down with food poisoning. Billy was the worst hit: bed-ridden for almost two weeks, he lost 20 pounds and returned to the set quite skeletal and menacing. He had a proposition for me. Brooding in his fever bed, he’d decided that Junior Walker wasn’t an innocent, but a key player in the mayhem: Billy wanted to play Junior as a bad guy – a clean-cut sadist, worse than his brother. It was a great choice.

Having filmed Junior’s death and various other violent scenes, we wrapped at 5 or 6 a.m. This should be Toña or Victoria time, but just as first unit ended, second unit was stirring. And second unit looked suspiciously like first. Dave and I checked on Sando, setting up a scene on a Granada side-street where several extra Immortals poured through a hole in the wall, into a hail of bullets. All seemed to be going well, so I walked back across town to my house and went to bed.

I slept till 1 p.m., then woke and rode in my pickup to Managua, where I boarded the Actors’ Bus (lately renamed the Actors’, Extras’ & Crew Members’ Bus) northbound to León. On the bank of Lake Managua, in the shadow of volcano Momotombo, we were to shoot pickups for the scene where Walker decides to betray Vanderbilt, seize his boss’ ships, and go it alone. It was a gorgeous location on the lakeside, in sight of the geothermal power station that the Americans had built in Somoza’s time, and which the Sandinistas now ran, with the aid of some Italians.7

We’d filmed the bulk of this scene two weeks previously, but still needed a couple of extra shots to make it work. The actors on the bus were all working their second shift. The bus took us out to the location: a dilapidated, two-storey wooden hacienda inhabited by several families. When we got there, we couldn’t shoot. On the previous occasion, Cecilia’s art department had covered the corrugated metal roof with red ceramic roof tiles. The tiles were still there, on location, but they were no longer on the roof: instead, they were piled up neatly, in hundreds of rows, under the eaves of the building.

Our goal was a wide shot featuring this splendid, if crumbling, edifice. It wasn’t something we could do as a special effect, special effects shots being expensive in those days. We couldn’t shoot this building as it was. The solution was a group effort, converting our Screen Actors Guild cast into a roofing crew. For an hour, Miguel, Ed, I, and the rest of the actors and staff climbed ladders and spread red tiles across the roof. Here these great actors were, crawling across a hot metal roof in Nicaragua, passing me armloads of red tiles, in clear violation of their contract and job description, just so that we could get the shot.

We got the shot. And, as we headed for the buses, an old man who lived in the house came up to me and said, ‘Vos eres un gran amigo de Nicaragua.’ I don’t know if he said this because we’d just put new tiles on his roof, or because he approved of our attempts to tell this particular story, but he made me happy. I shook his hand, that strong, fluid, soul-handshake that the Nicas made, and hurried off so that he wouldn’t see tears in my eyes.

Concerned that something was still missing, I invited Ed and Sy over to my house in Granada to shoot a new scene based on Walker’s diary. Dave set up a simple two-shot, on the patio, with Ed and Sy seated at a table. In the scene, Walker read twice from his diary, on his theories of racial purity. And Hornsby read once, from the same diary, of the bravery of all the men at the Battle of Rivas, irrespective of their race. I wasn’t quite sure where the scene would fit, but I felt we needed it.

The last scheduled scene was Walker’s trial in San Francisco. This was shot in the set built on the Granada waterfront. Fox Harris played the prosecuting attorney. I had a haircut, and a shave, and played his assistant prosecutor. Fox was very quiet. Normally it was tremendous fun to work with him: though nervous, he was dementedly funny and apt to say anything that came into his head. But in Nicaragua, he was reserved, unusually serious. I didn’t know that he’d been diagnosed with AIDS. He died not long after. He’d told no one – not me, not friends like Dick or Zander – that he was ill.

At the conclusion of the scene, the ADs announced the film was wrapped. A cheer went up, and one of the extras punched me. I didn’t blame him, though it hurt a bit. He was a Dutch guy, one of the Sandinistas who’d dragged around in Walker’s army for nine weeks, putting up with bad food, inaccurate information, and un-solidaritous treatment. He’d clearly hated the power structure that ran Walker, but he’d put up with it. He’d waited nine weeks, respectful of my directorial authority, as long as it lasted. And then he punched me in the head.

I’ve always admired the Dutch – so able to combine justice with timing and common sense.

We didn’t know it, but as Walker wrapped, INCINE itself was shutting down. El Espectro de la Guerra – a musical about the war – had taken a huge effort. But some footage had been accidentally destroyed at the Havana lab. There was no insurance, or money for reshoots. As the war weighed more and more heavily on everything, the FSLN gave up on film production. Shortly thereafter, the ministry of culture was also closed.

POSTPRODUCTION

Among the actors, there was one who had no obvious plans to leave. Strummer, having faded into the murky texture of Walker’s cast, had hatched some very specific plans. He was there partially because he was enjoying the film thing, partially because of the political situation, but also because in the weeks we’d spent there, Joe had got into Nicaragua itself – it was so magnificent, so musical, so colourful, so olfactory. He was in no hurry to go home.

In pre-production, Joe, Lorenzo, and I had discussed his writing some music. At the time, we’d planned to include Nicaraguan composers and musicians, including Carlos Mejía Godoy, in the soundtrack. Now the shoot was over, the plan was for the entire company to return home. But where was home? I had no base anywhere; Lorenzo and Cecilia lived in LA; Joe had a wife and two daughters in England, yet . . .

Joe felt strongly, he said, that I should edit there. He remarked how beautiful Nicaragua was, how great the people were, what a rich creative world surrounded us. He said that, if we went back to London, we’d be sitting around, with cups of milky tea, kicking ourselves for having left this place. It wasn’t hard to convince me: I loved Nicaragua, and had no connection to London. By encouraging me to edit in Granada, Joe was also kicking the editors off the film. He was quite explicit about this. He knew David and Justin had families in London and wanted to go home. Joe had felt disappointment at the way Straight to Hell turned out, and he blamed David Martin for the initial failure of the film.

I think he was wrong about this. Straight to Hell’s flaws are inherent in the project. David did the best he could with four weeks’ worth of Hell, but he was never going to turn the material into a film as polished, or as well structured, or as profoundly acted, as Sid & Nancy. Justin gave the film an excellent sound design. Both did good work. But Strummer wanted regime change in the cutting room.

It was easy to orchestrate the rift. Lorenzo and I were more than happy to stay. After we wrapped, David and Justin returned to London; Lorenzo, Joe, and I remained in Granada.

Granada is a small city, politically conservative, beautiful to behold. My Spanish skills improved. Lorenzo and I had lunch with the Chamorros, who ran the soap factory. They told us we should make a commercial film in Nicaragua. We said that Walker was a commercial film; they laughed.

I cut Walker for a couple of weeks, while Lorenzo looked for a replacement for David. And I learned just what a good editor David was. Every time I doubted one of his cuts, and took it apart to try to improve it, I saw the reason for David’s edit – an actor blinked or looked away, there was a focus problem, someone forgot a line. He hadn’t put a foot wrong anywhere. His talents were indisputable. But, here we were.

Certain sequences, especially the big battles, involved a lot of material, and a lot of possibilities to be explored. I worked on these. In Mexico City, Lorenzo met Carlos Puente, who had edited several Mexican-based Hollywood pictures, and cut one of Arturo Ripstein’s films. Back then, Carlos was spouseless and childless, as was his assistant, Edgar: perfect additions to our rootless team. After they came to Nicaragua, we worked in parallel: I cut the battle sequences and the Shakespeare play, Carlos edited the narrative scenes.

Our office was off the main road between Granada and Managua. Most evenings Strummer turned up with a cassette tape of temporary score, which he’d play in shaky synch beside the flatbed, as we’d done in Soho. Joe came up with hours of music: dissatisfied, he’d go home, throw most of it away, and compose more.

One day, I suggested to Joe that he and I take a taxi to Managua, to meet Carlos Mejía Godoy, and talk about the score. ‘Well, Al, I’ve been thinking,’ he replied, ‘you know the scores of your last couple of films?’ Of course I did – Strummer had worked on both of them. ‘Well, I’m not entirely happy with ’em. You know, the way they turned out. I think Walker should have one composer. For the entire score.’ Silence. I looked at him. He looked back at me. The eyes that normally evaded people held me in one complete and penetrating gaze.

We walked into town, to have lunch at the café where they’d hung the picture of Walker and his Immortals at their Last Supper.

Strummer’s score for Walker was composed entirely in a small farmhouse outside Granada. It was performed and mixed in San Francisco, and re-mixed (in Francis Coppola’s barn) by Richard Beggs. I can’t describe the score of Walker, since I’m not a musical person. Nor could I account for its brilliance, originality, and orchestral breadth, nor judge the songs he wrote and sang. It was a work of great self-confidence. You could tell this by the way he mixed his vocals loud – not like the buried vocals of the albums that preceded and followed it.

It took eight weeks for us to finish the rough cut. Near the end of the process, Tomás Borge visited the cutting room. Lorenzo and I took bets as to how many pickups and four-wheel drives would be in Borge’s convoy, but the comandante surprised us. His very agreeable personal guard showed up to tell us Tomás was on his way. Borge arrived a few minutes later in a second car – no jeeps, no outriders – with a Cuban advisor. Having a Cuban advisor was something of a status symbol for the comandantes: I’d seen Russians in Nicaragua, but they didn’t fraternise much with the Nicas – they wore baseball caps and raced around in jeeps and acted, well, like Americans. The Cubans, on the other hand, were thick with the Nicas; very political, and could be a terrible wind-up.

Carlos and I showed Tomás and his Cuban asesor the burning of Granada scenes. We were quite proud of these – though they didn’t yet feature Joe’s final version of ‘The Brooding Side of Madness’. Tomás watched the sequence, nodded, and said, ‘Very good’ or something like that. We looked at his Cuban friend. ‘Yes,’ said the Cuban, ‘you only show a small part of Granada burning, of course. Is there a reason for that?’

I didn’t like this guy. We were supposed to be filmmakers, artists, internationalists and intellectuals, united in defence of the Nicaraguan Revolution – and here he was, dissing our film! Let the Cubans come here and make a film as funny and as good as Walker, and pay for it with American dollars!

I made up some bogus explanation, and got on the phone to Rocco Gioffre to ask if he could squeeze another effects shot into the budget: a high angle, at night, in which it was obvious (even to the most narrow-minded Cuban intellectual) that the city of Granada was entirely ablaze!

Over lunch, Borge told us all a joke. ‘Cox, what is more important, do you think – sexual technique, or the size of the male member?’

‘Well, technique, surely, Comandante.’

‘O’Brien, what do you think is more important? Size, or technique?’

Lorenzo also felt that erotic ability was more important than the size of the organ. Borge turned to his Cuban advisor, nodded, and said, ‘See? Two more guys with small dicks!’

We got the plate for Rocco’s shot from my balcony, using Frank Pineda’s camera. I enjoyed my daily walks, through two- or three-hundred-year-old streets, to the cutting room on the edge of town. It was hot and humid, the streets smelled of mangos and bananas and diesel fuel, people shouted, your landlady whistled at you, there were kids, carts, and animals everywhere.

I went swimming every day in Lake Nicaragua, with its famous freshwater sharks; I didn’t really believe the sharks were there. I’d head in a straight line out from shore, leaving the palm trees and the little taxi rank behind, making way towards the distant volcano. I’d swim for 20 minutes or so in that direction, then turn back. One day, I saw a long, straight fin, sticking out of the water, between me and that volcano. Or maybe it was a tall stick. Headed straight for me. Maybe. I didn’t wait for a closer look at Carcharhinus nicaraguensis, but crawled for shore.

That was my last dip in the lake. Carlos and I had a rough cut now and Strummer’s score was expanding daily, which provoked more picture changes, and more temp music. We needed to get back to San Francisco so Joe could start recording, and we could lock the music and the picture down. Richard Beggs was waiting to begin work on the sound design.

A few days before we closed the Granada office, I was sitting in the cutting room. It was about 10 p.m. and I was working on the helicopter scene, specifically, the moment where the Company Man points at Henningson, and the marines open fire on him, blowing off his arm. We’d had a running joke regarding Henningson’s injured arm, and René had asked if his arm could be shot off at the end of the film. Don Marcelino was happy to oblige him with much spurting blood, and a detachable arm.

Just as I spliced two shots – the soldiers firing, and Henningson’s reaction – there was a god-awful crash outside. Several crashes very close together, in fact – one of those road-accident-just-round-the-corner sounds. I ran outside and saw a terrible scene. A car, driving fast, had ploughed into the back of a truck trailer, parked across the road from our office. The car was packed with people, and – as its roof was torn off by the impact – the passengers had spilled out and were lying, dead or injured, in the road.

I stared at the accident. Lorenzo emerged from the office. He took in what had happened, and immediately yelled to the taxi drivers who hung out in front of Walker headquarters: ‘You, you! Pick those people up and take them to the hospital. You others,’ (this to me and the other taxi drivers) ‘get the rest of them out of the road.’

We raced to follow Lorenzo’s orders. Sometimes a hierarchical command structure works. We carried an injured woman out of the road. The taxis roared off to the hospital with the wounded. I went back to get another man, but he was dead. His arm had been cut off and it was lying next to him. I stared, mystified, at the severed arm; a taxista picked it up, and, not knowing what to do with it, laid it on the dead man’s body.

Lorenzo seemed to have everything under control. We waited for the ambulance and the Sandinista cops to arrive. The least injured comforted the more severely hurt. The taxi guys found blankets for the dead. I went back inside.

I found myself in the editing room, where the shot of Henningson’s severed arm still glowed in the flatbed window. I thought about the man who’d just been killed outside: the white meat of his arm, the lack of gushing blood. I thought of the lattice of coincidence – How could such things be? How could they be so horrible? What could they mean?

I turned off the machines.

In July, Carlos and I set up a new cutting room in San Francisco. This was to supply Richard with whatever material he needed, and make small edits to accommodate the music as it arrived. In fact, we continued editing the film. Strummer established mini-offices: one in the cutting room, another in a cupboard in the corridor outside Richard’s studio. He kept his rolling papers, lighter, notebook, guitar, and other essentials there.

We shot two new sequences at Old Tucson, Arizona, on 14 and 15 August 1987. These scenes gave Walker a new aspect: the Western town set with its railroad tracks, and the magnificent, saguaro-filled desert where we staged a fictitious meeting between Walker and his financier, Vanderbilt.

After Beatty, our next choice for Cornelius Vanderbilt had been Peter Boyle. He was a great actor and he looked like the original Cornelius Vanderbilt. But Peter had been doubtful about travelling to Central America, and we’d gone with another actor. His performance wasn’t very strong, and, as Lorenzo observed, without a mega-powerful Vanderbilt Walker would make no sense. When we asked Peter to play the part a second time, in Tucson, he accepted the role, and did it for no fee.

We cut the new Vanderbilt material in and showed the film to Rudy and Ed Harris in San Francisco. For the first time, we discussed a voiceover narration. I talked to Bob Dawson about explanatory maps. Bob, who also designed the title sequence, created the animated maps depicting Walker’s route from San Francisco to Nicaragua, and some of his journeys in the country. Rudy and I had vowed two things when he embarked on the script: no voiceover narration, and no maps. Now, in an attempt to make the narrative as clear as possible, we would have both.

Richard Beggs produced a cornucopia of unexpected and delightful aural elements: he filled the air surrounding Vanderbilt with farts and flies (some of which I regret that I declined). He also offered helicopter fly-bys during an early campfire scene: I declined them, too, because I thought we should wait for the physical arrival of the helicopters at the end. But I was endlessly impressed by the work he put in on small things – animal and insect sounds, for instance – and the way he worked with Joe to design the Rivas battle.

The MPAA screened a tape and told us Walker would receive either an R or an X rating. No cuts were required, and it received an R. Joe delivered the last track, ‘Remix Brooding # 6’, at the end of October. He said he’d hijacked the lovely melody from the screeching vocals in the main theme of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I wouldn’t have known: it was a delicate, pretty piece that worked in the contradictory manner of Tôru Takemitsu’s score for Ran.

Carlos and I continued to make Richard’s job more difficult. At the eleventh hour, after a complete screening of the cutting copy, we put back the impromptu scene where Ed and Sy read from Walker’s diary.

RELEASE

The regime had changed, but my Universal experience was pretty much the same as it had been with Repo Man. There was endless dickering about the poster. The new boss, Tom Pollock, had okayed Paul Mavrides as poster artist, but it was a struggle to get anyone else there to accept this. Mavrides painted a cartoon image of Walker without a face. This freaked everyone out. The poster had to have a face! Lorenzo and I attended a meeting with 16 people from marketing, all of whom clearly had better things to do. Walker, like Repo Man, was doomed.

We requested another meeting with Tom Pollock. In the middle of it, the door to his office suddenly opened. A hand, expensively cufflinked, appeared. It beckoned to Pollock, with one finger; Pollock leapt up and ran from the room.

Lorenzo, a studio exec, and I stared at the door. ‘Is that Lew Wasserman?’ I asked the exec. He grew pale, and put his finger to his lips. I’d guessed it was the capo de capi, the Boss of all Bosses, because who else would walk into a studio head’s office without knocking, and beckon him outside, other than the real boss? We waited, staring through the plateglass window, down into the Valley smog. Finally, Tom Pollock returned. ‘It was Lew,’ he explained, carefully shutting the door.

There was a Walker benefit for the Nicaraguan women’s charity MADRE on 30 November, where I met Nicaragua’s ambassador to the UN, the magnificent Nora Astorga. The film opened the following week. The first reviews, in Time magazine and the New York Times, were positive, and for a moment we thought we’d got away with it, but every major review that followed was entirely negative. There was a consistent quality to many of the reviews: a repetition of phrases (particularly “blood spurting,” and the use of “clever” in a pejorative sense), and a recurrent admonition that no such films should be made again.

Like Repo Man, Walker was gone from the cinemas in a couple of weeks. In London, Martin Turner took me to an exhibition of drawings by Otto Dix, at the Goethe Institute. Dix’s anger, graphic brilliance, and specific-ness made me feel better about political art.

The film played at the Havana Film Festival, twice, in one of those huge cinemas named after the twin heroes of the revolution, ‘Carlos’ Marx and ‘Carlos’ Chaplin. It was a 2,000-seater auditorium, and every seat was occupied. After the second screening, I met three young people in the lobby of the Nacional. They were students of the Cuban film school at San Antonio de los Baños – two guys and a woman, kids really, one from Ecuador, one from Argentina, and one from Peru. They all shook me by the hand, and swore with great sincerity, ‘Cuando hacemos peliculas, queremos hacer peliculas como Walker!’

Back in England, on 30 December, I saw, with Cecilia and Dick, the RSC’s production of The Revengers Tragedy, at the Swan Theatre. Like the Dix exhibition, this stoked my enthusiasm for radical art. On New Year’s Eve, I wrote two quotations in the back of my appointment book: ‘No one has ever prospered or died happily outside the law’ – the words of G.D. Hadfield, US Marine Corps Commanding Officer, to A.C. Sandino, Nicaragua, 12 July 1927; and Vindici’s line from Revengers, ‘Great men were gods if beggars couldn’t kill ’em!’

I requested a meeting with UIP, the multinational distribution corporation owned by Universal and Paramount.8 They owned all foreign rights to Walker, and I wanted to learn their distribution plans. I met their head honcho in London, who was even more nervous than Tom Pollock, and even more determined not to release the film. ‘We all loved Repo Man,’ said Universal’s man in his big office off Soho Square, ‘but you have to admit you didn’t get it right this time. With Walker, you didn’t get it right this time.’

The UIP boss was quite big, and was talking very loudly. I said I didn’t think it mattered if I’d got it or not, that his company had chosen to buy the international rights to Walker, and that it was in our mutual interest to coordinate the release of Joe Strummer’s excellent soundtrack album with the opening of the film. The man wasn’t prepared to begin discussing it. ‘It’s the violence, you see. The violence – before, we could have got away with it. But not now. Not after Hungerford.’

Hungerford – an English town where a madman, armed with guns he’d acquired via a licensed gun club, opened fire in the main shopping area, killing a number of people. Hungerford – he said the word two or three times. This was the reason that UIP wasn’t going to release Walker in Britain. It was on account of the violence. Hungerford. He was actually shouting, and I asked him to lower his voice a bit. I said I didn’t know enough about Hungerford to comment on his analysis. But we were still business partners, with a duty to get this film out there, to help it find its audience. In order to address his concerns about the violence, I said I was prepared to sit down with him if he liked, and cut all of the violence out.

Maybe Walker was too violent. I wondered how it would play without the violence, with only minimal suggestions of killing and battle scenes. It might be like Repo Man, re-cut for TV, with the drugs and swearing taken out – different, but by no means worse.

My man was shouting again. Re-editing the picture wasn’t going to help because . . . nobody wanted to exhibit it! UIP wasn’t going to distribute Walker in Britain, because there weren’t any cinemas that wanted to show it anywhere. Because they’d already asked.

One of the reasons I had gone to see UIP was because my British agent, Nicky Hart, was the daughter of an exhibitor and distributor, Romaine. Romaine owned a couple of screens and wanted to screen the controversial Walker as soon as possible. So did Andi Engel of Artificial Eye, who had made so much money from Repo Man. I told the UIP man this – it didn’t make much difference.

In England Walker did eventually get a release in London, via Jeremy Thomas’ Recorded Picture Company. Hungerford had nothing to do with it: the British censor passed the film with three seconds of cuts; shots of two horses falling. But in the rest of the world – including natural markets like Italy and Latin America – Walker was never shown.

At the end of 1989 the US invaded Panama, killing thousands and overthrowing a client dictator whom they had previously installed. US troops also attacked the Nicaraguan embassy. The message wasn’t lost on the Nicaraguan people. In general elections a few days later, they voted the FSLN out of office, and a US-approved coalition, led by a Chamorro, in. The same month the General Assembly of the United Nations condemned the United States for supporting the Contra war against Nicaragua (only the US and Israel voted against the resolution), and for imposing an illegal embargo against Nicaragua (again, only the US and Israel were opposed).