By Fred Topel | Image property of respective holders.
Hudson Hawk
You kids born after 1991 may not even have heard of Hudson Hawk. The pet project of Bruce Willis about a musical cat burglar was that year’s Gigli, incurring the wrath of a slightly more limited press corps. It’s one of my personal favorites for its outrageous creativity, and I’ve taken every possible opportunity to tell Bruce Willis I love it. He happily replies that it’s in profit now. The film’s director, Michael Lehmann, isn’t so happy to hear even good things about Hawk.
Interview: Lehmann's Hudson Hawk
“Bruce has always liked to say that because the movie was so hated when it came out,” said Lehmann. “I get it now fairly regularly from people. Mostly from people on movie crews who come up to me and say ‘You directed Hudson Hawk’ and I go ‘yes, yes, yes’ and they go ‘Oh I loved that movie.’”
You can see the discomfort on Lehmann’s face though, and he explained what a personal trauma it was. “It's interesting. The release of that movie was really painful for me. I was a young filmmaker. I had done Heathers and I chose to do Hudson Hawk because I thought I could really take that what the action adventure genre was and completely f*ck with it and that was the idea. We just got punished, we got punished brutally. It almost completely ruined my career as a director and I had to kind of walk around for a couple of years with my head down and suffer basically a certain kind of humiliation which I said, ‘We tried and we did this.’ I have no perspective on that movie. There was a lot of work that went into it and a lot of stuff that Dan Waters and I really wanted to put in there that made it through I'm really happy when people tell me, ‘Oh, I like the movie or the movie has life’ and I go ‘oh good’ because it never got what it deserved when it came out that's for sure.”
Now people realize that it was a genre spoof. At the time, people wanted Die Hard 3. “They didn't know that at the time. It shocked me that people looked at the movie and said, ‘Gee, it's like an incompetent version of what we expected.’ I go, ‘No, that's what we wanted to do.’
There was actually a planned special edition DVD that mysteriously fell off the schedule in July 2006. Lehmann didn’t know about it either way. “Nobody ever tells me about this stuff. I did the directors commentary for [the first release of] Hudson Hawk. They called me and they said do you want to do the commentary and I said, ‘Well, is Bruce going to do it? Is Joel Silver going to do it?’ And they said no and so I said, ‘Okay, I'll do it.’ So I flew down to LA and they put me in a room and I hadn't even seen the movie in years and just talked. It's impossible for me to gauge whether there’s any interest in that movie. I'd love to see a special edition of that.”
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