Luke Owen sits down with Rocky Morton, co-director of Super Mario Bros…
Out now on Blu-Ray, Super Mario Bros. was the very first big screen adaptation of a video game, and many feel it set a low bar for subsequent efforts. Often considered one of the worst movies ever made, Super Mario Bros. is famous for its disruptive production and constant script changes and is a fascinating example of “studio involvement”. But even with all the negativity surrounding the movie in this Internet age (including The Nostalgia Critic and Who Did This Get Made?), Super Mario Bros. has earned a cult following and this Blu-Ray release is a result those who petitioned for its release.
In an interview to promote the movie, Flickering Myth Deputy Editor Luke Owen sat down with Rocky Morton, co-director of Super Mario Bros., to talk about how he got involve, its troubled production and his side to the infamous “hot coffee” story.
LO: Rocky, thank you for joining us for a chat today. You came onto the project after Greg Beeman and at that point you and Annabelle Jankel were best known for Max Headroom, how did you get involved?
RM: We were part of an agency and they were sending us scripts to read, and one of them was Super Mario Bros. I read it and it was horrible, but I liked the concept. So I said to my partner Annabelle (co-director Annabelle Jankel) and said we need to do this. So we came up with this idea of an alternate dimension where dinosaurs weren’t extinct but had evolved and then these two plumbers come into their world. And they’re brothers, but without parents. So the older one had to sacrifice his role as the older brother to be a mother and father figure. And along the way the younger one falls in love and eventually rescues the princess. We pitched the idea to the producers and they loved it.
Both Annabelle and I wanted to make a family movie, but a bit darker if you see what I mean. Like Batman (the Tim Burton 1989 movie). We liked the idea of these brothers and this relationship and their conflict that needed to be resolved. Rekindle that relationship you know. But, also the love story.
How familiar were you with Super Mario Bros at the time?
Very. I had a feeling that these video games would one day be bigger than movies. You know, it’s a great and fun and all that, but they’re also very cinematic in a way. So I always thought that they would one day be bigger than movies.
Tell us about the original shooting draft of the script.
So we worked with two great writers, Dick Clements and Ian la Frenais and they wrote a fantastic script which we loved. So we went to film in California and, you know it was all done from nothing. Yes it was based on a game, but the world, the dinosaurs, the creatures were all created by us. But the studio (Light Motive) needed money and needed backing. So they got this backing and word came back to me that they (Disney) thought it was too dark, which I didn’t agree with. This was about two weeks before we started production.
This was the Ed Soloman script?
Right. Annabelle and I said that the decision was fine as we could work with him, but we were locked out of speaking with him. We got the new script the weekend before filming began! We skim read it and had to present it to the actors and pretend that we love it. It turned out that there were a lot of flaws and there were loads of silly gags that we didn’t like, but were forced to film.
This of course led to a difficult production?
It was very hard. Because we started with a new script and it wasn’t the script that the actors signed on for. It threw production into turmoil. And the script just didn’t work. We’d go to shoot someone picking up a crystal and the continuity girl would say, ‘we can’t do that because of this on page 24’ and I’d say, ‘shit, you’re right’. Actors then became despondent as they could see it was all falling apart. We ended up running 3-5 different units during the production. I was getting up at 5am every day to storyboard for all of the units. Before the new script, I had the entire movie from start to end storyboarded, but I ceremonially burned them when we got the new script. And because budget was tight, we couldn’t hire in a storyboard artist so I was getting up at 5am to do them.
One of the earlier drafts called for a Bill Murray-type character, but you ended up casting Bob Hoskins. What attracted you to him?
That was through the agency. He was available. And the studio wanted him.
Based on the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
That probably had something to do with it.
Did you have any other actors on your wishlist?
Danny DeVito. But he turned it down.
In interviews since, both Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo have talked about the troubled production. Perhaps most famously is the “hot coffee story” (John Leguizamo claims in his autobiography that Rocky threw boiling hot coffee on an extra to make him dirtier). Could you perhaps give your side of the story?
Well, let me tell you because this story does annoy me. John [Leguizamo] was some distance away. The extras all came out in their outfits and I wanted everything in this parallel world to be dirty. But they came out and the costumes were all latex and clean. I wanted them to be dirty. We were in the middle of shooting a scene and I explained to the costume lady that they needed to be dirtier. I said what we need to do is put some mud on them. So I picked up some mud from the set and called one of the extras across and I chucked the dirt on his costume. But, because it was latex, it would stick and just slipped off. So I said have we got something we can use to stick the mud on. I picked up half a cup of coffee that had been there for some time because of all that was going on and I said to the extra, ‘I’m going to pour this on you to stick the mud on, is that okay?’. I poured it on his shoulder and, it was still warm – but it wasn’t boiling hot. But he screamed and I then started apologising and got some water to help cool down his shoulder. That’s the truth of the story.
That’s the story people always bring up about the troubled production so it’s good to hear the other side.
Well, it’s not the other side, it’s the truth. John didn’t really see what happened. It would be like seeing a crime from a far distance and saying you saw it clearly. Annabelle would back me up, the costume department would too. And I’m sure if you could track down the extra, they would too.
You were also locked out of the editing room is that correct?
We were locked out of the editing room and we had to get the DGA (Directors Guild of America) to let us into edit. And they kept refusing to cut the film digitally, they would only cut it on film so it took a long time to edit.
It’s been over 20 years since the release of Super Mario Bros., how do you feel about the project now?
I’m proud of my contribution to the project. It was my concept. The designs, the world, the struggles, the characters and the whole production. Yes there was a production team but it came from me. The thing I regret is letting it get messy. I should have put my foot down more. But when I did, I was just met with a wall of, ‘do it our way or you’re fired’. When the new script came in, Annabelle and I nearly walked away from the production because it wasn’t what we wanted to make. It was just full of silly gags like people walking into plate glass windows which we were forced to shoot.
Super Mario Bros. is out now on Blu-Ray.
