John Milius had a dream not long ago in which he was on trial for war crimes.

Meryl
Streep was the prosecuting attorney and the jury consisted of film critics Pauline Kael
The writer- and Stephen Farber. Genghis Khan, one of Milius’s idols, appeared as a character
witness, as did Milius’s’ friend Steven Spielberg. However, the jury didn’t believe
director behind Spielberg; it felt he had been paid off.
Conan has been A six-foot bearlike man of thirty-eight with a dark, trim beard and shy smile,
Milius relishes telling stories as much as he does making movies. The war crimes trial,
portrayed as a which now occupies a permanent place in the Milius storytelling canon, is
fire-breathing, particularly revealing. It reflects his amusement with his press image as a gun-toting
reactionary.
liberal-baiting Milius’s first brush with the press came nine years ago, when he began adding
reactionary. It’s directing credits to his small but impressive output of screenplays. Newsweek dubbed
him “The Macho Kid,” and Esquire called him “Mr. Macho” and carried a picture
an image he of him dressed in a bush jacket, scowling and cradling a gun big enough to take down
a bull elephant. In those and subsequent interviews, Milius seemed to enjoy spouting
relishes. the kind of right-wing rhetoric that’s as rare in today’s Hollywood as a B Western.
Kirk Honeycutt “My politics are strange,” he says. “I don’t think anyone takes them seriously.”
He can blame himself for a lot of his image problesms. As he sits in an office done
over as a command post—cane furniture; position maps on one wall; books on
military history lining another; guns, swords, and hunting trophies for
decoration—tales of war and antiliberal one-liners start to flow. Milius calls himself
a “Zen Fascist.” His motorcycle gang, Mobile Strike Force Paranoia, is small but
growing, he says. “There aren’t enough of us yet to sweep down and terroize small
towns.” Aides come and go with clicking heels and mock Nazi salutes. His production
company’s name, A-Team, is a combat designation borrowed from the Green Berets.
So it’s really no surpise when interviewers dub him “General Milius,” “a road
company Hemingway,” or “an American samurai.” Milius simply shrugs: “Genghis
Khan had bad press, too.”
If Millius seems at times unconcerned about the bad press, it may be because he
knows that Hollywood is more sanguine about it all. “After a flop, the press treats you
like you’re an enemy of humanity,” he says. “But in the industry they like to hire you after
a failure because they know you’ll be more conscientious about bringing the movie in on
©1982 Maureen Lambray

time. Hollywood isn’t as bad as everybody thinks. The industry looks at the movie. They
don’t look at Heaven’s Gate and say it’s an unqualified disaster. They say, ‘There’s nicely
done stuff here. Cimino’s a good director if
held down. He’s going to make a very good
film—maybe the next one or the one after
that.’”
For Milius, the battlefield is the stage for
man’s greastest melodrama; in this theater of
carnage, he finds a moral ambivalence.
Milius says that when the U.S. Marines
charge to the rescue in The Wind and the
Lion, the viewer should momentarily take
pride in the forceful Amercian military pres-
ence, and then question that pride and the
vulture. If you fight with broadswords, he
wants real swords that weigh ten pounds.
Which, of course, puts you in danger as an
“John wants to bring actor. But John’s line always was, ‘Pain is
reality to the screen,” only temporary, but the film is going to be
permanent.’”
says Schwarzenegger. Milius, who shares the screenplay credit
with Oliver Stone, says “Kurosawa talks
“His line was, ‘Pain is about making a movie that’s composed of
temporary, but the motion—motion and emotion. In this film I
tried to tell a story without dialogue and nar-
film is permanent.’ ” ration, but through mood and nuance and
color and editorial motion. What I really like
about Conan is that it achieves a sense of the
surreal—a dreamlike, separate reality.”
Milius is more in tune with the “sepa-
rate” realities he imagines on the screen than
with contemporary society and its values. Ill
at ease with his own culture, he has studied
others for insight into alternatvie concepts of
morality. He claims he lives by the Japanese

©1981 Dino De Laurentiis Corp.

Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) does battle with the evil Rexor (Ben Davidson).
brutality of the action. Apocalypse Now,
which he co-wrote with Francis Coppola,
vividly illustrates the lunacy of war, yet also
evokes the compelling and seductive nature
of its horrors. “There’s something unspeak-
ably attractive about war,” says Milius.
“People enjoy intensity. The human animal
seems to be drawn to it like a moth to a
flame.”
As a counterpart to the Jane Fonda
school of filmmaking—the well-intentioned
liberal dramas dealing with social
problems—Milius offers his own brand of
romantic, escapist high adventure. But it’s
not the comic book world of Star Wars, in
which villains are bloodlessly dispatched
with beams of light. Violence in Milius’s
films is explicit and intense.
In his new film, Conan the Barbarian
scheduled for release this month, that inten-
sity explodes into a blood-soaked cartoon of
barbarity. Swords pierce, heads fall, bones
crunch, axes hack, and, in the heat of sexual
passion, a woman turns into a wolf-witch. “I
think Conan is a very sensitive film,
myself,” says Milius dryly. The $19 million
Universal Picutres-Dino De Laurentiis epic
re-creates the adventures of a brawny super-
stud invented for thirties pulp magazines by
a moody, reclusive writer named Robert E.
Howard. Conan lives in the Hybrorian Age
of twelve thousand years ago, a mythical
time of black magic, pneumatic-breasted
women, and thick-skulled warriors who kill
according to a personal code. Conan is con-
cerned only with the naked fundamentals of
life and is, according to his credator, con-
stantly “afire with the urge to kill, to drive
his knife deep into the flesh and bone, and
twist the blade in blood and entrails.”
To visualize conan’s savage world,
Milius commissioned research papers on
medieval snake and assassination cults,
reviewed Mongol history, and investigated
ancient warfare and weaponry. He and pro-
duction designer Ron Cobb attempted to cre-
ate a prehistoric screen world so believable
that, according to Milius, “an anthropologist
can look at this film’s culture and say, ‘This
is consistent.’”. He insisted his actors train
for six months in broadsword fighting,
kendo (a Japanese martial art using bamboo
swords), horseback riding, and stunt work
before shooting began in Spain early last
year.
“John wants to bring to the screen as
much reality as possible,” says Arnold
Schwarzenegger, the world-champion body
builder-turned-actor who plays Conan. “If
you’re attacked by a vulture, he wants a real
warrior code of Bushido; a strict sense of
honor and of loyalty to friends and beliefs. “I
guess you could say I’m an anachronism,”
he once said.
“We grow up in a society where morali-
ty is coming to you on a plate and never real-
ly tested,” Milius says. “You either accept it
or cheat on it, but you never really deal with
your own morality. What we call barbaric or
pagan cultures are simply non-Christian.
They often have certain truths and freedoms
that are much more acceptable to me than
our own.”
A historical fantasy like Conan allows
Milius to escape from complex problems
that refuse to yield to easy solutions. “John
would like to be the heroic people he makes
movies about,” Spielberg observes. As
Milius says, “I’m so far to the right, I’m
probably an anarchist.”
orn in St. Louis in 1944, the son
of a prosperous shoe manufactur-
er, Milius moved to Los Angeles
with his family when he was
seven. He took up surfing as a
teenager. It’s a loner’s sport, he admits, where
you learn to rely not on teamwork but on your-
self. “Surfing really was a central experience
in my life,” he says. “I was very lucky to have
something like that, like the kid in Breaking
Away who loves to ride a bike. Unlike the
other three, he has something that drives him,
and that’s why he becomes the leader of that
group.”
Then he discovered Japanese culture—the
literature, kendo, but most of all the movies.
He studied the films of Kurosawa and
Kobayashi, and now he’s using what he
learned. He points to the samurai-like concept
The warriors of Conan’s archenemy Thulsa Doom brandish the emblem for the snake-worshipping Cult of Set
of the warrior and his sword in Conan. A
group of horsemen rides through a forest
from shadow to shadow, causing sunlight to
flicker and giving viewers a sense of speed,
a trick picked up from Kurosawa.
He entered the University of Southern
California, intending only “to take some
English and history and then go into the mil-
itary and die.” He explains, “No surfer in my
era wanted to live past twenty-five. You
were supposed to burn out, to go down in
flames—or risk going down in flames.” But
the military rejected him because of his
weak lungs and chronic asthma. (“I felt
guilty about that for years,” he ways.) He
began taking art courses at USC, entertain-
ing vague aspirations of becoming a serious
painter or commercial artist. Eventually he
drifted into the film school—as did so many
other filmmaking contemporaries of his, at
USC and elsewhere.
For Milius and others, the film school
camaraderie continues. He sent out reels of
Conan to Spielberg for suggestions. On
Jaws, Spelberg asked Milius to write the
Robert Shaw speech about the sinking of the
Indianapolis, a scene often cited as the
film’s most powerful. To give screenwriter
Paul Schrader a chance to direct, Milius’s A-
Team agreed to produce Hardcore.
(Schrader wound up directing Blue Collar
first.) Members of the “SC Mafia” regularly
screen rough cuts of their work for each
other and ask for advice.
“John is first and foremost a screenwriter,”
says Spielberg. “He was always the best
writer of the group and he still is. Looking at
a film, John is the first to point out where
there’s a flaw or hole in the story. He loves
the old-fashioned three-act structure, those
movies written by Frank Nugent or films by
John Ford, where everything is in the story-
telling.”
Milius’s 1967 animated student film, the
cynical, psychedelic Marcello, I’m so Bored,
earned him a job offer from Hanna-Barbera,
but he turned it down. He wanted to try his
luck writing screenplays on speculation.
When American International Pictures
bought The Devil’s 8 (1969), a low-budget
biker version of The Dirty Dozen he had
written with Williard Huyck and James
Gordon White, Milius’s writing career was
launched.
In 1969, Francis Coppola hired him to
develop with George Lucas a screenplay on
Vietnam. the result was called Apocalypse
Now. Although nearly everyone in
Hollywood praised the screenplay, no one
seemed to want to back a production of it.
Nevertheless, it did get Milius a lot of writ-
ing assignments. George Hamilton persuad-
ed Milius to rewrite Evel Knievel. Next he
did extensive work on the right-wing police
fantasy Dirty Harry (1971), without
credit— “I never arbitrated; I thought to
arbitrate was dishonorable”—and wrote the
original script for its sequel, Magnum
Force.
After Dirty Harry, Milius cut loose on
“Liver-Eating Johnson,” about a mountain
man who, legend has it, ate the livers of 250
Crow Indians he killed in revenge for the
murder ofhis wife and child by several
drunken braves. The screenplay was as the-
atrical as it was gory; the film’s director,
Sydney Pollack, recalls, “Johnson’s reac-
tion when his wife dies is to run out and eat

Mr. Universe
Conquers a
New World
I
f I have to do films the rest of my life
with John Milius directing,” says Arnold
Schwarzenegger, “I will be very, very
happy.”
Strong words for a man who for six
months endured subzero cold in Segovia,
oppressive heat and mosquitoes in Almeria,
ligament pulls and assorted painful injuries
in other locations all over Spain—all while
covered with blood and dirt, and all for the
sake of playing the title role in Milius’s
Conan the Barbarian. “The only time I was
clean was when I was sleeping,” he says,
laughing.
“John is a true leader on the set,” says the
champion body builder. “He brings such joy
and energy that it really makes you just do
anything he tells you to do. He talked me into
jumping forty feet into boxes, which I don’t
think anybody else could do. You feel that to
ask for safety measures would be ‘pussying
out.’
“He makes sacrifices, so you feel like
also making sacrifices. Even when he got
very, very sick, he would not allow the set to
close down. He directed sitting in a trailer
and watching a video monitor. Everyone on
the set went beyond what he’d done any-
where else. You’re not working for
Universal; you’re working for Milius, and
he’ll protect and help you in return.”
The rapport between star and director
began long before principal photography,
says Schwarzenegger. “When we went skeet
and trapshooting together, he would talk
©Patrick La Bianca/Transworld
about the character continuously. He would
watch my facial expressions and memorize
them. Then [on the set] he would call for the
facial expressions and be able to trigger
emotions very easily because he knew me so
well.
“It sneaks up on you. There is never a
time when you feel now he is pulling this
trick on you to get you psychologically
ready for a scene. He just has you right in
this excitement; then all of a sudden a lot of
diretion is coming from him. The actors
joked that we felt like we were dogs and he
the dog trainer.
“What he didn’t like was for you to come
to work with set ideas. If you got intellectu-
al about acting, he would freak out. I saw
him do that with the French actress [Valerie
Quennessen], who would say, ‘Well, I see
the chracter as a bit more insecure.’ He
would scream, ‘Don’t think! Just do!’”
Schwarzenegger began training for
Conan a year before filming. Then he and
the other actors arrived in Madrid a month
ahead of time for extensive rehearsals,
which included working out physical action
with stunt coordinator Terry Leonard.
“For a scene in which wolves attack
me,” Schwarzenegger recalls, “I worked
seven days straight every morning with
dogs—being attacked by five or ten different
dogs—just to get rid of the fear. When it
came time for that scene, which was the first
one we shot, the animals escaped too early
and I was not all the way up on the rocks yet.
So they pulled me down and I fell ten feet on
my back. All of a sudden I had on top of me
four of those animals. John came over and
said, ‘Well, now you know what the film is
going to be like.’”—K.H.
a tree. That just isn’t my style.” Pollack called
in other writers, and on the finished film,
Jeremiah Johnson, Milius shared screen cred-
it with Edward Anhalt. “Milius wanted to
accent the violence and its legendary
aspects,” says Pollack. “I felt the story was
more of a morality play.
he screenplay that thrust
Milius further into the lime-
light was a Western called The
Life and Times of Judge Roy
Bean. Like Jeremiah Johnson,
it grew out of his interest in how men turn
themselves into legends, and Milius “des-
perately” wanted to direct it for AIP. Judge
Roy Bean was meant to be a cheap, sleazy,
funny Western about a crusty old outlaw
who sets himself up as the law in a Texas
town, not unlike Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.
“I know the law,” Bean growls. “I spent my
entire life in its flagrant disregard.” Milius
had Lee Marvin in mind for the part.
But the script fell into the hands of Paul
Newman, who wanted to play the judge.
When producer John Foreman asked how
much the script would cost if Milius didn’t
direct, the young writer said $300,000, an
amount almost unheard of at the time. He
never dreamed Foreman would agree. “If I
sell out,” he said not long afterward, “I sell
out high.” Director John Huston and
Newman turned his reprehensible old man
into a whimiscal, blue-eyed charmer and his
script into “a Beverly Hills Western.” Milius
says he has never been as miserable as when
he observed the transformation during
shooting. But he did get along with Huston,
and learned a lot from him, especially about
how to deal with actors.
“It would have been interesting to see how
my career would have gone had I directed
that movie,” he says. “I think people would
have a different attitude about me than they
did after Dilinger, which was a very harsh
and violent film. Judge Roy Bean had a real
kind of humor and heart to it that Dilinger
lacked.”
Dillinger (1973), Milius’s directorial
debut, fit a familiar pattern: gangsters
(Warren Oates as John Dilinger, Richard
Dreyfuss as Baby Face Nelson) and cops
(Ben Johnson as G-man Melvin Purvis) all
obsessed with their own legends; a chivalric
code of hunter and hunted; brutal gun bat-
tles. “I was much better as a writer than as a
director,” Miliius observes. “Learning the
technique of directing—moving cameras
and picking lenses—takes a little while.”
Not that long, though. His second film,
The Wind and the Lion (1975), showed off a
much more confident filmmaker. It
represents Milius’s most mature, even-tem-
pered, and cinematically expressive film to
date. In combining desert romance and
action-adventure with cheerfully fabricated
history, he created a confrontation between
two of his favorite heroes: Teddy Roosevelt
and Raisuli—Rough rider and desert chief-
tain.
Raisuli kidnapped an expatriate
American in Morocco (in the Milius version,
an American widow) during a civil war, and
Roosevelt sent the marines to the rescue. It
was a situation rich in cultural contrasts and
provided Milius with the opportunity for
meditations on the passing of adventurers
into a world of increasingly sophisticated
weaponry and declining moral codes, a
favorite theme.
Milius’s reverie for lost glory came a
cropper in 1978 with Big Wednesday. His
memoir of the Malibu surfing subculture of
the sixties borrowed from the Arthurian leg-
end; chivalrous knights in search of the Holy
Grail are here surfers in search of the big
wave. The script by Milius and cowriter
Dennis Aaberg dished out heavy doses of
macho mysticism, and the dialogue fre-
quently tasted of overripe corn; “Back home
[in Chicago] being young is something you
do while growing up,” says a newcomer to
L.A. “Here it’s everything.” Milius now
admits that the film’s tone was all wrong. “It
was too melodramatic,” he says. “I told a
fairy tale in Big Wednesday. The true story is
that all those guys turned out as dope addicts
and scum. I fantasized them into a group of
knights. I’d never do something very per-
sonal like that again. It’s better to be one step
removed when you write about yourself.
“In a way, Big Wednesday was a success,
because it forced me to take an enormous
risk, to step out on a limb and cut it off. I’m
not afraid to take risks any more. It’s made
me a better filmmaker. The work I did
directly after Big Wednesday, when I
rewrote Apocalypse Now, was so much bet-
ter because of my having done Big
Wednesday. To go through something like
that—where you expose yourself and are
derided for it—builds character.”
Apocalypse Now proved to be another char-
acter-building experience. Milius never vis-
ited the location in the Philippines. “Francis
wouldn’t allow me, because he feared a
coup,” he quips. The two friends twice had a
falling out over the picture, once over con-
tent and the other time over credit. “Francis
wanted to change the political intent and
force a more liberal view on the movie. I did
not write the scene where they machine-gun
the people in the boat. I don’t think it entire-
ly belongs in that movie, although it’s very
effective.”
Apocalypse Now drew inspiration from
many sources—Sir James Frazer’s The
Golden Bough, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,
The Door’ recording of “The End,” pieces of
opera, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Stranglove, and
most obviously, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness. But Milius has always insisted
that the screenplay was an original work.
Milius was incensed when, he claims,
Coppola wanted the writing credits to indi-
cate an adaption of Heart of Darkness. “If
it’s based on Heart of Darkness, then Moby
Dick is based on the Book of Job,” scoffs
Milius. The Writing Guild arbitration com-
mittee ruled that the screenplay was original
and that Milius and Coppola share the cred-
it, with Milius billed first.
“I love the Bomb.
Like the plague in
the Middle Ages, it’s
the hand of God
coming out
indiscriminately to
snatch you.”
ilius once spoke of his
regret that he wasn’t
part of the golden age of
Hollywood, when the
grand gesture was a way
of life, when flamboyance was not only
accepted but expected. It’s possible that he
has cultivated his right-wing, macho image
out of a need to revive some elements of
that era. Generally, those who have worked
with him have nothing but kind words.
Conan’s production designer, Ron Cobb,
whose cartoons appeared for years in leftist
underground publications, finds him a
“very enthusiastic, kind, and fair person.
We spar a bit, but essentially I like John as
a human being and storyteller and enthusi-
ast about all manner of things. He blusters
around strangers, mostly to maintain that
public image. If you can’t see through it,
you deserve to believe it all.”
If Milius seems to enjoy putting high
adventure on the screen, perhaps it’s
because he’s so enthralled with the high-
rolling, seat-of-the-pants concept of
Hollywood as a place where anyone can
strike it rich. “The film business is like the
Wild West,” Milius says. “People can come
out here with no degrees and a phone booth
for an office. All of these legends—they’re
all true. It’s rampant free enterpise and it
doesn’t happen anywhere else in the
world.”
Milius once casually palmed off his
work by telling an interviewer, “I dont’ take
movies very seriously. After all, it isn’t can-
cer research.” But he’s also aware of the
wide-ranging effects a popular film can
have: “Star Wars has made people more
interested in space exploration and aero-
nautical advancements.” He adds, in typical
Milius fashion, “It has brought kids out of a
residue of the counterculture and interested
them in American technology again.
George Lucas couldn’t have done that in
any other industry.”
There is evidence that Milius is enjoy-
ing himself as much as ever, and that he
finally feels comforable in the director’s
chair. “I especially enjoy the hours. I never
shoot before ten. I tell the actors, ‘If you
want direction before ten o’clock, get it the
night before.’” Although he would like to
shoot two more Conan films, he’s not sure
that his health will allow him. “My lungs
are chronically infected; that’s the reason
I’ve done only four movies. Also, the
movies I’ve chosen to do are particularly
difficult physically. Maybe I should do
pornography. As George Lucas says, it’s in
a warm room and the props aren’t impor-
tant.”
As for the physical violence in Conan,
Milius admits to having second
thoughts—not because he shows too much
gore, but because he is perhaps too
restrained. “I should have made Conan
stronger, because obviously you can’t
approach people at the ratings board intelli-
gently. You have to put more in so you can
take it out and trade with them. Then they
can justify their existence as state censors,
just like the Soviet Union.”
A large photo on his office wall shows the
detonation of a nuclear bomb. He is asked
about it. “Oh, the Bomb!” he exclaims, his
face brightening. “I just love the bomb. It’s
sort of a religious totem to me. Like the
plague in the Middle Ages or the Mongols,
it’s the hand of God coming out indiscrim-
inately to snatch you. The threat of nuclear
war keeps you in line. Here’s a world filled
with hideous, greedy people who cheat
their fellow man. But if these people can
wake up one night, look out their window,
suddenly it’ll be daylight for a second, and
they’ll cry, ‘But I had a deal at
Paramount!’”
Kirk Honeycutt is a film critic for the Daily News
in Los Angeles.