‘I woke up to read I’d made the worst film of all time’: inside Bruce Willis’s Hudson Hawk calamity

“Smug Hudson Hawk looks like a turkey,” said the Chicago Tribune on May 24, 1991 – the day that Hudson Hawk opened in the US. Bruce Willis’s comedy caper had been in the firing line since long before it hit cinemas. The accusation of turkey-faced smuggery was fuelled by months’ worth of damning set reports: constant rewrites as the film was shot; the leading lady being mysterious recast; Bruce Willis and producer Joel Silver – pumped up from the Die Hard 2 box office – ganging up on the director Michael Lehmann; and a budget which ballooned to a hefty $65 million – or up to $75 million according to some reports.

Hudson Hawk bombed like one of Bruce’s Semtex-down-the-lift-shaft explosions – the inevitable fallout from Bruce’s breakout success.

“They had started to review this film long before anybody saw any of it,” said Willis in a DVD interview. “It was just my time to catch a beating in the press.”

A few weeks after the film opened, director Michael Lehmann got a surprise call. It was Warren Beatty, just four years removed from the high-profile disaster of Ishtar. “He said, ‘Welcome to the club,’” Lehmann tells me. “I thought it was funny. I’m sure Warren Beatty was just calling me with relief because people would be talking less about Ishtar and more about Hudson Hawk.”

The film still has critics, including its own stars – “I’ve been walloped over the head ever since it was made,” Richard E. Grant once told Hudson Hawk fan Mark Kermode – and it was an odd concoction from the get-go: a self-parodying blockbuster; Bruce Willis at the peak of his rise to stardom; and the director and writer – Michael Lehmann and Daniel Waters, respectively – of the murderous teen film Heathers.

With 30 years’ hindsight, Hudson Hawk sits more comfortably between Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Last Action Hero (which also bombed) than any of the Die Hards. Audiences just weren’t ready for it.

In the film, Willis plays cat burglar Eddie AKA “Hudson Hawk”, fresh out of jail and trying to go straight. He’s roped into a plot to steal Leonardo da Vinci artworks – a plot which involves gangsters named the Mario brothers (one of several Nintendo references), the CIA (led by the menacingly-toothy James Coburn), and bonkers billionaire baddies the Mayflowers (Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard).

The Mayflowers are attempting to activate a da Vinci-built machine that turns lead into a gold – a roundabout plan for world domination (naturally). All Eddie wants is a decent cappuccino and to smooch with Anna (Andie MacDowell), an undercover nun from the Vatican’s counter-espionage division.

The film has often been described as Bruce Willis’s “baby” – a fact that escaped Michael Lehmann when he signed up. “I learned quite a lot about working with movie stars,” he laughs. “And working with movie stars who are personally invested.”

Willis had been nurturing the concept since his days as a barman in New York. He originally cooked up the character and story with his pal Robert Kraft, a composer who worked on The Return of Bruno (Willis’s mockumentary and accompanying soul album).

Willis recalled the idea was “James Bond before he became James Bond”. Though originally pitched as a serious action film, wacky ideas included the theft of a heart for a transplant op, and a wild west-style buffalo chase. At one stage Willis wanted a pet monkey – Little Eddie – which was set to be whacked in a mafia hit.

When Michael Lehmann and Daniel Waters came onboard, there was already a script – a more conventional actioner by Die Hard writer Steven E. de Souza. Michael Lehmann and Daniel Waters wanted Hudson Hawk to do something totally different with the genre. Action was primed for reinvention: the previous decade had been dominated by the pounding, pneumatic machismo of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone – whose films were as ridiculous as anything seen in Hudson Hawk, really – while the rugged, blue collar Bruce Willis was now the action-man-of-the-moment.

“We decided to take everything and turn it upside down and play it with full awareness of genre elements and f––– with them,” says Lehmann. “That’s what I told Joel Silver and Bruce Willis we wanted to do, and they were onboard for it. We figured audiences would get a kick out of that because they’d be sick and tired of being spoon fed a lot of very conventional action things.”

The idea, says Lehmann, was to make a “mishmash” – to draw on together different genre conventions and references. Hudson Hawk has it all: Bond, Ocean’s 11, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, the Three Stooges, the Pink Panther, Looney Tunes.

“We wanted to make a movie that commented on itself,” Lehmann says. “In that sense it’s a movie about movies. Its references were other bits of entertainment.”

See, for instance, its casting of James Coburn – a not-so-sly wink to the camera. Coburn had starred in Our Man Flint, an American Bond parody; in Hudson Hawk he plays a CIA boss named George Kaplan, named after Cary Grant’s mistaken identity in North by Northwest. To ramp up the silliness, Coburn’s CIA crew are named after chocolate bars: Kit Kat, Butterfinger, Almond Joy, Snickers.

The spirit of Hudson Hawk is best captured in its signature scene, when Eddie and his partner-in-crime, Tommy Five-Tone – the always-delightful Danny Aiello – commit a robbery while singing a duet of Swinging on a Star, going from action heist to all-out Rat Pack-style musical. (Rather than use a watch, they time their robberies by singing old school tunes.) Seconds later, a pair of flatfoot security guards give chase – before Eddie clumps their heads together with a cartoon sound effect.

“Me and Danny Aiello singing in the movie was just unheard of,” said Willis. “People were mad about it… like they were mad that we were trying to make them laugh.” As Michael Lehmann points out, their robbery-timed-to-music concept predates Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver by 26 years.

Richard E. Grant detailed the making of Hudson Hawk in his hilariously snarky, industry-riling film diaries, With Nails. Grant described Michael Lehmann and Daniel Waters as nice enough youngsters (like “undergraduates”) about to be steamrolled by the immense, unstoppable personalities of Bruce Willis and Joel Silver.

Bruce, according to Grant, was “constantly quipping and ‘gimme-me-five bother’-ing about” and had an “untouchable King Midas aura”. Whereas Joel Silver – a bombastic force of nature – was “not a man with whom you disagree without risking a verbal fusillade”. Lehmann remembers Silver screaming at agents down the phone, threatening that they’ll never work in this town again – or words to that effect.

Willis and Silver were basking in their own success. Die Hard 2 had opened the weekend before Hudson Hawk began shooting and scored a domestic opening of $22 million. “I basically had two 10,000-pound gorillas on my shoulders,” says Lehmann. “These guys were riding very high, and they were fairly arrogant about the whole thing.”

As for being steamrolled, Lehmann says: “It’s hard to generalise… in some sense, Joel and Bruce gave us complete free reign. They went along with all sorts of crazy stuff that we suggested. But then on-set, it was more difficult to get Bruce to do things the way I saw them. Because from his point of view it was his movie.”

Indeed, the legend of Hudson Hawk – propagated by reports at the time – is that Bruce Willis took over the film, changing and rewriting the film as he went.

“To say he took over is an exaggeration,” says Lehmann. “But he had opinions about everything.” Lehmann was unprepared for Willis flexing his superstar muscle: about how he wanted to play Eddie; how other actors should be playing their roles; how shots should be blocked; even which door Willis wanted to walk through in any given scene.

Richard E. Grant received conflicting instructions from the leading man and director. Bruce told him to do more and go “stark raving mental”, while Lehmann told him to ignore Willis and “do less”.

Grant wrote about a litany of behind-the-scenes problems: constant, soul-zapping delays on location in Rome and Budapest; a performing dog that wouldn’t perform; a customised limo which was customised to the wrong size; barmy cost-ineffective decisions; Joel Silver meltdowns (including his fury at the eight-hour time difference between Rome and LA: “What the f––– is f–––––– wrong with this country that it should be eight f–––––– hours ahead of everywhere else?”); and a script which resembled a “Crayola chart” thanks to new ideas being tossed in all the time. Every time Bruce Willis suggested a new joke, said Grant, it caused “schedule delays and big bucks burning fast”.

The book didn’t win Grant many friends in Hollywood. When it was serialised in Vanity Fair, the chapter on Hudson Hawk riled the wrong people – Richard E. Grant seemed to be struck off the pre-approved Hollywood list afterwards.

“Joel Silver was very upset. His sister told me,” Grant later told Premiere Magazine. “Not because what I said was inaccurate or untrue, but he doesn’t like to be reminded of something that was very painful for him. Maybe he won’t want to work with me again after this. His sister certainly indicated that he was never going to speak to me again.”

Lehmann confirms that Grant’s account was true, if “very much from his point of view… a comically exaggerated version of what was happening”. Lehmann also admits that it was indeed hard to keep control of the budget. “Whenever we came up with an idea, Joel and Bruce would push it and say, ‘We’ve got to do this!’” says Lehmann. “Sometimes those things were expensive.”

There was an inherent conflict at play behind the scenes: what Lehman and Waters wanted to do; what Willis and Silver wanted to do; and what the studio, Tri-Star, wanted to pay. “Those three things didn’t always line up,” laughs Lehmann. And Hudson Hawk was not a simple film to make. For one of its most inspired sequences, they staged a high-speed chase across the Brooklyn Bridge – except Willis races at high speeds through traffic on a gurney rather than a car.

Later, the climatic punch-up takes place on a molten lead-spewing clockwork mechanism; and Willis and MacDowell fly to safety in a 500-year-old hang glider.

The film should have been even crazier. Another sequence – the robbery of a hi-tech constantly-spinning safe inside the Kremlin – had to be abandoned, a necessary cost-cutting copout. Mike Medavoy, the boss of Tri-Star, visited the production in Rome to talk about the budget. “I got the sense that he felt that the train had already left the station and there wasn’t much he could do,” says Lehmann. “He sort of shrugged his shoulders and went back to Hollywood.”

For Lehmann, the biggest challenge was recasting lead actress Maruschka Detmers mid-shoot. Tabloids reported that Demi Moore had ordered Detmers to be fired for being “too friendly” with Willis. (“Either she goes or I go!”) which led to Andie MacDowell taking the part. In truth, Maruschka Detmers had to leave because of a back injury. It was one of many stories which turned the press against the film.

The reviews were vicious. “An embarrassment to both cast and audience… destined to join such storied flops as Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar (both superior to Hudson Hawk),” said one US critic. “A colossally sour and ill-conceived misfire,” wrote the New York Times. “We’re talking turkey. Major turkey,” said the Washington Post.

“Oh my god, it was terrible!” laughs Lehmann about the reviews. “You wake up and read in all the major newspapers that you’ve made the worst film of all time.”

Hudson Hawk was misunderstood. Critics took the film’s daft, deliberate jaunts between genres as incompetence. It made just $17 million in the US but fared better internationally.

There is, perhaps, a difficulty in it navigating the line between a hodgepodge of influences and being, well, just all over the place. Daniel Waters suspected trouble early on. Every day Bruce Willis and Joel Silver would announce it was something different: “This is a Pink Panther movie! This is an American James Bond movie! This is a Flint movie! This is North by Northwest with David Addison from Moonlighting!”

Certainly, Hudson Hawk is jarringly disparate: it goes from Die Hard-levels of profanity and violence (a dagger-armed butler slicing open a mobster’s throat) to Wile E. Coyote slapstick that’s both childish and R-rated – Willis getting bonked on the bonce with a variety of amusing objects, or jamming a load of syringes into a gangster’s face – and purposely implausible plot points. But Hudson Hawk takes on a different meaning in the context of its raucous, ridiculous ambition. There’s still nothing else like it.

“Given the reception, it was hardly encouraging for people to do the same thing!” laughs Lehmann.

One of the best gags comes right at the end: Tommy Two-Tone – after plunging off a cliff top in an exploding limousine – reappears alive and well, explaining that he was saved by an airbag and interior sprinkler system. “Yeah, that’s probably what happened!” says Eddie. It’s ridiculous but that’s absolutely the point – the kind of nonsense that any straight-faced action film would happily crowbar in.

“When you stick to convention and play things straight, people tend to not worry about how ridiculous movies are,” says Lehmann. “When you mess around with it, people say, ‘That’s absurd, nobody could ever survive a fall in a car like that!’ I’m sorry, have you watched the Fast and the Furious…?”