James Coburn

‘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.