25 years ago, this Thanksgiving weekend, Back To The Future Part II was released & became the big holiday hit of 1989. But..., There Was Never Supposed To Be A Sequel The flying car at the end was a joke, a great payoff, director, Robert Zemeckis recalls, but nothing more than that. We thought this would be really hard to unravel and do again. And he’s right. Then the movie took off, and became a smash hit. Which created a difficult conflict for Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale. You’re basically given a decision: we’re making a sequel, do you want to be involved in it or not? So we felt we had to protect our work. In Bob Gale’s early drafts of Back to the Future II, he wanted to explore a differnent decade. George McFly would have been a college professor, Lorraine is a flower child. Let’s do this stuff in the ’60s & see what we could do with that. Zemeckis, who was filming Who Framed Roger Rabbit, didnt warm to that idea. What he did like was how there were two Doc Browns one we know from the first film & the second was more of a corrupt scientist. He also suggested that since this was a timetravel film BTTFpartII should have to deal with the events in the first film. Back to the Future II into two movies was viewed as revolutionary. In an age where The Hobbit is now three movies, we barely blink whenare split in half. Back then, though, the concept of making a sequel into two parts was still ludicrous. As Gale and Zemeckis mapped out the story they wanted to tell, they realized they needed a second movie (Back to the Future Part III). When they asked Universal head Sid Sheinberg for permission, he replied, Either that’s the greatest idea or the most insane idea. Let’s do it! Robert Zemechis loves Back To The Future Part II. Spielberg, not so much. The director admits that extending the story led to some creative conflicts. But he says, Part IIactually turns out, in my opinion, to have been the most interesting movie I’ve ever made. It is genuinely avant-garde, genuinely out there. Spielberg, as a producer, has to acknowledge that it didn’t connect quite as cleanly as parts one and three. Episode II is that little dip in a trilogy that we all go through, like Temple Of Doom, Spielberg tells Empire. It was a very dark movie and when we previewed it, we could tell that the audience didn’t respond with the same appetite they brought to the first one. I loved Part III, all the Western stuff.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 05:44:01 +0000
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