‘I still don't know what it's about!' Buckaroo Banzai, the surreal 80s flop that became a cult classic
There are several surefire ways to reveal someone's character. Do they like pineapple on pizza? Do they think it's acceptable to talk in the cinema? And finally, how do they feel about the 1984 cult classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension?
This misshapen, esoteric and utterly magical science-fiction romp made less of a splash on release than it should have, but since then it has become a kind of celluloid speakeasy; a real 'if you know, you know' kind of movie. It all revolves around one man: Buckaroo Banzai, played by Peter Weller.
'For the life of me, I gotta tell you, Paul … I got no idea what the film is about to this day,' Weller says, on Zoom from Los Angeles. 'I know it's about a polymath guy, a brain surgeon, a gunslinger … but I still don't know what it's about! Kevin Smith once called it 'a genre-defying one-off'. He said, it's not action, it's not science fiction, it's not comedy: it's all those things. It's about race, it's about social science, it's about politics, existence, existentialism … Jeez, man! All I knew was that I dug the idea of playing a gun-slinging brain surgeon!'
Buckaroo Banzai is all of those things and more. He's a renaissance man. The thinking man's action hero. As the film opens, we see him finishing up a gruelling, pioneering neurosurgical procedure alongside his colleague Dr Sidney 'New Jersey' Zweibel (Jeff Goldblum). Before long, he's downing tools to carry out an incredibly dangerous experiment in his jet car, which is fitted with an 'oscillation overthruster' (imagine the flux capacitor after a run-in with a garbage disposal). The world watches on as Buckaroo, equal parts Sherlock Holmes, James Bond and Adam Ant, burns towards a waiting mountain … and drives through it.
From there, it gets even weirder, as Buckaroo and his friends battle a surreal interdimensional threat. But the real threat was from within: studio interference was rife during the film's legendarily fraught production process, resulting in an uneven, lumpy film – all part of its charm – made by bewilderingly talented people, on and off camera. 20th Century Fox even fired the renowned director of photography Jordan Cronenweth (the man who gave Blade Runner its unique look) halfway through the production.
'Jordan was a maestro, man,' says Weller, shaking his head. 'Like Rembrandt. It's not like our second DOP was a hack or anything, but Jordan was a one-off. You talk to Ridley [Scott], and he'll say, 'That guy was a painter.' Just look at the ambience of his scenes in the film, man. Look at the colour. Look at the softness.'
But for every off-screen battle, there were cast members giving career-best performances to make up for it. And what a cast: Weller is best known for playing Alex Murphy in Robocop, but his warmth and wit as Buckaroo is a thing to behold. The character was a patchwork of Weller's personal heroes: 'I was a real aficionado of Adam Ant and Hendrix, and jazz guys. There were these amazing people who I rolled in there. Einstein. Elia Kazan.'
John Lithgow's turn as the villainous Dr Emilio Lizardo is halfway between Mussolini and Gumby – a fervent, explosive maelstrom of idiocy. Goldblum is at his effortless best, wowing us long before Dr Ian Malcolm unbuttoned his shirt. Ellen Barkin's Penny Priddy is buttery and strange, and Christopher Lloyd's small but manic bad-guy performance sings.
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But being released in cinemas at the same time as Ghostbusters, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock meant that Buckaroo Banzai never stood a chance. Did the production woes, the screw-ups, the lay-offs, the box office, sour the memory of it all for Weller? He lights a cigar and mulls over the question.
'The way it's lasted, and the way people love it, is wonderful. Even when I didn't know what it was about,' he says. 'I was on a golf course with the wonderful Dennis Haysbert, who said, 'Peter, it's my favourite film.' I said, 'Why?' He says, 'Peter, it's about love.' And it is! It truly is. And that's what people love about it. It is about surrender, and happiness, and wondrous, wondrous science. And it brought me a lot of love from people who are friends to this day – I just had lunch with Goldblum in Florence, and a great time with Chris Lloyd in Japan. Lithgow, I haven't seen in a little while, but he's still a great pal.'
In the years since the film came out, Weller has become, much like Buckaroo himself, a renaissance man. He acts, of course. But he also directs, is an accomplished musician (he and Goldblum performed together for years) and, in a very literal turn, now has a PhD in Italian renaissance art history. We talk about renaissance art for a full half hour, Weller flourishing his cigar as he takes me through a thrilling, byzantine travelogue of times past. We might not need a Buckaroo Banzai sequel – not when Weller embodies the spirit of Buckaroo so fully himself.
Buckaroo Banzai is available to stream on Amazon Prime. Peter Weller's new book, Leon Battista Alberti in Exile: Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting, comes out 1 May
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5 days ago
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5 days ago
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A year ago Hawk Tuah girl went viral – Metro catches up with Haliey Welch to find out what happened next
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The Herald Scotland
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You need to see wild movie by Scots director that breaks all the rules
Not so, as it turns out. It's only now, a decade on, that Slow West's follow-up is preparing to make its theatrical bow after a well-received premiere at this year's Glasgow Film Festival where it was the opening film. A blend of samurai flick, chase film, historical epic and heist movie, Tornado follows the titular heroine, a Japanese puppeteer, as she and her father Fujin eke out a living somewhere in northern Britain at the end of the 18th century. Into their lives one day comes a band of brigands led by the ruthless Sugarman and his argumentative son, Little Sugar. The thieves are toting a sack of stolen gold coins, but it's when they are robbed in turn that the trouble begins for Fujin and, in particular, Tornado. A scene from Tornado by John Maclean (Image: free)Maclean's second film began life in 2016, immediately after the success of Slow West. You can't say he didn't hit the ground running. 'Having done a Western in America that to me was a little bit about immigration, I thought I could do the same for Britain – write a film where there's an African bandit, a French performer, a Japanese wanderer,' he tells me over Zoom. 'That was one idea. But then when I started the script, the heart of it started to come from father-daughter relationships. In Slow West, the thing I took from my personal life was a young Scottish boy being in love with somebody who didn't necessarily love him back, and him going to the ends of the earth for her. With Tornado, it was a father trying to teach his daughter his own Japanese culture, and her not being interested.' The process of writing the script continued into 2017 and then into 2018. When the pandemic happened it inevitably had an effect on production, but Maclean says a major issue even before then was one far more familiar to film-makers than zoonotic diseases – cash. 'I was ready to go but we just couldn't find people interested in funding it for a good while. I think it's just tough out there. You need a certain calibre of actor attached to finance films these days, and the actors have to become bigger and bigger to finance lower and lower budget films because – bottom line – people aren't going to the cinema so much.' Luckily, Maclean has never had much difficulty attracting big names to his films or identifying talents on the rise. He even managed it in his BAFTA-winning short Pitch Black Heist, which starred Michael Fassbender. It was released in the same year the Irishman won a slew of awards for his role in Steve McQueen's Hunger and first appeared as Magneto in X Men: First Class. Fassbender then returned to Team Maclean in order to work on Slow West and his co-star on that film was Kodi Smit-McPhee, who would also go on to star in the X-Men films (as Nightcrawler) and garner an Oscar nomination in Jane Campion's 2021 film, The Power Of The Dog. Things are little different this time around. The great Tim Roth plays Sugarman, Jack Lowden is Little Sugar and, for the roles of Fujin and Tornado, Maclean has cast Giri/Haji star Takehiro Hira and 22-year-old Mitsuku Kimura, who goes by the name Kōki. She may be new to acting, but by her late teens she was already a magazine cover star in her homeland, had walked the Paris Fashion Week runways as a model for Chanel, and was enjoying a successful pop career. Read more In fact Maclean had despaired about finding the right actress to play Tornado, even resorting to street castings to try to find non-actors. In the end Kōki was recommended by someone who had worked with her actor father Takuya Kimura, star of Takashi Miike's 2017 samurai action film Blade Of The Immortal. Meanwhile her mother, Shizuka Kudo, is a celebrated singer and 1980s pop star with 11 Japanese number one hits to her name. Maclean laughs as he remembers his first Zoom call with his prospective star. 'After about 10 seconds I was like: 'She's the one'.' So how big is she in Japan? 'Massive,' he says. 'She's known more as a model, but they don't know how great she is at acting – yet. And she came over here to Edinburgh and I think for the first time in her life she was able to walk around without being absolutely mobbed. People camp outside her house in Japan because her parents are so famous, so she's never had freedom. She came over here and absolutely loved it. She could walk around, didn't get hassled. She could perform and act and be creative. She's incredible. I didn't have to say anything to her, there was no direction. She just go it.' Lowden was recruited after an Edinburgh International Film Festival event at Edinburgh Castle – 'He told me he loved Slow West so I went straight back to the script and thought: 'I'm going to tweak this'' – while Maclean impressed Roth with his love of the work of British film-maker Alan Clarke. Best known for directing Scum in 1979, Clarke also made an iconic series of films in the Play For Today strand including folk horror Penda's Fen, Elephant (about the Troubles) and 1982's Made In Britain, which starred Roth as a racist 16-year-old skinhead. 'As soon as we got talking, he could see my love of Alan Clarke and that meant a lot to him.' For Maclean, meanwhile, it was a dream come true: as a student working at the Cameo Cinema in Edinburgh he had been wowed by an appearance by Quentin Tarantino in 1994 to promote Pulp Fiction. To work with the star of Reservoir Dogs made him feel he had come 'full circle', as he puts it. Japanese singer and model Kōki as Tornado in John Maclean's new film of the same name (Image: free) A shared influence for Maclean and Tarantino, both scholars of Japanese cinema, is Lady Snowblood, the 1973 film starring Meiko Kaji as a kickass assassin bent on revenge. It directly inspired the American's Kill Bill films and in Maclean's film it's a touchstone for Tornado's transformation from bored Gen Z-er into samurai sword-toting avenging angel. For the Scot, it's only one of a great many influences, however. 'When I'm writing a script I consume such a huge variety of films,' he admits. 'The most recent ones which were an influence were films coming out of Iran and Turkey. I'll always love action films, so my cinematic bedrock would Predator and Die Hard and Robocop, those sorts of films. But equally I love Tarkovsky, Bergman and Bresson ... This one was influenced by everything from touches of David Lynch's Blue Velvet all the way through to Steel Magnolias even. I watched that for some reason.' A 1989 comedy drama set in Louisiana and starring Dolly Parton and a young Julia Roberts is hard to place in Tornado's DNA. But, though the ingredients may be many and varied, it's the eventual dish which is the thing that matters – and this one has been worth the wait. Tornado is released on June 13. Since this interview was conducted The Beta Band have reformed for a tour of the UK starting at Glasgow Barrowland on September 25.
