# A Life In Movies: David Morrell

An episode of [All The Right Movies](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1471502633), 14 Aug 2025, 47 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO9397798940.mp3

On the latest episode of A Life In Movies, the movie interview podcast by All The Right Movies, we're talking to acclaimed novelist David Morrell. David is the esteemed author of over 30 novels, short stories and comics, including the creation of pop culture icon John Rambo in his groundbreaking novel "First Blood". Originally an academic who taught American literature, David balanced his writing career with university life before becoming a full-time author. Speaking to us from Santa Fe, David takes us behind the scenes on the incredible journey of First Blood from page to screen - a process that took years and went through multiple studios, with potential stars including Steve McQueen and Paul Newman before Sylvester Stallone ultimately brought Rambo to life. We discuss the differences between his novel and the film adaptation, his work on the novelizations for the sequels, and his experiences on set during the filming of Rambo III. David also shares fascinating insights into his academic influences, particularly Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", and how the Rambo phenomenon helped bring awareness to PTSD and the treatment of Vietnam veterans. A truly captivating conversation about one of cinema's most enduring action heroes. Connect with ATRM: To support what we do, access our archive and listen to exclusive episodes, become an ATRM patron: Listen on Patreon Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on YouTube Twitter/X: @ATRightMovies YouTube: Subscribe to our channel Instagram: @allthe_rightmovies Threads: @allthe_rightmovies Facebook: Join our movie group Bluesky: @alltherightmovies.com TikTok: @alltherightmovies Website: alltherightmovies.com

## Transcript

[0:04] All the rent movies. Hi everyone, welcome to A Life
[0:36] in Movies, the interview show from All the Right Movies.
[0:38] My name is Luke. On the show, we talk to people
[0:40] in the industry about their career in movies.
[0:42] Today we're talking to an esteemed author of over 30 novel
[0:46] short stories and comics, including the creation of pop
[0:48] culture icon John Rambo. It's an honour to welcome David
[0:52] Morel to A Life in Movies. Thanks for coming on the shore,
[0:55] David, it's an absolute pleasure.
[0:56] How are you doing? I am doing well, thank you.
[0:59] Great. You're in Santa Fe right now, is
[1:02] that right? Yes, the Santa Fe, NM.
[1:05] A lot of movies are made here. People who are not familiar with
[1:09] northern New Mexico imagine it as being something like Phoenix
[1:12] or Tucson, which is a low desert environment, lots of cactus and
[1:17] very barren. But Santa Fe is more a ski area.
[1:21] I'm surrounded by mountains on in every direction.
[1:25] People who come here expecting something else are quite
[1:27] surprised in the variation of the landscape means that they
[1:32] can shoot a lot of scenes for different locales in a movie as
[1:37] if they've gone all over the place.
[1:38] But in fact, they're still in Santa Fe, right?
[1:41] It's kind of fun to see all the signs around town saying, you
[1:44] know, this, this is shooting here and that's shooting there.
[1:46] And John Wayne's The Cowboys was filmed here.
[1:49] And even before that, Glenn Ford's Cowboy was filmed here.
[1:54] And it's it's fun to see how the community grew up around those
[1:59] sites. So yeah, there's a distinctive
[2:02] rock formation in the Glenn Ford movie that's still here.
[2:05] But in those days it was there was nothing.
[2:07] And now a big casino is next to it, so.
[2:11] But you're from Canada originally as well, David.
[2:14] So when when did you make the move?
[2:16] I, I was born and raised in Southern Ontario in a twin city
[2:21] called Kitchener Waterloo, which at that time was perhaps 60,000
[2:27] people. And I think of it as a small
[2:30] town. I went to grade school and high
[2:32] school there and I there is a university, the University of
[2:36] Waterloo, which has AI was, I was raised a Roman Catholic.
[2:41] I don't practice, but I was raised in the religion and Saint
[2:44] Jerome's College, now a university was affiliated there.
[2:48] So I I went to school there and I had ambitions to study and
[2:55] teach American literature. Now, this is kind of crazy
[3:00] because there I am in Canada talking about American
[3:05] literature, and what we have to understand is Canada in 1966,
[3:11] when I was moving to the United States, Canada didn't have much
[3:16] of an identity in in some ways. They did think of themselves as
[3:21] being an adjunct to the United States.
[3:24] And in 1967, Canada celebrated its 100th anniversary and there
[3:30] was a huge Expo, they called it Exposition in Montreal, in which
[3:37] the celebration was so big and so many different aspects of
[3:41] Canadian history were involved that thereafter Canada became
[3:45] very Canadian conscious. So the joke is I went to the
[3:50] United States and 66, I got a master's and APHD there at Penn
[3:56] State, and then I applied. This is a joke.
[3:59] I applied to teach back to Canadian universities to teach
[4:03] American literature, and they wondered what planet I was on
[4:08] that I would actually think I could get a job doing that.
[4:10] So by process of elimination, I remained in the United States
[4:15] and was hired by the University of Iowa.
[4:17] So I think it's kind of interesting in terms of the way
[4:21] Canada and the United States are now perceiving each other.
[4:25] And anyhow, just to finish the story, I had ambitions to be a
[4:30] writer simultaneously. And and so at Penn State, I met
[4:35] a professional writer named Philip Class William 10, and he
[4:40] trained me. And basically, if I hadn't gone
[4:43] to the United States, I never would have had that opportunity
[4:46] and my life would have been different.
[4:48] Wow, Sliding doors moment. And so you've you've written
[4:51] across multiple genres in that time, thriller, horror, action.
[4:56] Was that a conscious decision to kind of diversify the genres, or
[4:59] did it just happen naturally based on what you were
[5:01] interested in? These days, editors and agents
[5:04] want you to brand yourself immediately.
[5:07] If you write, let us say, medical thrillers, you're
[5:11] expected to continue writing medical thrillers.
[5:14] And, and the consequence is there are exceptions, but the
[5:18] consequence is that for many authors who stay in the same
[5:23] area, their careers last approximately more or less 20
[5:27] years because the their readers get tired of what they do and
[5:33] they get tired of what they do. And it wasn't an intention of
[5:37] mine. My agent thought, you know,
[5:40] what's wrong with you? Why do you, you know, do I have
[5:42] attention deficit disorder that I kept switching around.
[5:46] But the frame of the career was that in the 70s I was writing
[5:50] outdoor action. In the 80s I was writing
[5:54] espionage. And then each decade had
[5:57] something different. And and in the in the 2010 era,
[6:02] I was writing Victorian mystery thrillers.
[6:05] So figure coming from Rambo and outdoor action to do Victorian
[6:09] mystery thrillers and I'll I'll add those books that in 185455
[6:14] London were the books that I most enjoyed writing.
[6:17] Really. So that was more recent, but at
[6:20] the start of your career you were balancing an academic life
[6:25] with your writing as well. How did you do that?
[6:27] I had to get the most out of both.
[6:29] I had an idea that there was a way to combine the serious
[6:36] literature that I've been reading and studying with a
[6:40] popular mode of writing. And to me, because thrillers are
[6:45] so popular and reach so many people that I thought, OK, I can
[6:51] use all of the things I'd learned, but hide them in my
[6:56] novels. And, and the nice is one of the
[6:58] nice things that people say to me is they come back and perhaps
[7:01] reread a book again or even again, and they'll say it's a
[7:04] different book. Because the plot, once I got
[7:07] used to the plot, all this other stuff you had in there rose to
[7:10] the surface. I would compare this to the jazz
[7:15] pianist Oscar Peterson. And I don't know if anybody
[7:18] talks about Oscar anymore, but at one time he was the guy.
[7:23] Oscar was Canadian. And I saw him perform in jazz
[7:27] clubs in Toronto, which was near Kitchener Waterloo.
[7:31] And I remember watching him and, and then remembering also that
[7:36] he had started as a classical pianist.
[7:40] He had he was trained in Beethoven and and the other
[7:44] great, great composers. And I asked him, I had the
[7:48] opportunity once he he used to walk out after his sets and just
[7:52] introduce himself to members of the audience.
[7:55] I mean really, really cool. And I remember saying, you know,
[7:58] which do you like better? And and he said, well, I like
[8:02] them both, but one gave me the foundation for the other.
[8:05] And I, and without comparing myself to a great like Oscar
[8:08] Peterson, I felt that what I was writing in in my novels was a
[8:13] classically trained jazz person that, that I knew why I would, I
[8:19] never have any doubts why I'm doing what I'm doing in a story.
[8:23] And I know the effect. And then of course, there's that
[8:26] spontaneous whatever that, you know, that's inspiration.
[8:29] But that that for me the two worked very well together.
[8:33] And do you feel as though you wouldn't have been able to have
[8:35] that career as a writer if you didn't have the foundation that
[8:38] you had as a lecturer? Yes, right.
[8:41] I wouldn't have come in contact. For example, Joseph Campbell
[8:45] wrote a book called the hero with 1000 faces.
[8:47] Campbell it, it, it was a union who studied origin stories in
[8:53] various parts of the world and noted how often that those
[8:57] stories, which are extremely popular ancient stories in these
[9:01] various cultures with the same story.
[9:04] And so I mean different ways of approaching with the same story.
[9:07] And he had a theory that we were hardwired to admire certain
[9:13] stories over others. And it's hard to, it's hard to
[9:16] write a bad story about a cave, about a bridge, about a river,
[9:20] about a forest, about a mountain, about the great
[9:23] archetypal objects and, and people who are on the voyage to
[9:28] get over the obstacles there and then.
[9:31] And if you look at first blood, the big cave scene, you know,
[9:35] the, the mountains and, and it's not like I was doing it
[9:38] automatically, but can't, I never would have read.
[9:41] I never would have known about Joseph Campbell, who also
[9:45] inspired the Star Wars movies. George Lucas read that hero with
[9:50] 1000 faces and then said, I know what to do in in Star Wars.
[9:54] It's been, it's been, it's a source, a book for a lot of
[9:58] writers who who realize, and you don't do A1 for one, but you
[10:02] realize what, that you're tapping into certain patterns
[10:06] and fascinations that everybody has.
[10:09] I never would have written First Blood if I hadn't read
[10:12] Campbell's The Hero with 1000 Faces.
[10:15] So an incredible basis for your for the for the rest of your
[10:18] career, I suppose. Absolutely.
[10:21] Yeah. I never forgot it.
[10:22] So talking about First Blood, you've created a load of iconic
[10:26] characters in your literature, but I suppose the most enduring
[10:30] is Rambo. Did you have any sense when
[10:32] writing First Blood that you were creating something that
[10:35] would have such a a cultural stay in power?
[10:38] I did not. And any writer who has had a
[10:41] success and says, oh, I planned it all along, don't believe
[10:44] them. And I'm sure Rambo is kindly
[10:49] been compared of novels into movies and then world
[10:53] consciousness for his blood has been compared to works by Sir
[10:58] Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes or or Edgar Rice
[11:01] Burroughs Tarzan or or Ian Fleming's James Bond.
[11:05] And it you know, it's it's flattering to be included.
[11:07] In fact, it is the case Rambo 50 years later is still being
[11:13] discussed as if it's it's a current phenomenon.
[11:16] And and again, I take that back to the to the Joseph Campbell
[11:20] influence in his theories. I worked on the novel for three
[11:25] years while I was in Graduate School.
[11:29] I'm, you know, trying to get my degree and I was married, still
[11:33] am same person and but we had a little little girl, a daughter.
[11:37] And I'm thinking, why are you screwing around on this?
[11:40] You should hurry through your through and get your degree,
[11:42] teach and support your family. But this thing kept nagging at
[11:46] me and nagging at me and I worked on it for three years.
[11:50] What made the difference for me was a movie by Sam Peckinpah
[11:55] called The Wild Bunch. The Wild Bunch changed the
[12:00] history of Western movies. Yeah.
[12:03] There had never been that degree of realism, particularly about
[12:08] violence in a Western. I was halfway through the novel
[12:12] when I saw The Wild Bunch. And I said, ah, now I know what
[12:15] I'm doing. And when I showed it to my
[12:17] agent, he said he wasn't sure he could sell it, that he thought
[12:22] probably it could be like a quick paperback.
[12:27] And he said, but I'll do what I can.
[12:28] And there was a hardback publisher at the time called M
[12:32] Evans and Company, and they had done a lot of still influential
[12:38] non fiction books, open marriage, body language and they
[12:44] were getting into fiction. My agent, his name was Henry
[12:48] Morrison, sold it six weeks. He thought it was going to be a
[12:52] long slog and we were all shocked.
[12:54] He sold it six weeks after he submitted it to to various
[12:58] publishers and and very quickly it it had a sale to a book club
[13:04] and then there was a sale to the movies before the the book was
[13:08] published. And I mean, it was all very
[13:10] bewildering, but no one could have predicted it.
[13:13] A lot of it had to do, I think with right time, right place.
[13:16] And it was in 1971 when this was happening.
[13:20] The book came out in 72. The Vietnam War was at at a
[13:24] moment when people were saying, what is this?
[13:27] How did we get in this? And there were enough returning
[13:31] veterans who were having the kinds of troubles that Rambo
[13:34] had. And I have been fascinated.
[13:36] This is my generation. There was a cowboy actor named
[13:40] Audi Murphy AUD i.e. And Audi was America's most
[13:45] decorated soldier of World War 2.
[13:48] And the citation for his Medal of Honor makes anything Rambo
[13:52] did in the movie seem playful. This was, and he was like 1819
[13:58] years old, a little guy. And it's scary what he what he
[14:01] did. And when he came back to
[14:02] civilian life, he wanted, he he wrote a book called the
[14:05] Hellenbach. Whether he wrote it or had help
[14:07] doesn't matter, called the Hellenbach.
[14:09] And then he had he plans for another book, which would be
[14:12] about the difficulty of adjusting to peacetime.
[14:15] And he had what we call PTSD, slept with a gun under his
[14:19] pillow, woke up from nightmares shooting and things like that.
[14:22] And so he was my model for the character.
[14:25] And you know, so the a lot of it was in the air suddenly in 1971
[14:29] and 72. Looking back and not having
[14:31] experience of that time, it seemed to me quite prescient
[14:34] that you wrote that based on returning vets PTSD, as you
[14:40] said, because that only seemed to become apparent in in popular
[14:44] culture after the war. But you wrote this as the war
[14:48] was ongoing. Actually, I think we can we can
[14:51] date it more. I mean, the concept was was
[14:53] there after the Vietnam War. But when Rambo First Blood Part
[14:58] 2 appeared as a movie in the summer of 1985, I was on several
[15:06] radio and television shows and what have you promoting the
[15:10] film. And I was on a panel with other
[15:13] people and some of them were vets for the OR the, the
[15:16] surviving relatives of veterans from from Vietnam.
[15:20] And they began talking about PTSDI Have a feeling there's no
[15:26] way to document this, but I have of the the sense that post
[15:31] traumatic stress disorder became a term in our culture that
[15:37] summer as of 85 and that it it's because of the Rambo movies.
[15:42] It persisted. Again, you can't prove any of
[15:45] this, but I just anecdotally, I'm convinced this is the case,
[15:49] just as I had the sense that when the Vietnam Veterans
[15:54] returned from Vietnam, they were treated with contempt.
[15:59] Many of them at least they they were literally spat on at at
[16:02] airports and things like that. It was, it was disgraceful.
[16:06] And one thing I think the Rambo movies of the 1980s did was to
[16:13] make people able to distinguish between politicians.
[16:18] There's a line in the fourth movie that never got credit but
[16:23] really, really deserves to be repeated.
[16:26] Wars, old men start them, young men fight them, nobody wins.
[16:31] And that was sort of the sense that I think people acquired in
[16:35] the 1980s and that persisted, so that the movies had a big
[16:41] cultural significance, I think. As I've mentioned to you off the
[16:45] mics, we have covered the making of First Blood on a podcast.
[16:49] If my memory serves me right it went through quite a time to get
[16:53] to screen once you would sold the rights so to go through
[16:57] various different guises before it got to where it was with
[17:00] Sylvester Stallone. It was yes.
[17:02] And and I maybe later we'll talk about it, but there's a a new
[17:05] book by Nat Segal off called The Rambo Report, and he goes into
[17:10] this. The rights were purchased by
[17:12] Columbia Pictures in 1972 as the book was being published.
[17:18] And Richard Brooks was assigned to write and direct it.
[17:23] And whatever happened there, Columbia Pictures sold the
[17:27] property after a year to Warner Brothers.
[17:30] And there I heard that Martin Ritt was going to direct it with
[17:36] Paul Newman. Britt and Newman had worked
[17:39] together. I can't prove any of this.
[17:42] However, that package worked. There was definitely a package
[17:45] with Steve McQueen as Rambo and Sydney Pollack directing.
[17:50] And, and these are two of my my guys, right?
[17:54] And I admire McQueen as a movie actor.
[17:57] In fact, Richard Creno once said to me that in his long career
[18:01] and he'd been a child actor and, and, you know, and then, you
[18:05] know, an adult. And he said the two guys he
[18:08] worked with, he did. We're not talking about female
[18:10] actors. Now, the two guys he worked with
[18:13] who knew best what they were doing in front of a camera,
[18:16] where Steve McQueen and Sylvester Stallone are largely
[18:19] because of their eyes and knowing what to do with props
[18:22] and less is more kind of thing. But McQueen was in his 40s.
[18:27] He wanted to do the motorcycle stuff, but he was in his 40s.
[18:30] And before they started shooting, they realized there
[18:33] were no 40 year old Vietnam Veterans in 1975 when this
[18:38] picture would have been shot. That was a young person's war.
[18:41] They were 18/19/20 years old. So it never happened.
[18:44] And then they were, it's, it's a saga really as to the number of
[18:48] people who were associated with it, both as director and as
[18:52] actor and eventually two film distributors who'd been working
[18:58] in the Orient. I I got to know them well, Andy
[19:02] Vanya and Mario Kasahar. They wanted to get in the movie
[19:06] making business and they had heard about First Blood, who by
[19:10] then had 26 scripts and had been through three studios or
[19:14] something. And they were Caraco pitches.
[19:17] Is that right? Yes, they owned a company called
[19:19] Caraco. It's it's hard.
[19:21] I never know. I knew these guys all the for
[19:23] years. I never knew it was Caraco or
[19:25] Caraco. I always say.
[19:27] Caraco, it's the best guess for me.
[19:29] And, and they went to Ted Kotcheff.
[19:32] They had an understanding with Ted, who worked on a version of
[19:36] First Blood at Warner Brothers. And Ted had a script that he
[19:39] liked that had been done by by two writers there, William
[19:43] Sakheim. And oh, darn, I'm going to
[19:45] forget the other person. Forgive me.
[19:48] That's correct. Thank you so much.
[19:50] Because it's so important to give these people credit.
[19:53] Absolutely. And and anyhow, they Ted said
[19:56] this what I want to do. And they said, cool.
[19:59] And then the question was who to get.
[20:00] Now, Sly had never been in a hit movie other than Rocky.
[20:05] He'd been in movies. They knew overseas distribution
[20:08] and they knew that Sly was popular overseas.
[20:11] And and they said we can't, we can make this work.
[20:15] And and and slide for years. I don't know if he still says
[20:18] it, but for years he would say that first blood was the most
[20:22] important picture he made because he proved he could have
[20:24] a hit apart from Rocky. Yeah, he had a hand in doing
[20:29] rewrites on the screenplay as well, if if my memory serves me
[20:32] rights. That that's correct.
[20:35] My understanding is I told him I cannot relate to as a movie
[20:40] star, but I can relate to you as a writer, as a writer.
[20:44] So whenever we talk, we talk on that level.
[20:47] He likes to to find ways to take a project and internalize it
[20:52] somehow make it parallel to aspects of his life.
[20:57] And however he saw this, I don't know, but I can tell you that
[21:01] the knife, for example, getting back to the Steve McQueen, you
[21:05] know, Richard Chronic, that thing, the knife did not exist
[21:09] in any previous versions or in my novel.
[21:12] And this was what Sly's knows. He has to do stuff in front of
[21:16] the camera. And and so he said, I want to do
[21:19] the knife. And he had a friend named Jimmy
[21:21] Lyle who made knives and he said, Jimmy, you know, make me a
[21:24] knife for this movie. So the the contributions and
[21:28] also it was Sly's idea to have him not talk so much and which
[21:31] turned out to be an advantage because they didn't need Andy
[21:35] and Mario didn't need to spend a lot of money on dubbing in
[21:39] foreign languages. And with all the mistakes that
[21:43] occur. Anyhow, yes, I made a tremendous
[21:45] contribution to the script. And there are quite a few
[21:49] changes or differences from your novel to have it translated on
[21:53] screen. The ending was different.
[21:55] Rambo died in your book. Sheriff Teasel.
[21:58] He's more of a sympathetic character in your book, I
[22:00] believe. So how do you feel about the
[22:03] changes that were made from your vision for for this story to how
[22:07] we came across on screen? I'm a member of the Writers
[22:10] Guild and have been since 1979. The Writers Guild in the United
[22:13] States is the Screenwriters and Television Writers Organization,
[22:17] and I worked on many, many, many movies.
[22:22] And then when the dust settled, what my contribution is, either
[22:26] either the picture didn't get made, which is often the case,
[22:29] or else for whatever reason, I didn't get the credit.
[22:32] But I have a lot of experience in the movie business.
[22:36] What matters is what's on the screen.
[22:38] By definition, a movie is an interpretation of a novel.
[22:42] You can be slavish to the novel, which might or may not be a good
[22:45] novel, but it might be a dead movie.
[22:48] You know, The question is what comes alive on the screen.
[22:51] So I've worked with a lot of writers and and, and producers
[22:56] and, and what matters isn't the changes, it's whether they work.
[23:00] And the character in my novel is furious at himself, at the war
[23:04] and at his country for what war thought about him, about
[23:08] himself. That's kind of negative.
[23:11] They a lot of the reason the picture didn't get made was they
[23:13] went with that interpretation and Rambo just was not on the
[23:17] screen appealing. So what Sly was looking at is
[23:21] say, how do we make this guy more acceptable given how Sly
[23:26] wanted to do it? So the big scene, which is not
[23:29] in the novel is when Rambo goes to this house next to a lake and
[23:36] there's a woman hanging out laundry.
[23:38] And Sly says, I'm here, you know, I'm I'm here to see my
[23:41] friend. And the woman says, well, he
[23:43] died from Agent Orange. And then and then Rambo, like he
[23:48] doesn't really, but internally he collapses.
[23:51] Well, that's a significant change.
[23:54] Now, I'm not saying it's better or worse than my book, because
[23:58] my book stands on its own for the character.
[24:01] I was a very angry man And and in some ways people thought the
[24:06] the police chief was the main character of the novel.
[24:10] And as you say, there's a lot of sympathy for the police chief.
[24:14] So once they did that, once they made him like sly with those
[24:19] sympathetic eyes of the deer almost.
[24:22] He's so he feels so sorry for him very much.
[24:25] You can't kill him. So, so they and they did film
[24:30] and a part of the ending where he did die, but audiences really
[24:34] hated it. And, and Ted Kotcheff had filmed
[24:37] an alternate ending, and that was the one they used.
[24:41] You know, I sometimes say the novel and the and the movie are
[24:44] in different train tracks, The, the, the, the, the, the train,
[24:47] but they're on different train tracks.
[24:49] But it works, and that's what matters.
[24:52] Just to remember in a quote and I can paraphrase it, I can't say
[24:55] it word for word from a novelist.
[24:56] He's called Irvin Welsh. He's a Scottish novelist.
[24:59] He wrote Trainspotting. Don't know if you if you're
[25:01] aware, but he said the benefit of having your material adapted
[25:05] for the big screen is either if it's great, you can say that you
[25:09] can take the credit because it was, it was your ID in the 1st
[25:11] place. Or if it's a, if it's a Turkey,
[25:14] you can say, well, it's not my novel.
[25:15] I didn't have anything to do with it.
[25:17] Yeah, well, I didn't. Fortunately, I didn't have to do
[25:20] that. And I have.
[25:21] I have talked. I've introduced the movie in
[25:24] theaters, written very favorably about it in in many
[25:27] circumstances, And I mean it. It's everything about it is
[25:30] good. Now.
[25:31] Andy and Mario got the talent to do things and.
[25:34] And if nothing else, Jerry Goldsmith's score, you know,
[25:38] makes in a way makes the movie. Yeah.
[25:41] That movies are collaboration. So the success of First Blood
[25:45] obviously inevitably led to a sequel, David, but this time
[25:49] there was no source novel. So how involved in you were the
[25:52] creative process of Ramble First Blood Part 2?
[25:55] And not a whole lot. The now in the first movie, Andy
[25:59] Vanya, who was really smart, producers never do this, the
[26:02] novelist said. In the area in the United
[26:04] States, Kentucky, he said, we're planning to shoot this in Canada
[26:09] for money reasons, for financial reasons that that, that we can
[26:13] get a good deal up there and say that it's the Pacific Northwest
[26:16] in the United States. And is there a reason why this
[26:19] story won't work if we translate it to the Pacific Northwest?
[26:23] Now that's a smart man. You know, before they put all
[26:27] the money in it. Are we dealing with a, a serious
[26:30] problem? I said, no, there's no reason at
[26:32] all. I mean, you might lose a little
[26:34] local color, you know, big deal. And so for the second movie,
[26:39] it's a fascinating process. I by contract and the only
[26:44] person who can write novels about Rambo.
[26:47] And in fact, I'm having an issue with somebody who's been writing
[26:51] fan novels and says that I've, I've told him, yeah, it's fine,
[26:55] go ahead and do it. And I've told him, no, don't do
[26:57] it, don't do it. But he anyhow, another story.
[27:00] And, and those days there were things called novelizations,
[27:05] paperback versions of the shooting script of the movie.
[27:11] Basically, these are photocopies.
[27:13] I called it photocopying. I mean, you describe some stuff.
[27:17] You said what the characters were thinking.
[27:19] It said a little bit about their emotions, but you couldn't.
[27:23] That was the story. You could not change that.
[27:26] And I said, I, this isn't for me that Andy called me and he said
[27:30] we'd like to do a novelization for the movie.
[27:34] In those days, there were many, many big bookstores in American
[27:37] malls. And so the books would be in the
[27:41] windows if there were enough of them.
[27:44] And people, it's free advertising.
[27:46] And they might even, you know, have some success with the book.
[27:49] And so they really wanted this to happen.
[27:52] And I said, they sent me the script and the script, Rambo
[27:56] jumps up and shoots this guy. Rambo jumps up and shoots the
[28:00] other guy. Those were the stage directions
[28:03] and, and I said, Andy, I, I cannot do anything with this.
[28:07] I mean, rather it's just so thin.
[28:09] I said, do you have anything else?
[28:11] And he said offhandedly, well, there's the James Cameron script
[28:19] and now this. This was before Titanic and
[28:23] Terminator 2 and, and the, and the rest of it.
[28:27] I had seen the first Terminator, yes.
[28:30] And I knew that he'd worked for Roger Corman making, you know,
[28:34] piranha and all that. And, and I immediately I was
[28:37] interested and I said, can you send me that script which they
[28:41] owned? So he sent me the script.
[28:44] Oh my God, it was wonderful. Oh really?
[28:46] God, Oh, it began with Troutman getting out of a military
[28:51] vehicle and going into a mental institution.
[28:54] And he goes through, he passes various rooms where people are
[28:58] staring at screens or they're, or they're knitting or, and he
[29:03] goes downstairs. They, we get on into the
[29:05] dungeon, as it were, And he goes along this bleak hallway and
[29:08] there's a guy with a gun outside this barred door.
[29:12] I just love it. And it, and it, it's dark behind
[29:15] the barred, the barred window, right.
[29:17] And Chapman walks up to him and the guard says he smashed the
[29:20] light again. He thinks he's the fucking
[29:22] Prince of Darkness. Well, I fell in love, so.
[29:29] So I went back. There were problems.
[29:31] There was a sidekick who would have been played by John
[29:33] Travolta probably and. I read that and.
[29:37] There were it was not good. So you could see why Sly had
[29:42] rewritten the Cameron script to get rid of this.
[29:45] And also, as Andy said, we can't have Rambo in an insane asylum.
[29:51] You know, the whole idea is that he's supposed to.
[29:53] We had this problem with the first movie.
[29:55] He's not. Yeah, yeah.
[29:56] So, so he couldn't use it, but we did use elements.
[29:58] So I said, all right, this is what's going to happen.
[30:01] I'm going to use 1/3 camera and I'm going to use 1/3 shooting
[30:04] script. And I'm going to use and Cameron
[30:06] does get Co credit on the film and I'm going to use 1/3 me
[30:11] because neither script here's Rambo going back to the POW camp
[30:15] from which he escaped. And there's no psychological
[30:18] reaction. You know, he might as well be
[30:20] going to Disneyland. So so I said no, no, we've got
[30:24] to I have to make a big deal about this.
[30:26] Yes. And also the relationship
[30:28] between him and the Vietnam woman Co where there's a hint of
[30:32] a possible romance, even kisses her.
[30:35] And I thought, you know, many returned Vietnam Veterans with
[30:40] PTSD were not capable of sexual relations.
[30:44] And, and I mean, and that was something to explore.
[30:47] So what would be his? How close would he allow him to
[30:51] get to somebody? So I wanted to explore that sort
[30:54] of thing. And so the whole thing came
[30:56] together. And it's generally a recognized
[30:59] as a, one of the novelizations that sort of advanced what a
[31:04] novelization could be. There are others by other
[31:06] authors, but but this, this one has a place.
[31:09] And the big trick, of course, was that Rambo dies at the end
[31:13] of my novel. So how, how am I writing about
[31:15] him being alive in the second one?
[31:18] And there's a friend of mine, Max Allen Collins, who had who's
[31:22] associated with the Dick Tracy. And he did, he did a lot of the
[31:26] Dick Tracy cartoon in, in newspapers and also the graphic
[31:31] novel that became a wonderful movie with Paul Newman called
[31:34] The Road to Perdition. And, and, and at that time I was
[31:38] living in Iowa and, and he lived there too.
[31:41] And I told him my problem. And he said, well, it's not a
[31:43] problem at all. All you do is put a note at the
[31:46] beginning that says, in my novel First Blood, Rambo dies.
[31:50] In the movies, he lives. So I thought, all right, that's
[31:55] as good as anything. And nobody's ever, very few
[31:58] people have ever complained. They understand, you know, that
[32:01] this again, talking about our earlier remarks about different
[32:04] train tracks. They understand that the novel
[32:07] and these and the novelizations are are different train tracks,
[32:10] too. Yeah.
[32:11] It's very weird, huh? I mean that that all of this is
[32:14] is I sometimes say I'm Rambo's father because he grew up and I
[32:18] have no control over the guy. So, so in that regard, how did
[32:22] you feel about the direction that the character took from the
[32:27] sequel onwards? You said in the script it says
[32:30] Rambo stands up and shoots that guy and shoots that guy.
[32:34] It it is a different approach to what First Blood was.
[32:37] So how did you feel? The direction, it's very
[32:40] different. We could say that the first
[32:43] movie is an anti hero and the second one he's a superhero and
[32:47] and but again, you know, the proof is does it work?
[32:51] And Rambo First Blood Part 2 is an immensely entertaining film
[32:55] for what it is. It's a combination of like
[32:59] Saturday afternoon serials where at the end of every 15 minutes,
[33:04] and you'd have to come back next week to see what happened.
[33:07] You know, the hero falls off a Cliff or he gets stomped by
[33:10] horses or something. And, and I, I compared it to a
[33:13] Western that, that instead of having the fight on the
[33:16] Stagecoach, you have the fight inside the helicopter.
[33:20] And I, I, I, I called it a Rambo of the jungle was my, was my, my
[33:25] gag line for it, just as the third one was my Rambo of Arabia
[33:29] was, was my gag line for that. And it's, it's, it's very
[33:33] entertaining. I mean parts of it are are
[33:35] ludicrous. Rambo is in a helicopter that
[33:38] he's pretending is in trouble and is, is hovering over this
[33:42] Creek and this this huge gunship comes to shoot him down.
[33:46] And the last minute Rambo raises a anti tank rocket and and
[33:51] shoots it through the canopy and blows the helicopter apart.
[33:55] And the only problem is the back blast from the rocket would have
[33:59] killed all the prisoners of war he just rescued that were in the
[34:03] back of his helicopter. And people in the military
[34:05] laughed and laughed and laughed. They thought that was so funny.
[34:08] But what difference did it make 'cause it's not a real, you
[34:11] know, we're talking about a cartoon here.
[34:13] It's almost like a live cartoon. And on that level, it's a
[34:17] scream. I showed it to my my grandkids.
[34:20] I gradually introduced them to the idea that I created Rambo.
[34:23] And finally I thought one day, OK, let's watch Rambo 2.
[34:26] And they thought it was hilarious.
[34:28] They, you know, they really got it that it was, that it was
[34:31] funny as opposed to the first one being very serious.
[34:34] Yeah, very much. And, and it became this huge
[34:37] phenomenon in 1985, the box office receipts, the character
[34:42] just exploded and became part of the of the zeitgeist.
[34:46] Yes. And then by the time 1988 comes
[34:50] around, there's a Rambo 3 and you were on set for for the film
[34:54] and of that, is that right, David?
[34:56] No, I was on the set in two places.
[34:58] I was on the set in Israel near a lot for a week and I was on
[35:03] the set in Yuma, AZ. That movie wound up having an
[35:08] out of control budget for reasons largely to do with
[35:11] filming overseas. And they they shot the climax in
[35:15] Yuma. So I went there for I think I
[35:18] was there for three days. I saw a lot of it, although
[35:22] watching a movie being made is a tedious process.
[35:25] It's fun for a day, but after that it's you know that they're
[35:28] working and it's set up after setup.
[35:31] And my recollection of the Rambo three shoot was a particularly
[35:35] in Yuma. So I was doing a big act, the
[35:38] big action scene at the end with all the horsemen and, and the,
[35:43] the Soviet tanks and all that. And he's an expert rider.
[35:49] He's a polo, polo rider. And, and one of the things
[35:52] takeaways was I saw him on horseback for hours.
[35:56] Anybody who's a rider knows the amount of physical energy that's
[36:00] required to be and his posture, he is, he looks like a writer.
[36:06] He is a writer. You need that straight back.
[36:08] And, and if you're not used to it, it's achingly hard.
[36:13] And I, I just was so impressed by him all day.
[36:16] And at one point the script calls for him to be, to be
[36:20] charging with a, a Molotov cocktail and flames on the, the
[36:25] bottle filled with flammable fluid and a Wick that's burning.
[36:28] And, and when as he, as he rode holding up and it was, the
[36:32] flames were coming back. And so I know that it burned his
[36:36] arm. And then later he was required
[36:38] to fall off a horse and, you know, return fire for whatever.
[36:43] I forget the specifics of the scene.
[36:45] And of course you have to do that again and again and again.
[36:48] And I remember thinking, and I wasn't far from, I was probably
[36:51] 40 feet away from behind the camera and I remember thinking,
[36:55] God, that blood is really, that looks realistic.
[36:58] But well, there was a reason for it because every time he fell
[37:01] off the horse, he was, he was injuring himself.
[37:05] That was real blood. That was so it was, it was
[37:10] interesting to to he. He is.
[37:12] He's a hard worker. I mean, that comes across only
[37:16] in his performances. You can see no matter what film
[37:18] he's in, you can see that he gives it his all.
[37:20] Oh yeah. Full Blooded and you rounded off
[37:23] the original trilogy of Rambo by writing the novelization for
[37:27] Rebel 3 as well. A nice full circle moment.
[37:30] Did you enjoy diving back into the character?
[37:33] Yeah, by then I knew what what was involved and, and in that
[37:37] case, and this is again, because you know, you're you're
[37:40] interested in movies, how movies, some movies get made.
[37:44] So the first script I received was excellent.
[37:48] It was, I thought there's not much more to be done here.
[37:51] It was big. That's why I referred earlier to
[37:54] Rambo of Arabia. It had Rambo, I mean, as he
[37:58] entered the country with his Afghan guide, there was a huge
[38:03] sandstorm. So there was this big scene
[38:05] involving and he and the guide, you know, buried themselves and
[38:09] the horses. And then after that there were
[38:12] other things that went on and the plot had war orphans who
[38:17] were being cared for by a 40 ish European female doctor.
[38:22] I believe she was Dutch. I'd have to go back and look at
[38:24] the sources. There wasn't any hint of any
[38:27] romance. This was just two professionals.
[38:30] I like the film a lot. It's gorgeous looking.
[38:33] It's so well made. But if you look at the
[38:35] structure, it's flawed. Troutman is kidnapped.
[38:39] Rambo tries to to rescue Troutman and fails.
[38:42] Rambo tries to rescue Troutman and succeeds.
[38:46] Those are the three acts. Well the the original script
[38:50] Rambo rescued him in the second act, and the third act was
[38:55] Troutman and Rambo and the war orphans and the Dutch doctor
[39:01] going over a mountain range pursued by the Soviets.
[39:05] Oh, that would. Be it was wonderful.
[39:08] It was wonderful. And little by little these
[39:12] things got dropped. The war orphans disappeared, The
[39:15] Dutch doctor that disappeared because they had, they had
[39:19] serious budget problems of the first director hadn't worked out
[39:22] and the, and the, they thought they were getting usable film
[39:27] production studios. And it turned out not to be the
[39:29] case. And it, it, there was a lot,
[39:31] there was just a lot of things that went wrong.
[39:33] So for purely practical reasons, they had to cut back.
[39:37] So I began getting every week a new script.
[39:42] I'd, I'd started writing the novelization, then I'd get a new
[39:44] script. But wait a minute.
[39:45] Where'd this character go? Then another, Oh my God, the
[39:48] orphans are gone. Oh my God, the doctor's gone.
[39:50] Oh my God. And then finally I, I had about
[39:53] 12 of these. And finally I phoned Andy and I
[39:55] said, I can't write this. You're changing it.
[39:58] I, I mean, I three months from now I'm supposed to deliver this
[40:01] novel. It's impossible.
[40:03] I said, so are you, will you allow me to take the first
[40:08] script, the one I admire and use that as the model?
[40:12] And he said, we don't have a choice if we're going to have
[40:14] the book in production so that it comes out at the same time
[40:18] in, in for advertising for the movie.
[40:20] So. And then because I had more
[40:22] freedom, I thought, you know, one could think of Afghanistan
[40:26] is the Soviet, the USSR still existed as the Soviet version of
[40:31] their Vietnam. So I thought, OK, I'm I'm going
[40:35] to explore that. And so the book is half shooting
[40:39] script and half what I had initially been given.
[40:42] Plus, you know what I added? So these are very experimental
[40:46] books in terms of what a novel can do in order to to amplify,
[40:51] let us say, the the movie. A little anecdote of my own and
[40:55] not as exciting as as yours of course David, but I went on a
[40:58] family holiday in the late 80s. My brother bought your Rambo 3
[41:02] novel at the airport on the way, and I can vividly remember
[41:05] reading this when when I was away with my family.
[41:08] And never in a million years could I have thought that I'd be
[41:11] speaking to the author of that book.
[41:12] Many, many. Years oh, you're very kind,
[41:14] which shows you how everything comes around and you know the.
[41:17] Book. The couple of years ago, the
[41:19] books are still alive. A couple of years ago, special
[41:22] editions were published with a whole lot of textures.
[41:25] And as we speak there's a company called Vinegar Syndrome,
[41:29] which is a home video distribution company, very high
[41:34] respected. They do.
[41:35] They do really great disks and they now have a publishing
[41:39] division. And so a few weeks ago, new
[41:42] paperbacks of my novelizations for Rambo First Blood Part 2 and
[41:47] Rambo Three were released with gorgeous new covers.
[41:50] And I wrote introductions for them.
[41:52] And, and, you know, so it's funny, you know, who would have
[41:55] predicted? I keep thinking about my, my
[41:57] agent at the time saying I don't know if, if this can find
[42:01] anything. And then what we wind up with
[42:03] is, you know, all these years later, they're still alive.
[42:06] But it's it's unreal. That's unbelievable.
[42:08] And so are those in print now? Oh yeah, yeah, they're they.
[42:11] Just they were just released. You go to vinegarsyndrome.com
[42:15] and also they've bundled Rambo 2 and three together with I Can't
[42:20] Stop Laughing with a vinegar syndrome headband so you can get
[42:28] the whole. Package.
[42:30] Now you've you've lived. Fantastic.
[42:33] And you mentioned another book as well that is covering the the
[42:38] whole series and you did the forward for?
[42:40] That that was not Segaloff's book, The Rambo Report, five
[42:44] films, three books, 1 legend. And it's a full version of some
[42:49] of the stuff we've been talking about.
[42:52] And all the different ways that, you know, that came together to
[42:56] make the movies happen and the novelizations happen and, and
[43:00] the merchandising, you know, the knives and, and the, the other
[43:04] things that are associated with the, with the phenomenon.
[43:07] There's even a Saturday morning cartoon with Rambo stalking the
[43:14] animals in the forest. It's very strange.
[43:17] And and and also a a film called Son of Rambo.
[43:21] That and in Rambo is spelled RA MB OW and and it's two kids
[43:26] making Rambo movies in their fantasy world because their home
[43:29] life is terrible. Yes.
[43:31] Really, it's a it's a wonderful film.
[43:34] Yeah. It's really, really great.
[43:35] And all because of your creation, David, an incredible
[43:39] mark that you've created in the the cultural world.
[43:42] Well, you're, you're very kind. And as we discussed, no one
[43:45] could have predicted this. We do not worship at altars in
[43:49] our house. Well, Sly and I once said we
[43:52] were talking about something to do with Rambo and it'd been
[43:54] something in the in newspapers or something.
[43:56] And, and, and, and we both said we reacted as if Rambo was a
[44:01] third party, that this was a cultural, it's like Tarzan or
[44:05] James Bond and then said, well, wait a minute, that's us, that,
[44:09] you know, this happened because we made this happen.
[44:12] And so it, it's fun to be part of something like this that I
[44:17] can appreciate from my professor's point of view that
[44:19] I, I am, after all of my other life, a literature professor.
[44:23] And I see this as I look at it as a cultural phenomenon and
[44:27] I'm, I enjoy talking about it from that point of view.
[44:31] And I, I could see one day that there might be a, a film course
[44:36] that would, that would of course, not just be about the
[44:39] Rambo movies and, and the novels, but it would be about
[44:42] how movies are made and the decisions that are made.
[44:44] And there are very few books such as Gnats that examine the
[44:51] tales of how a movie comes about.
[44:54] There are people who make these and decisions that are made and
[44:58] obstacles that are over common. So I I as you can tell, I enjoy
[45:02] talking about it. Absolutely, yeah.
[45:05] And then it's been a thrill to have you on.
[45:07] David, thank you so much for coming on the show, talking
[45:09] about your amazing career, giving us a peek behind the
[45:11] scenes. Our audience, I'm sure, will
[45:13] love it. So thank you so much for that.
[45:16] Thank you. A huge thanks to David Morel for
[45:25] his time and sharing some amazing stories.
[45:27] What a career. Be sure to check out that book
[45:30] as well. The Rambo Report. 5 films, three
[45:33] books, 1 Legend by Nat Segaloff. As for all the right movies, our
[45:37] latest podcast on classic and hit films came out last week.
[45:40] We had a reunion with Hitman, romantic comedy Gross, Point
[45:42] Blank, and next week we'll be going behind the scenes on the
[45:45] outstanding Amadeus. For our Patreon supporters, we
[45:48] produce exclusive podcasts, The Watch List, where we review
[45:51] brand new movies and recommend you search them out or not, and
[45:54] Double Feature, where we talk about films that we wouldn't
[45:57] necessarily on our classic podcast show.
[45:59] There were brand new episodes of those every month, so become an
[46:02] ATRM patron for those and our full podcast archive with
[46:05] hundreds and hundreds of hours of incredible movie podcasts.
[46:08] You can sign up at patreon.com/all the Right Movies
[46:11] and our podcast archive is also available on YouTube, Apple
[46:15] Podcasts, and Spotify. It'd be also great if you could
[46:18] give us a positive rating on whatever platform you use,
[46:20] Spotify, Apple Podcast Pod, Chaser, it doesn't matter where,
[46:23] just five stars. If you like us as always, you
[46:26] can follow us everywhere on social media, on X Instagram,
[46:30] Threads, Blue Sky, TikTok, We've got a Facebook group and also
[46:34] you can subscribe to our YouTube channel and like our videos.
[46:37] They go up regularly. Our legendary making of movie
[46:40] Threads go up on X Blue Sky and Threads daily as well.
[46:43] And finally, our website is All the right movies.com.
[46:46] Thank you for tuning in everyone.
[46:47] We hope you enjoyed the interview with David Morrell.
[46:50] Come back next week for the big one, Amadeus.
[46:53] See you soon.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.