John Milius

John Frederick Milius is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is considered a member of the New Hollywood generation of filmmakers.
He rose to prominence in the early 1970s for writing the scripts for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Jeremiah Johnson, and the first two Dirty Harry films. He made his directorial debut with the film Dillinger, followed by The Wind and the Lion and Big Wednesday. In 1980, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Apocalypse Now, which he co-wrote with Francis Ford Coppola.
During the 1980s, Milius established himself as a director of action and adventure films, with Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn. He was also a sought-after script doctor. He later served as the co-creator of the Primetime Emmy Award-winning television series Rome.
Off-screen, Milius is known for his eccentric personality and libertarian political views, variously and contradictorily self-described as a "Zen anarchist", "right-wing extremist", and "Maoist". He served as a director of the National Rifle Association of America.

Early life and education

Milius was born April 11, 1944, in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of three children to Elizabeth Marie and William Styx Milius, who was a shoe manufacturer. When Milius was seven, his father sold Milius Shoe Company, which his grandfather George W. Milius had founded in 1923, and retired. He moved the family to Bel Air, California. John Milius became an enthusiastic surfer. At 14, his parents sent him to a small private school, the Lowell Whiteman School, in the mountains of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, because he "was a juvenile delinquent".
Milius became a voracious reader and started to write short stories: "I had learned very early, to write in almost any style. I could write in fluent Hemingway, or in fluent Melville, or Conrad, or Jack Kerouac, and whatever." He says he was also influenced by the oral story telling of surfers at the time, who had a beatnik tradition.
"My religion is surfing", Milius said in 1976, adding that "the other thing that influenced me throughout my youth was my involvement with things Japanese. I studied judo, kendo, and painting. I felt more comfortable with things Japanese and with Japanese people than I did with Europeans... feudalism in any country, at any period, fascinates me... I understand the reasoning of people in Asia, it makes sense to me. Zen is very sensible, the whole way of feeling things is logical, whereas many of the Western-motivated things—greed, business sense—I'm not comfortable with, I don't understand their rationale."
Milius says he attempted to join the Marine Corps and volunteer for Vietnam War service in the late 1960s, but was rejected due to a "chronic" and "sometimes disabling" case of mild asthma. "I'd have given anything to be a Marine", said Milius. "As a surfer I'd spent a lot of time hanging out with the Marines off Pendleton, and I'd had every intention of joining up... I was devastated, I felt like I'd been rejected as a human being." "It was totally demoralizing", he said later. "I missed going to my war. It probably caused me to be obsessed with war ever since." Milius said he was "dying to be able to... go prove myself in battle—the same as all young men long to do, if they are honest with themselves, whether it's right or wrong or even sane, which is a debate that's been going on since we left the caves. Only there was no way I could found my own unit, so I did the second best, which was to write it. Every writer wishes he could actually be doing the thing he writes about." He later admitted, "I don't know how well I'd have done. I really wanted a military career, to be a general, but I had a hard time polishing shoes. And marching. I was in the ROTC once, and I hate marching... I would have been good in the Mexican Army."
At one stage Milius considered becoming an artist or historian. During a rainy day on a summer vacation in Hawaii in 1962, he stumbled upon a movie theatre showing a week of Akira Kurosawa films and fell in love with cinema.
Milius studied film at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television, which he chose because it was an elitist school that trained people for Hollywood. His classmates included George Lucas, Walter Murch, Basil Poledouris, Randal Kleiser and Donald F. Glut. Milius says he was influenced by his teacher, Irwin Blacker:

He gave you the screenplay form, which I hated so much, and if you made one mistake on the form, you flunked the class. His attitude was that the least you can learn is the form. "I can't grade you on the content. I can't tell you whether this is a better story for you to write than that, you know? And I can't teach you how to write the content, but I can certainly demand that you do it in the proper form." He never talked about character arcs or anything like that; he simply talked about telling a good yarn, telling a good story. He said, "Do whatever you need to do. Be as radical and as outrageous as you can be. Take any kind of approach you want to take. Feel free to flash back, feel free to flash forward, feel free to flash back in the middle of a flashback. Feel free to use narration, all the tools are there for you to use."

Milius says his writing style was influenced by two novels in particular, Moby-Dick and On the Road:

I think Moby Dick is the best work of art ever made... I used to point out the dramatic entrance of characters, how they were threaded through... Moby Dick was a perfect screenplay, a perfect example of the kind of drama that I was interested in. Another great influence on me was... On the Road, which has no tight, linear narrative, but sprawls, following this character. Moby Dick and On the Road are completely different kinds of novels, yet they're both extremely disciplined. Nothing happens by accident in either of those two books.

Milius reflected his "ambitions stopped at B Westerns... I thought that was a good life. I never wanted to be Hitchcock or some big mogul, I didn't want to be Louis B. Mayer. I wanted to be... Budd Boetticher or something... John Ford."
His short films at film school included The Reversal of Richard Sun, Glut and Viking Women Don't Care. He wrote a documentary, The Emperor, directed by classmate George Lucas, who also edited an animated short Milius directed called Marcello, I'm So Bored with John Strawbridge.
Marcello, Milius's thesis film, won best animation at the National Student Film Festival and screened around the country in various festivals; it was praised by Vincent Canby of The New York Times. Milius received a job offer to work in animation but he turned it down as he could not see himself "sitting there drawing cell after cell."

Career

Early

Milius's first completed script was Los Gringos. "It actually wasn't bad", he later said. "It was sort of like The Wild Bunch... there was a lot of killing and shooting and riding and dust... sombreros.... It was a pretty good idea, actually. It had everything, and it was certainly as original as The Wild Bunch, but it wasn't as skillfully written as later stuff."
He followed this with The Last Resort which was optioned by Michael S Laughlin in 1969. Milius says, "Neither of them were ever made, but I was able to option them. I had them rented out for like $5,000 a year."

''The Devil's 8''

Milius then got a summer job working at the story department of American International Pictures through a student colleague of his who had begun working there, Willard Huyck. Huyck and Milius worked at AIP under producer Larry Gordon, reading scripts. They eventually collaborated on a rewrite of the screenplay for The Devil's 8, an action drama about moonshine drivers which ripped off The Dirty Dozen.
Milius's name had been mentioned in a 1968 Time magazine article about the new generation of Hollywood filmmakers, which also referred to George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. This was read by Mike Medavoy, who became Milius's agent. Medavoy called Milius "a badboy mad genius in a teenager's body, but he was a good and fast writer with original ideas."
Milius began to get writing commissions. He wrote a script entitled The Texans for Al Ruddy at Paramount, a contemporary version of Red River — Milius later said it "wasn't very good". He also wrote an original called Truck Driver which was purchased by Levy-Garner-Laven, although that film too was not made.
Milius later said he "didn't do a good job" with these two early scripts "because in both cases I was influenced by the people who had hired me. They said put this in and put that in, and I went along with it. Every time I went along with something in my whole career it usually didn't work. Usually there's a price to pay. You think of selling out, but there is a price to pay. Usually what people want you to do is make it current."

''Jeremiah Johnson''

Milius then wrote Jeremiah Johnson, a story loosely based on the life of the mountain man Liver-Eating Johnson.
Milius later said this was "the real breaking point" where he knew "almost overnight... that I had become a good writer with a voice.":

I knew that material. I'd lived in the mountains, I had a trapline, I hunted, and I had a lot of experiences with characters up there. So, it was real easy to write that and there was a humor to it, a kind of bigger-than-life attitude. I was inspired by Carl Sandburg. I read a lot of his poetry and it's this kind of abrupt description—"a train is coming, thundering steel, where are you going? Wichita." That great kind of feeling that he had, that's what I was trying to do there. I remember there was a great poem about American braggarts. You know, American liars—"I am the ring-tailed cousin to the such and such that ate so and so and I can do this and I can do that better than Mike Fink the river man..." I just realized that this was the voice that the script had to have. It was as clear as a bell. I knew that writing was particular to me.

Milius sold the script to Warner Bros. in 1970 for $5,000, going up to $50,000 if it was ever made. Warner Bros. had other writers work on the original script based on The Crow Killer. Milius was also called back to work on it, and his fee grew each time. Eventually, Robert Redford agreed to play the lead and Sydney Pollack signed to direct.