Where the river runs wild

John Boorman sent four men on an ill-fated hunting trip in his classic film Deliverance, which still shocks 40 years on, says Carl Dixon

THE Right Hook Classic Movies has screened a number of extraordinary films around the country this year, including Bridge On The River Kwai, Some Like It Hot and Taxi Driver.

Last month, director John Boorman travelled to the Gate Cinema in Cork city for a special 40th anniversary screening of his film, Deliverance.

The film, which was shot in Georgia and South Carolina and released in 1972, stars Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ronny Cox and Ned Beatty as four friends who decide to canoe down the Cahulawassee River, deep in the Appalachian back country, before it is dammed and turned into a big lake.

Under the charismatic influence of outdoor fanatic Lewis, played by Reynolds, the slightly condescending city boys begin to enjoy an adrenalised white-water ride until they are intercepted by some local rednecks.

Bobby, played by Beatty, is violently sodomised, and when Lewis kills the offending redneck with an arrow, the men must flee down-river. Drew, played by Cox, falls into despair over their decision to bury the redneck’s body.

Drew subsequently drowns and Lewis is badly injured. To survive, the rather meek Ed, played by Voight, must take control and kill another redneck who is stalking them. Though they survive, their actions haunt Ed’s dreams.

Deliverance was based on a novel by American author James Dickey, who also has a small but compelling role in the film as the local sheriff. However, the relationship between Dickey and Boorman was not always easy. “Adapting any book is a hazardous enterprise; you need to shrug off the book and leave it behind in some ways, you can’t be too respectful,” says Boorman. “The first half of the book depicted the comfortable middle class lives of these men in Atlanta, where, in a sense, they had never really challenged themselves. I decided to cut this part out and have their characters develop through the action, which Dickey didn’t agree with.

“He also had a very macho, almost Nietzschean idea of masculinity: Lewis has this desire to kill and Dickey felt that, in some way, by meeting this challenge he redeems himself. I took the opposite view and felt that the challenges the men face destroy them rather than fulfil them.”

The film has become a huge cult success, not least for its two hugely iconic moments; namely, the duelling banjo scene, where the idealistic Ed plays banjo with a local boy on the porch of a backwater gas station, and the male rape scene, which even today is still genuinely shocking.

Yet, as Boorman says, Warner Brothers were dubious about a film without a female character and kept cutting the budget. Paradoxically, the result was probably a sparser, more effective film. “When I first read the as-yet-unpublished manuscript, I had a clear picture of what I wanted,” says Boorman. “But, in a sense, the river was the dominant character during filming and we had to adapt to whatever it threw at us.

“Dickey had brought the traditional duelling banjo music to my attention, and for financial reasons I decided to jettison the composer and orchestra I had lined up and use variations of this tune performed by two musicians in a studio. The soundtrack, obviously, went on to be hugely successful.”

Boorman’s Grammy Award for the duelling banjos soundtrack was later stolen from his long-time home in Wicklow, probably by Dublin gangster Martin Cahill. Boorman would go on to portray the robbery in his film, The General.

The physical dangers of filming Deliverance on the river were real and created a strong bond between the participants, even though they came from different backgrounds and had different acting methods. For Beatty, for whom this was his first film role, it was a baptism of fire. “Voight believed in method acting and if a scene required him to be out of breath he would run around for two minutes so that he looked flushed,” Boorman says. “Reynolds would spray himself with water, start panting and be ready to go in 20 seconds. But, in a way, they were good for each other: Voight encouraged Reynolds to think more, and Reynolds encouraged Voight to stop over-analysing and speed up. Working with actors is like working with children: for your first child you develop a theory of parenthood, you modify it for the second, and by the third child you realise they are all different and throw all theory out the window,” he says.

Reynolds would later be quoted in an interview as saying that the rape scene was too graphic, but would have gone further if he hadn’t stopped it. This is, Boorman says, a Reynolds exaggeration. “The great thing about Reynolds is his wit and humour, but I think he has told the stories so often he is starting to actually believe them,” says Boorman. “In reality, the rape scene was shot in a very professional and technical way, and Reynolds wasn’t even there at the time.”

The rape scene is shocking, but is it still possible to shock a modern audience, in a world of video-game, internet and screen violence? “It is all about context really: if a man’s head is blown off in a film, then it may have no impact unless it is relevant to the context and characters,” says Boorman. “The censor wanted to cut the close-up, drawn-out death scene of the mountain man, but in the end I would only agree to lose seven frames, which equates to about one third of a second. The point of that slow death is that Lewis wanted to experience the act of killing and now he had to face the consequences of that act. This awful slow death is not gratuitous.”

Despite the misgivings of the film executives — who came out from the first viewing silent and shattered — the film was a huge success.

In some ways, perhaps, the emotive power of the duelling banjo scene and the traumatic intensity of the rape scene mask the subtleties of the film. The faded colours, the constant claustrophobic background noise of the roaring water, and the desperation of the characters ratchet up the tension to breaking point. It also illustrates, graphically, that our comfortable middle-class lives can at any moment be transformed into something hideous, where we must rely only on ourselves to survive.

“In those horrific moments, each of the characters is fundamentally altered,” Boorman says. “Lewis goes from independent survivalist to wounded passenger; the bumptious and slightly arrogant Bobby becomes silent and grim and naive; decent Drew falls into despair. Now the central character becomes Ed, who must confront his fears if they are to survive.

“In the end, Dickey believed that by facing their fears, and through the act of killing, both Lewis and Drew become stronger men. I felt it diminished them both, and I don’t think anyone watching the film will feel that these characters could have returned to their normal, orderly lives unaltered.”