“Mask of Zorro” Director Rejected It Thrice

When it comes to an action filmmaking track record, few are more up and down than New Zealand filmmaker Martin Campbell.

The man has made three absolute masterpieces of the genre – Bond entry films “Goldeneye” and “Casino Royale” along with 1998’s swashbuckling adventure “The Mask of Zorro”. He also helmed some acclaimed 1980s TV with “Reilly: Ace of Spies” and the award-winning “Edge of Darkness”.

There have also been more mixed affairs like “The Legend of Zorro,” “The Foreigner,” “No Escape” (aka. “Escape from Absolom”) and “Vertical Limit” along with outright duds like “Beyond Borders” and the “Green Lantern” film.

He returns with “Cleaner,” the new Daisy Ridley-led action vehicle that appears to be getting mixed reviews so far. During press for the film, he’s spoken about some of his past work and revealed that he rejected “The Mask of Zorro” three times before eventually agreeing to it. He tells Variety:

“The irony is I turned down “Zorro” three times. The reason was that Robert Rodriguez was originally going to direct that movie. He backed out because of budget reasons… I think he had a budget of $47 million, and he just said he didn’t have enough.

And they asked me three times to do it, and I turned it down three times. I didn’t like the script, even though the story was solid. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Steven Spielberg rang me and made me sound like the second coming, and I fell for it and I agreed to do it.

And the night I actually accepted, I sat with my agent in a restaurant and my lawyer with my head in my hands saying, “This is the worst mistake I’ve ever made doing this movie. I should never have said yes.

So how did they save it? He says: “Somehow we got other writers and so forth”. He’s likely referring to “Aladdin,” “Shrek” and and future “Pirates of the Caribbean” scribes Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio who came onboard along with John Eskow (“Air America”).

Even then, he indicates that distributor TriStar Pictures had a regime change during pre-production and the new president “didn’t like the concept at all”:

“He had a shopping list of why he didn’t want to do it because he had inherited it, and because he was my boss on ‘GoldenEye,’ there was sort of radio silence for 10 days, and we got green lit. And I said to him, ‘Why the hell did you green light this movie?’ And he said, ‘Well, even if it’s a dog, I can get $45 million foreign on this thing.’ That was the conversation, and we went ahead and made it.”

Despite the apparently troubled production and lack of faith on the studio’s part, the resulting film opened in 1998 to critical and commercial success – grossing $250 million on a $95 million budget, scoring two Oscar nominations and landed very good reviews.

In terms of legacy the film is now seen as one of the last true old school blockbusters, star Antonio Banderas said in a Yahoo interview that producer Steven Spielberg told him during the film’s making the movie would be “probably going to be one of the last Westerns shot in the way the Westerns were shot in the old days, with real scenes and real horses, where everything is real, real sword fighting, no CGI.’ Everything was practical.”

He adds Spielberg advised him to be proud of the film and Banderas says: “I am, probably even more now than at the time that I was doing it.”

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