The famous Burt Reynolds ‘Deliverance’ stories that never happened: “Absolute rubbish”
Actors have a tendency to embellish and exaggerate certain anecdotes to paint themselves in a better light, with Burt Reynolds so committed to a pair of anecdotes from the making of Deliverance that he spoke about them in public and wrote about them in his autobiography.
According to someone eminently familiar with the production, the only problem is that they never happened. In one respect, there was no need to leave the set armed with tall tales that were completely fabricated because the production itself was arduous enough to create plenty of talking points.
Director John Boorman’s controversial backwoods thriller rode a wave of publicity to box office success and Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, and it remains as chilling and profound as it was back in 1972 when audiences first saw four city-dwelling friends get more than they bargained for when they encounter the locals during a canoeing trip.
The most famous – or, to be more accurate, infamous – scene in Deliverance is undoubtedly the “squeal like a pig sequence,” a skin-crawling exercise in discomfort. According to Reynolds, things would have gone even further had he not decided to intervene to prevent Boorman from crossing a line he couldn’t come back from.
The star claimed that he’d seen more than enough and couldn’t sanction the filmmaker pushing the boundaries any further. “I asked John Boorman, the director, ‘Why did you let it go that long?'” Reynolds recalled. “He said, ‘I wanted to take it as far as I could with the audience, and I figured you’d run in when it got too far.”
It was an admirable intervention that made Reynolds look like a stand-up guy, or so it would seem. In an interview with Alex Simon, Boorman was asked about the veracity of the actor anointing himself as Ned Beatty’s knight in shining armour, and he couldn’t have been clearer. “Rubbish,” he said. “Absolute rubbish.”
That sent Boorman flying off into a tangent, where he brought up Reynolds’ memoirs. “In the book, he tells a story about how I screened the film for the actors and a few friends and went afterwards to my lawyer’s house for dinner, and everyone was telling him, ‘Oh, Burt, Burt, you’re going to win the Academy Award for that one scene where you make that big speech.'”
It’s innocuous on the surface because scenes get deleted all the time. However, Boorman drew the line at Reynolds suggesting that he’d been told by those around him that he’d been robbed of an Oscar when the footage was excised from the final cut of Deliverance. “And then the book goes, ‘And we wept all night,'” the director scoffed at his moment of glory being ripped away.
Boorman conceded that it did exist on the page, but there was a caveat that blew Reynolds’ story apart; “There was such a scene in an early draft of the script, and I never shot it,” he revealed. “So he fantasised this whole thing.” There are always two sides to every story, but considering the man behind the camera is adamant he never filmed it, it’s hard not to side with Boorman over Reynolds.
