The forgotten horror movie where Francis Ford Coppola directed Jack Nicholson for the only time
As two respective titans operating at the peak of their powers during the same transformative period in cinema history, it’s a crying shame that Jack Nicholson and Francis Ford Coppola never worked together on a feature.
It wasn’t from a lack of trying, though, with Nicholson famously turning down the part of Michael Corleone in The Godfather because he believed the role should go to an Italian-American actor, while he was just one of many established stars who rejected the opportunity to accompany the filmmaker into the deepest recesses of the jungle for Apocalypse Now.
While the five-time Academy Award-winning director, producer, and writer may have never been credited as the person behind the camera on a film where the three-time Oscar-winning legend was part of the ensemble, Coppola did wield the megaphone for a spell on a production where Nicholson was a key member of the cast.
Unsurprisingly, Roger Corman is the figure at the centre of their brief professional dalliance, with the powerhouse producer integral to both of them getting their starts in the business. It’s hardly the most celebrated credit in either of their legendary filmographies, but 1963’s The Terror nonetheless marks the one and only time Coppola and Nicholson collaborated on the same project to a notable degree.
Playing a French soldier, Nicholson’s protagonist ends up becoming entranced with a mysterious woman he encounters after being separated from his unit. When he eventually tracks her down, he’s welcomed into the castle occupied by genre favourite Boris Karloff’s Baron Von Leppe, with Corman’s fast-paced style of work instigating the once-in-a-lifetime team-up.
Corman had two days left on Karloff’s contract after they’d just made Edgar Allan Poe adaptation, The Raven, so he used those 48 hours with the same cast and crew to film his scenes for The Terror. However, as the filmmaker explained to the British Film Institute, his own obligations to small print ruled him out of steering the ship to the finish line.
“We shot for two days, closed down, and because I’m a member of the Directors Guild, I couldn’t shoot the rest of the picture,” he said. “So Francis came in for a few days before being signed to a major studio. The picture took seven or eight months, shooting a few days at a time with different directors, and on the final day of shooting I’d run out of directors.”
In addition to Coppola, Monte Hellman and Jack Hill also did uncredited work on The Terror, with Nicholson himself getting in on the act when Corman allowed him to shoot the final day. The B-movie maestro may have labelled it as “one of the weirdest films I’ve ever been connected with” – an impressive accolade looking at his career – but it endures as a historical curio for being the solitary instance where Coppola called action on a film starring Nicholson, regardless of the revolving door continuing to turn afterwards.
