‘The Hitcher’: The 1980s movie Christopher Nolan called “mind-bendingly arbitrary”
As if Christopher Nolan didn’t already have the lay of the land in Hollywood, his recent Academy Award wins for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ have further underlined his status as one of the industry’s leading filmmakers, one who already had the freedom to do whatever they wanted.
If the majority of directors went to a studio and pitched a three-hour biopic with a screenplay written in the first-person from the perspective of its protagonist, at least one question would be asked. This being Nolan, though, Universal flung itself at the opportunity to capitalise on his split from Warner Bros after a 20-year working relationship that had brought each party colossal success.
His filmography has primarily been characterised by cerebral, intelligent, and complex stories told on an increasingly massive scale, but film snobbery has never been Nolan’s thing. After all, he’s been known to quote MacGruber on his sets and has a deep-seated obsession with the Fast & Furious franchise, so it’s not as if he retires to his ornately decorated library to sit on a luxuriously oversized armchair to watch nothing but the classics.
Given his stiff upper lip, Nolan describing 1986’s The Hitcher as “mind-bendingly arbitrary” is intended as the highest compliment because he holds director Robert Harmon’s road-worn slasher as one of his guilty pleasure favourites, even though he “never questioned the logic” of the plot when he first saw it as a teenager.
He’s not wrong, either, considering the story begins with C. Thomas Howell’s Jim Halsey picking up Rutger Hauer’s hitchhiker John Ryder, who rather brazenly says he’s a serial killer. It’s an unprompted admission that would generally cause the driver to get the hell out of there as soon as possible, but Jim constantly finds himself crossing paths with the weather-beaten mass murderer.
After witnessing him killing an entire family, he decides to make it his mission to pursue the titular drifter with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s waitress in tow, as they collide in a string of escalating set pieces that flirt with the ridiculous but does it with enough style and panache to cement The Hitcher as a cult classic.
Nolan would also describe star Hauer as “criminally underappreciated”, which may help explain why he cast him as an unscrupulous Wayne Enterprises board member in Batman Begins, while he further celebrated the actor’s performance as “his finest and most influential Euro-psycho performance this side of Blade Runner“. That’s also true, but he was far from being the first choice to lead the cast.
Harmon was so adamant about casting Terence Stamp as Ryder that he carried around a picture of the distinguished thespian to pitch meetings all around town, which blew up in his face when Stamp read the script and promptly said no. Sam Elliott was next in line, but a disparity in his financial compensation ruled him out of the running, too, before Michael Ironside was placed under consideration.
It was then-HBO chief Maurice Singer who suggested Hauer, even if he wasn’t all that keen on playing another villain. Suitably won over by the screenplay, he admitted to the Los Angeles Times that “If I do one more villain, I should do this”, Not to offer a spoiler for the next four decades of cinema, dear reader, but The Hitcher was not the final time Hauer played a bad guy.
After all that, The Hitcher would go on to bomb at the box office after failing to recoup its budget, but home video and syndication eventually turned it into a firm favourite among the midnight movie crowd. Nolan was among that number, but it remains to be seen whether he was brave – or bored – enough to check out 2003’s interminable Hauer-less sequel The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting or the terrible 2007 remake with Sean Bean.
