The movie that ended Anthony Hopkins’ 20-year feud with Roger Donaldson: “Ready to kill each other”
By his own admission, Anthony Hopkins was not a fun guy to be around for large stretches of his early career.
Hopkins began acting in British theatre in 1960, but struggled with alcoholism until he decided to give up drinking for good at Christmastime in 1975. The alcohol contributed to a lot of bad behaviour, including many bust-ups with co-stars and directors, but even when he got sober, he could still be a difficult customer.
When Hopkins found himself in New Zealand in 1983, sweating under a blue Navy uniform in what director Roger Donaldson described as “100 degree [heat] with 100% humidity”, he often seemed like a volcano ready to blow. Hopkins was starring as Lieutenant William Bligh in Donaldson’s The Bounty, an adaptation of the real-life 1789 mutiny that also inspired the classic 1962 picture Mutiny on the Bounty. The production was beset with issues from the start, though, and soon the unbearable heat seemed like the least of Hopkins’ worries.
For starters, shooting on the water in real ships was a logistical nightmare for Donaldson, not least because it caused many members of the cast and crew to become seasick. There were injuries on set, too, and star Mel Gibson routinely showed up for work with a raging hangover from the night before. Hopkins was teetotal by this point, and to an extent sympathised with Gibson’s dependency on the sauce, but he couldn’t deny that it made for a stressful working environment.
“He’d get into fights in the bars in Tahiti, and Liam Neeson used to go out as his kind of henchman to try and calm him down and get him out of trouble,” Hopkins recalled of Gibson’s antics. “In those days, he had his troubles, as we all do.”
Within this pressure cooker environment, Hopkins and Donaldson routinely clashed, and the director admitted they were often “ready to kill each other”. Their arguments were so vociferous that both men effectively vowed to never speak to each other again when the shoot ended, and it coloured Hopkins’ view of the finished product. He once dubbed it a “sad mess of a film” and a “botched job”, which truly hurt him because he’d put an incredible amount of effort into playing Bligh, one of his dream roles.
Given this background, it may have surprised Hopkins’ fans when it was announced he was re-teaming with Donaldson for 2005’s The World’s Fastest Indian. This biopic of Burt Munro, a speed bike racer who set land speed records for motorcycles in the 1950s and ’60s, was a passion project for Donaldson, whose career began with a documentary about Munro.
It was certainly a surprise that he cast someone he once called the biggest pain in the arse he’d ever worked with as a man he admired so much, but the key to the decision may lie in Donaldson’s admission that the relationship went two ways. As in, when it came to The Bounty, he gave as good as he got, and was “the biggest pain the arse” Hopkins ever worked with, too.
Indeed, as with a lot of things in life, Hopkins and Donaldson simply needed time to be a healer. Despite being at each other’s throats in ’83, when they crossed paths again decades later, Donaldson told About Film, “We realised we were both pretty proud of that movie and that it was one of the most memorable movies we’d been involved in, so we became friends again. It’s hard to believe it, and I don’t know how it happened, but now we are just best of friends.”
Donaldson admitted that reuniting with Hopkins on another movie was “the most unlikely reunion” of his career, but the fact that it led to an enduring friendship and “one of the most enjoyable films I’ve been involved in” was the icing on a particularly heartwarming cake. In truth, perhaps they both realised they were simply caught in a bad situation on The Bounty, and it was neither man’s fault, and with the benefit of age and wisdom, all that bad blood could simply be water under the bridge.
