What makes a film great? The art of filming a cinema classic

Rocky Balboa is strolling past "the coconuts" and the yo-yos—the down-and-outs who are hanging around on a corner in South Philadelphia—when he hears a young girl curse.

"Hey, Marie, these guys teach ya to talk like that?" asks Balboa, as written and played by Sylvester Stallone in Rocky. Then he lifts the cigarette from her fingers and walks her home like an older brother. "Smoking'll make your teeth yellow. It'll make your breath garbage. Nobody likes garbage."

The producers, the power-brokers who hold the purse strings, "hated that moment," recalls the film's director, John Avildsen. "But I said, 'Only an exceptional character would bother about a girl using bad language. He's the perfect hero—he's nice to kids.'"

When Rocky came out, Frank Capra, the legendary three-time Oscar-winning director of It's a Wonderful Life, called it "the best picture of the last ten years. That scene where Rocky walks the girl home is the best in the picture.

"Producers think they don't need those scenes because nothing's happening—nobody's getting hit—but that's where the audience falls in love with Rocky. From then on, whatever he does, you're cheering for him."

Rocky won Academy Awards in 1976 for best picture and best director, and it has endured as one of the most popular films ever made.

Why do some films unexpectedly achieve greatness? Here is the story of four films that, by every measure, are incredible successes.

Yet in their infancy, each was regarded by Hollywood moguls as a risky commercial proposition. Today's filmmakers would do well to study these examples for clues to what the public really wants to see.

Sylvester Stallone was an out-of-work actor when he decided to create a hero for "the common man."

One day, he watched world-heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali pummel a little-known fighter named Chuck Wepner. Before Ali KO'd him, Wepner nearly "went the distance"—the full 15 rounds—winning respect from fans and giving Stallone his hero.

Stallone bought a book on screen-writing and created the story of "the Italian Stallion," a small-time Philadelphia boxer who gets a long-shot chance to fight the champ. What the champ doesn't know is that Rocky is inspired by the love of a shy pet-shop assistant named Adrienne.

Stallone dictated the final draft of the screenplay to his wife in three and a half days, then set out to sell it. 

Producers were interested in the story—for such big-name stars as Warren Beatty, Burt Reynolds or James Caan. But Stallone knew Rocky could make him a star.

Though he and his wife were down to their last 100 dollars and she was pregnant, Stallone refused 265,000 dollars (£120,000) for the script from producers who wouldn't let him play the lead.

Finally, producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff agreed to let Stallone play Rocky if he would do it for just 75,000 dollars and ten per cent of profits, and if the film's budget were less than one million dollars.

Avildsen, whose 1973 film, Save the Tiger, had won the Best Actor Oscar for Jack Lemmon, made the picture under budget.

Over the years it has returned more than 60 times what it cost and still ranks on entertainment industry magazine Variety's list of the top 100 all-time box-office champs.

What's more, Rocky Balboa has gone on to fight the good fight in four other Rocky films—grossing in all more than a quarter of a billion dollars.

Not surprisingly, Avildsen has heard many stories of people who were inspired by the film to "go the distance." In 1977, he was a guest clown with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus when one of the show's star aerialists, Dolly Jacobs, came up to thank him.

"Rocky gave me the courage to practise long hours on the Roman rings and to ask for an audition," she told Avildsen. "Rocky let me hope I could do it." A year after her debut, Newsweek declared Dolly Jacobs "Queen of the Rings."

British producer David Puttnam had rented a furnished house in Los Angeles in 1976, and was looking about for a book to browse through when he happened on An Approved History of the Olympic Games by Bill Henry.

This sentence about the Paris Olympics of 1924 caught his eye: "The dark-horse honours went to E H Liddell, a bandy-legged little Scottish divinity student who, driven from his favourite event, the 100 metres, by religious scruples that prevented him from running on Sunday, surprised everybody by winning the 400 metres in record time."

Here is a great character who could make a great film, thought Puttnam. Here is a character who stands for something bigger than himself—putting duty to God before worldly success.

Puttnam hired a writer, Colin Welland, and a director, Hugh Hudson, who had made documentaries but never a feature film. Then the three turned Chariots of Fire into an exploration of moral values.

Ian Charleson, an Edinburgh Scot, was cast as Eric Liddell. Ben Cross, an Irish Catholic, would play Harold Abrahams, who won the 100 metre race that Liddell would not enter. Abrahams was a Cambridge law student who used winning to defeat the bigotry he felt as an English Jew.

When David Puttnam submitted the finished script to Columbia Pictures, the studio turned it down.

Finally, he raised enough to make the film, 5.5 million dollars—half from Twentieth Century Fox in exchange for foreign-distribution rights and half from Dodi Fayed, the son of an Egyptian shipping magnate.

But even after the film was finished, Twentieth Century Fox decided not to buy US distribution rights.

Of course, Chariots of Fire became a runaway hit. New York film critic Rex Reed called it "one of the best movies ever made. It reaches deep for universal truths and expresses sentiments considered old-fashioned by today's cynical standards."

The film also became a major factor in the naming of Puttnam as chairman of Columbia Pictures, where he framed and hung on his office wall the studio's old letter rejecting Chariots of Fire.

Mahatma Gandhi is fasting in protest at the riot killings that followed the partition of Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan in 1947. A fellow Hindu approaches to confess a great wrong.

"I killed a child," says the man. "I smashed his head against a wall."

"Why?" asks the Mahatma (Hindu for Great Soul).

"They killed my boy. The Muslims killed my son."

"I know a way out of hell," says Gandhi. "Find a child, a little boy whose mother and father have been killed, and bring him up as your own. Only be sure he is a Muslim—and that you bring him up as one."

The grieving, guilt-racked father falls to his knees, weeping at the Mahatma's feet.

By 1966, Richard Attenborough, a successful character actor, was obsessed with making a film about Gandhi, who never stopped believing in non-violence. As Attenborough told a reporter, "I'm excited by this man's life, what he stands for. And I'm fed up with the sick, pointless, despairing films made these days."

But the 1962 box-office failure of Nine Hours to Rama, a film about Gandhi's assassination, made money hard to raise. Major studios told Attenborough, "Nobody is interested in a picture about a man dressed in a sheet."

Over the years, Attenborough turned down 40 acting roles and a dozen directing jobs to pursue his goal. He even declined to become associate director of the National Theatre because "it meant giving up Gandhi for ever."

Finally, money came in from sources outside the film industry and by 1981, Attenborough was in Bombay directing his epic.

The finished film covered half a century of India's struggle in three hours and eight minutes.

Ben Kingsley, 37 and a Royal Shakespeare Company veteran, played Gandhi from 1894—when, as a 25-year-old London-educated lawyer, he was thrown out of a first-class railway compartment in South Africa—to 1948, when he was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic on his way to evening prayer in New Delhi.

Scene after scene dramatised Gandhi's belief that "when I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Always."

When Attenborough showed his film to the major distributors in Los Angeles, "every single company that had turned it down over the past 20 years bid for it," he told The New York Times.

Even before Oscar night, Gandhi had taken 38 million dollars at US box offices alone. And when it won eight Oscars, including Best Director, Best Actor for Kingsley and Best Picture of 1982, it became, said The New York Times, "an event not to be missed."

In 1989, audiences were cheering an elderly Jewish widow, Miss Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy), and her black chauffeur, Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman), as they struggled towards friendship in the American South of the 1950s and Sixties.

But two years before, when producer Richard Zanuck and his wife, Lili, tried to entice major Hollywood studios into investing in Driving Miss Daisy, the response was a resounding no.

"They wanted Tom Cruise and racing cars," Zanuck told me. "But Daisy didn't have great names, and it didn't have any action."

Why were the Zanucks obsessed with making a film that everyone said would flop? "Because it had heart—something everyone can relate to," says Zanuck.

"So often film-makers do not think of the people out there. I have heard from thousands of them from all across the country, and they speak with one voice: 'We can't find anything to see.' They mean they are interested in the content of a film more than in mindless action and who the stars are."

To get Driving Miss Daisy made, the Zanucks agreed to a small budget—half the original 15 million dollars. "I spent most of my time convincing people how poor we were," says Zanuck. "One of my selling points was to tell them, 'This film will go on for ever.'

"For instance, I told a health-food shop owner, 'You let us put your shop in the film, and when the video comes out, you can invite friends over and fast-forward to the scene with your shop. You can show people your shop for ever!'

When we were making the film, that was wishful thinking. Now that we've won the Academy Award, that shop owner says, 'How did you know that was going to happen?'"

It happened because Driving Miss Daisy tells the story of two wonderful characters: Daisy and Hoke, the chauffeur who endures with dignity the unconscious prejudices of a woman still saying to her son when she is nearly 90: "I've never been prejudiced in my life—and you know it."

We see the change in her attitude begin with a winter storm that causes a power cut in Atlanta.

After making his way to her house over icy roads, Hoke tells Daisy, "I figured your stove was out. I know you gots to have your coffee in the morning." At the end of the film, she takes his hand and confesses: "You're my best friend. You are, you are."

Driving Miss Daisy is now on Variety's list of all-time box office champs. Jessica Tandy won the Oscar for Best Actress. Dan Aykroyd, who played her son, and Morgan Freeman were also nominated for Oscars.

"When I was a kid, I wanted to be a movie star," Freeman says. "Somewhere along the way, I started to think, No. Stardom is nothing. I want to change people's attitudes. I want to make films that mend us. I want to be a force for healing.

"I have a large stake in the future that films like Driving Miss Daisy are helping to bring about. I tell my children and grandchildren it's will-power that does things.

"All it takes is one individual to say, 'This will stop'—or to start something good."

Freeman and Avildsen are now making a film on precisely that theme, about a white boy and apartheid in South Africa, entitled The Power of One.

"Great films are films with great characters," says Avildsen. "Characters who stand for something bigger than themselves. That something," he adds, "is good values."

Indeed, all four of these critically acclaimed, financially successful and widely honoured films are about universally shared values that reflect the basic good in people: hard work, self-respect, love of family, friends, community and God.

When so many films show violence and sex without intimacy, the public embraces these films that sell neither. "Such films show us," says director Mark Rydell, "how the individual can make a difference in his own life and the lives of others."

And they give us hope. "You can't sell hopelessness to people," says Morgan Freeman. "They won't buy it. They can get that for free."

Avildsen offered one further idea about why great films get made.

"One of their messages," he said, "is that ordinary individuals are capable of extraordinary acts. We keep coming back to hear that message, back to drink at the well with good water."

Banner credit: Still from Chariots of Fire, courtesy of Warner Bros.

Read more: How filming the Cleopatra movie nearly broke Hollywood

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