From Indiana Jones to BODY HEAT: Lawrence Kasdan on Writing & Directing

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]I graduated from Michigan 70 and I got a master's degree in education just to have some way to make a living. It turned out to be the worst thing I could have done because it was the time of the Vietnam War and teaching was a way that people thought they could get out of their military because there was a deferment for that. And so the teaching market was full gluted, impossible to get a teaching job. So my backup thing was gone. And um I met a man my wife knew in Detroit and went to work in advertising. I optioned the bodyguard 1977. Then pretty quickly sold Continental Divide. So during those seven years between college and selling, I wrote things and they went nowhere.

[00:00:54]And it's easy to write the first screenplay. It's really hard to write the third one. Usually people who write the first one think it was pretty damn good and they don't understand why it wasn't received that way in the world.

[00:01:08]But when you write the third one, you start to understand what are people reacting to? What works? What are you doing right? what are you doing wrong?

[00:01:16]And as I used to tell young writers, I had no alternative plan. And that saved me because if you're not thinking, I'm going to get out of this cuz I'm failing. It makes you much stronger about staying and keeping at it. Someone once said to me, you know, you can't get lucky, which is really the key to Hollywood. Um unless you're on the road if you continued the journey. If you stop, there's no luck. You can never get lucky. And most people do stop because it's hard to keep going when you're not being rewarded or validated. And I was so lucky when I stumbled into Raiders of the Lost Arc. These guys, they looked at Continental Divide and said, "That's the kind of tone we want in Raiders: The Lost Arc." And George and Steven were coming off of Star Wars and Jaws. They were able to make best deal in history.

[00:02:15]And the studios hated it because they were asking things that no filmmaker had been daring enough to ask. You know, they wanted rights to things. They wanted pieces of the back end that were really pioneering.

[00:02:30]And so I got to watch that process, which is a business thing happen. But two things give you the power to be demanding. one, you've done something that everybody says, "Oh my god, that guy knows the magic." You have credibility. And the second thing is you have something they want to do. And the Raider script was that thing. And it spread across town so fast that here were the two hottest filmmakers in the world. They had hired this complete unknown to do this. I spent six months writing it and George was very generous with me, including me in that when I was completely unknown. I had no leverage whatsoever.

[00:03:13]When I finished writing it, he said, "Falling behind on the next Star Wars, would you come in and work on that?" Lee Brackett, wonderful writer, mystery writer, woman that worked on The Big Sleep, he had hired her to write The Empire Strikes Back. She'd become ill and passed. And he said to me, "I don't have a screenplay, but I have hundreds of people in England getting salaries as we prep this movie that I haven't written yet. Will you come and work on that?" It was a fast, expedited, faster than anything I'd done because the clock was ticking in England and the money was being spent. So working with George and then eventually Irvin Kersner was a wonderful addition to my experience.

[00:04:06]Someone once said that wanting to be a screenwriter is like wanting to be a co-pilot. All the power, all the decision making, all the fun, all the juice, all the excitement is in directing.

[00:04:19]And that's obvious the second you're doing it. And you know you may get real satisfaction out of writing. I did when I was writing columns and plays and fiction I wrote at Michigan too. It was pleasurable but it was nothing like I could see when I started directing my own plays at the University of Michigan.

[00:04:41]And I often say that people my age were born at the right time. And you don't think that when you're struggling to make something happen. But looking back now, you see what an incredibly welcoming moment it was in Hollywood. No one made it easy. No one wanted to do what you wanted to do. But in fact, the doors were open. And I had noticed that a lot of writers were beginning to get to direct and they were my contemporaries. And I thought, this is how I'm going to do this. I'm going to get in there the way that Paul Schrader did and John Millius and a lot of people who would never have had a chance to direct were able to get their foot in by writing. I said to George early on when it came close to directing Body Heat, I said, you know, I feel that I'm deficient in my technical knowledge and I really feel confident about my writing, but I not like Steven who grew up with lenses and cameras and how do you make this work and how could we have special effects in a high school movie?

[00:05:52]That had not been on my mind. And he said, "Directing has nothing to do with the technical aspects of it. It's all about what kind of person you are."

[00:06:05]Well, that's not something everybody gets to hear and it releases you from a lot of your insecurities. If you believe that, well, I can't change that much what I am, but obviously what I am has been drawn to this discipline, which is very difficult, hard to get into. And yet I've kept trying. So there's something more than just my interest.

[00:06:28]There's actually some drive to do this to fulfill my life. After this luck of stumbling into the biggest movies in the world, people said, "Whoa, who's this guy?" Alan Lad Jr. had made Star Wars.

[00:06:43]And I had gotten to know him around the making of Empire. He was a lovely guy.

[00:06:49]He said, "You're turning down my offers to write. What is it you want to do?"

[00:06:53]And I said, "Well, I want to direct and I know what I want to direct." And he said, "What's that?" And I told him about Body Heat. And he said, "Well, that sounds kind of good. I can't tell you I will commit to you directing, but I will pay for you to write it." So, I moved into an office at Fox where he was the head of the studio. So, once you were in, there were a lot of possibilities.

[00:07:20]And ever since then, it's been more and more difficult.

[00:07:25]And it's the rise of statistics and algorithms and technology that have where Hollywood began to think they knew how they could engineer a successful movie.

[00:07:41]Well, no one can and there's no knowing how anything it'll do. And the they had replaced these technocrats and things had replaced Jack Warner and Sam Conn and these singular difficult awful some of them people who ran these studios but who trusted their own instincts and brought in very good people to fight with. You know they brought in Hawk and Kappa and those guys started out as doing what they were told and making 10 movies a year. But when they became successful, they would fight with the studio heads. The studio head was always going to win in some way or another. But that for that fight created some of the best movies ever made. And it wasn't the studio was so brilliant, but he did had a lot of them had a strong instinct about what would keep people interested, what would make them come back to see the next one.