John Millius

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 11, 1944, John Frederick Milius became a voracious reader as a child, and later a surfer. He was crazy about joining the Marines to fight in the Vietnam War, but suffering from chronic asthma, he had to stay home. As a consequence, he suffered a kind of trauma to the point that many years later the Coen brothers caricatured him, taking him as a model for the character of Walter Sobchak, that Vietnam-obsessed Jew capable of pulling “a fucking pipe in the bowling alley” in  The big lebowski .“It totally demoralized me. He felt that he had been rejected as a human being. Possibly, I am obfuscated and have been fixated on the war since then, ”she recalls. He substituted his militaristic urges for writing. “Since I couldn’t find my own unit, I did the next best thing which was to write it.”

During a rainy day on a summer vacation in Hawaii in 1962, he stumbled upon a movie theater showing a series of Akira Kurosawa films , which made him fall in love with cinema. John Milius studied film at the University of Southern California School of Film-Television, where he met George Lucas . Together they would be part of the group destined to change the Seventh Art forever, which also included Martin Scorsese , Paul Schrader , Francis Ford Coppola , and Steven Spielberg , with whom he could spend entire days discussing plans by Howard Hawks and other classic filmmakers.

“Money changed everything,” John Milius told Peter Biskind, author of the book “Quiet Bikers, Wild Bulls.” “These guys got too bright, and they all drifted away. George Lucas had his entourage. He was infallible, everything had to be for him. And you can’t talk to Steven. He is no longer a human being. In his case, the producers realized his immense talent for dialogues, which is why they put him in charge of the Dirty Harry script , where he shone with “Make my day” and other pearls. With the scripts for The Adventures of Jeremiah Johnson and The Hanging JudgeHe came to collect a record sum for the time, 300,000 dollars for each one, and other strange counterparts, which show his eccentricity, what he called “girls, gold and guns”, that is, girls, gold (a lot of money) and pistols, for example he kept the 44-caliber Magnum worn by Inspector Harry Callahan.

When he wrote Jaws , he dictated over the phone to Steven Spielberg in the middle of filming, the unforgettable monologue about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. Francis Ford Coppola offered him absolute freedom to adapt “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad , which gave rise to Apocalypse Now , for which he composed other of his mythical phrases, such as “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning ”. For this work, Coppola and Milius received an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay, while the Writers Guild placed it among the candidates for the original screenplay, for the enormous changes from the book.

He soon got tired of writing movies that glorified others. “Writing for someone else is the biggest mistake any writer makes.” He made his directorial debut with The Reversal of Richard Sun , about a rebel leader in an apocalyptic world, which went largely unnoticed. He was better received with Dillinger , with Warren Oates as the notorious gangster and also The Wind and the Lion , in which Sean Connery played Raisuli, an Arab leader who kidnaps an American widow and her children. Unfortunately, his ambitious nostalgic film Big Wednesday , about young surfers, was crashing at the box office. At that point in his career, John Miliushe was about to be cut off from Hollywood.

Producer Dino De Laurentiis came to rescue John Milius , who signed him to direct Conan the Barbarian . It occurred to him that Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger was perfect for the role, but the Italian didn’t like the idea at all. “Hire someone else who has a box office pull”, to which the director replied “Okay, then Dustin Hoffman ”. In the end, the boss had no choice but to compromise. Shot in Spain, with Jorge Sanz giving life to the protagonist as a child, with Nadiuska as his mother, the film became the greatest success up to that moment of epic fantasy in the cinema.

At that time, John Milius was at the top, and he could choose any project he wanted. But he crashed into Red Dawn , where Patrick Swayze and other young men faced off against Soviet troops, who had invaded the United States overnight. Since then he has been relegated to low-budget projects, such as Farewell to the King and The Flight of the Intruder , which went unnoticed. “I feel like a barbarian in Hollywood, I only have enemies,” he said. Bankrupt, because his accountant ran away, leaving him with one hand in front of him and the other behind him, John Milius  was able to get out of poverty thanks to HBO giving the green light to the series Roma, in which he worked as creator. Unfortunately, in 2010 he suffered a stroke, which caused him to retire from professional activity.

Divorced in 1967 from Renee Fabri, with whom he has two children, he joined Celia Kaye, mother of his daughter Amanda Milius , director of the documentary The Plot Against the President , from 2020. Since 1992, he has had actress Elan Oberon as a partner. . Member for years of the Board of Directors of the National Rifle Association, along with Charlton Heston , John Milius defends compulsory military service, and curiously defines himself as an anarchist. “I am such a right-wing extremist that I consider myself an anarchist. Any true right-winger, if he goes far enough, hates all forms of government, because government must be done with cattle and not with human beings.”