About John Badham: John MacDonald Badham is an English-born American film director, best known for the films Saturday Night Fever (1977), Blue Thunder (1983), WarGames (1983), Short Circuit (1986), Stakeout (1987), Bird on a Wire (1990) and others.
There were scenes that just for length purposes, and knowing that the attention span of kids is not great, don't make it much longer than about 90 minutes.
I would do it today because the thing that appealed to me was not necessarily the mechanics of the robot, but it was his personality and how funny and charming he was.
Technological things, that Germans and Japanese would get real excited about.
Sometimes it's literally just a feeling that you get that somebody is more interested than someone else; and they may both say they're interested, but you get a feeling.
Phillip Harrison was the production designer, though, I think he's uncredited. He's done most of my films like Blue Thunder. Lots and lots over the years.
Monofilament is what you use to go fishing. The line on your fishing rod is probably going to be black. You get to the end of the line and you tie on this clear plastic, thin thread called monofilament.
In this movie they took them up in space. They're floating around and doing zero gravity stuff. Well, they had to do it all on wires. All the wires had to be painted black against this black background. If you didn't light it properly you could see t...
When the movie was done, Number Five was crated up. Eric took him over to Germany; displayed him over there because Germans really liked this movie. It was very popular with them.
The personality problem is so tough when you're not able to pay people. It's bad enough when you can pay people, but, when you have people working for free, often their motivation is diminished considerably.
I also know that in the second movie, the sequel, Eric made some huge advances with the robot suit. That just made it even better. You put the suit on and moved your arms then the robot's arms would move in sync with yours.
In our story logic which we're making up, if we're saying he's alive, then like a quadriplegic who's in bed he can move his head and shoulders, but he can't move his arms. If he could just turn on that power to his legs and arms, the nerves could get...
One thing I was thinking about the other day was you can't even conceive of the kinds of things you can do in movies today. The idea that you could draw, in a computer, dinosaurs and have them running around was totally impossible.
