At Largo, Waterworld‘s original director was Nils Gaup, a little-known Norwegian director who’d made the action-adventure, Pathfinder. Licht and Mueller wound up joining forces with producer Larry Gordon, who’d recently formed his own production company, Largo Entertainment – a firm that had recently enjoyed success with such films as Field Of Dreams, starring one Kevin Costner. The budget would have been somewhat more generous than the $5 million Brad Krevoy had balked at in 1986: around $30 million, making it roughly in line with a mid-budget thriller of the early 1990s, like Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break. “We had mapped out several ways of keeping it under control,” Licht told the LA Times in 1995, before explaining that their plan was to film the movie in a water tank in Malta – the same watery set used for such films as Raise The Titanic and the ill-fated Cutthroat Island. “We saw it basically as a spaghetti western on water,” Mueller said of that early draft, which impressed he and Licht enough that they began to figure out a way of making it on a relatively low budget. The screenplay soon landed in the hands of Andy Licht and Jeff Mueller, who by the late 80s had made a name for themselves with the low-budget teen comedy, License To Drive, starring Coreys Haim and Feldman. Perhaps bolstered by this, Rader dug out his Waterworld script, gave it a bit of a polish, and began to send it out on spec. It was surreal – he wouldn’t show anyone the horse, he would always hide it.”īy 1988, Rader had directed his first movie: a little-seen horror piece called Grandmother’s House, produced by Greek impresario Nico Mastorakis – the chap who also gave the world such films as Blood Tide and Ninja Academy. One of the things that made the Mariner unique in my script was that he originally had a white horse on his boat, which was a river barge at that point.
“There were also some very surreal elements. “There were all sorts of very odd, funny touches like that,” Rader said. Tonally, however, Rader’s screenplay had more eccentric and colourful elements than the shooting drafts the story’s villain, called Deacon in the finished film, was originally called Neptune, and “he had a trident and sat in a clamshell throne.”
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