Development
The novel was published in 1972. Film rights were bought that year by 20th Century Fox who announced the film would be produced by Paul Heller and Fred Weintraub for their Sequoia Productions Company. However the film was not made.
The material was optioned by Charles Roven who tried to interest Walter Hill in it in 1982. Hill turned it down. "I turned it down three years later and about two years after that", said Hill. "I thought it was a good yarn ... [but] ... At the same time, there is this plastic-surgery story I thought cheated on melodrama. It's one of those conventions of 1940's movies, like the missing identical twin or amnesia." Hill added that, "No studio wanted to make it, and I didn't think any actor would be willing to play it."
In 1987, Richard Gere was going to star with Harold Becker to direct. Eventually Al Pacino signed to play the lead. By February 1988 Becker was out as director, replaced by Walter Hill. Then Pacino dropped out and Mickey Rourke was cast instead.
In 1989, Walter Hill explained why he changed his mind:
First, I figured that Hollywood is based on melodrama anyway and, second, I thought up a way to present the story in a way that resisted histrionics. More importantly, I found an actor who could play Johnny and not make it risible. Someone who understood the pitfalls of the thing. The main thing is that motion pictures have conditioned us to expect psychological realism. This is a drama in a different category. It's about moral choices ... I knew I was on very thin ice. If you let any histrionics in, it will fall apart. You have to trust the drama of the whole rather than an individual scene. And that's antithetical to most actors. They want to know, 'Where's my big moment? When do I get to cry and scream?' Mickey understood that.
"I'm drawn to characters where there's no happy ending, where things aren't rosy in the end", said Rourke. "It's not a happy world and there aren't easy, sappy endings to life."
Hill said the film was reminiscent of 1940s film noir:
You have the doomed character, and audiences back then were more comfortable with it. You can imagine John Garfield having a lot of fun with something like this ... But this one has a hard road commercially, and I'd like to see it have a chance to find an audience that will be interested. Some people like the movie and others are really offended by it. That's fine with me. I like movies that stir things up a little.
"I wanted a very neutral palette", said Hill. "If I had my druthers, I'd rather have made it a black-and-white film. I don't think you can make a real film noir without shooting it in black-and-white. But that wasn't one of the options. You either have to have a star or a director that has sufficient clout. This did not fit into any of those categories."
"The audience is invited to anticipate the drama rather than be surprised", added Hill.
"Oh, there are action sequences in it, but it's not the heroes-and-villains kind of piece that people usually perceive to be an action film", Hill said. "I'd say it's more character-driven. ... Characters loaded down with psychoanalytic baggage bore me to death. My own belief is that Freud may have been a brilliant thinker, but Freudianism is completely without scientific basis. At least as `scientific' is usually defined." Instead of seeing character as something defined by puberty-related traumas, Hill prefers to see character defined by action – "what a man does", he says, "not what may or may not have been done to him in some faraway past." In this regard, the core of Johnny Handsome is a " a character-is-destiny story ... Maybe more than film noir, it's a tragedy. Something that just as easily could have played in Elizabethan England or Ancient Greece."
"I don't think this is a very real movie", said Hill. "But at the same time, it's quite real once you understand where you are, once you're kind of `over there.' But not everybody can get over there. And I think that the people that can't get over there, you're not terribly interested in, anyway. Which is probably not the attitude of the marketplace, but ... there are some movies you make for different reasons, you know?"
The novel was set in New Jersey in the small time Mafia but Hill changed it to New Orleans, where he had shot Hard Times (1975). "I thought the small-time Mafia thing had been seen an awful lot, and I thought maybe a kind of look at redneck crime in a Southern city might be a little different", he said.
"New Orleans is the kind of place where you can believe anything is possible", he added. "It's got a Gothic quality... We don't use what the New Orleans tourists see. Just the edge of the film is New Orleans. The book is probably a truer psychological profile than the film. This is the musical version compared to the book. The movie at least presents that there's a lot of agony, though. God, the movie is so . . . dark."
Hill recognised the ending was likely to polarise audiences.
A lot of people, it just kicks 'em right in the head. This is a strange thing to say, but 30 or 40 years ago, I don't think the ending would have been quite so surprising. Because, even though Hollywood is built upon the convention of happy endings, in the old days there was always the 20 percent, or something like that, that weren't. And therefore, if you didn't give 'em a happy ending it wasn't, like, out of nowhere. Now, there's just no movies that are like this. They'll have muted, sad endings ... but the idea that you're gonna shoot down your protagonist, shoot him dead ... But, you know, at the same time I think the film does have a positive ending. It's not a happy ending, but it's a positive ending. I mean, the character does achieve redemption on his own terms. And he always understood what the stakes were, he understood the code he was living by ... But I suspect that that's probably too difficult a calculation for most observers ... I think there's a problem with audiences coming into the movie, because they don't know what to expect. I always thought the proper title of the movie should be, in the Elizabethan sense, The Tragedy of Johnny Handsome. If you told everybody that's what the title of the movie was, they'd kind of be prepared. The story is organized along the lines of a rather more classic tragedy. It's certainly organized around the principle that character is destiny. ... I think it's a movie about moral choice, not psychological truth. If there is such a thing as psychological truth. I think my movies are very much about character. I take the view of character that has basically prevailed for about 2,000 years, up until the end of the second World War. Which is -- this is a vulgar oversimplification -- but it's that `What I do is my character, my actions define my character.' After the second World War, thanks to theories of modern psychology and confusion about what was scientific and what wasn't, the definition of character became much more, `How did I become what I am?' I am not so much interested in that theory as I am in the previous theory. And I think that throws you profoundly out of step with your peers and with the critical community. Not so much around the world, but certainly in the United States. But I think it's changing.
