In the annals of Hollywood history there have been few feature films of any genre as brutally criticized as 2000’s “Battlefield Earth,” the controversial adaptation of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s pulpy dystopian novel of 1982.
It was a rollicking space opera set in an Earthly wasteland of the year 3000, lorded over by a cruel race of cat-like, 9-foot-tall aliens called Psychlos, who had enslaved primitive humans to mine for gold. A rebellion rises led by a charismatic tribesman against the oppressors to ensure species’ survival.
Directed by Academy Award-winning British production designer and set decorator Roger Christian, the man who ushered in the pioneering “used universe” look of “Star Wars” and “Alien,” “Battlefield Earth” celebrates its 25th anniversary today.
This $44 million feature starring John Travolta, Forest Whitaker, and Barry Pepper was released by Warner Bros. on May 12, 2000, amid turbulent competition from Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator,” and was immediately panned and ridiculed for its odd costumes, dutch camera angles, plot holes, and hammy overacting.
“The war against Scientology was what triggered the initial backlash, and the film has nothing to do with it,” Christian explained to Space.com. “It is pulp science fiction, and nobody got it. We never stood a chance. I remember the first time in London when it was shown and I stood up in front of the audience and said, ‘This is what it is, it’s pulp fiction.’
“When we went to the L.A. premiere, I sat next to Quentin Tarantino, and next to him was John Travolta. At the end of it Tarantino said, ‘Give me a hug John, give me a hug Roger. This is what I really want to write. But it’s going to take 20 years for people to catch up and realize what you did.'”
Often liberally used as a cautionary tale and symbol of Hollywood box office bombs, if you move past the Scientology backlash, it’s possible to see “Battlefield Earth” in a more favorable light as a fun comic book-styled piece of pop culture.
“I didn’t pick ‘Battlefield Earth,’ I just finished shooting second unit for ‘The Phantom Menace’ and the trailer came out, and by chance, about half the shots I’d done were in the trailer,” Christian recalls. “Because I got to do loads of great graphic stuff that George [Lucas] didn’t have the time to do. I was in L.A. and my manager told me I’d been invited to dinner with John Travolta. I said, ‘Let’s go!’ He was the biggest star on the planet.
“So it was Travolta, myself, my manager and Jonathan Crane who managed Travolta. John gave me a huge hug and said, ‘That’s for ‘Nostradamus,’ because I love it. I can see you’re not afraid of actors.’ He said, ‘Listen I’ve spent years wanting to make ‘Battlefield Earth’ and I realize now I can do it.’ He’d got the power where he’d get the money from Warner Bros, but it had to be done like the first ‘Star Wars,’ at a very low budget. He’d seen the trailer for ‘The Phantom Menace’ and believed I was the only person he knew who could pull this off.”
The optimistic group then got “Star Wars” mastermind and Christian’s good friend George Lucas on the phone, who agreed that if they had that tight of budget, Roger Christian was the one to do it.
“I found out later when we were doing the press tour, John told me it also came about when he was putting a list of directors together for ‘Battlefield’ for Quentin Tarantino. Every time they came back, ‘no.’ When he put my name out, he said ‘yes.’ Quentin revered ‘The Sender’, and he hitched a ride back with us on the plane, and he was acting out scenes.
“John said, ‘If you don’t do it, I can’t make it.’ So there I was on the spot. I loved the book. This is one of the great science fiction books. And Ron Hubbard was the most prolific pulp fiction writer ever. Basically, the budget then was $9 million. We did ‘Battlefield’ in Montreal, where it was incredibly cheap. No one had filmed there yet, they’d only done French art films. I went in with that in mind, using my ‘Star Wars’ experience and the film ‘Nostradamus’ that I made for $4 million in Romania. I’ve always handled bringing in huge screen value with very tight budgets. The final total budget, everything, and I’ve said so many times, was $44 million ($21 million for production/VFX). I signed off on the papers with John Travolta in the Warner office.”
Despite poor reviews, “Battlefield” landed in 3,307 theaters as the second-best release that week of May behind “Gladiator.” It’s still erroneously thought to have lost the studio oceans of money, which isn’t necessarily true, according to Christian.
“‘Battlefield’s’ producer Elie Samaha said the only two movies he made a lot of money out of were ‘The Whole Nine Yards’ and ‘Battlefield Earth.’ None of the producers have ever stood beside it, and I don’t know why. We outgrossed ‘Gladiator’ in the UK for home video. I had to do the final coloring for the DVD with Giles Nuttgens, the DP. We were told that they expected to sell 200,000 copies in six months. They sold 600,000 copies in two months. The last time I got a reference from Elie Samaha, a few years back it had grossed over $150 million combined.”
But as the premiere date loomed, Warner Bros. and Travolta were prepping for an inevitable fight over their campy epic with film journalists lining it up in their critical sights. “They told Warner Bros. that if you don’t let us review it, we’re going to give ‘A Perfect Storm’ a trashing,” he recalls.
“John was furious. They put ‘Battlefield’ out for press right before we launched,” Christian recalls, stating that some critics alleged the film contained “buried subliminal messages into the film, and if you went to the cinema to see it, you’d come out converted to be a Scientologist”. Looking back, these allegations were made by websites like Cultwatch and Factnet, but they were reported on by major sites, including the New York Times, in the run-up to the movie’s launch.
“Our trailer was hitting high marks. 20th Century Fox had ‘Gladiator’, and it was hitting low marks. Rupert Murdoch owns Sky Television, and ten days before our film opened, they’d dropped a huge thing about how this was Scientology and really hammered it. That happened before every screening wherever Sky was prominent. They went to war against us,” alleges Christian.
Despite the controversy, Christian’s working relationship with Travolta on “Battlefield Earth” was ultimately a gratifying experience, and the A-list actor was closely involved in all aspects of the low-budget Canadian production.
“He was very hands-on for everything. The designer, Patrick (Tatopolous), and I went to Dreamworks and had an artist paint up John as Terl. We were able to develop him digitally into something using his face, so we got a big advantage. That ‘rasta’ look started to work. I had a huge fight with Jonathan Crane and Warner execs because I said we should do him like Terl in the book. They said, ‘We’ve got John Travolta. We’ve got to see his face.’ In the book, he’s fully masked with headgear with more of an industrial look. We ended up half-and-half with the nose clips. That was a long process to get that to look right. He went against doing the big, nasty villain voice and tried to carry an underlying humor in his portrayal.
“John was so supportive all the time. He took the food budget and flew in daily fresh fish from Maine and steaks and anything you could ever want. I had to say, ‘John, we’ve got to stop. I can’t even get the crew to work after lunch. And he’d say, ‘No, no you’ve got to feed the crew!'”
While the shift away from the negative narrative of “Battlefield Earth” that Tarantino once predicted hasn’t arrived from critics, the movie has developed a strong cult following, and we wondered what Christian would have changed in retrospect or if there’d ever been talk of a sequel.
“I would have done the second part of the book first,” admits Christian. “We wouldn’t have spent so much time setting up all the characters and the worlds. We could have done that the same way George did in ‘Star Wars.’ He came in on Episode 4. In the book, there’s a massive space battle where Jonnie Goodboy is trying to fly into a tiny hole in this space station. He gets trapped in there, and it’s like a horror film. It’s an amazing sequence.
“‘Battlefield Earth’ played for six months on HBO. They actually offered about $60 million to Travolta to do a sequel. But they deemed it wasn’t enough budget to do it, and I think John was put off by all the violence of the anti-Scientology stuff that Warner Bros. decided they can’t do it.”
After all the dust had settled, Roger Christian remains content, filled with happy memories of making “Battlefield Earth” 25 years later, despite the perceived dislike that has unjustly followed the film.
In an era of colossal box office flops like “The Marvels” and “The Flash”, “Battlefield Earth’s” tragic fate is just another drop in the ocean. Never to be called a classic, it’s far from abysmal.
“I’ve gotten lots of letters and emails saying, ‘You know, I finally watched this and I don’t understand. This is actually a really fun movie,'” he adds. “The biggest impact to me is John had never been on Barbara Walters before. She invited him on and she asked him what film he was most proud of in his life that he’d made. He said ‘Battlefield Earth’ immediately. And that to me was worth a million smiles.”
