LOS ANGELES — Upon its release back in 1972, John Boorman’s man-versus-nature classic, “Deliverance,” featured a fading TV star, Burt Reynolds, opposite a burgeoning Jon Voight on a fateful canoe trip down a backwoods river.
Based on the best-selling novel by poet laureate James Dickey, the movie became a box-office hit with three Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture.
Boorman, Voight, Reynolds, and Ned Beatty gathered before a screening Saturday morning at Hollywood’s Chinese Multiplex 1 to reflect on their experiences making the movie. The talk was part of the TCM Classic Film Festival, which ran April 25 through 28.
“I just wanted a job,” Reynolds told a packed house. Up until “Deliverance,” he was mainly known for playing Quint the blacksmith on the TV western “Gunsmoke.” At the age of 35, he was a little old to be breaking into movies.
“When I left there, I was walking down the street,” he said about his audition. “I screamed in the air, ‘I think I got it!’ And there were a lot of people going, ‘I think he’s got it!’ not even knowing what the hell I was talking about.”
“Of course Burt was happy to get in a movie like this. It was a movie,” quipped Beatty, who was in a raucous mood, taunting the crowd and griping about promoting the movie for no pay.
Reynolds, a former stuntman, recalled going over the falls one day on the river after camera tests using a dummy proved unconvincing. The result was a broken coccyx and a separated kidney.
“We go to rushes the next day and I said [to the director], ‘How do you feel, John?” laughed Reynolds. “He said, ‘It looks just like a dummy.’”
Voight, who was nominated in 1969 for “Midnight Cowboy,” was coming off a flop called “The Revolutionary” and was skittish about his next project.
“I was a little bit frightened of the rape scene,” he said about the infamous scene in which Ned Beatty’s character is raped by a hillbilly. Boorman told him he had Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando standing by if he wasn’t interested, leaving the actor wondering, “If he can get Brando or Nicholson, what the hell’s he doing with me?”
So Voight consulted his wife, actor Marcheline Bertrand, who thought the script was brilliant.
“Marcheline was always smarter than Jon, no big friggin’ news there,” noted Beatty, who was plucked from regional theater to play the part of the rape victim, Bobby.
“I cast Ned ’cause he was angry,” smiled Boorman. “He walked into the interview in Warner saying, ‘I don’t want to be in your fuckin’ film.’ So I said, ‘I’m casting you anyway.’”
“Deliverance” tells the story of four Atlanta suburbanites who test their mettle on a disastrous canoe trip. With Vietnam raging overseas and an environmentalist movement taking root at home, the 1970 novel has been called a cautionary tale about man’s relationship to nature, as well as an incisive look at our fractured psyche during wartime.
The movie adaptation is regarded as a classic and represents a career high for both the cast and the director.
“I’ve done 70 movies and four television series,” Reynolds said, reflecting on his career. “And of all of them, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve only been in one movie.”