Background and career
Lawrence Edward Kasdan (born January 14, 1949) is an American filmmaker. He wrote and directed Body Heat (1981), The Big Chill (1983), Silverado (1985), The Accidental Tourist (1988), and Dreamcatcher (2003). Kasdan also wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and The Bodyguard (1992) and co-wrote four Star Wars films: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Force Awakens (2015), and Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018). Kasdan is known for updating old Hollywood genres—film noir, science fiction, the western—in a classical dramatic style with quick-witted dialogue, but dealing with contemporary social themes. He is also known for his frequent collaborations, including directing William Hurt and Kevin Kline or writing dialogue for Harrison Ford. Kasdan has been nominated for four Academy Awards: as a producer for Best Picture nominee The Accidental Tourist, for which he was also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, and for Best Original Screenplay for both The Big Chill and Grand Canyon (1991). He has often collaborated with his wife Meg Kasdan, his brother Mark Kasdan, and his sons Jonathan Kasdan and Jake Kasdan.
Kasdan was born in Miami Beach, Florida, the son of Sylvia, an employment counselor, and Clarence Kasdan, an electronics-store manager. Kasdan is Jewish. His older brother is Mark Kasdan, who co-wrote Silverado (1985) and produced Dreamcatcher (2003), and he has two sisters. Kasdan grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia. "I felt very fortunate to have had a regular American childhood in the fifties," he said. "It was a safe place, where you owned the town if you had a bicycle." His parents were both "thwarted writers." His father, who died when Kasdan was 14, had wanted to be a playwright, and his mother claimed to have studied with novelist and playwright Sinclair Lewis at the University of Wisconsin. She sold a few stories to "confessional magazines" in the 1950s, and later bought self-help books and typed up their contents with the dream of writing her own book one day. She also struck up conversations with strangers on the bus, saying it was all "grist for the mill" for future writing. "Looking back on it now," Kasdan wrote, "I wonder if maybe I owe her everything. Whether by nature or nurture, I became a writer." Many of Kasdan's movies were inspired by his "difficult childhood and home life," he wrote. "So, in my work, I've looked for something more stable or explored why growing up in my home was so upsetting." "We didn't have a lot of money and neither did anyone around us, and going to the movies was the happiest thing about my childhood," he said. "Movies weren't very big in Wheeling in those days. We used to call up the theater to ask what time the show began, and they'd say, 'What time can you get here?'" He particularly loved The Great Escape (1963) and The Magnificent Seven (1960), both directed by John Sturges—movies that shaped his ideas of manhood and heroism. "Film made its values tangible for me in the ways that parents, school, Sunday School had not. I wanted to live in the world I found in the movies." In 1963, his brother Mark took him to see David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. They arrived a few minutes late, and Mark insisted that they kill six hours until the next showing. "I thought my brother was crazy. But when the show was over, I knew I had done the right thing. As I stumbled from the theater, having seen the whole movie, I had a new hero. It was not T. E. Lawrence, but David Lean". He graduated from Morgantown High School in 1966. To earn money for college, he worked various jobs at a glass factory and the night shift at a supermarket in Wheeling, scraping meat from butcher machines. He applied to the University of Michigan because he was told it had the best-paying college writing contest in the country (the Hopwood Award), and that the playwright Arthur Miller had paid for his studies by winning the award. Miller's teacher, Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, was still a professor there, and Kasdan studied drama writing with Rowe. Kasdan won the Hopwood Award four times between 1968 and 1970, winning a total of $2,000. "When I received the letter telling me that I had won Hopwood Awards in both fiction and drama, my life changed forever," he said. "It was the first sign the real world, the outside world, the big-time world, had given me that this was not just a hopeless dream. ... Even though I had many discouraging years after that, there was never a day after I received that letter that I doubted I would be able to make my way as a writer." While in college, Kasdan marched on Washington to protest the Vietnam War. He also made one short film. "Technically, it was very crude," he said. "It was a wry look at a professor I knew who was very interested in all the young female students—sort of a rough, humorous film about his fascination with one particular girl. It was shot on 16mm. I cut it and did the sound, but I was never a technically proficient student filmmaker." He was determined to become a director, and decided the best path was to write screenplays. He got into UCLA's writing program and briefly moved to Los Angeles, but found the experience frustrating and moved back to Ann Arbor, where he worked in a record store and continued writing screenplays. He pursued a master's degree in education at the University of Michigan and graduated in 1971, with plans to support himself as a high-school English teacher until he broke into Hollywood. But he soon discovered that there were no high-school English teaching jobs. "It was almost as hard to get that kind of work as being a movie director," he said. The experience he did have as a student teacher later proved useful on film sets: "You can control an unruly class at almost any level, but the more you yell, the less effective yelling becomes," he said. "That has influenced my approach to directing; for me, being hard is giving someone a look where another director might scream at them."
Unable to find a teaching position, Kasdan took a job as an advertising copywriter at the W. B. Doner agency in Detroit—a profession he didn't enjoy but found success in, earning a Clio Award for his first TV commercial, as well as an award from The One Show. His supervisor, Jim Dale, remembered Kasdan "always said he was better at writing for TV than for print, and that was certainly prophetic." Kasdan called his five years in advertising "hellacious", and persisted in writing screenplays at night.
The Bodyguard Kasdan's sixth finished screenplay, written in 1975, was about a singer who falls in love with her bodyguard. With The Bodyguard he was able to get an agent, Norman Kurland, and he took an advertising job in Los Angeles to further justify a move to California. Kurland sent the script around town for two years, and it was rejected 67 times. "We couldn't even get him a job writing Starsky and Hutch," Kurland said, although Kasdan had no desire to write for television. He was hired to write a treatment for a low-budget feature for Paramount, but the film was never made. He continued to write screenplays, including what he called an "un-producible historical" movie. The Bodyguard was finally optioned by Warner Bros. in 1977 for $20,000. It was rewritten many times over the years, and attached to different actresses (including Diana Ross and Whoopi Goldberg) whose characters had various occupations. Kasdan wrote it with Steve McQueen in mind as the bodyguard, Frank. In the original draft, the U.S. president Frank failed to save was John F. Kennedy. Kevin Costner read the screenplay when Kasdan directed him in Silverado, the role that made him a star. In 1991, he asked Kasdan to make The Bodyguard with Costner in the title role. Kasdan had "messed around" with it so many times that he felt too burned out, and he was also preparing to direct Grand Canyon—so he chose instead to produce it with Costner, and they hired Mick Jackson, who had just made L.A. Story, to direct. Whitney Houston was cast as superstar singer Rachel Marron. Kasdan was not happy with the way the film turned out, "but I think it had nothing to do with Mick Jackson," he later said. "I think it had to do with the fact that I'm not a good person for having other people direct my screenplays ... and so I was very unhappy with The Bodyguard. Kevin and I got very involved in the editing, which is not something I would normally do with any other director. I don't want people messing with my movie. But we were the producers and we had serious problems with it." Despite receiving "probably the worst reviews I've ever had," Kasdan said, the film was a huge box-office success, earning more than $411 million worldwide. "If I had directed that film it probably wouldn't have done anything like that business," Kasdan wrote. Continental Divide While The Bodyguard was being passed around town, Kasdan wrote Continental Divide—a script about a brash Chicago journalist who falls in love with a woman living in the mountains studying eagles, in the vein of an old Spencer Tracy / Katharine Hepburn comedy. He came up with the outline while eating lunch on the lawn of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Kurland shopped it around, and took it to Steven Spielberg, who was on the dubbing stage for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Spielberg had Universal buy the script for $150,000 in October 1977, with a desire to serve as executive producer. "I was looking for a love story to do," Spielberg said. "Actually, it was a very intense bidding situation. There were four studios bidding for it and Universal made the highest bid. The script was wonderful. Larry is an excellent writer. He writes the sort of material we haven't seen around here for a long time. He writes about the '30s and '40s in a fascinating, exciting way. He loves old movies and draws on them for his work. He's exploring new territory based on old ground." The movie was eventually made several years later, starring John Belushi and Blair Brown and directed by Michael Apted. It came out on September 18, 1981, three weeks after the release of Kasdan's directorial debut, Body Heat. According to Kasdan, the original script was "very different from the film which resulted. The script had a kind of Howard Hawksian speed, momentum, hopefully wit about it. I don't think the film turned out that way, which was one of those painful experiences I had early on."
Raiders of the Lost Ark Spielberg's enthusiasm for Continental Divide led him to hire Kasdan to write Raiders of the Lost Ark, which he was developing with George Lucas. "I think that what they were looking for was someone who could write Raiders in the same way that Hawks would have someone write a movie for him—a strong woman character, a certain kind of hero," Kasdan said. In a now-famous meeting (with producer Frank Marshall also in the room), "George, Steven, and I talked for about 20 minutes. Then we stood up and shook hands, and George said, 'Let's make this movie.' I had just met the guy, and a few minutes later I'm in business with him." "George said, 'We're going to do a movie that's like the old serials,'" Kasdan recalled. "'I don't know too much about it, but the hero is named after my dog, Indiana. I know the hero wears a fedora and a leather jacket and carries a whip.'" That the artifact would be the Biblical Ark of the Covenant was writer-director Philip Kaufman's idea. Kaufman got it from his orthodontist when he was 11 years old (at one point, Kaufman was going to be involved with the screenplay. He received a "story by" credit). The rest of the plot was hashed out in a brainstorm session with Lucas, Spielberg, and Kasdan:
We had a tape recorder going, and George essentially guided the story process and the three of us pitched the entire movie in about five days. And that's where the fantasy of all our pent-up, wet-movie dreams coalesced. Most of the time we were on our feet, trying to out-shout each other with ideas. They wound up with a hundred-page transcript, and Kasdan wrote the screenplay in Spielberg's office while the director was making 1941. It took him six months. For the character of Indiana Jones, Kasdan said he wanted to capture the essence of old Hollywood stars like Errol Flynn, Burt Lancaster, and Clark Gable. "One of my favorite actors is Steve McQueen," he said. "I loved the poetry in the way he moved—his stylized movement. I wanted Raiders to have that heightened reality. That's where I came together with George's love of serials and Steven's fascination with kinetic thrust." Lucas wanted the character to be more like James Bond, so Kasdan had to write a different version of the scene where Brody goes to his house, he said. "George wanted Indy to be a playboy, so Jones was going to answer the door wearing a tuxedo. Then, when Brody went into the house, he would see a beautiful, Harlow-type blonde sipping champagne in Indy's living room. My feeling was that Indiana Jones' two sides (professor and adventurer) made him complicated enough without adding the playboy element." The film came out on June 12, 1981, and made more than $390 million internationally, winning five Academy Awards out of nine nominations. Kasdan eventually warmed to the finished film. "I look at Raiders now and I'm very proud of it," he wrote in 1999. "I think it's a terrific movie and I think Steven did a magnificent job with it." He was later asked to write Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but declined because he didn't want to associate with the film; he perceived it as "horrible, mean and unpleasant" due to it being developed during a chaotic period in Spielberg's and Lucas's lives. Several elements from Kasdan's earlier Raiders draft found their way in the prequel. Kasdan semi-returned to the franchise in 2007 when he assisted David Koepp in writing some romantic dialogue for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back Lucas initially hired Leigh Brackett, the sci-fi novelist who also wrote screenplays for Howard Hawks—including The Big Sleep (1946)—to write the sequel to Star Wars (1977). But Brackett died in March 1978, while the film was still in pre-production, and Lucas was dissatisfied with her script. He wrote the next draft himself, which established structure and twists close to the final film, but needed dialogue polishing. When Kasdan delivered his script for Raiders, Lucas asked him to rewrite The Empire Strikes Back. Kasdan suggested he read Raiders first, but Lucas reportedly said: "If I hate Raiders, I'll call you up tomorrow and cancel this offer, but basically I get a feeling about people." Most of the plot elements and characters were already in place, but Kasdan helped in part make it darker than the first Star Wars. "George was open to it and ready to have it happen," he said. "Over the three Star Wars films, he saw a trajectory. The Empire Strikes Back was the second act, and traditionally, the second act is when things start to go bad. George had made his [most important] decision when he hired Irvin Kershner to direct, even though Kershner and I were acting as his tools." When The Empire Strikes Back came out on May 21, 1980, it was the first time Kasdan's name appeared in a movie's credits. He felt his main contribution to Lucas's series was developing character. "George is one of the good guys," Kasdan said in 1981. "But he and I have some disagreements, too. George thinks if you play the commercial movie game, a very expensive game, you have to play for big stakes." Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi Kasdan launched his directing career after writing The Empire Strikes Back, and was uninterested in writing another Star Wars movie. But Lucas had supported him on Body Heat as an uncredited producer, so when Lucas asked him to write the screenplay for the third chapter (then titled Revenge of the Jedi), Kasdan felt obliged to repay him. He spent the summer of 1981 co-writing the shooting script with Lucas (based on a story by Lucas). "In both the Star Wars movies it's really George's story," Kasdan said. "I came into Empire after there was already a draft. On Jedi, George had done a draft, which we changed radically. Then he and I really collaborated on the script." Return of the Jedi came out on May 25, 1983, and made $475 million. Lucas had already publicly spoken about making both a prequel and sequel trilogy; the prequels he wrote and directed himself 20 years later, and the Walt Disney Company made episodes 7 through 9 after it purchased Lucasfilm in 2012. In 1981, Kasdan surmised that "they'll probably shoot the before-Luke trilogy next, about young Darth and young Ben. But with George, you can't be sure. For myself, I can only say this will be my last Star Wars movie. On the other hand, you never know. I didn't think I'd be working on this one." During the Star Wars prequels' development, Lucas constantly approached Kasdan to help him write them, but Kasdan resisted returning to the franchise, opining that Lucas should do the prequels as he wished given the creative clashes Lucas had with him, Kershner and Richard Marquand during the original trilogy's development, despite that Lucas thought it would be great for Kasdan to take a second pass at the screenplays. Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens When Disney bought Lucasfilm with plans to make more Star Wars films, Kathleen Kennedy, Lucasfilm's new president, asked Kasdan to be involved. "I said, 'I don't really want to ... I just feel like I've done this,'" he recalled. "They said, 'We want to do a movie about Han.' That got me. That was the only one that could possibly have gotten me." Kennedy had hired Michael Arndt to write Episode VII, and she asked Kasdan if he would consult on that script as well. He always felt that "Han Solo is really the character that people find irresistible, not Luke," he said. "Luke is too good for people to invest in. Han is right out of the classic mold. He's William Holden. He's Jimmy Cagney. He's Humphrey Bogart. Han is the one who is compromised and reluctantly forced to be altruistic and heroic." He had wanted to kill Han off in Return of the Jedi. "We're closing off the trilogy," he said. "And we want to lose somebody important. It would give some stakes to this thing. And George did not like it." In The Force Awakens, he and actor Harrison Ford finally got their wish. Star Wars: The Force Awakens came out on December 18, 2015. It made more than $2 billion internationally, breaking the North American record for top-grossing film of all time. In his review for The Hollywood Reporter, Todd McCarthy wrote: "One notably feels the hand of Lawrence Kasdan, who ... co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and, perhaps more significantly, authored Raiders of the Lost Ark, the film this new one most resembles in terms of its incident and exuberance." Kasdan, Abrams, and Arndt won the Saturn Award for Best Writing for The Force Awakens. This marked Kasdan's first win for a Star Wars film, after being nominated for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Despite not working in the following sequels, Kasdan later talked with Abrams, Lucas, and Rian Johnson about the story for the saga's last episode, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Solo: A Star Wars Story Kasdan wrote the screenplay for a Han Solo origin story—the one assignment with Disney and Lucasfilm he initially signed on for—with his son, Jonathan Kasdan, a writer and director. The younger Kasdan had had small roles in his father's movies since The Big Chill, but they had never written a script together. Solo: A Star Wars Story details the character's backstory: how he got his name, how he met Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian, and the beginnings of his internal battle between self-interested scoundrel and hero. Alden Ehrenreich was cast in the role Ford originated. The production was plagued by drama; most notably, the original directors—Phil Lord and Christopher Miller—were fired during the shoot and replaced by Ron Howard. The film opened on May 25, 2018, and made just under $393 million worldwide. Kasdan later attributed Solo's underperformance to Lucasfilm "blowing it", after which he left the Star Wars universe as promised, not responding to any of Lucasfilm's subsequent attempts to woo him back, even sending him a messenger with a new script.
