'Saturn 3' Was the Weirdest Sci-Fi Movie

In March of 1977, the late John Barry approached producer/director Stanley Donen with an idea for one of the weirdest sci-fi movies ever pitched, which contained elements of both the Frankenstein tale and the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Donen liked the idea and offered to raise the money for Barry to make the film. Donen then took the story to Lord Lew Grade and Martin Starger, whom he hoped would back the project.

Grade agreed to look at the script and took it with him on a trip from Los Angeles to New York. Sitting across the aisle from Grade on the plane was actress Farrah Fawcett. As Donen told the story, “Grade walked across the aisle and said, 'How would you like to be in this picture?' And then he handed her the script. Farrah's representative was flying with her, and by the time they got off the plane, Grade had made a deal with her to make a movie which he didn’t even own.”

But Grade wasted no time in changing that circumstance. “He rang me up,” Donen continued, “and said, 'How would you like Farrah Fawcett?' I said, 'Fine.' He said, 'Well, you have her.' He then proceeded to make a deal for the rights.”

Donen Steps In

Thus began the saga that ended with the production of Stanley Donen’s first sci-fi movie, Saturn 3. The eminent producer/director, whose forte has been primarily musicals and sophisticated comedies, initially had no intention of becoming personally involved in the film. It was to be the project of his friend and working partner, John Barry. But then, in the midst of making the sci-fi movie, Barry died and Donen was forced to take over.

The man who directed such classics as Singing in the Rain, which is considered one of the best films of the 1950s, as well asSeven Brides for Seven Brothers, Funny Face, Indiscreet, Charade, and Arabesque, had misgivings about doing this sci-fi movie, although he was always a science fiction aficionado.

“This one is so different,” Donen explained as he relaxed in the posh Bel Air home he shared with his then actress-wife Yvette Mimieux. “I wasn’t going to direct it, so I can’t really relate to it as I did to my other films. It was not for me to do, though I did end up directing it. I don’t know whether I would have chosen it for myself. It’s in a different world. The story is very challenging to sustain. That was going to be somebody else’s problem.”

Basically, said Donen, the story is about two people. “Adam and Eve, if you like—Farrah Fawcett and Kirk Douglas, who live in a remote place which no other people inhabit. It’s a little planet of their own, actually a moon. They have been there for years on end, and there is no end in sight. In the midst of that comes Harvey Keitel, who, I suppose, is the snake in the Bible. When he sees the lady, he is dripping with desire and passion for her. He brings with him plans for a robot that he is going to build, which is part mechanical and part organic. The robot learns whatever it learns from the man who creates it. In that situation, Farrah and Kirk have to deal first with Harvey and secondly with the robot. The son starts to resemble the father—a sort of Frankenstein. But I shouldn't tell you any more because the fun of any story is not knowing how it is going to work out.”

Donen admitted that he was wary about doing a sci-fi movie which only had three human characters. “But I enormously enjoyed The Thing, which had very few characters. And Alien, which I only saw about two months ago—long after our film was finished. Alien, I guess, had about eight or nine characters, which is a nice handful. We’ve really got just three. It was worrisome, but that was the nature of the idea. We were off and running before anyone knew what was going on.”

Gothic Horror with a Robotic Twist

As in Alien, the characters in Saturn 3 are trapped in a relatively small, enclosed space while a monster runs amok. But Donen said the similarity ends there. He did hope, however, that the audience would sense the same sort of tension as they did in Alien. “It's a terror movie,” he explained. “And it was written before Alien. John [Barry] had the idea four or five years ago. It’s a pity we didn’t get it out first. There is the similarity of the monster villain, but ours doesn’t take on the guise of a monster. Ours is beautiful to look at—in a strange way. The alien was a sort of organic reptile with a steel mouth. Ours looks more human—it has legs. And we show ours.

“In Alien, you only see bits of the creature briefly. If you got more than a glimpse of it, that would give the game away. From a story point of view, if you have a frightening villain, you can’t show him much. Remember the shark in Jaws? You mostly look at the sea. In The Thing, you don’t see it. It’s hidden behind a door, and a hand comes out. Eventually, when you do see it, the Thing is on fire and obscured by smoke. Ours, on the other hand, is constantly on the screen. And one of the biggest problems was to make it believable. I longed for the Alien situation where the terror is unseen but present. But I didn’t have that option. The robot had to be present in the scene.”

Donen had great admiration for the principle robots in Star Wars. “I loved them. I have never seen better. I hope we did something as good. But what we tried to do is so much more complicated because our story is basically the four elements—Kirk and Farrah, Harvey and the robot. We were attempting something so tremendously complex in building it.”

Almost Human

While admiring Star Wars’ robots, Donen tried to avoid creating a robot that looked similar to such well-known ones. “But you do that from the inside out,” he explains. “You say, ‘No, that looks like something else.' The hardest part is the reality. What our robot is asked to do is what a human can do, and more. It is supposed to remove something from Farrah's eye and rip down a metal door. Our robot is expected to sit, walk, climb, think, regard, pick up chess pieces, break a metal flask in his hand, cut things with his fingers, drum his fingers.”

In addition to making people believe the robot could do all these things, Donen said it was extremely challenging to give this mechanical creature emotions, as well. “We had to show that it has strong feelings. It is humiliated. It is angry. It is suspicious. And it has to show these emotions by the way it moves or doesn't move. It has these emotions because it has a brain—an organic brain.”

Donen expected the audience would have some sympathy for this primarily mechanical monster. “You feel it is caught in a situation,” he explains. “It is a villain because of his creator. The robot has inherited evil traits.”

The construction of the robot was the single most difficult task the production crew faced. It took nearly two years to perfect the creature, and Donen estimates more than a million dollars were spent in building it.

Building the Robot

“It was enormously expensive,” Donen explained, “because of the number of man-hours that went into building the robot. Actually it wasn’t just one. We had many. It wore out; so we had many covers. We didn’t have many arms, but each arm was separate, and each arm had a team of men working it. We had three teams working offstage—each with a set of radio controls. We had a crew of 20 working on this one robot.

“The robot was generally radio-controlled. Occasionally there was somebody inside of it. It depended on what the robot was asked to do. It is somewhat in the shape of a human—a two-legged creature. But it only has a four-inch head, and it doesn’t have human hands. I wanted it to move unlike a human; so I tried mostly not to have someone inside. Occasionally that was necessary.

“It’s an extremely complicated mechanism. It has a pendulum for balance. It has a pair of eyes. We considered putting the eyes off-level rather than level, but in the end we decided it made more sense from a stereoscopic point of view to have them level. It has neck and head movements. It can go up/down, and backward/forward, turn this way and that.”

The head, Donen continued, took a lot of time and effort to develop. “We couldn’t decide on a shape for it. You can’t invent shapes. It’s a development. We would pick up bits of things wherever we were and say, “Does this work? How does that look?” After a while, everything took on a ‘head' look. A doorknob could be a head.”

For the joints of the robot (which in the credits is listed as “Hector: First in the Demi-god series”), Donen and the special effects crew went to prosthetics makers for advice. “Just picking something up and putting it down seems simple when you first think about it. But there is a great deal that happens. If I wanted this creature to pick up a table and bring it to you, well, he'll probably walk over and hit you in the nose with it. We tried endlessly, and we had hilarious problems with it. When I wanted it to pick up a table, everything slid off onto the floor because it had no way to keep the table level. It was those steps that we had to consult with the artificial limb makers about.”

Unlike many movie robots, the robot in Saturn 3 doesn’t have hands in gloves. It has claws. “I think,” said Donen, “we ended up with five claws and a thumb on each hand. And it has a variety of things between the thumb and fingers that can come out. It has sharp things that can cut. It has pincers which are used to take something from Farrah's eye. There is no 'man in the hand;' it is all mechanical.”

Many people were responsible for the construction of the robot, which continued until virtually the last day of shooting. John Barry was in on the initial stages of it; Colin Chilvers and Stuart Craig worked hard on it. “Colin was our special-effects man. We had a large crew of people. And we had large companies build parts of it for us. One company made one part; another company made another part. You could have spent your life building such a creature and still felt as though there was more you could do with it.

“But actually,” he continued, “if we could build a robot to do all that, we would be better off going out of the movie business and into making robots. We could have them doing our gardening, cooking our meals, and making our beds.”

Production Problems

The robot wasn't the only challenge that the production crew had to face. The set construction itself was a difficult undertaking. “The main set,” said Donen, “was built across two sound stages. It was built off the floor, and there were a series of tunnels, truly enclosed tunnels, reasonably small—about 7'—and sort of oval in shape, made of plastic. Each unit was separate and the lights were on a bank. The whole thing was on a series of scaffolding. Sometimes we were six or eight feet above the floor of the set.

“The tunnels roll through this place and go off in all directions. There are no junction points where they cross each other. The rooms, such as they are, aren't conventional rooms, but are placed within the maze of these tunnels. It took eight months just to put up the set. Before that it had to be all molded in shops. And even these molds had to be made. It took a lot of men because nothing fit. Special joints had to be made for each piece of plastic tubing because each one was turned a different way. It was a very slow process.”

Costuming also created design problems. “We went through endless torture,” remembered Donen, “making the suit Harvey Keitel wears. It is made of leather, but it looks as though it has a series of veins in it. It has an incredible organic design of beautiful veins and then larger arteries which are actually air hoses and other apparatus. But we couldn’t find any way to keep these things on the suit. When the man moved, they would pop off. We didn’t want to sew them on. Finally, they found a supple wire and some sort of glue that kept them from springing off.”

Donen's favorite piece of design was the helmet worn by Harvey Keitel. “It’s the only thing that I kept [for myself] from the movie,” he said. “It really is the most beautiful piece of design I have ever seen. It's very difficult to describe, but it has an aesthetic about it which is incredibly ominous but at the same time believable. The shape of this helmet doesn’t feel as if it is a derivative of anything else. Darth Vader's head I thought was a gorgeous thing, and I loved it. But it seemed to be derivative of those Japanese warrior costumes. But I couldn’t put my finger on the origin of this thing.”

Cost fits the script as with so many sci-fi movies, Saturn 3 was plagued with budget overruns. The picture eventually cost over $10 million, “That’s a lot for a film with three characters,” admitted Donen. “The robot cost a lot more than we expected. It was slower to photograph than we thought it would be. And when John couldn’t finish directing the picture, that took time.”

When the film starts, the two main characters, scientists played by Farrah Fawcett and Kirk Douglas, are at work in an isolated space station in Saturn's third ring. “It’s not what they’re doing, but their relationship with each other that is interesting,” mused Donen.

“They have been there for years. They have rejected living in an urban society. Part of the story is the age difference between Kirk and Farrah. He says that their relationship can’t go on forever and that some day she would have to find another man. She's never been to Earth because she was a colony-born creature. He has rejected Earth. Then this man (Harvey Keitel) comes in and says to her, ‘You should see Earth. Maybe you would love it.” It’s the simple parable of not being able to escape the world’s problems. No matter how far you go to try to escape, the world intrudes itself on you.”

According to Donen, many script changes were made after Farrah was finally signed. “We went through all sorts of thoughts. There were times when we had a story where no one was the villain. But I think there was always an age difference between Farrah and the man with whom she was working. I think we were looking for an older rather than a younger man in every version of the story. Yet I don't feel that the script was changed to accommodate the casting of Kirk Douglas.”

The three performers in this film had to work extremely hard, Donen said, because every scene had one, two, or all three of them in it. “But in one sense, I feel they enjoyed being on constantly. They had enough problems as actors. They enjoyed that. The three of them were constantly searching for ways to make their roles intricate because they were so much in evidence. They were fine; we all worked well together.”

Wrapping Up and Looking Ahead

Donen felt that Saturn 3 is among the most challenging of the films he has done, especially since he had to take over in midstream after John Barry's untimely passing. The problems began at the inception of the project. “The script wasn’t thoroughly realized at the point we signed Farrah Fawcett. We had a starting date when Lord Grade got off that airplane, but no script. The building of that robot was a major concern. The limitations of the surroundings was another problem. It was like making a movie in a rowboat. To give the movie variety in that one complex where the characters live was very difficult.”

About his past films, Donen remarked, “Singing in the Rain is the one most people remember; so I suppose that gives me a certain bit of pleasure. But I like a number of them. I think people had fun watching Charade. They enjoyed Two for the Road. I loved Movie, Movie, which was the last picture I made.”

The shift from musicals and comedies to a sci-fi movie was not too drastic a departure for someone who has always appreciated science fiction. “It’s a bit difficult, however, to say what a science fiction film is,” stateed Donen. “I always thought King Kong was a great movie. I like The Day the Earth Stood Still, but I didn’t think it was a great movie. I love The Thing. I love 2001. My wife, Yvette Mimieux, is in Black Hole. She says it is terrific, but I haven’t seen it yet. I love Star Wars. And I love Alien, but I was bored by Superman. It’s not really a sci-fi movie to me, although I did think the opening sequence was wonderful.

“I can remember a picture called The Most Dangerous Game, which I think of as science fiction. I'd love to make The Most Dangerous Game in a science fiction setting—a guy living alone in his little kingdom and having an alien spacecraft land there. And then it would chase him across his planet. He would encounter all sorts of exotic animals. That would make a wonderful, extremely complicated story.”

Another film he considered making at one time was a sci-fi movie musical—something he was preeminently qualified to do. But the problems, he said, are enormous. “There is an economical problem for musicals. They don't sell well in foreign markets because they don’t translate easily into foreign languages. Science fiction films are also very expensive because of the complications of building and manufacturing everything.” Donen explained, “You can’t buy or rent anything. You can't film on the streets. Even in our little situation, everything had to be built—even the glasses, the chairs, the tables, the doors. And if you combine a musical with a science fiction film, it becomes such a large-scale project that it would take a lifetime to complete. So I try to think of other things instead of that. I have only one lifetime, and I don’t want to spend it making one movie.”

Two alternative food researchers, played by Farrah Fawcett and Kirk Douglas, work in romantic and professional bliss off of the rings of Saturn. That is, until their lives are disrupted by the intrusion of Benson, who was sent to speed up their work.