Enemy Mine (film)

"By late in the 21st century the nations of the Earth were finally at peace, working together to explore and colonise the distant reaches of space. Unfortunately, we weren't alone out there. A race of nonhuman aliens called the Dracs were claiming squatters' rights to some of the richest star systems in the galaxy. Well, they weren't gonna get it without a fight. Space was the new battleground. For many of us, Earth became a precious memory light years away. Our only home was a fortress in space. As in any war, there were long periods with nothing to do but wait. And then..."

"It's funny, but I'd never actually seen a Drac. I knew they were completely inhuman. Not even male or female, but both, bundled together in a scaly, reptilian body."

"Any chance is better than no chance."

"What I'd been hearing at night was the scavenger ship. The scavengers were human all right. Barely human. They were outlaw miners who raped whole planets for precious ores. They hunted Dracs for slave labour, so we tolerated them."

"Maybe we should open up a little place here. I could ruin the food. You could frighten the customers."

"God, Jerry,... what am I supposed to do now, huh? You taught me all about the Talman and the line of Jeriba. But you didn't say nothin' about taking care of baby Dracs!"

"I guess he was an ugly little cuss,... but no uglier than the pictures of those other kids that were shown around the mess hall."

"And so Davidge brought Zammis and the Dracs home. He fulfilled his vow and recited the line of Zammis' forfathers before the Holy Council on Dracon. And when, in the fullness of time, Zammis brought its own child before the Holy Council, the name of Willis Davidge was added to the line of Jeriba."

"After we'd been shooting for about a month, the studio wasn't happy with what they were seeing, so they hired Wolfgang Petersen as the new director. ... We reset and resculpted with a new design concept, although it wasn't all that different from Drac's original look, which I always thought was cool. He looked more like an iguana, and dark grey, peppered with small, iridescent patches."

"Before we wrote the screenplay, we tried to get the studios interested in the story. It was turned down everywhere. But again, after the screenplay was done, there was quite a bit of studio interest. We finally went with 20th Century Fox. Then they started having trouble finding a director. Either the ones they wanted weren't available, or wanted to go in such a different direction with the story that they were unacceptable. Finally, Richard Loncrane was hired. The first draft of my screenplay took ten months, which is a very long time. When I started working with Richard, I would fly to London or he would fly here. He had a wonderful, very exciting vision of the film, but at the same time, it might have exceeded what was possible. What you see on the screen today is maybe 75 script pages. The script Loncrane and I started shooting with in Iceland was 140 pages long."

"The problem ... was that the original novella was not structured for film. It has big gaps in time and essentially starts another story two-thirds of the way through. This is when Davidge takes the young Drac back to Dracon and has to deal with their prejudice against him. We just didn't have the money for that. I had to create a new ending where Zammis is kidnapped by gypsy miners who use Dracs for slave labor. Davidge has to rescue him, and this leads to a new understanding between the two races. There was a good line in the film that got cut out, where Davidge's friends come to help him and run into a party of armed Dracs. The Drac who knows about Davidge and Zammis is about to shoot the friends when one holds his hands up and says "Hold it! I don't understand it completely either, but we're on the same side now!" I also wanted to have a scene at the end where Davidge is shown on Dracon at Zammis' acceptance ceremony. To be officially accepted into Dracon society and become head of your family line, you have to stand before the Council of Elders with your father. He introduces you by reciting your line's entire heritage. That's from the book and I wanted to make that a big scene, but it wound up as a matte painting because that's all there was money for. That's as close to the Drac culture as we could afford to come."

"The space burial sequence now two-thirds of the way into the film was actually menat to be the first scene of the movie. Davidge is found after three years on Fyrine IV, but doesn't initially answer what he did there or how he survived. The story is initially told through flashback because I wanted to set up suspense by slowly uncovering what had happened to him. After the first public testing, Wolfgang decided that it wasn't right. I can see some of it, but I still think that's the best structure for the story. Plus I think they cut more out of the film than they should have. There's some stuff showing his relationship with his three friends aboard the battle station that I wish they would have kept in. I think it created a feeling in the first of the film that carried over to the ending. But I do think that the film has an epic grandeur and enormous emotional intensity to the two characters. That's what I wanted to do most and I think that got to the screen."

"... this is the first science fiction film I know of that's based on character rather than hardware. I read the story on a plane from New York to LA and, at a critical point, I had to throw the script down. I was in tears... it touched me that much. It's such a wonderful story. Here's two guys who are enemies. One happens to be an alien. They could easily be an American and a Russian."

"The way I look at it, I am the alien! I'm the one devoid of human values. Drac has them. Not me. Not Davidge, the spaceman. For me, the film is the discovering of the human side of myself. You know – How to be human!"

"It's the biggest, most satisfying role I've ever had. Davidge is a human being who gets to know a lot of sides to himself. Wolfgang thought he was a bit too Han Solo, at first. Now, Davidge really evolves through everything in the story: humour, anguish, tears, hate, pride, love, pain, action. There's no end to the action! I'm trying to do most of it, myself. So, it's also, physically, a very gruelling experience."

"Dennis Quaid - Willis "Will" Davidge"

"Louis Gossett Jr. - Jeriba Shigan"

"Brion James - Stubbs"

"Richard Marcus - Arnold"

"Carolyn McCormick - Morse"

"Bumper Robinson - Zammis"

"Jim Mapp - Old Drac Slave"

"Lance Kerwin - Joey Wooster"

"Scott Kraft - Jonathan"

"Lou Michaels - Wilson"

"Andy Geer - Bates"

"Henry Stolow - Cates"

"Herb Andress - Hopper"