Dino De Laurentiis’ Last-Minute Director Swap and the Producer’s Push for a 'Hero' That Fractured Fighting Back

Studio System2/5 wildness

Dino De Laurentiis’ Last-Minute Director Swap and the Producer’s Push for a 'Hero' That Fractured Fighting Back

Fighting Back (1982) / Dino De Laurentiis / 1980s

Two weeks before cameras were due to roll on Fighting Back, heavyweight producer Dino De Laurentiis pulled the plug on the filmmaker who had been developing the project and installed Lewis Teague as director — an abrupt, heavy-handed move that set the tone for a production riven by creative tug-of-war. De Laurentiis came to the project riding the box-office halo of Death Wish and was intent on packaging another crowd-pleasing vigilante picture. Teague, by contrast, had imagined the lead as a morally complicated, Raging Bull–style antihero: fascinating, flawed and morally ambiguous. The result was a production in which the producer demanded scenes that framed Tom Skerritt’s character as a clear hero while Teague kept staging sequences that exposed the protagonist’s darker vendettas. Teague later described the finished film as “a little schizophrenic in its point of view — you don’t know whether to like the guy or detest the guy.”