Few directors reach the sort of stardom where their names are thrown on billboards. A Nolan or a Tarantino or a Peele become brands in and of themselves, while the other 99% bubble quietly under the surface; reliable journeymen, gallantly plugging away at the nuts and bolts of what used to be the mid-budget feature scene. These are the filmmakers who not only set the pace, but who change the very language of a genre too, consistently firing out exciting, crowd-pleasing, attention-grabbing stuff, year after year, decade after decade. Creative puppet masters living behind the scenes; their movies aren’t as stylistically loud, but their generation-spanning oeuvres are just as (if not more) legendary.
Don Siegel, J. Lee Thompson, Mary Lambert, Renny Harlin, Jonathan Demme, Doug Liman, John Frankenheimer – even just picking a handful of names at random gives you a who’s-who of filmmakers responsible for some of the most important genre cycles of the last fifty years. So it’s particularly exciting that this year’s Forbidden Worlds Legend is genre cinema vanguard Peter Hyams, a veteran of the action and sci-fi world, and a true multi-talent whose work blending and stretching genres across more than four decades has very much shaped the movie landscape we see today.
Originally an anchorman for Chicago news, Hyams got his start shooting documentaries, moving west to Hollywood at the turn of the ’70s to sell his first screenplay. Emotional drama T.R. Baskin didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but it would help Hyams almost immediately break into directing with a pair of TV movies for ABC – Rolling Man, and Goodnight, My Love. The latter of which being a ’40s-set buddy thriller which won Hyams such great acclaim that he was immediately hired by United Artists to make his theatrically-released feature debut, another entry in the popular buddy cop canon – Busting, starring Elliott Gould.
And when he was in, he was in. Despite middling reviews for Busting, Hyams was off, helming another two features straight off the back of it, while quietly beavering away on the screenplay for what would prove to be his first big hit, space-themed conspiracy thriller Capricorn One (again starring Gould, alongside James Brolin). Which, much like many of the post-Watergate movies of the era, leant into contemporary paranoia and framed the American government as the bad guys.
Once again building on popular genre nuts and bolts, riffing on everything from North by Northwest to Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men (Woodward and Bernstein even get name checked), with Capricorn One, Hyams started to find his voice, injecting his own inflections and other genre influences into well-worn templates. Not satisfied with simply towing the genre line – this one surrounding a faked NASA mission to Mars, and the astronauts and journalists caught in the crossfire trying to reveal the cover-up – Hyams mixed in western and survival drama beats, ending on a huge, expertly shot aerial dogfight that would also put most war movies to shame.
The result is a conspiracy thriller with a twist; a rare ’70s space movie that’s both grounded in its execution, and huge in its ambitions. Still challenging shady Western governments and spotlighting the politics of the time, but using even more tools from the genre movie chest to do so.
When Hyams’ follow-up, actual WW2 fighter-pilot drama Hanover Street – starring a fresh-faced, post-Star Wars, pre-Raiders Harrison Ford – royally crashed and burned at the box office though, he’d once again find himself a little more penned-in that he’d like. Despite wanting to get his hands dirty with another vintage genre from his youth, a western that would shed any sense of ‘glamour’ for the reality of life on the frontier, the market said otherwise. The director realised very quickly he’d have to be a lot more flexible if he wanted to get anything even remotely resembling his vision made at all.
It was, after all, George Lucas’s Hollywood now, and the western lived in space. So Hyams did what any great journeyman would do, and pivoted his plans, shuffling his frontier adventure from the American wild west, to the third moon of Jupiter. Aside from the setting shift though, the director would get almost everything else he wanted. Outland – starring Sean Connery as Federal Marshal W. T. O’Neil, a no-nonsense police chief transferred to a small remote mining colony – focuses on the blue collar realities of space industry, no glamour in sight; much more Ridley Scott’s Alien than Lucas’s Star Wars.
Aside from some dated tech and a hefty amount of grand, operatic sets (gorgeous miniatures of a huge mine scaling the edges of the moon Io), the rest is High Noon through-and-through. A deep-rooted love letter to the more vulnerable, human side of the American western as it played throughout the 1950s and ’60s; the honourable town sheriff fighting for what’s right, threatening the corrupt foundations of the local government, and having to do so alone when the townsfolk abandon him. It’s a familiar story in new clothing, but Hyams is careful to update the subtext too, re-imagining the Gary Cooper classic as more of an anti-capitalist fable, the little guy standing up against giant corporations who put profit above human life. Updating a favourite formula, taking a beloved genre and moving it along ever so slightly.
And while Outland is now very deservedly hailed as one of the great genre crossbreeds of the 20th century, in 1981 its reception was decidedly more mixed. Never wanting to repeat himself, but known for his steady hand on crime thrillers and now, space-set adventures, Hyams would see out the ’80s remixing his greatest hits, with buddy movies like Running Scared and The Presidio, and sci-fi epic 2010: The Year We Make Contact. If ever there were a perfect encapsulation of Hyams’ under-appreciation by Hollywood, it’s 2010; a bold, fascinating big-picture epic, positively covered in Hyams’ fingerprints (even serving as his own cinematographer, which he’d continue to do for the rest of his career), but forever cursed to live in the shadow of its Kubrick-helmed predecessor.
By the 1990s though, things had changed. Star Wars was gone, home video was all the rage, and Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Bruce Willis were the biggest stars in the world. Hyams’ action CV needed to evolve once more, and there was only one pair of muscles for the job: the hardest-working Belgian in the business, Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Known mostly for his razor-sharp cheek bones and impressive athletic prowess (kicking, doing the splits, more kicking), JCVD was very much the action star mirror to Hyams’ journeyman persona; an under appreciated master craftsman who found himself forever usurped by tinseltown’s louder and more “bankable” names. Following his breakout hit Bloodsport in 1988, Van Damme had gone on to make what soon equated to an entire sub-genre of eerily similar follow-ups in the years that followed, none of which proving to be the hit he desperately needed. It was only after his successful brush with sci-fi in Terminator-riff Universal Soldier that Van Damme realised he too needed to pivot, cannibalising another element of James Cameron’s time-travel saga for what would be the Hyams-helmed Timecop.
The result is a real shot in the arm for both creatives; a weird, inventive and gorgeously convoluted mash-up of Hyams’ familiar buddy cop police procedural, but partnered with both a twisty time travel thriller and a balls-to-the-wall ’90s actioner, that rests on both Van Damme’s endless charisma (playing two different versions of his hardened time-agent Max Walker) and Hyams’ confident, experienced approach to filmmaking. From the opening set piece – a gigantic fiery explosion that kills Walker’s wife (a brilliant Mia Sara) and sets him on a path of redemption – to all the time-hopping and high-kicking that follows, there’s not a single sequence that doesn’t drip with either tension, humour, or both. It’s a silly action romp for sure, but one which Hyams wisely takes seriously, cranking up the emotional stakes at every opportunity.
Case in point, the director would later joke to Empire about managing to coax tears out of famous Hollywood hard man Arnold Schwarzenegger on screen in their late ’90s apocalyptic hit End of Days, but he did it many years earlier with Van Damme first, in Timecop. While not as much of a grimacing straight-man as Schwarzenegger or Stallone, JCVD was still very much a man of action; a chiselled alpha who solved problems with his fists (or feet). But the film only works because Hyams taps so deeply into Max Walker’s vulnerability and pain, squeezing real heartbreak from Van Damme over the loss of his wife, the corruption of his politicians, and the complete collapse of his moral compass. Unlike a Commando or a latter day Rambo, Walker’s success isn’t a given here, and Hyams is well aware that it’s his strongest tool to play with.
Timecop happily shot straight to #1 at the US box office, giving both legends their biggest hit to date and beginning a famously fruitful professional relationship that would continue well into the next generation. First a year later, with Die-Hard-at-a-hockey-game actioner Sudden Death, and later with a Universal Soldier reboot that Hyams would shoot, under the command of his son, director John Hyams.
After over 40 years in the business, he’d finally hang up his viewfinder and retire aged 70, bowing out with one final Hyams/Van Damme team-up in 2013’s Enemies Closer; another reliably vicious and ballsy shoot-em-up that in classic Hyams fashion, blends in other sub-genres, with elements of the survival and home invasion thriller, while also recasting Van Damme from hero to villain. It’s a bold move, but one which pays dividends thanks to the director’s built-in knowhow on harnessing that trademark JCVD charisma, making for a joyously nasty turn for the Muscles from Brussels.
Few directors can claim to have had the sort of impact that Peter Hyams has; not just a long and storied career in Hollywood, but one which sought to push and pull at the pillars of genre, taking his movies just beyond the realms of the familiar. Comfortably thrilling, yes, but also fascinatingly subversive in the most delicate of ways, gently nudging the tide and opening up endless possibilities for even the most steadfast of cinematic mainstays.
If that doesn’t scream legend, I don’t know what does.
Capricorn One, Outland and Timecop were screened as part of Forbidden Worlds Film Festival 2024. For more info on the festival and future events, head to forbiddenworldsfilmfestival.co.uk.
