Bob Dolman on writing his beloved 1988 script, lessons from George Lucas and the franchise’s new Disney+ series.
By Danny Munso
The first thing Bob Dolman did in his time as the screenwriter for the 1988 film Willow was to turn down the project. In 1986, he received a call from his director friend Ron Howard. The pair first worked together on the TV pilot Little Shots in 1983 and were currently collaborating on a script that would eventually become the 1992 film Far and Away. Howard had been approached by George Lucas to helm a fantasy film he had in mind and had asked for suggestions on writers. Since Dolman was at the top of Howard’s list, he pitched him Lucas’ idea. “When Ron called me, I didn’t think I was right for the job and I told him so,” Dolman says. “I told him I didn’t know how I would ever write a story like the one he was describing. It didn’t seem to be something I could do. Most of my experience was in television and sketch-comedy television. So I passed and hung up the phone.” Thankfully, Howard called back five minutes later. “He said ‘You know what, Bob? You might want to reconsider.’ It was such a funny moment because I did the thing we so often do—I missed an opportunity. But now I had a second chance.”
Dolman was scheduled to meet with Lucas a couple of weeks after that phone call, and leading up to it he still had reservations he was the right man for the job. Working in an unfamiliar genre was at the forefront of his mind, but reflecting back, Dolman thinks his hesitation stemmed from another source as well. “I now think the bigger reason was I was afraid to go into that arena,” he says. Lucas was one of the biggest names in Hollywood and fresh off his original Star Wars trilogy and producing the first two Indiana Jones films. It’s understandable if Dolman approached the offer cautiously. But in fact it was that first meeting with Lucas that convinced him he could undertake the project. “What changed for me was George being a regular guy,” he says. “When we first met, he, Ron and I sat together and just talked. I felt so comfortable. I let go of those fears. I thought if I can sit here and just hang out with these guys and it’s already becoming creative, then I can write this story. And that turned out to be true.”
Willow started out as an idea Lucas had back in the ’70s, a fantasy epic about a little person named Willow Ufgood who finds a baby that turns out to be the future of the realm. Lucas thought now was the time to tackle the story because of two things. First, his Industrial Light & Magic had advanced visual effects to the point that he thought he could finally do the story justice, and second, he had met actor Warwick Davis on the set of 1983’s Return of the Jedi as the young actor who portrayed a key Ewok, Wicket. Lucas mentioned the idea to Davis—who was only 12 during Jedi’s filming—on set and offered him the part, though the project was still mostly theory at that point. As for the rest of the story arc, Lucas didn’t have much more. When Dolman was brought on board as the writer, Lucas had nothing written down for the story. That soon changed when Lucas was informed that to receive story credit on the project (“which he absolutely deserved,” Dolman notes), he needed to submit a synopsis to the WGA. “It was about three pages and described the essence of what Willow became,” Dolman says. “It was a seed, a germ. It described the baby being found by Willow and Willow taking her out to a world of bigger people that were at war. And the baby would become the future queen. That was all there.”
What was not there were the greater details of what would eventually become the meat of the story. For example, key supporting characters such as the swordsman Madmartigan (Val Kilmer), the evil queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsh) and her daughter Sorsha (Joanne Whalley) weren’t mentioned. It turned out to be indicative of the different ways Lucas and Dolman approached writing, a difference Dolman actually credits with the script’s success. “My starting place was character, and George’s starting place was plot,” he says. “At first I thought that was going to be difficult for me, but I now see a lot of wisdom in what George did to get me working.” He relishes retelling the details of his first of many story sessions with Lucas and Howard. “This was the most bizarre of all the meetings we had. We sit down and we’re all ready to go, and George says, ‘Let’s think up 45 scenes.’ I had no idea where this was going. In fact, I thought it was ridiculous. He says, ‘Let’s just think up scenes we’d like to see in the movie.’ I was hesitant because we don’t even know who the characters are [at this point]. I said, ‘Where are the scenes coming from?’ He said, ‘Let’s just think up stuff we like, because if we like them, probably other people would like to see them in the movie.’ To me they were all random, but by the end of that one day, we filled up that sheet of paper with 45 scene ideas.”
The ideas were short on specifics, instead just listing general plot ideas like a love scene, a chase down a river, a scene with a dragon. Dolman went home that night and tried to make sense of it all. “I didn’t know how I would ever organize it,” he says. “I was trying to be reasonable about the whole thing, thinking, Okay, which of these scenes line up with the outline we’ve got? Somewhere after that first night of thinking it through, I got what George was doing—he’s making me think. He’s making me start to think about the story, and there’s real value in that. It’s one of the many gifts he had to offer in our story sessions. I looked at those 45 scenes and tried to figure them out like a puzzle. It got me thinking and thinking: If we’re going to have a love scene, who is it between? Who are they, and what’s motivating them? All the questions you want to ask about character, I started to ask right away. Putting them in a potential action, even if it doesn’t end up in the screenplay, starts to reveal character, and that’s what George had me do. In the end, that list of 45 scenes didn’t matter. It never mattered from the start. It just got the engine going.” Dolman notes that Lucas’ exercise wasn’t simply for his benefit, it was for Howard as well. “He was also giving Ron things to start to think about as the director. All of these scenes and actions were things Ron started to think about visually. He had us working right away and being productive.”
That was just the beginning of Lucas’ methods as a producer. Dolman recalls several occasions where Lucas would ask them to watch specific films as examples of how he wanted Willow to feel. “We were on the Columbia lot, and he said, ‘I booked a screening room for you two to go and watch Yojimbo [Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 classic],’ ” Dolman says. “Ron and I would be walking through the lot, going, ‘What’s he want us to watch this movie for?’ But we watched it, and sure enough, we would think about how this might have something to do with the movie we were creating. The Japanese movies were very important to George and he wanted us to know more about them.” Lucas screened several other Kurosawa films for the pair when they would have meetings at Skywalker Ranch. Dolman remembers Lucas showing them Orson Welles’ 1966 film Chimes at Midnight. “I’ll never forget it. He wanted us to look at the battle scene. It was so inspiring because you see this guy going through all this battle, and he’s helpless. He’s not a soldier and he’s trying to stay alive. We were watching that, and George goes, ‘That’s how I want the movie to look.’ ” But the screenings weren’t the end of it. As Dolman was preparing to write the first draft, Lucas set him up with an office at Skywalker and gave him access to the ranch’s considerable library. “I got the royal treatment. He had a team of people standing by just for me. It was like having Google. I would wonder how people ate food in the dark ages, and these people would run downstairs and come back with the answer. They would print out articles for me on things like clothing and customs. Even though it was fictional, I was very interested in finding a kind of historical setting for Willow, and George loved all that stuff. He loved me writing up ideas based on the research and sending it over to him. I spent a lot of time gathering material, and as I did, ideas for plot would come.”
Bob Dolman
All these elements represented fragments of the story Dolman eventually began piecing into an outline. Other story elements came more organically. At their third story meeting, Lucas walked in with a simple idea. “He said, ‘I thought of a character on the way here this morning, and I’m calling him Madmartigan,’ ” Dolman laughs. “We thought it was the coolest name and were very excited. Right away, that name gave us an idea of what kind of character he could be. We all saw the character Val Kilmer would eventually play. That gave way to him being imprisoned and having to break out. So many things came out of just that name. I kept track of all this in notebooks and mapped out this growing story, and it was always from that original outline of George’s.” Based on the love-scene prompt from those very first story sessions, Dolman paired Madmartigan with Sorsha, who starts the film as an antagonist as she searches the realm for Willow and the baby—Elora Danan—he is protecting. Eventually she turns against her mother and helps Willow and Madmartigan protect Elora. “The love story was something I thought a lot about. It was always there from the very first draft, and we always had the idea she would be working for her evil mother and then turn against her.” Dolman’s writing may have worked too well, as Kilmer and Whalley would fall in love in real life as well and be married the same year the film came out.
In Lucas’ original story idea, he had Willow protecting Elora from an evil king. Dolman was insistent that be changed to a female character, feeling the evil king was too similar a character type to Lucas’ Darth Vader. That stance only solidified as Dolman continued his research. He felt strongly that the world of Willow be one where the most powerful characters are women, and that idea certainly is evident in the finished film. Beyond Bavmorda and Sorsha, there are other key female characters. There’s Fin Raziel (Patricia Hayes), Bavmorda’s nemesis and a sorceress who imparts her wisdom on Willow. There’s Cherlindrea (Maria Holvöe), the fairy queen who gives her wand to Willow so he can use it to aid Raziel. And of course the film’s entire narrative is built on the premise that Elora will one day grow so powerful she will cause Bavmorda’s downfall, which is why Bavmorda is after her in the first place. “I felt myself being drawn to the idea of a matriarchal society instead of a patriarchal society,” Dolman says. “We were digging up material about civilizations where women had the power—and there aren’t a lot. That idea intrigued me, and I pitched it to George and Ron, simply saying we have queens in this world, that all the power in this story is being held by the women and not the men. And we could make more of that. That gave way to what I think is the best idea in Willow, which is the male characters, particularly Willow and Madmartigan—Willow through magic and Madmartigan through his swordsmanship—are trying to get power but the women hold the power. We enjoyed letting the men fail.”
Bavmorda’s presence in the film is worthy of analysis. She has often been cited as one of Lucas’ most frightening villains, as the six-year-old version of this writer can confirm. Part of that is because she barely appears onscreen in the film’s first two acts, so when she is unleashed in act three, it’s even more terrifying because audiences don’t know quite what to expect. This was by Dolman’s design. “We don’t go into her point of view very much, and we don’t see much of her the way you often do with bad guys in movies,” he says. “I liked that because I really wanted to downplay the Darth Vader aspect of the bad guy. She had to be different.” Her lack of screentime did cause issues for the production and may represent the only aspect of writing Willow Dolman admits he did not like. After some early test screenings, audiences came out confused about Bavmorda and her motives. Dolman had to go back and pen several bridge scenes featuring her having brief interactions with Sorsha and her main ally, General Kael (Pat Roach), inquiring about their progress in tracking down Willow and Elora. “I didn’t like writing them because I felt they were telling the story rather than showing it. We shot them later as pickups to help the audience know there was a bad guy out there, but we never thought about it until we got that feedback and saw it was a problem.”
The film’s final battle takes place in Bavmorda’s tower with a large battle being waged outside the castle walls. As she attempts to perform a ritual on Elora and take her powers, she is confronted by Sorsha, Raziel and Willow. Though Willow is the hero of the story, he is also the least powerful person in the room. That complicated how exactly the scene needed to play out. “The question was who should end up as the hero,” Dolman says. “Of course it’s Willow, but that doesn’t have to mean he ends up with the power. The battle had to be between Raziel and Bavmorda and Sorsha. It had to be. I think Willow stands alone or in a very small group of movies, where in the course of the story the women stay in power and hold the power at the end.” As draft after draft went by, Dolman and the creative team were still trying to figure out Willow’s job in the final scene. How could the smallest and least powerful person in the room also fulfill his promise to keep Elora safe as the others fought it out? The answer ended up being a great callback to an earlier scene where Willow performs a magic trick, not with a wand but with sleight-of-hand, and makes a pig disappear. “I remember not knowing how Willow would ever save the day. What powers did Willow have after his journey to learn magic? In one of the story sessions, I pitched the idea that instead of using the magic he picked up along the way, he resorted to the magic trick and, in some ways by doing so, goes back to the person he was at the beginning of the movie. He taps into a resource he had instead of something he hadn’t achieved.” The writer could relate to the character in that way. “That was my personal theme while writing. I would often think the only way I’m going to write this scene is to follow my own intuition instead of trying to be some other kind of screenwriter. I related to him. I didn’t want him to turn into the great sorcerer he wanted to be, and I don’t think George and Ron wanted him to do that either. So at some point I brought up the magic trick idea, and we were squeamish because we thought what if that was too corny. But we couldn’t come up with something better.”
Part of Willow’s legacy lies in the groundbreaking visual effects that were perfected for the film. A particular sequence wherein Willow transforms Raziel from her animal form back to her human one was the forebear of the famed industry-changing digital effects in films like T2 and Jurassic Park. For Dolman’s part, he didn’t have to worry about how something he wrote would be translated to the screen. “I never had to think about whether or not something would remain in the movie for technical reasons,” he says. “That didn’t seem to be my department. Mostly I was thinking about characters and plot and developing the story. When it came to technical things, I could go to George and Ron and say I didn’t understand the mechanics of this scene, but my job was to keep the characters in mind more so than how it was going to be shot.” That is not to say he had no interaction with the wizards at ILM. Dolman was having trouble penning one of the film’s battle scenes, in which Willow and Madmartigan face off against some of Bavmorda’s forces while encountering trolls and a two-headed monster that can breathe fire. There is a lot to keep track of in that massive sequence, and Dolman shared his concerns with Lucas, who sent him to ILM. “He said ‘I’m going to send you over there, and you’re going to sit down with a storyboard guy and he’ll draw what you’re talking about. You’ll be able to see it and go back and write.’ That was amazing—and really fun.”
Through the year-and-a-half writing process that spanned seven drafts, it’s clear Dolman relished working with Lucas. “It went fast because I never had a fear that whatever I wrote would be rejected,” he says. “Everything for George was an opportunity to keep going and adding, so he never thought of something as ‘this is bad.’ He would say, ‘Great, let’s get together and keep talking.’ It was this growing process. There was always forward motion, and it was great to have George there to say, ‘Okay, what if we do this and what if we do that. Let’s see where this could take us.’ To have that sort of mentoring was an incredible experience.” Needless to say, Dolman is glad Howard called back after his initial rejection. “I thought I was in a bigger league than I belonged to, but I had a lot of freedom. It proved to be the opposite of the fear I had when Ron made the call. I felt like I was always being encouraged and given the right kind of support.”
Dolman continued working in Hollywood for almost another 25 years. He and Howard finally made Far and Away, and Dolman wrote and directed The Banger Sisters in 2002 and How to Eat Fried Worms in 2006. After that he began to feel dissatisfied with his career and took an extended break. “I got to a point about 10 years ago where I thought the things I was pursuing at the time—writing some screenplays and developing some things—that I wasn’t really happy doing it,” he says. “I identified with being a writer and began to ask myself what would I be if I weren’t a writer. What would my life be like? What grew out of that was all kind of room to think about other things, and what fell away was an attachment to my writing as a thing that would identify with me. I felt myself wanting to explore other things.” During that break, he attended a friend’s party where there was painting. Though he’d never tried it before nor was he interested in painting at all, Dolman joined in. “I really enjoyed it. What I really enjoyed was it was nonverbal. I wasn’t working in words anymore. I was working in shapes and colors. I started to do that and not with any ambition to be a professional but just to do it.” To say he took to it is an understatement. Dolman’s paintings are breathtaking, especially considering when he took up the art form. His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles and in Stockholm, where he began teaching part time. He is still writing as well, but these days it’s mostly short stories and poetry.
With one major exception—after Lucasfilm announced that it was doing a continuation of Willow with an 8-episode Disney+ series, Dolman was invited to be a consulting producer and join the writers’ room led by Solo: A Star Wars Story’s Jon Kasdan. He’s also the credited writer on two of the series’ episodes. Though the series just premiered, when Dolman spoke with Backstory, he was still a few days away from seeing the finished product from the first time at its world premiere. “It was odd and surreal being in the writers’ room 35 years later,” he says. “Being the old guy instead of one of the younger ones and witnessing so much change in how things were done over those 35 years.” He initially had mixed emotions about the writing of the nostalgia-filled series, especially in contrast to the incredible originality showcased in the feature film he helped create. And it was certainly a major change going from one of the three lead voices on the film—along with Lucas and Howard—to being one of many working on a series, which has so many more hands on it than the famously independent Lucas. “Sometimes there would be an insecurity at an idea that was really unique and original, and I find that to be where it’s at. I loved the originality of the movie.” Still, Dolman enjoyed the work of the writers, and of Kasdan specifically. “We had gifted people in that room, and they had wonderful ideas for the story. Jon came to the room with a lot of characters he’d invented and a lot of situations. He really got that thing going and saw it through to the end. I am rooting for it to succeed.”
Visit Bob’s website for his paintings HERE!
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