Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ronny Cox, and Ned Beatty on "Deliverance" 40 Years Later

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Deliverance Stars Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds Discuss Giving Men 'A Feeling About Rape' (Video)
7/3/2012
by Todd Gilchrist


Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, Deliverance remains one of the quintessential films about man’s relationship with nature – as well as with his own nature.

The Hollywood Reporter spoke with stars Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ronny Cox and Ned Beatty about the tough challenges they faced bringing the film to life and how director John Boorman ultimately made it all possible.

Deliverance is available on Blu-ray now.







When you were working on the film was everything as tight and in shape as the end result, or did a lot of work go in-between you guys acting that lead into the final product?


Burt Reynolds: I think John Boorman deserves so much credit for everything about that film. I remember that men had not really had a feeling about rape that they got when they saw the film. And it was the only time I saw men, sick, get up and walk out of a theater.

I’ve seen women do that, but to see men do it, I thought maybe this film is more important in a lot of ways than we’ve given it credit for.



Ronny Cox: Well that was the thing that John Boorman had, he had such a vision and it was shot almost like a guerrilla film or like a documentary. We were all so tight and well organized because we were so under-budget and behind schedule.

In my estimation the genius and talent of John Boorman's artistic vision was what made everything so well put together.



Jon Voight: The picture that has four leading characters all inter-related, I think what really makes it work was that they were all so different. Each element has to play out separately for each character and you can't overlap elements. When they threw lines at us we would go over it and say "No, that's a Ned Beatty line," things like that.

All good actors, and these were all good actors from the beginning, know how to feed each others' elements as well as stay within their own. That's what we did. Each of us had our moments that we had to make and we relied on each other to make those moments.

I've spoken about this, those final scenes when I come back from this experience and go into this room going through several layers of screen doors, visually this was all a return. This was the brilliance of John Boorman who said that visually it will look like a return, layers and layers of unpeeling re-entering civilization.

The way that Ned handled that scene it was almost like that I didn't have to do any work. The care and delicacy in the way that he treated me after the experience, and here was a guy who's been through everything, his response to me made the scene for me.

This happened a lot with us.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...boorman-344681