Point Blank (1967 Film) - Production

Production

Director John Boorman met Lee Marvin while on the set of The Dirty Dozen in London. Boorman and Marvin talked about a script based on the book The Hunter. Both hated the script but loved the main character of Walker. When they agreed to work on the film, Marvin threw the script out the window. Marvin called up a meeting with the head of the studio, the producers, his agent and Boorman. Boorman recalls, " said, 'I have script approval.' They said 'yes'. 'And I have approval of principal cast'. 'Yes'. He said, 'I defer all those approvals to John .' And he walked out. So on my very first film in Hollywood, I had final cut and I made use of it."

The unusual structure of the film was due in part to the original script and developments during the course of shooting the film. Rehearsals took place at Marvin's house in Los Angeles. On the rehearsal day that Marvin is asking Sharon Acker what happened to the money, Marvin had lines which he did not speak and forced Acker to continue the conversation on her own. "I saw right away he was right," replied Boorman, "Lee never made suggestions. He would just show you." So Boorman changed the lines in the script so Acker would essentially ask and answer Marvin's questions and the result is in the finished film. "It made a conventional scene something more," added Boorman.

This was the first film ever to shoot at Alcatraz, the infamous prison which had been shut down since 1963, only three years before the production. 125 crew members were used to shoot for two weeks in the abandoned prison facility. While Marvin and Wynn enjoyed shooting on-location, Wynn was concerned about the weather and the need to loop half the dialogue. During the shoot, Angie Dickinson and Sharon Acker modeled contemporary fashions for a Life magazine exclusive against the backdrop of the prison. Acker was accidentally hurt by the blanks that Vernon used to shoot at Marvin early in the film.

Director Boorman chose locations that were "stark." For example, the airplane terminal walkway that Marvin walked down originally had flower pots lining the walls. Boorman had the pots taken out to "make it all bare."

After Boorman showed the finish cut to executives, they were "very perplexed and mumbling about reshoots". Margaret Booth, a legendarily traditional-minded supervising editor on the picture, told Boorman as the execs filed out, "You touch one frame of this film over my dead body!"