Ron Howard’s Cocoon is a refreshingly unique experience. We speak to actor Brian Dennehy, who played lead alien Walter, about why the movie continues to resonate with audiences…
If ever a genre film attempted to appeal to a more mature demographic, it was Cocoon. Ron Howard’s 1985 character-driven science fiction comedy concerned a group of senior citizens who feel instantly reinvigorated after plunging into a swimming pool belonging to a group of aliens in human guises.
It featured a roll call of yesteryear stars including Don Ameche (who subsequently won an Academy Award for his spritely efforts), Jack Gilford, Gwen Verdon, Maureen Stapleton, a surprisingly not-so- elderly-at-the-time Wilfred Brimley and true-to-life spouses Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, who would significantly reteam for the equally sci-fi hinged Batteries Not Included. Caught in the middle of these senior shenanigans were Steve Guttenberg, former Planet Of The Apes star Linda Harrison, Tahnee (daughter of Raquel) Welch and veteran character actor Brian Dennehy, who was cast as kindly alien Antarean leader Walter.
“Later when we became friends I asked Ron Howard what in the world prompted him to offer that part to me?” Dennehy reveals to SciFiNow. “This was a guy who is supposed to be a creature from some other universe, who has chosen to take on human form – why in the world would he take on my human form? Why not someone like Robert Redford? And Ronny replied: ‘Well, we couldn’t afford Robert Redford!'” laughs the actor.
The extraterrestrials at the heart of Cocoon were very much of the ‘we come in peace’ benign variety, but largely without the heavy burden of rubber prosthetics – until of course they shed their human skin disguises to reveal their luminous inner alien selves. “Regardless of the look of the character, he’s a leader and an intelligent man and someone who’s very cool and thoughtful,” considers Dennehy with regards to portraying Walter. “He understands that huge gap between [humans] in terms of intelligence, history and the millennia of existence. I decided to play him as a man who is always essentially slowing down his process. He’s dealing with creatures of far-lesser intelligence and imagination and therefore he has to slow down his whole persona in order to deal with them. It’s as if he feels himself always talking to children, who couldn’t possibly understand who he is or where he’s from or what he’s trying to do.”
As Walter tells his dumbfounded human skipper Jack (Guttenberg), after a peeping tom incident in which the hired hand quite literally catches alien being Kitty (Welch) exposing herself, these extraterrestrials are from an outer space planet called Antarea. They’re on a rescue mission to collect their friends, inadvertently left behind at the bottom of the ocean encased in life supporting rock-like cocoons following the sinking of Atlantis.
After retrieving the cocoons, they’re placed in the swimming pool of a rented house to energise them for their trip home. This is what leads the trespassing elders to involuntarily absorb the pool’s life force and thus make themselves youthfully stronger, resulting in several eye-opening moments including the extraordinary sight of a 77-year-old Don Ameche breakdancing at a nightclub and the once cancer-stricken Hume Cronyn attempting to revive his sex life.
But it’s not all fun and games. As word gets out about the healing potential of the pool, a mass of enthusiastic OAPs emerge from their care home, take a dip and unintentionally drain the water of its therapeutic power, leading to one of the film’s most potent and emotional scenes involving a dying cocooned alien in Walter’s helpless hands.
Dennehy explains how his insistence on returning to that scene during production helped instil that heartfelt moment with deeper resonance: “When we originally shot that scene something bothered me about it. [The alien] passes away in my arms and it was pretty conventional,” considers Dennehy. “Then a few days later it suddenly came to me and I said to Ronny that we had to go back and do one more shot. I said: ‘He’s cradling the creature in his arms and my character has assumed a human persona, so what if a tear comes out of his eye?'” continues Dennehy. “Then he reaches up, touches the tear and thinks: ‘What the hell is this?’ Because they don’t have grief or tears in Antarea, so he’s looking at this strange thing that is happening to his eyes and his human personhood is confused because he’s suddenly feeling human emotions. Ronny immediately said: ‘You’re absolutely right – we have to shoot that!’ It became a very powerful moment in the movie.”
The moment underlines very human fears in relation to illness and our own inevitable mortality; one of the reasons the film no doubt resonated so strongly with audiences at the time and continues to over 30 years later. Toward the climax, as Walter and his fellow Antareans are ready to return to their home planet, the ageing humans are offered a literal opportunity of a lifetime with an invitation to leave their families and join the aliens to live a life eternal in Antarea.
Dennehy, who is now of similar age to the senior citizens in the movie, admits that it’s a very tempting offer. “I guess now that I’m pushing
80, I would probably choose to go. Why not! Goodness knows what’s going to happen in the next couple of years.”
In Cocoon, the senior citizens also elect to journey to outer space to continue their lives except notably one character (played by Jack Gilford) who has recently lost his wife to dementia. “That’s a reasonable philosophical argument: One of the things that was most important to [him] was his relationship with his wife and he doesn’t want to go some place else to have a different life, even if it’s everlasting,” says Dennehy. “It’s a very interesting script and there’s a lot of tiny and not-so-tiny moments in it that are powerful moments about the whole experience of life and what is the importance, if any, of ending.”
Akin to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Cocoon is also unique in that it doesn’t contain any bonafide antagonists. However, perhaps that’s because there’s a very real human antagonistic threat that looms large. “I guess the antagonist, in a philosophical sense, would be death or non- existence,” ruminates Dennehy. “Some of the characters have experienced death first-hand and are widows or widowers. The idea of non-existence also means non-feeling, non-happy or something else. It’s a hard concept to wrap your mind around and [then] here comes the possibility of limitless existence.”
Upon its release, Cocoon certainly tapped into popular audiences’ imaginations, becoming a sizeable hit for 20th Century Fox and its famed Jaws producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown. It also nabbed two Academy Awards; one for Best Supporting Actor for the aforementioned Don Ameche and a second for Best Visual Effects.
“I felt good about the script and about being cast with those wonderful people who I had incredible respect for but nobody could’ve anticipated what happened with the movie – it became an international treasure and established Ron Howard, who had a tremendous career,” reflects Dennehy. “This picture stays in people’s memory – in that trunk that they all have someplace in the back of their minds. It’s interesting how it has affected so many different people in so many different ways. You can’t call it deep or penetrating but it has some kind of an effect on people. It’s about hope and imagination and that combination. It’s not just about these creatures.”
Dennehy does, however, lament the emitting of a particular scene of celebration between the human elders and the Antareans, which showcased a social acceptance between the different species. “I saw a long cut of the film and there was this wonderful scene where the extraterrestrials, who were not in their assumed human guises, have established relations with the old folks,” reveals the actor. “There’s a party and they’re talking and dancing and the camera moves across the group and everyone is having a good time. As the camera drifts up toward the ceiling you see some of the Antareans dancing with the women and [also a] female extraterrestrial dancing with a man in space; they’re elevated and move into the ether… It was beautiful, charmingly done and very funny. I loved that scene, as it was rich, interesting and very entertaining. I asked Ronny: ‘How could you lose that?’ He looked at up me with that kind of farm boy face of his and said: ‘When you’re directing sometimes you have to kill your children.'”
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water… along came the sequel, Cocoon Returns, which reunited the entire cast three years later including a brief appearance by Dennehy during the climax. “I had a small part in it. The picture was not particularly successful and it probably couldn’t be,” considers the actor. “The first picture should probably have been left alone. Hollywood never leaves anything alone if it can make a lot of money. I think I only spent three days on the set but I was nevertheless glad to do it.”
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly with our current cinematic climate of continuous remakes and reboots, there haven’t been much talk with regards to a Cocoon reinterpretation, however Dennehy wouldn’t be completely opposed to it. “It would be kind of interesting to exactly make that movie with almost the same script but in modern life,” he ponders. “[Perhaps] some of the characters are computer geniuses, who have become rich creating a whole new world, so how would they deal with being 75, 80 or 85 years old and losing their various facilities slowly or rapidly as the cast may be? That would be kind of fun to explore for a writer or a producer. How can someone so brilliant and as tremendously successful not be anymore?’
That’s certainly an interesting concept. For now, however, we have Ron Howard’s light-hearted, yet utterly thought-provoking original. A movie strengthened by triumphant performances from a predominately seasoned cast, with a winning mix of comedy and heart-wrenching drama and possessing a theme that us mere mortals can all relate to. But given the choice, would you choose to live eternally?
This article first appeared in issue 137 of SciFiNow.
Cocoon is out now on DVD and Blu-ray. Get all the latest sci-fi news with every issue of SciFiNow.
