In the middle of a war, two pilots – one from each warring faction – crash-land in an isolated place far away from the conflict. Forced to cooperate in order to find food and shelter, their unwilling alliance gradually becomes a firm friendship. Film enthusiasts may recognise the pitch from John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific, but swap the Pacific to outer space and the remote island to an unidentified alien planet and you have Wolfgang Petersen’s 1986 film Enemy Mine.

The film adapts the 1979 novella by science fiction author Barry B. Longyear. Originally planned as a lavish blockbuster by 20th Century Fox, it was plagued by production issues and failed to break even in cinemas. The film fared much better on television and home video, and eventually developed a fairly strong fan following. Look into the circumstances of its making, and it is a wonder Enemy Mine was released at all.

The Enemy Mine story begins with producer Steven J. Friedman. Born in 1937, Friedman had originally worked in Hollywood as an attorney for both Columbia and Paramount Pictures. Keen to shift into production, he optioned the film rights to Larry McMurtry’s 1966 novel The Last Picture Show. Director Peter Bogdanovich was looking for an opportunity to follow up on his 1968 debut Targets, and after considering adapting The Last Picture Show Bogdanovich and wife and producer Polly Platt approached Friedman about developing the picture together. It was an enormous creative and commercial success, winning two Oscars from eight nominations and grossing US$31 million from a US$1.3 million budget.

By 1980 Friedman had produced another six feature films, including George Roy Hill’s Slap Shot (1977) and Robert Mulligan’s Bloodbrothers. Like all of Hollywood, Friedman had seen the record-breaking success of Star Wars in 1977 and was keen to develop his own science fiction picture. He sent two production staff to a Texas science fiction convention in order to option a suitable science fiction story. They came back with Enemy Mine.

It was a logical choice of text to develop into a film. For one thing it had a strong central concept – two enemies forced to work together to survive. For another it was in theory an affordable concept too – two main characters, and limited scenes of space battles or complicated visual effects. Thirdly, it bore a strong pedigree: Longyear’s story had been awarded both the Hugo and Nebula science fiction awards.

In 1982 Friedman hired Ed Khmara to write the screenplay. While none of Khmara’s previous work had made it to the screen, his in-development work made it clear he had talent. Khmara said: ‘When Steven Friedman was looking for a writer, I had Ladyhawke, another thing I’d done in the fantasy genre, in pre-production or whatever it was. Steve called me in and asked me to read the novella. I read it and he asked if I thought we could make a movie out of this.’^[1]

As no studio seemed willing to pick up Enemy Mine based on a pitch alone, Friedman personally paid for Khmara to write the script. The task immediately presented the writer with a key challenge. Khmara again: ‘The problem with making a movie from the book was that the book was not structured. There was no real ending.’^[2] In another interview, he noted that ‘there was very little action. The two characters were suffering terrible boredom because there was virtually nothing to do on the planet, and I knew I couldn’t convey that without boring the audience.’^[3] By necessity, Khmara’s adaptation was to be a loose one.

Based on Khmara’s screenplay, Enemy Mine soon gained a studio – 20th Century Fox – and an executive producer – Stanley O’Toole. The British-born producer had worked on a number of notable film projects, including Downhill Racer (1969), The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1977), The Boys from Brazil (1978), and Outland (1981) – a Peter Hyams ‘space western’ starring Sean Connery.

While 20th Century Fox considered and even approached a number of potential directors – Terry Gilliam reportedly turned the film down in favour of making his own film Brazil – they eventually zeroed in on English filmmaker Richard Loncraine.

Even today Loncraine seems a peculiar choice of director. Like many British directors, he started his career working for the BBC. At the time of 20th Century Fox’s offer he was best known for two 1982 features: The Missionary, a Michael Palin period comedy, and Brimstone & Treacle, a film adaptation of a controversial BBC play written by Dennis Potter. He had never worked on a science fiction picture, and had never handled a large studio-funded budget. Nevertheless Loncraine immediately set about working with Ed Khmara on a fresh screenplay draft. O’Toole recalled: ‘‘When I read his revisions, I was floored. Richard brought out things in Ed I don’t think Ed knew he had.’^[4]

While sets were constructed in a Budapest studio, Richard Loncraine went about the task of casting his two leads: human pilot Willis E. Davidge and the alien Jareeba Shigan – whom Davidge takes to calling “Jerry”.

For Davidge, Loncraine offered the role to rising star Dennis Quaid. The actor has been performing in Hollywood since 1975, but had risen to fame off the back of 1980 western The Long Riders and particularly the 1983 drama The Right Stuff, where he played astronaut Gordon Cooper to considerable acclaim.

Jerry was played by Louis Gossett Jr. The experienced actor had made his debut on Broadway in 1953, before moving into film with a screen adaptation of the play Raisin in the Sun in 1961; Gossett had originated the role on stage. By the time he started work on Enemy Mine, Gossett had also won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his role in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). When asked about his casting as Jerry, Gossett said that ‘the reason I got the part is nobody wanted to play a character with five and a half hours make-up in the morning and they couldn’t see your eyes, your face or your mouth so it was a challenge to me. I had to go to a mine and I had to go to a ballet dancer, learn how to stretch and walk on flat feet, squatting. I learned some stuff from my childhood. I was able to weave it together and a character that was hopefully, thank God, credible, and it became a life of its own.’^[5] The ‘childhood stuff’ to which Gossett describes learning from was an ability to gargle his own saliva. As a child he did it because it was gross and funny; as an actor he adopted the technique to give Jerry a truly alien way of speaking.

Make-up artist James Cummins described Loncraine’s desired Drac designs as ‘thin, elegant, very Egyptian-looking. The head was conical-shaped with throbbing membranes down the side.’^[6] By the time shooting commenced, the designs had been pared back to a more streamlined appearance. Special attention was paid to keeping the mask elements – nine in total – as thin against Louis Gossett Jr’s face, to ensure he could still properly emote while wearing them.

Loncraine submitted the current screenplay draft to visual effects house Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), hoping to use their award-winning talents to realise the critical dogfight scenes at the start of the film, and to better visualise a future Earth, the Drac homeworld, and the desolate planet Fyrine IV.

Visual effects art director Dave Carson said ‘Richard was very interested in establishing a stark contrast between the human’s world and the alien’s world – and although we wouldn’t actually see the alien’s planet until the final shot of the film, we would perhaps be able to comprehend the Drac’s culture as his character was revealed.’^[7]

Initial plans for the opening space battle included keeping the camera static while human and Drac fighter craft flew around. It was hoped such an approach could ensure the scenes did not so closely resemble Star Wars and other derivative pictures of the past half-decade.

Loncraine was keen to employ physical effects wherever possible. A full-size human fighter was constructed so that it could be mounted to a truck on location and forcibly driven into a ditch.

To simulate the surface of Fyrine IV, Loncraine was intent on shooting on the main island of Vestmannaeyjar, a small archipelago off the coast of Iceland. O’Toole pushed hard for Lanzarote instead, the easternmost of the Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa. ‘Iceland is a very expensive country,’ he argued. ‘Running costs were so high. And it’s not a filmmaking country as such, so therefore you have to bring everything in by ship: cameras, trucks, things you couldn’t get anywhere else, even the catering.’^[8]

Faced with intractable positions from both director and executive producer, 20th Century Fox sided with Loncraine. Khmara said: ‘Richard wanted a grey, barren, colourless appearance, and he got that in Iceland.’^[9]

Location filming commenced in April 1984. True to O’Toole’s word, almost everything required for the Vestmannaeyjar needed to be shipped in from the Icelandic mainland. This included a dermatologist for Gossett Jr, who experienced a skin reaction to his makeup. A specialist was flown in by helicopter from Reykjavik.

Make-up artist Chris Walas recalled ‘working in Iceland was an amazingly gruelling experience. It was simply astonishing how badly the production went. Richard wanted Iceland specifically for its remote, stark, and very rugged scenery and for its unusual subdued lighting.’^[10]

At the two-week mark, Friedman and O’Toole expressed concern at the ‘dailies’ – raw footage from Loncraine’s Icelandic shoot. ‘What was coming back just wasn’t what we expected,’ Friedman said, ‘there were serious problems with the look of the picture.’^[11] O’Toole, who had been overruled on shooting in Lanzarote, was particularly scathing. When science fiction magazine Starlog later visited the studio shoot, the producer openly told journalist William Rabkin that Loncraine’s footage looked as if it had been shot in an English coal mine. ‘I could have gone out in the morning and shot it in Yorkshire,’ he quipped.^[12]

As tensions rose between Loncraine and his producers, rumours of trouble on the Enemy Mine shoot circulated through Hollywood. Popular buzz was that Loncraine was working too slowly, and that the costly location shoot was eating into the budget. There were reports of pressure to relocate exterior scenes onto sets, to be shot later in Budapest.

At the four-week mark, O’Toole – his patience spent – directly contacted 20th Century Fox to request that Loncraine be fired from the picture. They initially refused. After another two weeks they backed O’Toole’s position and Richard Loncraine was dismissed.

There is a good chance no one outside of Enemy Mine’s producers will ever find out what occurred regarding Loncraine’s firing. For his own part, Loncraine has never publicly commented on the affair. Both Friedman and O’Toole have since died (in 1996 and 2004, respectively). Neither Dennis Quaid nor Louis Gossett Jr have appeared to offer any insight.

There is even a question over whether the scenes Loncraine shot in Iceland were as poor as Friedman and O’Toole intimated. Production artist James Cummins once claimed ‘from what I heard, no one can understand why Fox let him [Loncraine] go since the dailies supposedly looked great.’^[13] Chris Walas, while admitting the first set of dailies did not reflect the location at its best, that ‘the second set was some of the most beautiful stuff I’ve seen.’^[14]

In recent years Hollywood has relied heavily on Iceland to provide desolate alien landscapes, including in (but not limited to) Prometheus (2012), Oblivion (2013), Interstellar (2014), and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). Richard Loncraine appears to have been well ahead of the curve.

What was the 20th Century Fox executive machine doing in the two weeks between turning down O’Toole and acceding to his requests? As the various sayings go: a monkey never lets go of one branch before grabbing onto the next.

‘I got a call in the middle of the night,’ said German film director Wolfgang Petersen. ‘It was my agent calling. He said he had just got a call from Iceland asking if I would like to take over a very big, very important film called Enemy Mine. I said no.’^[15]

Born in 1941, Petersen was the son of a naval officer. After an early career directing for theatre and then television, he made his feature directing debut with One or the Other of Us in 1974. It was another seven years before he directed his second film, but that was the international smash hit Das Boot (1981). Das Boot was, at the time, the most expensive German film ever made. The initial screenplay – and Petersen’s production of it – was so long that, after a successful worldwide release, Petersen re-edited it into a five-hour miniseries. A success in both Germany and the USA, Das Boot grossed US$85 million and was nominated for six Academy Awards.

When approached regarding Enemy Mine, Petersen was putting the finishing touches to his 1984 fantasy film The Neverending Story. Funded by Warner Bros, the production was – like Das Boot – entirely shot within the Bavaria film studios in Munich. Unwilling to compromise on his current film, Petersen had no interest in immediately jumping into another one.

Fox’s representatives persisted. Petersen said, ‘if I was going to do this film, I had my conditions. I said the only chance is to start from scratch, with a totally new concept, with my people, in the Bavaria studios. Push it back for about half a year, then start.’^[16]

It was a significant request for Fox to consider. For one thing, Enemy Mine was already in a financial hole to the tune of US$9 million and interest on the production loan would continue accruing for every week production lay follow. For another, keeping Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr on retainer for another six months would require additional payments and guarantees. On the other hand, Enemy Mine had been seen as a critical ‘tentpole’ for the studio’s 1985 schedule. While it could potentially be delayed from Summer to Christmas, losing the film entirely would place a significant hole in their commercial strategy.

48 hours after he was first contacted, Wolfgang Petersen agreed to take over directing Enemy Mine. He kept Quaid and Gossett in their respective roles, and released the entire supporting cast from their contracts. The only other actor to be retained from Loncraine’s shoot was Brion James (Blade Runner), because Petersen had particularly liked his performance.

All of the sets constructed in Budapest were dismantled and junked. No footage from the original version was kept. While in theory such footage would have been carefully archived, this did not seem to occur in the case of Enemy Mine. No scenes or production photographs from Loncraine’s film appear to remain; save for a few test pictures of model spacecraft. While much of the design team was retained from one version to the other, all models, sets, and make-up effects were abandoned and re-developed from scratch. Chris Walas recalled ‘we were supposed to be closed down for two weeks for the restart, but it was a full six months before we got going again.’^[17]

Petersen paid particular focus to redesigning Jerry and the other Dracs seen in the film. ‘Walas went through tons of designs,’ said James Cummins, ‘actually sculpting and moulding them, then being told “no, we don’t want them. Do it again.” It was nerve-wracking and frustrating.’^[18]

‘It was a little disheartening for everyone,’ said Walas, ‘because there seemed to be a lot of apparently aimless and directionless repetition. We had difficulty in trying to get any real aesthetic input from Wolfgang.’^[19]

‘I think the design they ended up with is clumsy and awkward,’ said Cummins. ‘They should have left it alone. It doesn’t look very intelligent. It looks more reptilian and dinosaur-like, with spikes..,. Like a big, ugly horntoad.’^[20]

As for scenes shot on location, Petersen concurred with O’Toole. The shoot was moving to Lanzarote.

ILM’s Chris Evans supervised the development of matte paintings to overlay the real-life locations and make Pyrine IV look more alien in appearance. Petersen’s drive to make the planet seem as unearthly as possible led to an unexpected challenge. Evans explained: ‘The way the story developed, the look of the sky was that there was, to begin with, a cool blue or green night. As the sun came up, the sky became pink and then finally changed to a golden orange colour throughout the daylight hours. By the time the sun set – because of the volcanic smoke in the air or whatever reason – the sky turned a very deep orange until finally it was, once again, the blue night. Therefore, all our shots had these very intensely-coloured skies. The challenge for me as a landscape painter was that human beings like us, who live on planet Earth, perceive distance according to how blue things are as they get further away from us. Well, if you have a totally orange sky in the middle of the day – as opposed to sunset when things are typically backlit – optically, according to science, all the shadows should be deep orange or red. But if you paint deep orange shadows on everything, it’s going to look very bizarre – same problem if you have a green sky, what does that really look like?’^[21]

Issues with the matte paintings were compounded when the first unit in Lanzarote used coloured filters while filming. The paintings needed to be recoloured to match the footage.

Wolfgang Petersen largely abandoned using ILM for other on-set tasks, preferring to use his own visual effects workers with whom he had made The Neverending Story. All of the human elements – the space fighters primarily, and the space station from which they launched their anti-Drac attacks – were completely redesigned and remade. The Drac starships went largely unchanged. The space sequences were simultaneously filmed by ILM in the USA and Petersen’s own team in Munich.

The studio sessions for Enemy Mine were undertaken in nine out of Bavaria Studios’ 11 soundstages. Due to the delays filming took place in the middle of winter, with outside temperatures rarely rising above freezing levels. This first-ever West German science fiction film was afforded a US$24 million budget, although with the US$9 million already spent it was really more like US$33m. By the conclusion of post-production it would be much higher. Fox admitted to US$40m; industry insiders leaked it was something closer to US$48m.

Rather than use blue screen effects, the production made use of painted backdrops instead. As they looked fake without being obscured, the sets were filled and re-filled with smoke. By the midpoint of production the soundstages had been flooded with smoke so often that members of the crew began complaining of nosebleeds.

An early scene of Quaid and Gossett running through a petrified forest during a meteor shower almost ended in disaster. Petersen said: ‘One of the meteorites hit the tree. The flames went up very high and started to burn the roof. That was quite dangerous, but we got it under control.’^[22]

‘To make a horrible, un-earthlike ice storm on a stage with falling trees and meteorite showers and monsoon-like rain and fire on the water is very tough, very difficult. We have a lot of special effects teams working together here – English people, Americans, Germans. It’s very difficult to get past that.’^[23]

Stunt coordinator Martin Grace found the quality of West German stunt performers so low that he brought in most of the team in from the United Kingdom. ‘These babyfaces can roll around on the floor, but they can’t do stunts,’ he complained in one interview.^[24]

Stephan DuPuis was responsible for applying Gossett’s prosthetic makeup on set. ‘Filming Enemy Mine was rather difficult for everybody,’ he said, ‘because it was such a long show to be involved with. To work on just one picture for an entire year gets to be a bit depressing after awhile. And it was really hard for Lou because he had to be in makeup all the time. There were some days when we would put him into makeup and something would happen on the soundstage – a pump would explode or someone would fall off a catwalk – and he would end up spending the entire day in the complete Drac makeup and they wouldn’t shoot a thing.’^[25]

Read any interview or article about Enemy Mine, and the same key issues surface again and again: a long, exhausting production, indecision over designs, a frantic shooting schedule, and constant technical mishaps. A Starlog set visit by William Rabkin details a day-long attempt to shoot a scene of Davidge lighting a small lake on fire with his gun. The pyrotechnics consistently fail, leading a frustrated Dennis Quaid to storm off to his trailer.^[26]

The result of so many challenges, delays, and misfortune is, in the final analysis, a proverbial curate’s egg. There is plenty in Enemy Mine that works brilliantly, and forms a wonderfully entertaining science fiction drama. There are also visible results of poor technical choices and second-guessing; things that stop Enemy Mine from making the shift from being an entertaining film to being a masterful one.

Events through the film are narrated by Davidge, breaking in at regular intervals as if the film’s makers did not trust the audience to follow the plot. When scripted and filmed, Enemy Mine was to be told in flashback by Davidge after his rescue from Fyrine IV. When this element was removed during the editing process, it seems the narration was introduced to ‘paper over the cracks’.

No time is wasted in launching the film with a space battle, as Drac fighters attempt a raid on a human space station. The opening dog fights near the space station were made by ILM, using motion control technology, and the effects team in Munich, using much less advanced wire model work. Visual effects artist Bill Kimberlin said ‘Don Dow and Wolfgang Petersen didn’t want it to bear any resemblance to Star Wars, for example, in the way the fighters moved. They wanted the BTA and the Drac ship to have characters of their own. And they do. They bank and manoeuvre in a manner much more like something you would see on Earth.’^[27]

Enemy Mine employs a fairly old-fashioned idea of outer space, one dominated by colourful nebulas and multiple planets and moons in shot at the same time. It certainly is not realistic by any sensible measure, and that strange unreal effect is maintained once Davidge and Jerry are each shot down and forced to crash on the planet below.

Fyrine IV is palpably the work of the same team who realised Wolfgang Petersen’s The Neverending Story. The painted backdrops and smoky sets give the planet an oddly theatrical effect, much as they did for Fantasia in the earlier film. When modified by colour filters and matte paintings, the location footage from Lanzarote looks oddly fake as well. For all of the debate on where to shoot those elements, the result is so artificial that Petersen may as well have shot the entire production in Munich. Even the various alien creatures, all puppets of one size or another, have that same old-fashioned and theatrical vibe. When put all together, it is a marvellously consistent aesthetic. When put alongside the likes of George Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy, it feels weirdly retrograde.

The cucas – small alien life forms that wandered the surface of Fyrine IV – were originally developed purely as window dressing. Under Richard Loncraine they had changed their appearance from mammals to insects and even into snails before settling on a sort of armoured bug. Under Petersen they were made significantly larger so that their shells could serve a specific purpose in the plot. As the shells themselves needed to be particularly durable – Dennis Quaid smashes a rock into one, while others were fired from an air cannon more than six metres into the air – they were constructed out of hard plastic rather than the more typical fibreglass.

Another alien resident of Fyrine IV was the ‘predator’: a giant antlion-like creature that eats the cucas and nearly does the same to Davidge and Jerry. The monster was constructed in California, shipped to Munich, and then reassembled on-set. Delays in shooting meant that by the time the predator had arrived on set its scenes had been cut. Walas personally begged O’Toole to put the scenes back into the schedule, and his team worked free overtime to set the creature up.

The strange alien grub that Jerry offers to Davidge to eat was made four different times, due to ongoing discussions on what it should look like. The fourth version seen in the finished film was a last-minute compromise. ‘It’s not much more than a slimy, white hot dog,’ Walas admitted.

If there is a master stroke to Enemy Mine, it is how Jerry is designed, realised, and performed. First and foremost, Louis Gossett Jr does a marvellous job of playing the role. His physical movements are strange and reptilian. His vocal cadence is deliberately odd. He acts from behind prosthetic makeup that not only partially obscures his mouth but almost entirely covers his eyes.

The cat-like pupils were realised through painted contact lenses, which would keep rotating on Gossett’s eyes and forcing delays while Chris Walas’ team corrected them. The process was so painful for Gossett that he ultimately wore two lenses in each eye: one with the alien pupil, and a soft plastic one underneath to protect the cornea.

When Jerry reveals that they are pregnant, the film opens to its most interesting science fiction element and engages with themes of masculinity and parental roles. Gossett’s performance as Jerry is inflected with stereotypical behaviours of pregnant women, and yet he maintains the same core personality that has dominated the film to this point. When Davidge delivers Jerry’s baby it is a hugely emotional scene. When he takes up raising the Drac infant Zammis, he is forced to transform from resentful, somewhat racist soldier to honest, nurturing parent. Doing so in the context of a very masculine, male-oriented film lightly challenges notions of parenthood and gender. The execution is imperfect but well-intentioned, and foreshadows a much more effective treatment of the ideas in 20th Century Fox’s subsequent television drama Alien Nation (the episode in question is titled “Real Men”.

The infant Zammis was a cable-controlled puppet, requiring up to eight technicians to operate. When it came to using the puppet on location in Lanzarote, the local conditions made it very difficult. There was no suitable building for the effects team to base themselves and make repairs and preparations. A group of German puppeteers who were supposed to operate the baby were left behind in Munich as a cost-cutting measure. Video monitors that were supposed to enable the artists to see how the puppet looked on-screen did not arrive. By the time baby Zammis’ location shoot was complete, both legs, one arm, and several facial components were no longer working.

The child Zammis was played by child actor Bumper Robinson. It is a strong juvenile performance, and when paired with Dennis Quaid’s newly sympathetic portrayal of Davidge it forms some of the most enjoyable scenes of the film.

The film’s climax, in which Davidge is forced to rescue Zammis from a crew of rogue miners, was not part of Barry Longyear’s original novella; indeed, Longyear reportedly joked that the ‘enemy mine’ was included so that a mass audience would make their own sense of the film’s title. For a time during production on Petersen’s version the scenes were actually cut, but at the last minute they were reinstated and hurriedly put together.

The sudden change put enormous pressure on Chris Walas and his prosthetics team, who had assumed all of the extra Drac outfits would no longer be required. ‘We actually sculpted ten background Dracs in a day,’ said Walas, ‘and some of them were really nicely done. We had what we called a “sculpt-a-thon” – everybody in the shop got a block of wet clay and a head form and just whaled away.’^[28]

The latter portion of the film does have an unerring sense that scenes have been cut from the screenplay – whether there were scenes actually filmed and then cut is unclear. Davidge’s return to human civilization, his military commanders’ fears he has been converted to the Drac cause, and his desperate flight to return to Fyrine IV all feel remarkably abrupt and rushed. The film’s conclusion feels about as sudden: Davidge stands by Zammis as he is inducted into Drac society, while an anonymous voiceover explains the ending for the audience. It is the only part of the film with this anonymous narration. All other examples were described by Davidge in the first person.

Enemy Mine was released in American cinemas on 20 December 1985, acting as 20th Century Fox’s key Christmas release. Rather shockingly for a studio release, it opened in ninth place, behind fellow new releases Out of Africa and The Color Purple, and a re-release of Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmations. It was also outgrossed by Rocky IV, The Jewel of the Nile, Spies Like Us, Santa Claus, and White Nights – all holdovers from previous weeks. It is no surprise that one anonymous Fox executive, when asked how much revenue the film would need to generate to break even, claimed ‘It doesn’t really matter, because it’s not going to do it.’^[29]

Given a total budget of at least US$40 million, the US$12.3 million grossed in American cinemas left a significant black hole in Enemy Mine’s finances. It fared poorly with a lot of critics as well: in the New York Times resident writer Janet Maslin announced that ‘this season’s Dune is Enemy Mine, a costly, awful-looking science-fiction epic with one of the weirdest storylines ever to hit the screen.’^[30] Of course as with Dune, Enemy Mine found an enthusiastic audience on home video and television. It remains a cult favourite today, although it is becoming harder to find: the film is yet to find a home on Disney+, which owns the streaming rights, and in Australia at least the DVD and bluray are long out of print.

This is a flawed film, but it is also a worthwhile one. Louis Gossett Jr’s performance is one of the best to ever grace an American science fiction film, and its presentation of an alien culture is admirably developed and – for its time – rather progressive. For Enemy Mine the road to completion was, by all accounts, a difficult one. Personally speaking, I am glad they made the journey.

^[1] William Rabkin, “The unseen Enemy Mine”, Starlog 103, February 1986.

^[2] William Rabkin, “The unseen Enemy Mine”, Starlog 103, February 1986.

^[3] Janine Pourroy, “Behind the lines of Enemy Mine”, Cinefex 25, February 1986.

^[4] William Rabkin, “The unseen Enemy Mine”, Starlog 103, February 1986.

^[5] Kevin Jacobsen, “Louis Gossett Jr. (‘Watchmen’) on the ‘gorgeous’ writing for Will Reeves”, Gold Derby, 23 August 2020.

^[6] Les Paul Robley, “Enemy Mine”, Cinemafantastique 15-5, January 1986.

^[7] Janine Pourroy, “Behind the lines of Enemy Mine”, Cinefex 25, February 1986.

^[8] William Rabkin, “The unseen Enemy Mine”, Starlog 103, February 1986.

^[9] William Rabkin, “The unseen Enemy Mine”, Starlog 103, February 1986.

^[10] Janine Pourroy, “Behind the lines of Enemy Mine”, Cinefex 25, February 1986.

^[11] David T. Friendly, “One studio has seen the Enemy, and it’s costly”, Los Angeles Times, 30 December 1985.

^[12] William Rabkin, “The unseen Enemy Mine”, Starlog 103, February 1986.

^[13] Les Paul Robley, “Enemy Mine”, Cinemafantastique 15-5, January 1986.

^[14] Janine Pourroy, “Behind the lines of Enemy Mine”, Cinefex 25, February 1986.

^[15] William Rabkin, “The unseen Enemy Mine”, Starlog 103, February 1986.

^[16] William Rabkin, “The unseen Enemy Mine”, Starlog 103, February 1986.

^[17] Kent Hill, “Fantastic Beasts and the Man who made them: An Interview with Chris Walas by Kent Hill”, Podcasting Them Softly, 6 July 2017.

^[18] Les Paul Robley, “Enemy Mine”, Cinemafantastique 15-5, January 1986.

^[19] Janine Pourroy, “Behind the lines of Enemy Mine”, Cinefex 25, February 1986.

^[20] Les Paul Robley, “Enemy Mine”, Cinemafantastique 15-5, January 1986.

^[21] Janine Pourroy, “Behind the lines of Enemy Mine”, Cinefex 25, February 1986.

^[22] William Rabkin, “On the set of Enemy Mine”, Starlog 102, January 1986.

^[23] William Rabkin, “On the set of Enemy Mine”, Starlog 102, January 1986.

^[24] William Rabkin, “On the set of Enemy Mine”, Starlog 102, January 1986.

^[25] Janine Pourroy, “Behind the lines of Enemy Mine”, Cinefex 25, February 1986.

^[26] William Rabkin, “On the set of Enemy Mine”, Starlog 102, January 1986.

^[27] Janine Pourroy, “Behind the lines of Enemy Mine”, Cinefex 25, February 1986.

^[28] Janine Pourroy, “Behind the lines of Enemy Mine”, Cinefex 25, February 1986.

^[29] David T. Friendly, “One studio has seen the Enemy, and it’s costly”, Los Angeles Times, 30 December 1985.

^[30] Janet Maslin, “Screen: Enemy Mine”, New York Times, 20 December 1985.