Inside Matthew Broderick’s ‘WarGames’ 35 Years Later: ‘Shall We Play A Game?’ (EXCLUSIVE)

The original idea didn’t involve computers at all.

Walter F. Parkes: “The concept really came from two places. I had been thinking about a movie about a super genius that was born into a family that couldn’t recognize his genius. It was a character I found interesting, and it turned out that Larry Lasker, who I went to college with and was an old friend, had been thinking about a similar movie, a little bit more aimed at the Falken character. He was actually thinking about Stephen Hawking as a dying super genius who was reaching out to find his successor. So we had these two poles of the story — the super genius in a world in which he did not belong, and the retired, dying super genius who somehow needs to find a successor. Ironically, we didn’t have anything about computers or thermonuclear war. We had the character journey of this kid from suburbia into this high tech world, and we were able to sell the project based on that. Then we just started researching to see what kids like that would be into.”

Welcome to NORAD

Walter F. Parkes: “Our research took several months and we ended up going to Cheyanne Mountain and NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command]. From there we traveled around the country talking to experts about kids who were autistic, who could learn language better from computers than from people. We went to research laboratories to hear about weaponry and somehow through all of that came the plot that is WarGames. The great breakthrough was we went to the Stanford Research Institute — SRI — where we met a man named Peter Schwartz, who has gone on to be a very important futurist. He started something called The Global Business Network, and wrote a book called The Art of the Long View. We told him what we had and he said, ‘You should look at the technologies of the missile displays at NORAD and look at the technology of these new things called video games, and you’ll see kind of a parallel between your two characters.’ Which was fantastic. And at the time, I think the only real video game was at the Stanford Coffee House. It was really just at the beginning of that whole thing. Then, of course, they grew quite a lot over the couple of years that we were researching and writing it.”

There was no attempt to understand the technology on display.

Walter F. Parkes: “We made a conscious decision not to really understand very much about how computers actually worked, which meant that the people to whom we spoke would have to explain all of this in very everyday language. I think it helped us communicate some rather esoteric ideas to a mainstream audience, because we had to understand them as mainstream ideas. What’s great about research is that if you can capture some of that language, and those buzzwords, it gives the whole movie an air of authenticity, even if the audience doesn’t necessarily understand every detail. Because I’ve made so many movies since, I think it was the most organic process of developing a story I’ve ever been involved with.”

Director John Badham was immediately drawn in when he read the script.

John Badham: “Reading that script at that time was really exciting. My agent had called me and said, ‘There’s this picture that’s in trouble over at United Artists and they want you to read the script, but I don’t want you to do it, because it’s in trouble and those things are always a mess. I’m just letting you know.’ I said to him, ‘But, Lee, what if it’s any good?’ So I read it, and I have to say, I’m not an easy person to please with a script, I can assure you, but this one I got caught up in; in this young boy who had a wonderful personality, but was in way over his head in a situation that he was trying to grapple with. And he wasn’t a victim. He just seemed to really handle it wonderfully.”

John Badham was brought in to replace Martin Brest as director.

John Badham: “Martin Brest had done a really brilliant job in preparing the movie and it was wonderfully put together as far as the preparation was concerned. But the producers seemed to be unhappy with the way the performances were coming out, because the movie was taking on this really dark, dark tone, as though these two kids, played by Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, were rebelling against their parents and were like junior terrorists. You could see that the Matthew character seemed kind of depressed and a loner and down and miserable, and stuck up in his room. There was something dark about it. This is what I thought when I saw one scene that had been shot that I reshot. If you’re a 15 or 16-year-old kid, and you can show a girl how you can change her grade on the computer, you would be peeing in your pants with excitement. Yeah, it might be rebellion and, yeah, you might know it’s wrong, but you’re excited about it. It’s a thrill. In my high school there was a Coke machine that cost a dime to get a Coke. We figured out a way that you could get the Coke for a nickel. It was just some kind of trick, but we were so excited about what we had gotten away with. We weren’t thinking we were doing terrible things; this was just kind of fun beating the system. Just like going out at night and doing kid-like stupid things. It wasn’t to be bad, it was just because it was fun. That was the shift in tone that I basically brought to it and moved it in that direction. And Matthew Broderick was fabulous in it. If you saw him in the Neil Simon plays at the time, Brighton Beach Memoirs and the various sequels to it, it was the same thing. He just charmed the bejesus out of you with a character that could have been very uncharming and very unpleasant.”

In many ways, computers were seen as a fantasy in 1983.

John Badham: “It was great, great fun, and in a world we were not familiar with at that time. Computers were at a level that most people didn’t pay attention to them. They were used in business. They were something that got used in accounting and that’s about all that people knew. The idea of personal computers was still kind of ridiculous.”

Walter F. Parkes: “At the time, it was a really big leap to think that you could access a defense computer system via phone. That’s where the big leap is. But it was fine. We willfully made that fiction up, because it was such an exciting prospect that computers could talk to each other on the phone at all. The fact that we pushed it a little beyond what was in fact possible didn’t change the strength of the scenario.”

For a brief moment, ‘WarGames’ went from reel to real

Walter F. Parkes: “Right around the time of the release of the movie, there was a simulation tape left in the real system that was misinterpreted by analysts as the real deal. We probably went to Defcon 4 for 10 or 12 minutes. But, look, if you are relying on electronic means to perceive reality, there’s every reason in the world to expect that at some point there’s going to be a mistake. You’re not seeing anything; you’re seeing sensors tell you something.”

Keeping the computers “real.”

Back in 1970, a film called Colossus: The Forbin Project was released, which was about a new defense computer created for America that ultimately takes control of the world. As such, it definitely feels like a cousin to WarGames.

Walter F. Parkes: “I think they both tried to stay legitimately within the plausible behaviors of a somewhat inteligent computer system. In other words, Colossus is great because it’s carrying out what it is supposed to do, which is protect the United States, and ultimately decides that the way to protect is to control it. It’s the same way the program Joshua was just doing what it’s supposed to do, which is play these scenarios and play these games, and find ways to win them. There’s something good about the narrowness of that. It’s more realistic that the imagined behavior of these intelligent computers actually is quite narrow and stays realistically within the realm of its invention.

“The same thing could be said of RoboCop, another great movie. WarGames, RoboCop and the first Terminator are these three movies in the ‘80s which are absolute zeitgeist movies. All of them deal with this kind of collective fear of the power of the computer. Of us losing some modicum of the control of our destinies to them. They’re so different tonally, but they definitely spring from the same well of concern.”

Joshua was treated as a character in the film.

John Badham: “Joshua was very much a character. Just like when I did the film Short Circuit, I had to virtually beat the crew and cast into submission saying the robot, Number 5, is the star of our movie. It’s like we’ve got Harrison Ford or Eddie Murphy here and we’re going to have to treat him as such. We’re not going to treat him as this silly robot prop. People would think I was nuts, but I didn’t care. Joshua is critical to the whole thing and the backstory of where he comes from. His inventor is seeing it as what his son would have been if his son had grown up, because he lost his son, Joshua, and some of that personality is in the computer. It’s he playfulness of a kid. There’s an innocence to the computer’s personality. Not necessarily a malevolent one, but one that takes people’s instructions in a kind of literal way and it’s just coming out sort of unfortunately.”

Creating the voice of Joshua.

John Badham: “When I was looking for the voice, I experimented, unsuccessfully, with the idea of having an eight-year-old kid do the voice of the computer, because Joshua was very young when he died. Could we make that kind of voice work? I didn’t have any luck coming up with a young actor who could do it, so I retreated to John Wood who played Professor Falken, and I had him do the voice. But what I had him no was to read the lines backwards. So if the line was, ‘Hello, how are you?’, I would have him go, ‘You are how hello,’ so that the words would come out flat, thinking that in a computer database there would be a bunch of words there that have to work in different contexts that are strung together to make sentences. So then you just reconstructed his words forward. The sound effects guys just scrambled them around, got them forward, and then that sort of flattened out the intonation. But because it was John Wood, who is a wonderful actor, you still get something sort of interesting out of it. Then we treated it electronically. We experimented with that for quite a while to get something that sounded good. And it sounded better than whatever the voice synthesizers could have done at the time. There were some around, but they didn’t have much personality to them.”

‘WarGames 2’?

While there had been a made for DVD remake of WarGames a decade ago called WarGames: The Dead Code, it was pretty low budget and an awful attempt to cash in on the original. However, Walter does have thoughts about a sequel, though no one is seriously talking about one.

Walter F. Parkes: “I almost thought there was a WarGames sequel which had to do with the Joshua program kind of taking over and trying to find David Lightman, who’s now grown up. The other thing is that there are all these young writers who love that movie, who would go and really do a good job reimagining it. If you imagine a WarGames sequel, it’s that Joshua doesn’t exist in a closed source computer network, but it’s all over the world now because of the Internet. It would be so interesting to think about that petulant child program looking for his friend David within an enormous world, which he now has access to. I mean, you could do something which is from the point of view of Joshua learning, or understanding, that the world is a very different place, and discovering his own power. There are a million places you could take it which are fascinating.”

John Badham: “We spent the longest time trying to find a story for a sequel that we liked. We actually commissioned one script, but nothing really worked. It seemed like what was the inherent nature of WarGames was an idea whose time had passed. You know, the emerging computer culture was something that had a freshness to it that, by now, has been imitated, copied, and expanded upon. It’s all kind of been done at this point.”

The enduring power of ‘WarGames’.

Walter F. Parkes: “The film was not a warning against the machine. Actually, I think it went the other direction. In retrospect, I feel good about the way we portrayed David Lightman. His view was the technology is out there and computer systems are out there, not to be beholden to and not to be afraid of. I mean, yes, maybe an audience back in 1983 could say, ‘Oh my God, look at what these great machines can do. Look what power that these systems have,’ but for David this is an instrument to be played. There’s something healthy and empowering about that. That was in some ways more interesting to us than any kind of political sociological warning.”

John Badham: “I really believe it’s the characters that appeal to us and what keeps us coming back to it. it’s not necessarily the plot so much as it is just liking the characters and their way of dealing with the world. That’s usually the sign of a movie that will last for a long time. If it’s kind of all plot and the characters don’t have much substance to them, we tend to write it off and forget it pretty easily. We go, ‘Yeah, here’s the part where the car blows up, and, oh yeah, here’s the part where this guy gets killed,’ and so on. This is what I think about Saturday Night Fever, too. There were a lot of imitations of that film that came out afterwards and they seemed to be based on the theory that we’ll put a lot of cool music in and a lot of dancing and kids will go for it. But we’ve forgotten all about the Thank God It’s Fridays and those kind of movies, because they really did not have any characters in them.”