Richard Donner’s Inside Move: Making Inside Moves after being removed from Superman II

When Richard Donner wrapped Superman in 1978 he had reshaped the blockbuster — then lost control of its sequel. Donner had shot much of Superman II back-to-back with the first film, but creative and contractual clashes with producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind resulted in his abrupt removal before the picture was completed. The public fallout was sharp: a director who had redefined spectacle found himself sidelined from his own franchise, bruised and furious.

“I couldn’t put it down.” — Richard Donner on the Inside Moves screenplay.

Inside Moves (1980) arrived out of that rupture like a deliberate retreat. Adapted by Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin, and photographed by László Kovács with a score by John Barry, the film is small in scope and large in empathy — a study of flawed, loyal people eking dignity from hard lives. Donner later said the screenplay “found” him while he was still tangled in Superman business and that he “couldn’t put it down”; he welcomed the material as an antidote to blockbuster exhaustion.

“John Savage is a total sweetheart.” — Richard Donner praising his lead.

On set Donner embraced the quieter demands of character work. In interviews and retrospective features he praised his actors freely: John Savage, he called “a total sweetheart,” and he spoke warmly of Diana Scarwid’s Oscar-nominated performance. The film’s later DVD extras and interviews show a director who relished the chance to let performances breathe and to be guided by light and patience rather than pyrotechnic spectacle.

Every time me and Mr. Donner have an argument, you’d be siding with Mr. Donner.” — Tom Mankiewicz on his loyalty to Donner during Superman II’s troubles

Donner did not, however, put the Superman grievance behind him. Close collaborators and contemporaneous accounts describe his deep frustration with the Salkinds’ decision to replace him; Tom Mankiewicz’s recollections capture both the animus and the loyalty that later helped in restoring Donner’s voice to the material. That protracted effort ultimately produced Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (2006), an archival assembly that used Donner’s footage and Mankiewicz’s structural revisions to present a version much closer to what Donner had intended.

A Fraught Time Leads to Intimate, Emotional Inside Moves

There are vivid, human anecdotes that illuminate how Inside Moves functioned for Donner. He described finding the script during a fraught time and feeling immediate relief at the prospect of working on a set where actors, not stunts, dictated the pace. Critics and historians have repeatedly noted the film’s ironic fate: despite critical praise and Scarwid’s Academy Award nomination, Inside Moves received weak marketing and a limited theatrical release that pushed it toward obscurity for years.

“Donner expressed amazement that anyone cared so much to find all of the lost footage.” — on the making of the Donner Cut and the archival efforts behind it.

Viewed together, Inside Moves and the Donner Cut form a compact story about authorship, repair, and scale. Inside Moves reads as a director’s deliberate recalibration — a turn toward human-scale storytelling after a very public creative injury — while the Donner Cut functions as belated vindication, restoring fragments of a vision that had been scattered by studio politics. For Donner the arc is quietly moving: the filmmaker who could orchestrate mountains of spectacle chose, briefly, to tend to smaller lives and later worked to reclaim, as fully as archival possibility allowed, the larger narrative he had once been denied.

Donner Loyalists Never Abandoned His Vision

Tom Mankiewicz later recalled how loyalty among Donner’s collaborators kept restoration hopes alive; he helped sift footage and scripts when the idea of a director’s cut gained traction. Though the 2006 Donner Cut could not erase the original hurt, it offered public recognition that Donner’s approach mattered. In interviews Donner sounded relieved and quietly proud: Inside Moves had steadied him artistically, and the restored Superman II finally allowed audiences to see a version closer to his intent. DVD reissues and retrospectives have slowly rescued Inside Moves from obscurity and re-framed it as a compassionate counterpoint to Donner’s blockbuster identity.