Steven de Souza wrote some of the biggest action movies of the 1980s, including Commando and The Running Man, both starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Calum Waddell sits down with the blockbuster screenwriter to talk about this meeting of mind and muscle…

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rae Dawn Chong in Commando (1985)

Steven de Souza ponders on the time-honoured question of whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie...

Perhaps you had to be there, but forty long years ago bigger was better and action movie icon Arnold Schwarzenegger, who reached his peak in the decade of Reagan, hair-metal and mullets, was no exception. Given the great man’s recent Netflix biography, and his touring of a live audience question-and-answer show, what better time to reflect on two of the former body-builder’s biggest and most bombastic blockbusters, Commando (1985) and The Running Man (1987), than now?

Both of these muscular motion pictures were written by Mr. Steven de Souza, also famous for such genre-defining moments as 48 Hours (1982), Die Hard (1988), and the somewhat inevitable Die Hard 2 (1991). Catching up with de Souza proved to be a pleasure, with more movie-memories than you can flex a bicep at – and plenty of chat about how the erstwhile “Terminator” became a cornerstone of eighties-Americana…

So how did you become the go-to action movie writer of the 1980s?

I had been working seven years in Hollywood, going from story editor to executive producer, from television shows such as The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, and into movies. And I did two pictures which were runaway hits – the first was 48 Hours – with Eddie Murphy – and the second was Commando, with Arnold. Both of these indicated I had an ability to juggle action and humour, and that was what the studios wanted at that time.

Let’s talk about Arnold – what was your very first impression of him?

Arnold’s professionalism really impressed me. It was stunning actually. I wrote Commando and The Running Man for him and two other movies with Arnold in mind that might yet get made, we have spoken about it recently. I said to him once, “Arnold, it is such a lot of fun to do this stuff with you” – and it really was. He just had that discipline and self-belief. As soon as he arrived in America, he was convinced he was going to be the biggest star in the world.

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