For five years he suffered the filth, brutality and degradation of imprisonment in an environment of hellish squalor, while his family fought in vain to secure his release. It was the year when he was arrested at Istanbul airport, tried, and sentenced to 30 years in a Turkish jail. It was the year when he tried to smuggle 4lbs of hashish from Istanbul back to his home in America. For Billy Hayes, 1970 was a horrifying year. A true story of capture and incarceration danger and degradation hope and survival. The effect on audiences is something else-to them, it’s real.Description for Midnight Express Paperback. “What flickers up there on a screen for us as filmmakers is an illusion, a thousand shots with fifty thousand Scotch tape joins. “When I saw this scene for the first time with a paying audience, I remember a woman ran out and vomited in the lobby because she was so appalled,” said Parker. The violence swiftly escalates far beyond a vicious jailhouse pummeling, and even today the sequence hasn’t lost any of its bite. Starring Brad Davis as Hayes, the movie was filled with several highly emotional moments, none more shocking than this fight scene in which a duplicitous Turkish convict (Paolo Bonacelli) snitches on dissolute inmate Max (John Hurt), causing Hayes to go ballistic.
Budgeted at about $2.3 million, Midnight Express ultimately made $100 million in worldwide box office, and earned Parker a DGA and Oscar nomination for best director. Adapted from Hayes’ memoirs by then-unknown screenwriter Oliver Stone, the film was Parker’s second feature after directing several BBC shorts and more than 500 commercials before his 1976 big-screen debut with Bugsy Malone. Loosely based on a true story, the 1978 film follows young Billy Hayes, who was arrested in Turkey for attempting to smuggle out two kilos of hashish and underwent years of abuse in confinement before successfully mounting a daring escape.
The director looks back at how he did it.Ī prison drama with the dramatic intensity of a horror movie, Alan Parker’s Midnight Express has its fill of gut-wrenching, heart-stopping scenes. Alan Parker pushed actor Brad Davis to the limit-and beyond-in one of the most intense and gory fight scenes from Midnight Express.
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