Trailer
Plot summary
After an unsuccessful attempt to stir an armed insurrection in Mexico, William Walker is put on trial by a United States official for violating the Neutrality Act and is acquitted. He wants to settle down and launch a newspaper, but cholera takes the life of his fiancée, Ellen Martin. The American multimillionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt then offers him work in Nicaragua: aid the Democratic Party against the Legitimists in a civil war and steady the country, which would protect Vanderbilt's rights over an overland route between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Walker believes firmly in Manifest Destiny, accepts, and recruits sixty mercenaries for the expedition.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Walker (1987)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- To get into character, Ed Harris led the entire cast on a 10-mile forced march through the Nicaraguan countryside. Harris said he was drawn to playing a man with incredible moral convictions who turns into an evil person in the name of spreading democracy, and to the script's anti-Contra politics.
- The Guatemalan government, apparently hoping to please America, held Alex Cox with his entire cast and crew at the Nicaraguan border for a week and obliterated the budget. Cox, producer Edward R. Pressman and star Ed Harris all donated from their own wages to bring the film back on track.
- The delays left almost no time for reshooting, so one scene has only one of Walker's two brothers in it. On another day Ed Harris ad-libbed a whole speech about how America will "be back" and never "leave Nicaragua alone"; it was shot just in case and ended up in the finished film.
- The production took over Granada: 300 local carpenters built sets and 6,000 people were hired as extras. Electricity poles in the town plaza were torn down, leaving homes without light, some families lost their telephone lines to the shoot, and several inches of dirt were laid over the central square to recreate the 1850s.
- Nicaragua's Vice-President Sergio Ramirez and Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal, a novelist and a poet respectively, edited the screenplay themselves. Both men, along with the Minister of Education, the Interior Minister and a military commander, would drop in on the set.
- Two people were accidentally killed during principal photography, both in separate vehicle incidents; for one of the deaths the company paid for the funeral and compensated the family. Fires lit by locals made the air so thick that it was hard to breathe on set.
- Walker cost Alex Cox his studio career: he was never employed by a major Hollywood studio again. In a 2008 interview with The A.V. Club he said he had been on the studios' blacklist for 20 years, and that the last film he was asked to direct was The Running Man, which he would have liked to make.
- Joe Strummer, who had given songs to Cox's Sid and Nancy, wanted to compose a whole score. After filming his small part he went back to his room and taped the music on a four-track cassette with an acoustic guitar and a little plastic synthesizer, working with guitarist Zander Schloss.
