40 Years Ago, An Iconic ‘80s Movie Pulled Off the Impossible

“It is the most difficult thing I ever thought I was gonna get into,” Richard Donner says with a smile. “I never anticipated what it was gonna be like. Because, individually, they’re wonderful. They’re nuts. They’re the warmest, craziest things that have come into my life. But in a composite form, you get them all together and it’s mindblowing.”

The director of The Goonies (or co-director with Steve Spielberg, depending on who you ask) is talking directly into the camera for a behind-the-scenes featurette where he both derides and praises the child cast of his cult-classic comedy, which debuted in theaters on June 7, 1985. Four decades later, it’s clear that Donner’s difficulties corralling a gang of unruly kids were more than worth it.

With its nonsensical story about pirate treasure hidden beneath a small coastal city in Oregon, The Goonies sometimes feels less like a movie and more like a series of comedy sketches, Rube Goldberg contraptions, and theme park commercials held together with Scotch tape. But the result is somehow more than the sum of its parts, an iconic ‘80s relic that holds up to this day—and the stories from the making of The Goonies reveal the heroic effort required to pull it off.

Any way you slice it, The Goonies is the work of an absurdly talented team of filmmakers. Donner (Lethal Weapon, Superman) is officially credited as director, while Spielberg (smack dab in the middle of making the Indiana Jones trilogy) has a “Story By” credit. Screenwriting duties fell to Chris Columbus (who had already written Gremlins and would go on to direct Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire, among many other classic films).

Behind the scenes, Spielberg was apparently more involved than you might think. In that same featurette, Donner gripes about “Spielberg looking over my shoulder all the time.” He then quickly backtracks, adding, “which I have to love, because he’s the biggest kid of them all and comes up with the best ideas.”

In his 2004 autobiography, There and Back Again: An Actor’s Tale, Sean Astin (one of several child actors in The Goonies who went on to become a Hollywood star), puts things a bit more bluntly:

“Dick [Donner] and Steven [Spielberg] were incredible engines, with different strengths. There was a time when I thought Dick didn’t get it, that he didn’t understand the real poetry and mystery of the story. In retrospect, of course, I know I was wrong. He did get it. It’s just that he was something of a drill sergeant: ‘Get over here, kid! Hit your mark! Say your line! Now get out of the way.’ He was a bombastic leader on the set, and I didn’t realize that the bravado masked his true sense of the magical. Steven was different. The tenor and the ambience when he was directing scenes (and they really were like co-directors) was much gentler, more whimsical. They’re both extraordinary directors, of course, but as a kid I presumed that Steven had a more natural appreciation for the spirit of adventure. I’m not so sure that’s accurate.”

But while the question of who directed The Goonies may be a bit murkier than the credits suggest, Donner alone gets credit for pulling off the movie’s most memorable moment.

The film’s biggest set piece comes in the final act, when the kids finally solve the mystery and uncover One-Eyed Willie’s hidden pirate ship, The Inferno. Hidden in a flooded, underground cavern, the ship is massive and totally real. A team of artists and craftsmen worked for two and a half months to build the giant vessel, which stretched 105 feet from bow to stern and required roughly 7,000 square feet of material for its sails. The Inferno anchored in a giant water tank inside an even larger soundstage at Warner Bros. Studios. (After filming wrapped, nobody wanted the ship, so it was unceremoniously torn apart.)

To emphasize the big reveal, which occurs after the kids fall down a water slide, Donner kept the ship completely hidden from his cast until the last possible second.

“They were banned from this stage, from day one, from the start of its construction,” Donner says in The Making Of The Goonies. ”The day they were supposed to come out of the chute, hit the water, turn around, and see the boat for the first time. I brought them all in, not blindfolded, but with their backs to the camera. They all knew what they were going to see, but they had no idea what it was going to look like.”

The idea was to capture the authentic reactions of a handful of kids seeing a life-sized pirate ship for the first time. For the most part, it worked, although at least one of those child actors snuck a peek. At a Goonies reunion panel in April 2025, Astin revealed that he couldn’t resist checking out the Inferno ahead of time.

“I wanted to perform in a way that really made them think that they had captured the honest reactions, so they would for 40 years be like, ‘Oh, we got these kids to do this thing!’”  Astin said (according to People, which moderated the event).

But aside from Astin, some of those reactions are real. Martha Plimpton, who plays Stef in The Goonies, confirmed that her first time seeing the ship was captured by Donner’s camera. “My performance was honest,” she said at the People event, adding that Donner only needed to film the scene one time.

If you rewatch the scene, most of the child cast responds to the ship with true wonder—wide eyes and shouts of “Oh wow!”—while Astin has nothing but a dumb look on his face. 

Donner was clearly on to something by keeping The Inferno a secret, and while his bombastic leadership style may have annoyed some of the child actors at the time, it’s a major reason why The Goonies continues to inspire and astound us all, even 40 years after its release.

You can watch The Goonies right now on HBO Max.