FILM · 1980 · UK
Saturn 3
32 archived facts 7 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (32)
- #001
The robot Hector stood over two metres tall and cost slightly more than $1 million to build.
- #002
Kirk Douglas reportedly directed this film for two days after John Barry left the project.
- #003
Original director John Barry had made his name as a set designer, earning great acclaim for his work on Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) and Superman (1978). After being removed from this film, he collapsed on the set while working as second unit director on Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and died of meningitis.
- #004
Producer Lew Grade said he was disappointed with how this film turned out. He said it looked good on paper, but the project began to fall apart because of John Barry's inexperience, Kirk Douglas's ego rebelling, Harvey Keitel's lack of cooperation, Farrah Fawcett's character personality and mediocre acting, script problems and poor planning. Grade said the film he agreed to fund was almost two different films. Fawcett also implied that the film turned out different from how it had been sold to her before production began.
- #005
Executive producer Lew Grade removed two scenes because he considered them distasteful. In one, Hector tore apart Benson's corpse on a laboratory table. The other was a dream scene in which Alex and Adam kill Benson.
- #006
Kirk Douglas found the clothes he wore in this film so comfortable that he kept them after production.
- #007
Harvey Keitel's voice was dubbed by Roy Dotrice because Stanley Donen felt Keitel's Brooklyn accent did not suit the film. Keitel was asked to come in and re-record his lines with a more neutral accent, but he was either unavailable or refused to do so (accounts vary).
- #008
Twenty people were needed to operate the robot Hector.
- #009
Building the vast Saturn 3 set at Shepperton Studios outside London took 79 craftsmen four months to complete. The result was one of the largest independent sets ever built in Britain. It occupied the entire floor space of Shepperton's immense A and B stages; the dividing doors between the two stages were opened to accommodate the set, which ran along a continuous 280-foot path and stretched wall to wall across the 120-foot-wide stages.
- #010
Elmer Bernstein wrote an hour of music for this film, much of it progressive and experimental, but most of it went unused until the final half hour of the film, after the opening sequences. After the film was extensively re-edited, Bernstein removed some cues because they did not work in shortened form, while others appear to have been removed by producer and replacement director Stanley Donen. The complete soundtrack was released as a Limited Edition CD in 2008 and is now out of print.
- #011
A fantasy scene featuring Farrah Fawcett in a tight leather outfit with garters was filmed but not used. Photos from the sequence were heavily used for publicity in the film's original release.
- #012
When Raise the Titanic (1980), another production from Sir Lew Grade's ITC Production company, went over budget, this film's production budget was reduced.
- #013
Asked about original director John Barry's abrupt departure, Stanley Donen said: "It was my fault, not John's. The truth is that John had hardly ever been on the set, which I hadn't noticed. He was a tremendous talent but he spent most of his time in the office. He knew almost nothing about staging a scene or dealing with actors, and since nature abhors a vacuum, the actors jumped on him. The film began to flounder. In the end I had to go too. I told him, 'This isn't working. I'm going to have to be on the set with you.' After all, I was going to make sure the film went well. But when I came to the film set, John said he couldn't work that way, so firing him was out of the question."
- #014
Farrah Fawcett was so popular at the time that she received top billing over Kirk Douglas.
- #015
This was the first film for which science fiction specialist production designer and art director John Barry served as story writer.
- #016
Farrah Fawcett's topless scene was ranked 18th on the Flashbak website's list of the Top 20 Most Gratuitous Nude Scenes of the 1980s in July 2014.
- #017
Adam was initially thought to be played by Sean Connery, and Michael Caine was also initially in the running to play Benson. However, Connery's refusal to work in the United Kingdom (as he was then residing in Spain as a tax exile) quickly put an end to that idea. Michael Caine also turned down the role of Benson because he was living abroad in the United States for the same tax reasons. In hindsight, casting Caine may seem an odd choice, since the script describes the character Benson/James as 'young, handsome, arrogant, difficult', and Caine, who was forty-six at the time and only three years younger than Connery, was much closer in age to Alex than to the considerably older Adam.
- #018
Colin Chilvers modelled "Hector" on a drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci.
- #019
According to Farrah Fawcett's 1997 appearance on David Letterman, the "butt slap" scene was improvised by Kirk Douglas, and for the rest of the shoot Kirk Douglas could not keep his hands off her. Although Kirk Douglas is known to have taken over directing for 2 days, those two days were spent on the scene in which Fawcett's character gets her back dirty. Kirk insisted on using his hands to dirty his trousers while putting them on. Those two days of shooting were repeated 57 times and resulted in a scene lasting only 17 seconds. He also suggested adding a shot in which he comes out of the shower completely naked, but the woman refused. Douglas was removed from the directing job until Stanley Donen was brought in to replace him.
- #020
The robot's name, "Hector", is taken from the Trojan Wars in Greek mythology, in which Hector was a Trojan prince and Troy's greatest warrior.
- #021
During production, Farrah Fawcett faced professional and personal crises: the premiere of director Stanley Donen's previous film, Somebody Killed Her Husband (1978), a remake of his own Charade (1963), had failed to ignite the previous year's box office, and her marriage to TV actor Lee Majors (The Six Million Dollar Man) was falling apart. As a result, filming on the Saturn 3 set was halted several times because of repeated "illness."
- #022
Sir Martin Amis drew heavily on his experience as the screenwriter of this film for the basis of his novel "Money." The director John Self is based on John Barry, the film's original director, and Lorne Guyland represents a caricature of the aging star Kirk Douglas, still trying to prove how sexy he is. Caduta bears some resemblance to Sophia Loren, who was not in the cast.
- #023
Farrah Fawcett celebrated her 32nd birthday during the making of this film.
- #024
Stanley Donen was making the B-movie spoof Movie Movie (1978) for Lew Grade and gave Grade a copy of the script to read. Grade read it on a plane with Farrah Fawcett, handed the script to the interested Fawcett, and agreed to make the film by the time the plane landed. Donen later said: "At the point we signed Farrah Fawcett, the script hadn't literally come to fruition. By the time Lord Grade got off that plane, we had a start date." Donen later said: "I was quite surprised he said yes in the first place, because in the first scripts his wasn't that big a role." The script changed once Fawcett became involved. "We went through every kind of idea," said Donen. "There were times when we had a story in which nobody was the villain. But I think there was always an age difference between us. Farrah and the man she worked with, I think in every version of the story we were looking for an older man rather than a younger man. But I don't think the script was changed to accommodate Kirk Douglas joining the cast."
- #025
The film was accused of resembling Alien (1979), but Stanley Donen pointed out that John Barry had come up with the idea several years before that film was released. "It's a shame we couldn't get it out first. There is a similarity with the evil monster, but ours doesn't disguise itself as a monster. Ours is beautiful, in a strange way. The alien was a kind of organic reptile with a steel mouth. Ours is more humanoid, it has legs. And we show ours."
- #026
According to writer Steve Gallagher, who was hired to write the novelization in 1979, the script had indeed gone through a series of rewrites after Martin Amis delivered his draft: "The script was terrible. I thought it was bad at the time, but looking back, with experience I can see how inept it was. It may not be Amis's fault. Years later I met someone who worked on the production and he told me that every script doctor in town took a pass at the script without being credited. The titles change accordingly, so it's impossible to say whether it was stillborn or killed by the mob."
- #027
Original director John Barry wanted to make a small, low-budget science fiction film because he had no experience as a director. However, after Farrah Fawcett became involved in the project, the budget was set at 10 million dollars. Barry suddenly found himself directing a much bigger-budget film, which was one of the reasons he became overwhelmed and resigned.
- #028
Kirk Douglas had just finished work on The Villain (1979), a comedy-western in which he shared the lead with the young Arnold Schwarzenegger, and was planning a long vacation when Stanley Donen approached him for the role of Adam. Douglas was so interested in the Saturn 3 concept that he immediately agreed to do it. In an interview he explained: "These days I only make films that excite me. I'm looking for a challenge, something new. The idea behind this film is so new, so different from anything else I've been offered in science fiction, that I didn't want to miss it." However, some sources reported that the opportunity to appear naked with Farrah Fawcett (a sexy starlet half his age) probably had a lot to do with his accepting the role.
- #029
The project was based on an idea by John Barry, one of the leading production designers of the 1970s, whose work included A Clockwork Orange (1971), Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) and Superman (1978). He pitched it to Stanley Donen while they were shooting Lucky Lady (1975) together, and Donen suggested that he produce while Barry directed (Donen had no prior experience with science fiction).
- #030
Principal photography lasted 15 weeks.
- #031
The film was nominated at the 1st Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Picture, Worst Actor (Kirk Douglas) and Worst Actress (Farrah Fawcett). It also received two 1980 Stinkers Bad Film Awards: Worst Actress (Farrah Fawcett) and Worst On-Screen Couple (Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett).
- #032
Speaking of nudity, Kirk Douglas's bare buttocks get more screen time after the first fight than Farrah Fawcett's right breast does after her shower scene.
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