Ted Kotcheff, ‘First Blood’ and ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ Director, Dead at 94

Ted Kotcheff, director of First Blood and Weekend at Bernie’s, died Thursday, as reported by Canadian publisher the Globe and Mail. He was 94. His death was confirmed by his family, though no cause has been disclosed.

The Canadian filmmaker launched his career in in the late Fifties, directing film and television productions including Fun with Dick and Jane, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and more over the following decades. His credits also include The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and North Dallas Forty.

North Dallas Forty, in particular, is regarded as one of the greatest sports films of all time. “Ted Kotcheff’s down-and-dirty sports drama does double duty as a broad satire as it delves into the corrupt underbelly of professional football — the drugs, the sex, the backstabbing, and the bureaucratic incompetence,” Rolling Stone wrote in 2020. “Here’s a movie that explodes all that — both an ode to and an interrogation of Seventies locker-room machismo, American style.”

First Blood, on the other hand, carries the legacy of having introduced the world to Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo. After being swayed by Stallone and a particularly passionate test audience, Kotcheff altered the ending of the film to embrace a more hopeful outlook than originally planned. It was his first time directing an action film. “You know, I think action movies are the easiest to direct,” he told Filmmaker Magazine in 2016. “Comedies are the hardest, dramas come second, and action movies are relatively easy, because you have this built in structure of the pursued and the pursuer that you can use to build suspense.”
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Kotcheff was often selective about the projects he chose to devote his time to. After Weekend at Bernie’s and Winter People, both released in 1989, the director took three full years to release another film, Folk! in 1992, and another three to follow that one with The Shooter in 1995.

“When you make a film, it takes at least a year and a half from conception to scripting, shooting and editing, and all the rest of it. That’s a year and a half out of your life, so I’m very careful,” Kotcheff told Film Talk in 2017. “If you feel you care very much about the film you’re gonna do, then all problems become bearable. If you don’t, then all problems seem like mountains. I don’t function very well as a director unless I care about it deeply. That’s why I have these long gaps before I find something that’s worth putting a year and a half of my time and energy into it.”