13 Fascinating Facts About ‘The Elephant Man’

In 1980, David Lynch was an arthouse filmmaker looking for a bigger break, Mel Brooks was a comedian who wanted to produce serious movies, and Jonathan Sanger was an assistant director looking for a producing job. They would be united, somewhat unexpectedly, by a single screenplay that told the remarkable true story of a man with physical impairments who won over Victorian London.

The script was The Elephant Man, and together, Brooks, Sanger, and Lynch battled a lawsuit, makeup difficulties, scheduling conflicts, and more to get it made. The result elevated all of their careers, and became one of the most acclaimed films of the decade. To celebrate 45 years of The Elephant Man, here are 13 facts about how it got made. 

1. Its journey to the screen began with a babysitter.
2. Several studios turned The Elephant Man down.
3. Mel Brooks deliberately kept his name out of the credits.
4. David Lynch said yes based on the title alone.
5. Brooks hired Lynch after screening Eraserhead.
6. The production was almost derailed by a lawsuit.
7. Pauline Kael helped get it made.
8. Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nance were considered for the title role.
9. Anthony Hopkins was the first choice for Dr. Treves.
10. Lynch originally wanted to do the Elephant Man makeup himself.
11. The final makeup was based on Merrick’s real death mask.
12. Hopkins convinced everyone the makeup would work.
13. It earned eight Oscar nominations (and won none of them).

Its journey to the screen began with a babysitter.

Before The Elephant Man was connected to Paramount Pictures, or Mel Brooks, or David Lynch, it was a screenplay written by Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren, who’d never written a screenplay before. Inspired by the memoirs of Dr. Frederick Treves—Merrick’s eventual caretaker—which had fallen into the public domain, and with an option on anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s book The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity, they crafted a screenplay about the life of Joseph (called “John” in the final film) Merrick, the “Elephant Man” of the title—but they hadn’t found anyone to back it.

Fortunately for De Vore and Bergren, they had a connection to Jonathan Sanger, an assistant director and production manager who had his eye on breaking into producing movies. Sanger found out about the script through his children’s babysitter, De Vore’s girlfriend at the time, who asked him to read the script and offer feedback. Sanger agreed, read the script in one sitting, and called De Vore to option it.

“ ‘I couldn’t put it down,’ I told him. ‘And I was weeping when I finished it,’ ” Sanger recalled in his memoir of the production, Making The Elephant Man. The two budding writers had a budding producer on their side, but they still had to find a studio to make it all come together. 

Several studios turned The Elephant Man down.

With Sanger’s backing, The Elephant Man was pitched to several studios, all of whom said no. But Sanger had a connection with one of Hollywood’s most successful filmmakers, Mel Brooks, for whom he’d worked as an assistant director on High Anxiety.

While working as a production manager on Fatso, directed by Brooks’s wife Anne Bancroft, Sanger got The Elephant Man script into Brooks’s office, where it landed with development executive Randy Auerbache. When Sanger was traveling to shoot Fatso, Brooks called him up and explained that he’d read it over the weekend. Suddenly, an extremely influential writer and director who’d just formed his own company, Brooksfilms, was on board. 

Mel Brooks deliberately kept his name out of the credits.

Though Brooksfilms as a production company would go on to shepherd his comedy films of the 1980s and 1990s, Brooks was keen at the time of its founding to make his company a place where non-comedic work would flourish—and he saw The Elephant Man as a key part of that mission. Brooks was immediately interested in producing the film through his company, but knew from the beginning that putting his name in the credits could create confusion among audiences who might go into theaters expecting a comedy.

So Brooks made the decision to work on the film as an uncredited executive producer, while Cornfeld took on the named executive producer role, and Sanger kept his role as producer. The project was a success for Brooksfilms, and just a few years later the company would back its other most famous non-comedy release, David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly. 

David Lynch said yes based on the title alone.

Stuart Cornfeld was the first person on The Elephant Man team to bring up David Lynch, and encouraged Sanger to go see Lynch’s legendary arthouse debut, Eraserhead. After screening the film, Sanger was intrigued, and called Lynch for a meeting. The two met (at Bob’s Big Boy in Los Angeles, naturally), and Lynch explained that he was trying to get a film called Ronnie Rocket made as his Eraserhead follow-up.

In Lynch’s recollection, it was a conversation with Cornfeld that sealed the deal. According to the director—who told the story in Chris Rodley’s interview book Lynch on Lynch—he expressed interest in The Elephant Man as soon as the title left Cornfeld’s lips, without any knowledge of the true story, the script, or who else was involved in the production.

“I knew nothing, and yet I knew everything,” Lynch recalled. “In that one instant.”

Whether it was Sanger or Cornfeld who first broached the topic of The Elephant Man, Lynch was immediately intrigued. Now he had to impress Brooks.

Brooks hired Lynch after screening Eraserhead.

Mel Brooks was all set to make The Elephant Man with De Vore and Bergren as writers, Sanger as producer, and Cornfeld as executive producer. What he wasn’t yet sold on was Lynch himself, despite recommendations from his production team. So the Brooksfilms team arranged a screening of Eraserhead for Brooks on the Fox lot (where Brooks’s office was at the time), and asked Lynch to attend. Lynch, not wanting to sit and watch Brooks while Brooks watched Eraserhead, politely shied away from the screening, but arrived in time to meet Brooks when it was over.

According to Lynch, he first met Mel Brooks when the legendary comedian burst out of the screening room doors, wrapped him in a hug, and said “You’re a madman! I love you. You’re in.”

The production was almost derailed by a lawsuit.

While developing The Elephant Man, Sanger discovered that a play of the same name, also based on Joseph Merrick’s life, had opened in New York. After earning rave reviews, the stage play made its way to Broadway, threatening both the novelty and the potential copyright of the film version.

According to Sanger, Brooks advised the team to stay the course and simply understand that competing projects about the same subject happen all the time in Hollywood. Eventually, though, the theatrical production sued the movie production before The Elephant Man had even rolled film. Ultimately, an agreement was reached in which the film’s ads would all include a disclaimer indicating that it was not based on the play; the film production also paid the play an undisclosed sum.

Interestingly, in May of 2025, Variety reported that A Different Man star Adam Pearson is set to play Merrick in a new film version of The Elephant Man, this one based directly on the play. 

Pauline Kael helped get it made.

With a director on board, and Brooksfilms backing the production, The Elephant Man now needed a distributor to shepherd the film to the big screen. One of the interested studios was Paramount Pictures, then run by future Walt Disney Company head Michael Eisner.

But Eisner wasn’t working alone. According to Sanger’s memoir, legendary film critic Pauline Kael was, at that point, an advisor at the studio, reviewing and advising on potential Paramount projects, and out of a stack of scripts, she’d singled out The Elephant Man as a promising cinematic story. The deal was made, and The Elephant Man came to Paramount. 

Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nance were considered for the title role.

When it came time to cast The Elephant Man, talk naturally turned to the title role, which would need an actor who could comfortably disappear behind makeup to simulate Merrick’s physical differences. Dustin Hoffman, who shared a lawyer with Brooks, expressed immediate interest in playing the role, but Sanger was unconvinced. He believed that, with a recognizable movie star in the lead, the audience would always be looking for Dustin Hoffman under the makeup—so the Midnight Cowboy star was out.

Lynch himself wanted to re-team with Jack Nance, his friend and Eraserhead star who’d later also appear in Dune, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, and Lost Highway. Then he saw The Naked Civil Servant, and decided that film’s star, John Hurt, would be the ideal Merrick. 

Anthony Hopkins was the first choice for Dr. Treves.

With Merrick’s role cast, the production then had to find an English actor to play the role of Dr. Frederick Treves, the surgeon who takes the Elephant Man in and makes caring for him a priority. Anthony Hopkins was everyone’s first choice, and it helped that he had the endorsement of Anne Bancroft, who not only offered her services for the role of Madge Kendal, but spoke glowingly of her experience working with Hopkins on Young Winston.

According to Sanger, Hopkins’s agent turned the script down, explaining that the actor was trying to steer his career away from more traditionally English roles. Undeterred, De Vore and Bergren were convinced that if they could get a copy of the script to Hopkins directly, he’d be interested. So they went to a play in Los Angeles in which Hopkins was performing, got him the script, and sure enough, he said yes.

Lynch originally wanted to do the Elephant Man makeup himself.

The next great challenge, as The Elephant Man moved toward principal photography, was getting the look of John Merrick right. Lynch, who’d achieved phenomenal low-budget makeup effects in Eraserhead, took on the task himself, and set up a small studio in the garage of his house in the London suburb of Wembley to get to work while the film was in prep. Lynch envisioned a kind of all-encompassing suit that would be applied to Hurt quickly, then blended with the actor’s real features, and based his work on Merrick’s real-life look.

Hurt, meanwhile, was in North America working on Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, which had run well over schedule and, thus, was making The Elephant Man producers nervous. By the time Hurt arrived in London for work, he’d lost a significant amount of weight, and when Lynch put the suit on his actor, it was an immediate failure.

“And even as I was slipping it on his head, even before it got there, we both knew that it was, like, maybe a million miles away from happening,” Lynch recalled in Lynch on Lynch. “It wasn’t that it looked wrong, but the material—instead of being flexible—was like concrete! And there was no way John could move in this thing.”

With time ticking down on the production clock, the film was forced to look elsewhere for a makeup artist. 

The final makeup was based on Merrick’s real death mask.

To get the makeup done, the production turned to Christopher Tucker, who’d worked on the BBC’s hit series I, Claudius, as well as various creatures for Star Wars in the mid-1970s. Tucker immersed himself in Merrick’s real-life look, visiting the Royal London Hospital Museum to view Merrick’s skeleton, as well as plaster casts of his body made upon Merrick’s death in 1890. In an unorthodox move, Tucker actually requested to take the cast back to his studio to work on the makeup, and the museum’s curator unexpectedly agreed to the request. Tucker took the one-of-a-kind piece of medical history back to his workspace, and built the makeup appliances that would form John Merrick onscreen.

Hopkins convinced everyone the makeup would work.

Tucker was working against the clock from the moment he began makeup for The Elephant Man. The film was already shooting, and Lynch and company were working around the lack of Merrick’s full-bodied presence, filming scenes with Hopkins and other actors while they waited for the final makeup, and shooting scenes where Merrick was obscured by curtains and costume. Then, one day, the call came.

There was no time for a traditional makeup test. Hurt had arrived late to the production due to Heaven’s Gate, and Hopkins had to leave to work on his next project, A Change of Seasons, so things had to get rolling. After 12 hours in the makeup chair, Hurt arrived on set to what he called “stunned silence,” and was ushered into Merrick’s little attic room in Treves’s hospital for his first scene, in which Treves teaches Merrick the 23rd Psalm.

“Hopkins did half of the scene, and then turned, looked at David and I, and smiled and nodded his head. And we all knew, just visually, we knew that it was gonna work,” Sanger recalled.

In an interview later, Hurt also credited Hopkins with cementing the makeup as a working piece of the production.

"Tony Hopkins, yeah, if it were not for him … had he not behaved that way, at that moment, on that day, it would’ve been destroyed," Hurt said.

Later, Tucker recalled that his makeup work on The Elephant Man was a key piece of the argument when makeup artists lobbied for an eventual Best Makeup Oscar. 

It earned eight Oscar nominations (and won none of them).

The Elephant Man premiered in the fall of 1980, and quickly became one of the most celebrated films of the year, alongside Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Robert Redford’s Ordinary People. When awards season rolled around, the film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor for Hurt, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Editing, and Best Original Score. The entire production was baffled by the exclusion of cinematographer Freddie Francis, but the attention was gratifying.

In the end, The Elephant Man didn’t take home any Oscars—instead, Ordinary People led the night with wins for Picture, Director, and Screenplay (among others), and Robert De Niro took home Best Actor for Raging Bull. Still, the legacy of The Elephant Man is secure today. It helped Brooks’s company gain a reputation among filmmakers, it elevated Lynch to more mainstream status, and it remains one of the most celebrated movies of the 1980s.

Additional Sources: Making The Elephant Man: A Producer’s Memoir by Jonathan Sanger; Lynch on Lynch: Revised Edition, edited by Chris Rodley

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