Decades before he was “Papa” Brenner in Netflix’s hit series, Stranger Things, and two years before his generation-defining performance in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Matthew Modine starred in a coming-of-age wrestling drama called Vision Quest, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary. I reached out to Executive Producer Adam Fields, who had this to say about the film about Modine’s casting: “When I first found Terry Davis’ book, Vision Quest, I immediately knew there was a great story that would lend itself to a motion picture adaptation. Director Harold Becker had already displayed his remarkable eye for young talent in Taps with the marvelous casting of young Tom Cruise and Sean Penn, among others. He lived up to that by casting Matthew Modine, who was so terrific in the film.”

Modine stars as Louden Swain, a high school wrestler who tasks himself with cutting a significant amount of weight so he can take on the toughest wrestler at a rival school. Meanwhile, he becomes increasingly distracted and infatuated by Carla (Linda Fiorentino), a drifter who catches his fancy. She’s mysterious, mature, and gorgeous: everything an 18-year-old boy could imagine his dream woman to be. Vision Quest follows Louden’s difficult courtship of Carla, as well as his pursuit of athletic greatness. The result is a must-see drama for teens, and a nostalgic rush of emotion for grown-ups who remember what it was like to be young, ambitious, and unprepared for the pressures of adulthood in the 1980s.

ScreenRant interviewed Matthew Modine regarding the 40th anniversary of Vision Quest. He discussed the film’s enduring legacy, which owes something to the meteoric rise of Madonna, who made her feature film debut in Vision Quest as a singer in a Spokane nightclub. The Madonna song “Crazy For You” featured prominently in the film, going on to become a #1 hit and dethroning “We Are The World” from the top spot on the charts. Modine also reflected on the film’s 80s sensibilities and how Vision Quest shares some unlikely similarities with his current project, Netflix’s Stranger Things.

Matthew Modine On The Enduring Slow Burn Cultural Success Of Vision Quest

“Not to toot my own horn, but I think Vision Quest is an incredible coming-of-age movie.”

ScreenRant: Let’s go back. You’re 23, you already have Private School and Birdy under your belt. Did you feel like you had already, quote-unquote, “made it?” Or were you like, “There’s a 50% chance that this could end with me picking up boxes on the dock?”

Matthew Modine: Yeah, you never know. Al Pacino, after he did Revolution, thought he was going to have to get a job working on the docks, because he thought his career was over after the tremendous box office failure that Revolution was.

But the only thing that an actor, a performer, is responsible for is that moment between action and cut. You have to do all the preparation you can, be as prepared as you can when you get to the set to come in and perform your ‘piece of the music,’ to say your words and play your role. Afterward, it’s out of your hands. It goes into the editor’s hands, the distributor’s hands. Sometimes a film is successful and sometimes it’s not. It’s not necessarily the fault of the performer, especially with box office.

Vision Quest was a moderate success when it was released in the United States, and a bigger success overseas when they changed the тιтle to Crazy for You because of the Madonna song. If I compare it to It’s a Wonderful Life, the Jimmy Stewart movie, that movie wasn’t necessarily successful when it was released. Then somebody programmed it back when televisions were black-and-white and put it on at Christmastime, and it became a perennial hit. Every year, it’s a movie that we sit down and watch because it’s so good.

Not to toot my own horn, but I think Vision Quest is an incredible coming-of-age movie that deals with a lot of things in mature ways with a terrific soundtrack and a really wonderful bunch of actors that are in the film, really taking their responsibility very seriously.

I want to ask about Michael Schoeffling, who retired from acting. Do you keep in touch with him at all?

Matthew Modine: No, but I love Michael. I think he’s a terrific actor, and he was a really great guy. There’s a reason he became a carpenter and moved back to Pennsylvania and got out of the business. This is a hard business, and it’s really rough on the ego, the way that we’re judged and so loudly criticized if somebody doesn’t like something that you made. If you had a donut shop, they wouldn’t go to the donut shop. But if you made a donut that the entire United States had to read about, that it was terrible, it would probably shut your business down. It’s a tough business.

It wasn’t that Michael wasn’t cut out for it, but he just chose not to be a part of it.

Matthew Modine Loved “Starring In A Madonna Movie,” So To Speak

“I’d meet people on the street, and they’d say, ‘Oh, you’re in that Madonna video!'”

What about Madonna? Was she a fully formed Madonna yet, or was she figuring it out at that point?

Matthew Modine: She was figuring it out. She didn’t even know really what her look was. It was that Boy George moment in her career, with the same kind of hair tie and the clothing, lots of torn fabric and things like that. She was a recording artist at Warner Brothers, and they put her in the film to sing a couple songs. I don’t think she was there more than half a day, six hours. But then of course, when the film opened, “Like a Virgin” had come out, and she was a multimillion dollar, million album success. And all of a sudden I was in a Madonna movie.

(Laughs) Funny how that worked out!

Matthew Modine: Yeah. I’d meet people on the street, and they’d say, “Oh, you’re in that Madonna video!” She was singing “Crazy for You.”

The Importance Of Arts Education In Public Schools Can Never Be Underestimated

“A child that takes a drawing class may not become the next Picᴀsso, but he might become the next I.M. Pei.”

I’ve seen you talk about the importance of arts education in schools, but there’s not a whole lot of education at all to go around these days. We’ll see how things shape up over the next couple of years, but I think about how you got some education with your family’s drive-in business. Would you say that that was as educational, in its way, as what you learned in school?

Matthew Modine: Yeah. In those days, they used to send 16mm trailers to the theater managers to pick first features, pick second features, the combinations. You’d get these little reels of 16mm film, we’d watch them, and occasionally you’d get a featurette that talked about the making of the movie. Up to that point, movies were documentaries in my mind. James Bond was really James Bond, and cowboy and Indian movies were documentaries. They weren’t fantasy or fictional stories.

But when I saw the making of Oliver, I realized that this was a profession of making films and that the young kids that were in the films were learning to sing and learning to dance and learning to say their lines. It was all laid out in the little featurette documentary about the making of Oliver. And I thought, well, “That’s what I want to do. That’s a great job.”

I started in Orem, Utah, taking tap dancing lessons. I joined the Glee Club in junior high school. And then, in my sophomore year, I got cut from the football team. And when I was pᴀssing the drama department, they were having auditions for Our Town and I played George Gibbs in the play. And I think that’s when it really, you know, bit me. And I enjoyed becoming a part of the arts.

You mentioned the arts, and I think that it is worth pointing out in schools that a child that takes a drawing class may not become the next Picᴀsso, but he might become the next I.M. Pei. He might become an architect. The drawing helps you to see the world in different ways, spatially. And the volume of a room. That has an impact on many different walks of life, of education. And so it’s very good to teach a child to draw because of how it affects different areas. It might help them in their math class.

If I use Benjamin Franklin as an example, he invented bifocals. We know him as a great statesman, but he was also a scientist and an inventor. He invented the harmonium. If you ever played a wine glᴀss with your finger, you know, he invented a thing where there was a whole bunch of glᴀsses of different sizes and you could play this thing. The glᴀsses were rolling in water and you played a harmonium. He discovered the Gulf Stream. He invented waterтιԍнт hulls for boats.

Back in those days, you didn’t isolate somebody, like, “He’s just a bone doctor.” A doctor tried to understand the entirety of the human anatomy of the body. A person who was a doctor could also be a politician, and I don’t know why we put people into little pockets. People should be able to do all kinds of things. But maybe not like that expression, “master of none.”

40 Years After Vision Quest, Matthew Modine Returns To The 1890s With Stranger Things

“I wish I could tell you more, but Netflix would find me and they’d cancel my subscription”.

ScreenRant: Can you give me anything about Stranger Things? Can you give me anything?

Matthew Modine: Can I give you anything? The show’s going to open sometime later this summer, probably around July. How’s that? And it’s going to be really good. Uh, Millie Bobby Brown is in it. I had the pleasure in late Summer 2024 of marrying her, officiating her wedding to Jake Bongiovi, in one of the most beautiful ceremonies I’ve ever witnessed, let alone participated in.

Wow. That’s beautiful. You really are Papa.

Matthew Modine: I really am Papa. I wish I could tell you more, but Netflix would find me and they’d cancel my subscription.

But since you bring up Stranger Things, the similarities of Stranger Things and Vision Quest are [interesting]. They both take place in the 80s. They’re both coming-of-age stories. I think that the appeal, whether consciously or unconsciously for young people and people that grew up in the ’80s, is that it was a simpler time. It’s a time before the internet. It’s a time before social media, mobile phones, texting. If people wanted to meet, if they wanted to hook up, they had to get on their bicycle or get in a car, get in a motorcycle and go see that person to communicate with them. I think that’s very appealing to people because we’ve become so isolated from one another.

Source: Screen Rant Plus