When Planes, Trains and Automobiles roared into theaters on November 25, 1987, it was somehow both a sure thing and a big risk. Its writer/producer/director, John Hughes, was coming off a string of hits (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off among them), modestly budgeted character-driven dramedies whose big grosses meant big profits; leading actors Steve Martin and John Candy were among the biggest comedy stars in the country. But Hughes, who had established himself as the poet laureate of ’80s teendom, was telling a story about grown-ups for a change. Martin, whose biggest film successes thus far had come in broad comedies, was attempting to remake himself as a more intellectual screen presence. And although Candy was one of the brightest lights of the SCTV ensemble, he had found precious few film roles that put his tremendous talent to full use. 

But these three comic legends collaborated to make movie magic, and in the 35 years since its release, Planes, Trains and Automobiles has become not only a holiday perennial, but one of the most beloved comedies of the ’80s. To mark that anniversary—as well as its recent 4K Blu-ray and video-on-demand release, featuring over an hour of previously unseen footage for those who purchase it—Vanity Fair spoke to nearly 20 members of the movie’s cast and crew, as well as the children of the late John Hughes and John Candy.  

Even before a single frame of film had been shot, anticipation for the movie was high. “Steve Martin and John Candy have their work cut out for next February. Paramount has snagged them to star in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, written and directed by John Hughes,” Marilyn Beck wrote in a September 1986 syndicated column. ”Paramount is so high on the script—and on Martin and Candy—that it already has targeted P, T & A as its major release for the holiday season next year.” 

Bill Brown (Associate Producer/Second Unit Director): I remember going out to dinner at Ivy at the Shore in Los Angeles with [Hughes] on, like, a Wednesday night. And he goes, “I’ve got this idea.”

John Hughes (Writer/Producer/Director): This movie is based on an incident that actually happened to me. When I was an advertising copywriter I set out from New York to Chicago on Thanksgiving weekend and after a five-day delay, ended up in Phoenix, Arizona, via Wichita, Kansas. (Edmonton Sunday Sun, 1987)

Brown: And he was just sort of pitching the idea for the movie.

John Hughes: There was an old guy there, a salesman who had been on the road for years. He knew everything about this kind of situation. I kind of hung out with him. I was so impressed by this guy’s understanding of the situation. (Rocky Mountain News, 1987)

Brown: This is a Wednesday night at dinner, just casual, sitting around talking about it. The following Tuesday, it was a greenlit picture at Paramount.

Janet Hirshenson (Casting Director): As I remember, he came in, we had a session on a Monday and he came in and said, “Oh, I wrote a script over the weekend. I think we may be doing it later.”

Ira Newborn (Composer): He could write a script in a day or two days. I mean, he had all this stuff in his head! 

Brown: We’d have dinners mostly at his house, but sometimes at restaurants. And they were an opportunity for him to kind of talk through stuff. And then he would start work. So he would generally start work after dinner and work until like four in the morning, that was his prime writing time. And it would take about three nights to lay down a draft.

James Hughes (John Hughes’s Son): He wrote his first drafts as quickly as possible, almost in a fugue state.

Tarquin Gotch (Music Supervisor): He would get in the zone, and not stop. And you could not get hold of him. Phone’s dead. And it could be two days.

Howard Deutch (Director, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, The Great Outdoors*):* He’d write and I’d usually fall asleep…. On Some Kind of Wonderful, we were doing rewrites. I woke up and I said, “How’d it go?” And he said, “Oh, yeah, I did this instead, sorry.” And he hands me 50 pages. I go, “What is this? We were supposed to do three, four pages on Some Kind of Wonderful.” He said, “Oh, I get sidetracked. Tell me what you think of this. I don’t really know what it’s about. But I wrote it.” And it was the first half of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. So that’s the guy we’re dealing with.

John Hughes III (John Hughes’s Son): He was always writing, there were always people in and out of the house, there was always music blaring from the other room, late-night music temp sessions and that sort of thing. 

Deutch: There were always half-written scripts or quarter-written or almost-done scripts lying around the office. And Planes, Trains was one of those. I started to read it, and it was fantastic, I loved it right away. And I said, “I want to do this.” He says, “Okay!”

So I started prep. And it wasn’t very long into the prep that I got a call from Ned Tanen, the head of Paramount. He said, “Listen, I just got a call that Steve Martin’s interested in doing this. And I know John has a major actor crush on Steve Martin. I think John’s gonna want to do it. But John has other things in mind for you if he does.”

John Candy (“Del Griffith”): There’s a picture, this January, February, that would be ’87. John Hughes wrote a script for Paramount, and Howard Deutch, I believe, is set to direct it. As yet it is untitled, and it’s a very funny story, hysterically funny story. I laughed a lot when I read this. (City Lights, 1986)

Planes, Trains was not Hughes and Candy’s first collaboration—Candy had appeared in National Lampoon’s Vacation, which Hughes wrote and Harold Ramis directed, in 1983. Candy had not initially been cast; he was brought in when the film’s original ending, in which Clark Griswold goes to Roy Walley’s house wielding a gun and demanding entertainment, was scrapped.

John Hughes: I preferred the original and still do, but the rewrite gave me an introduction to John Candy. (Zoetrope: All-Story, 2008)

Chris Candy (John Candy’s Son): He really knew how to capture my dad’s essence.

John Hughes: I thought Steve Martin was the funniest man alive. He was the first real rock-and-roll comedian who appeared in arenas, not little clubs. So I was a little in awe when he came to my home for a meeting for Planes, Trains. I found him disarming and cooperative. Then I met John Candy, he was the same sort of man. We became fast friends. (Boston Herald, 1987) 

Steve Martin (“Neal Page”): Part of the difference of this character, more than anything I’ve ever done, is that the serious base of it sets up the comedy—like the more serious and tense the character is, the funnier it gets when he goes crazy or finds himself in an awkward situation or sleeping, you know, with John Candy. (Getting There Is Half the Fun: The Story of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, 1987)

John Hughes: John and Steve are very different kinds of guys and they’re an incredibly unlikely combination. That’s what appealed to me. Steve has gotten fairly sophisticated and he’s handsome. John is the absolute opposite. (Rocky Mountain News, 1987)

Jennifer Candy (John Candy’s Daughter): This was the first role that I really noticed him prepping the character. He really planned the facial hair. He really planned the hair, like, Del Griffin had to have a perm. And we went and got a perm. I remember him coming home with dark hair and a perm. So it was like, okay, this is what he’s doing now.

Paramount had greenlighted the picture, but with a catch: They wanted it in theaters by Thanksgiving, which only gave Hughes nine months to shoot, cut, and complete the picture, a process that typically took a year or more. And that wasn’t the only ticking clock.

Gotch: There was a DGA strike at the end of June, so we had to shoot the movie by the end of June. 

John Hughes: I finished She’s Having a Baby at the end of December, the 19th of December. And we started this picture on the third of March. It’s very difficult to edit, preview, and score a film in two months, while prepping another film. And I was very happy that Paramount allowed the film to be taken out of the summer schedule, because I would have had to have a film released that I had no input on the back end. (Getting There Is Half the Fun: The Story of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, 1987)

But Hughes still had to hit the tight holiday deadline for Planes, Trains, even when Mother Nature decided not to cooperate with the late-winter shoot. The snow so direly needed for the November-set tale would prove a feast-or-famine situation—usually the latter.

Shooting began in Buffalo, New York, on March 2, 1987.

Michael McKean (“State Trooper”): We shot the full day, and then overnight it snowed. So we couldn’t shoot the rest of it—we had to go back and start again, because now things looked a lot different.

Associated Press, March 4, 1987: “The snow even came just in time for the first scene involving newly arrived stars Martin and Candy. But the squalls were so intense they caused a whiteout, near-zero visibility in blowing snow. Shooting of a sequence in which Martin and Candy, riding in a burnt-out car, are pulled over by a state trooper were delayed while the crew waited for the weather to quiet down and the camera lenses to clear.”

McKean: So we essentially shot the thing twice in two different days.

Brown: There were logistical elements with the making of the film that were difficult. But that particular year, I just remember we were chasing snow. We were chasing snow everywhere we went. It was really, really bad.

Martin: We actually lived the plot of the movie. As we would shoot, we were hopping trains, planes, and automobiles, trying to find snow. (John Hughes: A Life in Film)

Brown: I’ve worked on a number of films where there’s almost like…I refer to it as method filmmaking? Because it’s like, you just become the characters, in their experience.

The best illustration of the touch-and-go nature of the shoot is probably the story of character actor Troy Evans, just starting out in 1987, who was hired for what was intended to be the one-day, one-line role of the cheese truck driver at the end of the journey. 

Troy Evans (“Antisocial Trucker”): They hired me and I was going to shoot in LA. And they offered me a thousand dollars, for this one day, to go in and say that one line. Then my agent called a couple of days later, and said, “They’ve decided they’re going to shoot that scene in New York.” And I said, “So am I off the movie?” “No, no, no, you’ll go to New York.” Well, about this time, they decided that they would use this scene as their cover set, because there was threatening snow, so they’re holding me. If it snows, then they’ll shoot this with me in the truck, with the snow blowing. 

But it didn’t snow, and they kept holding Evans for his one scene—at $1,000 a day—as the company moved from Buffalo to Ohio to St. Louis to Illinois, taking him along for the ride to each new location.

Evans: I don’t remember, it was 11 cities total. Ended up, I’m pretty sure, we finally shot the scene in Kankakee, Illinois, on my 51st day. So I left home not having $300 in rent. And when I went back home, having done my one line in the movie, we bought our first house. 

As the weather interfered with shooting days and travel days were added, the schedule and budget of the film ballooned. The production started in Buffalo; moved to Kankakee, Woodstock, Gurnee, Kenilworth, and Chicago, Illinois; and zipped over to St. Louis and New York City before landing in Los Angeles for soundstage shooting. 

Laila Robins (“Susan Page”): I remember, they flew me out to LA and we went into what was going to be the interior of our house. And John Hughes said, “I don’t like this interior. Let’s redo it.” So they sent me home for a week. And then I came back! Talk about disposable money.

McKean: If I’ve wrapped on something, I don’t really think about it again…But a couple of months later, I ran into Don Peterman, the DP [director of photography]. And I said, “How was the rest of that shoot?” And he said, “Oh, it’s still going!” “Oh, wow. Really? Amazing.” 

Paul Hirsch (Editor): They shot 85 days! You know, normally on a two-character comedy, you’d shoot…36 days, 40 days. Eighty-five days is unheard of, 85 days is what you scheduled for Mission: Impossible or something. 

But John Hughes, according to everyone who worked with him, kept his cool.

Dylan Baker (“Owen”): I thought he was a great director. You could tell he was having a good time.

Jeff Laszlo (Camera Operator): He kept the same crew, film to film, and they were all extremely loyal to him, and vice versa. So that sets a good tone on a film set.

Kevin Bacon (“Taxi Racer”): We finished She’s Having a Baby, and in the course of making that film, John and I had become very close. You know, I was essentially playing him. And so we ended up spending a lot of time together. I think, for various reasons, I was at a point in my life where I didn’t want that to end, in a funny kind of way, you know? And he said, “I’m going to go and do this movie, Planes, Trains and Automobiles with Steve and John.” And I said, “Hey, put me in the movie, I’ll do anything! You can make me an extra.” And so basically, he did! I was an extra with a trailer.

James Hughes: I think with it being a road picture…things just caught his eye along the way, certain locations or certain background actors and next thing you know, he would be rewriting on the fly or shooting an entirely new sequence that just sort of occurred to him in the moment.

Baker: The joke I heard was that they always had somebody, some assistant to a producer, who was following John Hughes around. Because when he went into the restroom, he’d come out with 10 additional pages.

Brown: He would just shoot from top to bottom and a lot of times, he would reset within a take. 

Bacon: He would stop and go back. And he’d go, say this maybe or say that or look for something in the kitchen to play with. And I was like, this is the greatest thing because now I’m living in this character’s shoes…it was like it was a seamless kind of world. 

Brown: The other thing he would do would be indulge the actors in drifting away from what was scripted, and creating stuff out of, you know, almost whole cloth on the day. 

John Candy: John loves to do that. John loves to improvise. Which I don’t know why, because his scripts are so good. (The Dick Cavett Show, 1993)

Bacon: He wasn’t precious about his own dialogue. He was precious about his characters. 

Brown: He knew a lot of it was going to be wasteful. But he also knew that he would probably find some gold in there somewhere. And when you’ve got a guy like Steve Martin and John Candy, you’re almost like, it’s almost a waste to not indulge their sensibilities and the ideas that will come up.

John Candy: Steve and I would finish the scene. We’d be looking at each other, we’d still be in character, and we wouldn’t hear cut. Our eyes kind of flashed just a little. You realize he’s not going to cut. Uh…so then you stay in character and you go, “Well, what about this?” (Later With Bob Costas, 1989)

John Hughes: Every take was a little bit different, you know, there’s no point in doing the same take over and over and over. (Getting There Is Half the Fun: The Story of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, 1987)

Larry Hankin (“Doobie”): He was saying, “Okay, Steve and John, you stick to the script. Larry, you can improvise, you just say anything you want. Okay, go.” And then they would film it. And then he goes, “all right, cut. Okay. All right, Steve, John Candy, and Larry, you go according to the script, Steve, you just say anything you want, you improvise. Okay, go.” So now we’re doing this for four hours, we broke for lunch. And we come back and we continue. So we shot the entire day. We shot as written three times. And the rest of the day we improvised.

John Candy: Rehearse and make it play, see what worked, what didn’t. (Getting There Is Half the Fun: The Story of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, 1987)

Hankin: And then he said, “Okay, that’s it. Dismissed.” So that was my part. I go home. I am invited to the cast screening. So I’m curious to see how that scene came out with all the improvising and everything. I watched the movie, and the scene is exactly as written. No improvising at all, word for word. You know, hey, it’s John Hughes. It’s his movie. Whatever!

One scene that benefited greatly from improvisation became one of the movie’s comic highlights: Neal and Del waking up cuddling in their shared motel bed. 

John Candy: I couldn’t stop laughing. That was one of the hardest parts. They had the camera rigged up over our heads, and they would laugh. You’d see the cameras start, you know, they’d look at us and we’d see that, we’d start laughing and then everybody started. (Planes, Trains and Automobiles press conference, 1987)

John Hughes: And we’re all very serious. We’re trying to talk very serious. (Planes, Trains and Automobiles press conference, 1987)

John Candy: “Now kiss his ear, nibble it, just nibble it, just—lower, lower.” (Planes, Trains and Automobiles press conference, 1987)

Martin: It was so funny, because John actually plays the music that’s going to be in the scene, to sort of help you get in the mood. It’s very effective. And you know, just the idea of laying there, holding John, and hearing, “I’m back in baby’s arms…” (Planes, Trains and Automobiles press conference, 1987)

John Candy: Every time we got in that position, we’d started laughing, and we’d hear the music, and we’d start laughing. Then we’d settle down and we’d see the cameras start shaking, everybody lost it. (Later With Bob Costas, 1989)

Andy Lipschultz (Unit Publicist): To me the funniest line, the famous line, was, “Where’s your other hand?” “Between two pillows,” “Those aren’t pillows!” Okay, that was not in the script. That is a John Candy line…That was something John Candy came up with on set.

Martin and Candy’s affability extended to the rest of the cast and crew.

Robins: Steve was very, very nice. When he was off camera, he didn’t feel particularly compelled to be the funniest guy in the room. He was very professional. It wasn’t like, you know, some comedians are more compelled to be “on” all the time.

Laszlo: Steve Martin was very nice, but he was also very quiet and sort of reserved. Candy, on the other hand, was also very nice, but was more sort of one of the guys. 

Robert Crane (John Candy’s Publicist): John Candy acted, to me, like the old Alfred Hitchcock stories that I’ve heard. I heard on Hitchcock’s sets, he knew every crew member’s name, first name, and would thank them at the end of the first day, and go up and the whole crew and cast was there on the stage. And Hitchcock went up, shook everybody’s hand, thanked them by name. And that was John Candy.

Lipschultz: Just a wonderful, warmhearted, lovely man. Just a beautiful soul. He just really cared about everyone; you just got the sense he was born that way. There was nothing fake about him, he was just really interested in everyone, interested in different people. 

Jennifer Candy: It goes to the family thing. It’s like, you’re part of a crew, they’re part of your family too…You’re with these people, you better like them and you better treat them the way you want to be treated. And he genuinely showed interest in what everyone did. 

Evans: It was the night of the Oscars. And the phone rings, I’m sitting in my underwear in my room, eating room service and watching the TV. And the phone rings. “Is this Troy?” I said, “Yeah.” “Troy, this is John Candy. I’m having a few folks up to watch the Oscars, and wondered if you’d like to join us.” I was so excited. You know, John Hughes will be there. The producers will be there. And maybe I’ll meet Steve Martin. I didn’t have any dress clothes, but I cleaned up as best as I could, and went up to John Candy’s room. He was in the same hotel, you know. And John Hughes wasn’t there. The producers weren’t there. And Steve Martin wasn’t there. Who was there was everybody who was like me on the movie. He went through all the down-the-ladder actors and invited them all up to his suite. Isn’t that wonderful? And then he got like, a thousand dollars’ worth of room service. He got like 20 pizzas, and just the food just kept coming all evening. And so as I was leaving, I tried to slip him $200 to help with the food. And I’ll remember this on my deathbed. John Candy said, “Troy, that’s been taken care of.”

Principal photography was completed on July 1, in time to avoid the DGA strike—which ultimately was averted at the last minute. 

Laszlo: The last day of the shoot, we worked into the wee hours of the morning, to try to squeeze it in. 

Newborn: They shot it with way too much footage. If you shoot a movie and use a million feet of film, it’s a hell of a job for the editor to cut it down into something that’s concise and has continuity. 

Brown: What I always said about John was that he would write a really tight script, and then we would shoot our way into a big sloppy draft of a movie. And then he would cut his way back to a wonderfully tight movie.

Hirsch: When I did Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the first cut was three hours and 45 minutes. So this is an order of magnitude much greater than what I’ve been accustomed to working with. 

John Hughes III: It was just another chance to be creative in the process, instead of being locked in. I think he liked that option at the end.

Brown: I always joked that I think John cut out more funny stuff out of his movies than most people put in. That’s how profoundly exploratory some of the filmmaking was with those big comedies. It was really great. It would always put them behind, it always made it so that UPMs [unit production managers] were knocking on his trailer door, and studio executives are calling, so it created a headache for him. But in the end I think he ended up making the movie he wanted because of that process. I believe that.

Hirsch: When we first ran the cut, it was on 24 reels, reels of about 10 minutes, little less than 10 minutes. Twenty-four reels. Twelve reels is about the average length of a movie. So we run 12 reels, we break for lunch, we come back, we run the next 12 reels. He turns to me, he says, “It’s too long.” I said, “Yes, I know.”

James Hughes: I know that he was particularly pleased with the entire motel sequence, the first night that they spend together. It almost existed as this kind of one-act play within the movie. And I think there were some pretty sharp jokes in there that were tough for him to lose.

Hirsch: The reason we cut it down was not because it wasn’t good. He shot some really funny material that I was sorry to see go. But here’s the thing: You have this motel scene in the first third of the movie, and it’s running 45 minutes. You can’t do that! You can’t have a road film that stops for 45 minutes in the first third!

Gotch: His favorite part of the process was lying on the sofa in the editing room with a cigarette and a coffee, watching picture. And thinking about, What if we move that there? Have we got another take, have we got a take there where he looks sad? What if? You know, it’s playing with pieces. And he did that in the writing. He did it in the shooting. And he did it in the editing. 

Hirsch: So we sit down, we start going through the reels on the KEM [a film-editing machine]. And he says, “Take that out, just take it out.” So I’m taking it out. So we’re taking out big chunks of the movie, “Lose that.” There was a whole subplot about how Steve's wife didn't believe that Del was a real person, she thought that Steve was having an affair, and making up this guy.

Robins: There were all these other scenes, you know, but when you’re already hours over time and over your budget and you’ve got Steve Martin and John Candy…who’re you gonna cut? It’s gonna be me. 

Hirsch: So we went through and made one pass. We took out an hour and 15 minutes on the first pass. So we went from 3:45 to 2:30. That’s a third of the cut we just dropped. We shot for 85 days. So I turned to John, I said, “You know, you just cut out 28 days of shooting.” And he just shrugged. He’s like, “ you know, oh, well.” You couldn’t tell him it’s much easier to do this on the page than going to the trouble of shooting it all and then eliminating it after seeing it once. So he wasn’t efficient in that way. But he was brilliant, you know.

Newborn: As I was writing the stuff, I’m in the middle of a cue, and the music editor calls me up, “I’ve got a couple of edits.” Then he would tell me like nine edits! What do you want me to take out, a half of a note? 

Brown: I think with Planes, Trains and Automobiles, we previewed that movie 10 times. Maybe more.

Hirsch: We got it down to about two hours. By the end of August, we had a screening and I thought this is the funniest movie ever made. And people started walking out. And it took us four screenings to figure out what the problem was, why people were walking out. And the answer was the audience started to perceive John Candy as using Steve Martin, taking advantage of him, and Steve was paying for everything. In our hurry to shorten the picture, we had taken out part of a scene at a train station where they’re parting—not for long, but we don’t know that yet—and Candy says to Steve, “Give me your address, I’ll send you some money.” And Steve wants no part of this guy, never wants to hear from him again. He says, ”No, no, that’s okay.” So we restored that. And that was it. That one exchange changed everyone’s attitude about the character, that he’d offered to pay.

Baker: I remember my biggest shock when I saw the film for the first time in the theater, was there was a page-long monologue for John Candy.

Hirsch: The other big problem was at the end, we had the penultimate scene at a train station in the suburbs, where Candy reveals that he’s been homeless.

Martin: That scene was a page and a half long in the script, and in the movie I think it’s cut to three lines. But there was such beauty in it and I never understood why John [Hughes] trimmed that scene. (The Guardian, 2021)

Hirsch: That speech was getting bad laughs. As he was delivering it, people started to giggle, and then it got worse and worse. So we concocted a version in which Steve figures it out for himself, that Candy is homeless, and goes and fetches him. In the original version, Candy sort of ambushes Steve. And the version we came up with was better for both characters, because it gave Candy more dignity, that he wasn’t throwing himself in front of Steve, and it was better for Steve’s character that he had enough empathy to figure out what was going on. So it was better for both characters. 

Paramount Pictures Press Release: “Planes, Trains and Automobiles, starring Steve Martin and John Candy in a John Hughes film for Gulf+Western’s Paramount Pictures Corporation, will open in 1,035 theatres nationwide on Wednesday, November 25.”

Variety: “Disaster-prone duo of Steve Martin and John Candy repeatedly recall a contemporary Laurel & Hardy as they agonizingly try to make their way from New York to Chicago by various modes of transport, and their clowning sparks enough yocks to position this as a strong performer for Paramount through the holiday season.”

Richard Schickel, Time: “For all its broadly farcical air, Planes, Trains and Automobiles finally seals its bond with the audience in the same way that Martin and Candy seal theirs, with a sly, shy resort to sentiment. Maybe that’s just the spirit of the season, but one does not mind indulging it.”

Other reviewers were less enthusiastic, but the film’s notices generally leaned positive. It opened in third place for the Thanksgiving weekend, behind Three Men and a Baby and Disney’s rerelease of Cinderella, and grossed a respectable $49 million against an estimated $15 million budget.

But as the years passed, the film’s audience grew.

John Hughes III: It’s a holiday film, and it got sort of rediscovered that way through television play. Because I don’t think there were many films that kind of fit the Thanksgiving billing. 

Those seasonal TV airings were supplemented by robust home video sales, especially on DVD and Blu-ray, where the film was released in multiple editions. But only one of the many scenes deleted from those first long cuts made its way onto the special features.

James Hughes: If I had a friend or a colleague at the house, and they expressed interest in my dad and his work, and especially if they singled out PTA, he would either disappear into his office or would invite whomever into his office to show a tape that he kept of the original cut. There were sequences that he liked sharing with loved ones and close friends, or just people who are interested in filmmaking. 

Bob Buchi (President, Worldwide Home Media, Paramount Pictures): Unfortunately, in that era when the film was made, it was really commonplace within the industry to discard all the trims and outs—which is so unfortunate, but it was just the common practice, which is not true today. And so we had scoured our archives, and were only ever able to find that one scene. So we went to the editor, Paul Hirsch, and asked him, do you have any leads…. He thought about it, and looked, and he didn’t have anything, but he referred us to the Hughes estate. 

James Hughes: There was always an awareness that he had some type of an analog, VHS record or accounting of his work. He always kept the duplicate copies of the movies as they were being edited. 

John Hughes III: It wasn’t like, the greatest quality. 

James Hughes: It was very balkanized across these different cassette tapes, and some of this material and some cuts would have been some sequences, and some would only have certain reels. So a lot of it had to be pieced together. I think it was less a sense of discovering this footage and more hoping and praying that for the durability of the analog record—which is again, VHS tapes and things like that. And remarkably they’re very…they held up.

John Hughes III: Also with that film, like the final cut…it’s such a good final cut, you know? There’s some things, especially in the first assemblies, that make you really appreciate how good that final cut was.

McKean: I wish he was still making movies. Because he would have gone through all the stages of adulthood, he would have gone through the…Listen, his film about dying would have been a wonderful thing. 

John Hughes: I like taking dissimilar people, putting them together, and finding what’s common to us all. Part of the point is there are a privileged few who operate between New York and Los Angeles or London and Paris. But if something screws up and they get off the exclusive track, it’s someone like Del Griffith who knows how to get them home. What kept the movie going was the opposites—two dissimilar guys. If it weren’t for a storm, someone like Neal Page would never meet a guy like Del. (Rocky Mountain News, 1987)

Brown: At the core of John’s movies was this heart, and this exploration of the human condition, and this wonderful exploration of people’s feelings, and really, at a base level, what it means to love another person. I don’t mean necessarily just romantic love, but love with a capital L. 

Robins: I just think it’s a beautiful story of people opening their hearts and having compassion for each other and not judging each other. And then the generosity of him bringing him into the family just gets your heart every time.

Evans: You know, there’s that old cliché, it’s nice to be important but it’s more important to be nice? Well, Del Griffith is like a billboard of that message. And I think that was the gift of that movie to our culture. Just be nice to people.

Deutch: The humanity that John was able to write in these characters that you watch, and very quickly get invested in and pulled into the undertow of their journey—because you feel like, I know that person. That’s my Uncle Bill, or that’s my Aunt Mary, or my sister Lisa, they are real people. They were all so relatable. And so that’s part of it. And I think the icing on the cake for that movie is also that it’s this…It’s so funny. 

Jennifer Candy: If everyone’s home for the holidays and there’s one person there that’s the curmudgeon, you put on Planes, Trains and they’re gonna laugh at something and then that means everyone’s laughing at something.

Chris Candy: I think that every person inside of them has a bit of Del, and a bit of Neal—where they are really warm and open, but then also they don’t want someone taking their socks off next to them on a plane. I think I think we all have that inside of us. I know my dad had that, and I’m sure Steve Martin has that. We all have that, but this film really visits these two extremes of a way to approach a really difficult situation.

Baker: I happen to be a huge fan of It’s a Wonderful Life. And there’s not a Christmas that goes by without my family watching it. I know it was not at all a big success when it came out, and I think the same thing has happened to Planes, Trains. Around Thanksgiving, that’s what you want to think about. You want to think about how we’re all going to help each other out when it comes down to it.

John Hughes: PTA is about having a real good time and making people laugh. Hopefully, though, people will walk out with a little more compassion for the guy in the middle seat with the funny-looking coat. (Rocky Mountain News, 1987)