Director Tried to Engineer Real Romance Between Young 'Blue Lagoon' Leads

Christopher Atkins says Randal Kleiser actively meddled in his and Brooke Shields's personal lives during the 1980 shoot, pushing the two teenage stars toward an off-screen relationship.

Christopher Atkins claims director Randal Kleiser tried to manufacture a real romantic relationship between him and Brooke Shields on set.
The alleged meddling took place during production of the 1980 film, when both leads were teenagers.
Atkins made the disclosure publicly, adding a new chapter to the already fraught conversation around how Shields was treated during her early career.
The Blue Lagoon has faced renewed scrutiny in recent years over the conditions surrounding its production and the treatment of its young stars.
Shields has previously spoken in detail about exploitation she experienced in Hollywood during that era, including in her 2023 documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.

The summer of 1980 was the season of the lagoon. Columbia Pictures released Blue Lagoon in July of that year, a castaway romance built on turquoise water, soft-focus cinematography, and two teenagers most of America had never heard of. One of them, Christopher Atkins, was making his film debut. The other was Brooke Shields, already a cover star at fourteen and one of the most photographed young women in the country. The movie grossed over $58 million domestically. What was happening off the cameras, Atkins now says, was its own production entirely.

In a recent interview flagged by Page Six, Atkins revealed that director Randal Kleiser did not simply want his two leads to have on-screen chemistry — he wanted the real thing. According to Atkins, Kleiser actively attempted to push the pair into a genuine romantic relationship during filming, meddling in their personal lives in an effort to generate something the script could not manufacture on its own.

The disclosure lands at a moment when the film's legacy is already under significant pressure. Shields's 2023 Hulu documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields reopened a wide cultural conversation about how the industry handled her throughout childhood and adolescence — the nude photography, the adult roles, the systematic failure of the adults around her to draw obvious lines. That documentary reached an audience far beyond film-history enthusiasts and reframed the whole early-Shields archive in a harsher light.

Kleiser, now in his late seventies, has not publicly responded to Atkins's account. Atkins is 65. Shields is 60. The film turns 46 this summer.