Lance Henriksen Magic Interview (3 of 4) - The Transcripts: A Passion For Acting

Lance Henriksen Magic Interview with Lance Henriksen - Part 3 of 4
(Friday 6th February 2004 11.30am, Prague)

The Transcripts - Part 3: A Passion For Acting
As Lance Henriksen and I continued chatting we soon got onto the subject of his other films. Despite Millennium being a high point of his 30-year career, it is still for his film roles that many people (including me) love Lance. The likes of Near Dark, Aliens, Hard Target, Gunfighter’s Moon and many others; some perhaps more B-movie material than others, but in every role Lance puts his soul into his performance creating characters that are still alive long after the memory of the film has faded into the ether.

I asked him with 187 films and TV shows behind him, is he still enjoying himself? Does he still get stage fright when taking on a new role? (Do actors even get stage fright?). Lance answered, his husky voice purring at me across the table, sending tingles up my spine, “When I start working I go back to zero again literally. It’s the only way, because if I approach a film without being at zero I’m not having the experience. I’m just bringing my tricks – and I’m not gonna do that. It’s risky because you end up on an adventure that you weren’t expecting, and I like it. That’s why I do acting. I am still enthusiastic about acting. I’m not bored. I’m not doing a George Sanders: poor guy killed himself. His note was ‘I’m bored’. Poor guy. But no I love it.”

Of course I had to ask him about his favourite films. “I think science fiction … the original Thing was the one that influenced me the most because Howard Hawks directed that. I even told Paul when we started this ‘You should see that film Paul’ because we had such an ensemble. Scenes of maybe ten characters in a scene and to have overlapping dialogue is such a wonderful thing.” I asked him if he had seen the John Carpenter remake of that movie. “I saw it but effects don’t do it for me because I know all about it. I’ve seen it. You know when I watch effects, that’s not the part that gets me. It’s always about people, where they’re at in their relationships but that’s because I’m an actor. I’ve done so many effects movies that every time I do one I go ‘uh uh’.”

From the many articles that I have read about Lance over the years I knew that one of his least favourite roles was Torquemada (the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition) in Stuart Gordon’s The Pit and the Pendulum. I didn’t realise quite how much Lance disliked this character. “Well that’s about as close to a Nazi as you can get. You know the weirdest thing happened there. One weekend I was stuck in a castle the whole time we were shooting and I didn’t mind because I was staying in it. But I got a weekend off and I went to Rome and I went up near the Vatican, I just found myself nearby, “ he paused here in his story and asked to back to the beginning. “Let me back up a little bit. On the set a Dominican monk came on to the set to see what we were doing and I said to him, ‘How come you didn’t excommunicate this guy? He was just a monster’. The guy looked at me and for a second he went ‘He was a very important theologan’. And then he turned, and I got so mad.”

“Then when I got to Rome on that day I saw a priest coming out of the Vatican and I started screaming at him. I don’t know why. I was just hollering out ‘You fucking monster!’ I mean I was really flipping out and he ran down the block, I was almost chasing him! But it was because the role was so dark.” Lance seemed a little agitated at the memory of this, he added. “And the weirdest thing is I’m taking it serious and they’re doing a comedy. I didn’t realise that. When I saw the movie I went ‘It’s two movies!” However The Pit and the Pendulum doesn’t come across as a comedy as such to me, perhaps it has comedic elements, and even though creating that character was obviously a painful process for Lance, he does carry off the high priest as an unforgettably evil man.

I was keen to hear more of Lance’s stories, because Lance is a great storyteller. He takes a theme and carries the threads in his head as he expertly weaves a complex story, rarely losing his track, illustrating it with examples and keeping his audience (me!) enthralled all the way. So asked him about a personal favourite of mine – Gunfighter’s Moon. Lance once said the biggest stretch for him artistically was playing Frank Morgan in Gunfighter’s Moon. I told Lance that Morgan was a wonderful character and GM a great film. I asked him what it was that stretched him about the role? Lance smiled deeply and said, “Yeah, I love that. Oh yeah. It was the guy that directed it, he also wrote it. He’d written Hunt for Red October – Brian Ferguson. He’s a brilliant writer and he wrote this simple western. It’s a simple story. I took the movie – he came up while I was shooting Dead Man. And I was just about to get married. I had to get married in between the two movies … we had to run to get married! We didn’t even get a honeymoon until after. I had three in a row to do.”

“And we sat there talking and he said ‘They want to do a television series with this’. And I said ‘I don’t wanna do that with a western, it’s gonna die. I’ll do it but as a movie and not try that, cater to anything like that.’ So him and I … because I said that … he got the same way. We conspired to think a movie. So I got the hat, boots and guns. My saddle I had made, you know in a town in New Mexico. It cost like $5,000 to have that thing made. It was to me part of the building of this thing so that by the time we were shooting the movie I was so immersed in that role it was just unbelievable.”

Lance’s outfit for that role was very original and unique: from the jacket to the boots. Lance told me, “I had my boots made, they were period boots, my guns were like $8,000 for the Colts. They were made the way they did it in the old days.” He paused, I could see him remembering it all, “Aah, it was fantastic. And I practised for months before I started that movie, so I was very…”

I told Lance that one of the things I admired most about that film was his riding, being a keen horse rider myself. I asked him if he did all the riding and his own riding stunts in the film: His face lit up, “Did you see the mounts I was doing! Those mounts and dismounts?” he laughed. I agreed enthusiastically that these really were super stunts, very entertaining, but also difficult to do I imagined, it must take a lot of skill, agility and balance to do what he did. “I worked for months on that.”

I couldn’t help but go off at a tangent and talk about riding horses at this point (sorry for those readers who are interested in this!). The Western (US) style of riding is a much better form for me, it is a deeper seat, longer legs and with much more comfortable saddles than UK style. Lance agreed, “I don’t like those hats they make you wear! First time I got to England I was gonna ride a horse, just for the fun of it. They brought those hats out and I said ‘Cowboys don’t wear shit like that man!’ and the guy said, ‘unless you put it on you can’t ride’. So I told him, ‘well, I’m not gonna ride, I’m not putting that on!’, just to make the point. I actually went riding and took the hat off and dropped it!”

To conclude about his work on Frank Morgan, Lance finished, “To me the whole process of gathering is a major process for actors, to start getting into the role. Because by the time you start the movie you want to actually be the guy rather than waiting to be the guy. There’s a difference.”

I then moved onto another, probably less well-known film - The Last Samurai - a film about a billionaire businessman on a quest to Africa to find the truth about his Samurai ancestor and discover the Samurai spirit within himself. I wanted to know how much input did he’d had on his character? One of the stories his character (Johnny Congo) tells is about the death ritual of African warriors (or something along those lines), I wondered if this is an example of him adding to the script. I got the impression that this wasn’t one of Lance’s favourite films but he told me his story. “It was in Africa and I met these guys and they were Zulu and we sat around and drank beer together - their home made beer – and watched the dancers. And they started telling me stories and that was one of them.”

“ Whenever I found myself in trouble in a low budget film I would tell that story. The reason I did was because something real’s gotta happen here. I would get really frustrated and go, ‘Let me tell you something’. You know what I mean because in a lot of ways when you do a low budget film they try to compete with budgets which is a ridiculous idea. I’ve always told directors on these things, or producers, ‘You have to compete with your creativity and your mind, you can’t do car chases, you can’t do a remake of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. You’ve gotta use your imagination and rarely, but occasionally they do. And when they do, they give you the opening, you try to infuse it with ... You’re desperate because you get to a scene and you realise ‘This is not working, this is dead’. “

“And then what you do, like in that African film (The Last Samurai) – as I was going to the set that day I saw this little monkey and I said I want to use that monkey in the scene. So I put the monkey on my shoulder and he became a little friendly, you know, and he’s eating stuff out of my mouth – peanuts and stuff. And then right before we’re gonna shoot the scene we would rehearse and play with the monkey’s tail and he was fine. The minute they said ‘action!’ and they started rolling, it sounded just like the 22 that killed its mother and that monkey went berserk! He gathered my face and tried to rip my skin off and pull my hair out of my head. I mean it went nuts! And I got him by the tail and went ‘get this thing off me!’."

"Anyhow, it shot up a tree and wouldn’t come down for like an hour or two … and I said ‘no I wanna use the monkey. So finally I used the monkey. But it was that kind of adventure, that kind of thing. I said ‘I wished you’d filmed that. Why didn’t you film it? Let the monkey go berserk on me’. You know what I mean, I thought he was gonna tear an eyeball out, this little thing was so strong. I’d never felt strength like that in a little tiny animal. But anyway, when you do a low budget film, you gotta let your intuition fly.”

Finally I asked Lance about a more recent film he's made - One Point 0 - a low budget Sci-Fi movie that was recently screened at the Sundance film festival. Lance had previously told me that, "It is so original, I couldn't turn it down. I was in Romania when they spotted
me walking through the lobby ... and the rest is history." However post Sundance he was a little disappointed, " I don't think One Point 0 was received very well, they said it was laconic - not my stuff, but the tenor of the film." But Lance as always, was philosophical about the reviews. "So be it. I loved doing it."

Whilst Lance is taking a well earned rest after AvP, the good news is he hasn't got any plans to slow down for the time being. With a working schedule that has seen him make an average of four films per year for the last ten years or more, this will mean that fans of his work should continue to enjoy his new endeavours for years to come!

- END -

In my final transcript of my interview with Lance Henriksen he tells me about The Invitation, how he thinks the movie business could make better films, about how he got into acting and what he did before this, and about his pottery.