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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.
Read the other interviews in this series:
The Transcripts - Part 1 : Alien vs.
Predator
The Transcripts - Part 2 :
Frankly Speaking
The Transcripts - Part 4: By Invitation Only
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