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In the film Lance plays a rich, burnt out writer who travels to South America and has a life changing, near death experience which he uses to 'enlighten' his friends at a dinner party back home.  I commented that this idea of having the Peruvian Indians in the writer's life brought that part of his journey alive for the audience. He agreed,  "Yeah, it was like it kept it alive, it supported it.  And the other thing was, originally in it the guy doesn't die and I said 'Wait a minute, we're living in a drug filled world right now.  People resent drugs.  You can't have this guy do these things to these people and live, or the audience is just gonna go 'get out of it! Forget it!'  So I said he's got to die, there's no way around it. So it took a lot of negotiating.  But they turned that script into something that I thought was in the right area.  If you knew what we shot that movie for, you wouldn't believe it." I pressed him on this, because the film to me didn't look that low budget. So Lance told me, "A couple of hundred thousand.  That was it."

"And we rehearsed it like a play, everybody developed those things. But again its actors experiences.  Low budget, you can grow with it. " I observed that the cast seemed to give a lot to their roles in this film, and I said that it was great to see him with Lucy Butler (!) again (Sarah Jane Redmond from Millennium).  This raised a laugh from him - perhaps in having to think of her as Lucy Butler again.  He added, "She's great, I like her a lot.  She's a wonderful actress."

"But again, we're all wanting the same thing: to have our cake and eat it too - if you do a low budget film.  I actually did the movie and I called Jim Jarmusch (he directed Dead Man) in New York and I sent him the movie. He saw it and he said, 'Lance, but I don't like those people.  Why did that character do it to those people?  I hate those people.' And I said 'Jim, you know you can't interchange people.  You have to look around and say this is my world, I can't change these people.  Get up, you know, pick different people.  Those are the people.  But I said, 'imagine for a second if you used that $200,000 movie as the script to make a $10 million movie.'  You just have to think about it another way." 

"What if somebody looked at The Invitation and said 'we're gonna make a $10 million version' ? And we've done all that work and seen all the flaws and seen all the possibilities.  Imagine taking it to the next step.  And that's what the business doesn't do.  You have one shot so all the struggle and strife is on that one shot.  If I was offered a $10 million movie to do, what I would do is get a group together, shoot a $100,000 movie.  And there we are - we've rehearsed it, we've shot it.  It took a month to do and everybody's learned everything they can.  Then say, 'ok guys, guess what?  Now we're gonna shoot the real movie.'  And I don't think there's an actor in the world that wouldn't be thrilled at that idea.  Absolutely.  The one thing we don't get in our movies is a lot of rehearsal.  You got to do it by yourself.  It's an interesting idea."

"I never understand with movie companies, why they don't think of where to spend money.  A lot of the time they throw money at things that don't work.  They just keep throwing money at it.  'Well this movie, if it didn't work with that much money, this will make it work!'  But they don't know that if they paid actors for a couple of weeks to rehearse, they would save hundreds of thousands of dollars on the set."

"So anyway, that's my struggle.  That's not everybody's struggle."  Lance sighed a little. "I came into this business not because they invited me but because they couldn't stop me.  And also I see it from a different angle.  I'm not ...", Lance paused to think here,  "sophisticated.  I'm more practical. Paul and I have something in common.  He said if he wasn’t in movies he would’ve been an engineer.  If I’d gone to college I would’ve been an engineer.  I love to build.  I build all kinds of things.  Everybody has their own thing”  

I asked Lance about how he ended up in the business.  I'd heard that he went and saw a play that inspired his acting ambitions.  He told me this story.  "Julie Harris was doing The Lark in Central City, Colorado, and I was 15 going on 16 and everybody had come out at intermission and when they went back in I went back in with them.  And I stood at the back.  I'd never seen the play.  And this guy came out with an onion - a big one.  It was mediaeval times and he was eating the onion. And he went 'this is my fucking breakfast!'.  And when I heard him say 'fucking breakfast' I waited for the recoil.  I thought the audience was gonna stone him.  And everybody laughed!  And I went 'God! this is for me!'  I was thrilled. I thought, Jesus!  I watched the rest of the play.  It was like a light!  My heart was pounding! It was the place to be anything you wanna be! It was very exciting."  Lance's voice was charged with excitement, I could almost feel myself transported back with that 15 year old.  And I suddenly remembered my own excitement of first seeing theatre when I was a teenager.  

I asked Lance if had done any theatre himself after such a life changing experience.  I couldn't remember reading that he had.  He told me,  "I did about 9 years of theatre - New York, I did it up in Boston,  I was in the Guthrie Theatre, Minnesota.  I did a lot of little plays everywhere."

I asked him about when he was a painter, I wondered what he painted. He told me that he painted stage sets for the theatre, and I wanted to understand if this was just a talent he had or if he had been trained in it.  "I had that talent, it was in my family.  My family were all artists.  But I first started in order to get near theatre.  I used to do sets.  They'd do Antigone and I'd say 'What's it about?' They'd tell me and I would do a set."

I suggested that the creativity he so obviously has, he now channels into his pottery as well as his acting.  "Oh yeah! I love pottery.  I've been doing it for 30 years.  It's really good stuff.  You haven't seen the latest stuff. I'm making platters this big!"  He moves his hands apart to show me!  I told him that lots of people keep asking me if he is going to bring his pottery web site back.  "Yeah, but it's gonna be different.  We're redoing it."  He wasn't keen on the idea on his site being a commercial venture.  "I don't know who talked me into selling it like that.  I don't care if I never sell a pot.  When I started I had to sell 'em, it was misery.  Making these things, like cups!" he laughed, giving a particularly bland looking sample in front of him (his coffee cup) a big knock!

I told Lance that I actually come from the Potteries, famous as being the centre of ceramic art in the UK.  "Really?  Oh great, that's where all the great clays come from.  Britain has some of the best clays.  Ball clays, kaolins, all that stuff, porcelin." I was keen to find out what type of material Lance works with.  His eyes lit up at my question,  "There's a miracle happening right now.  It's like a renaissance in ceramics going on.  And one of the reasons is, for the first time in history you can get materials from all over the world - Africa, Russia, England, Kentucky.  And in the old days, before this, the potteries were situated near the clay mines.  They all used local materials but you couldn't get exotic anything.  And now I can get materials from anywhere on the planet: oxides, everything.  So I use anything I want." 

At this point my tape finally gave out, but our chat didn't finish here.  To be honest, I wasn't bothered about the tape.  I was just enjoying talking to this guy.  I mean I could've talked to him all day.  Lance went on to tell me about other stuff.  Like how he doesn't like awards ceremonies, he just sits in the audience hoping he won't get one because he doesn't want to get up and give the speech!  He told me about how he loved Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner (wow i said, i must have seen that film 20 times!), and how he felt like Rutger had really set the precedent for an android character in films and how he felt the challenge in making Bishop live up to him.  I told him that Bishop surpassed even that masterpiece (as well as Holmes' Ash in Alien). 

He told me that despite the fact that his family are Norwegian (Lance is first generation) he's never been there - he only got as far as Sweden! And the funniest thing he did - I was in creases - was when I got him talking about his role in The Day Lincoln was Shot. I thought he gave a marvellously touching portrayal of the great man in that movie.  However, Lance said that he wished he could've had some creative licence with him.  He read loads about Abe Lincoln and the thing that stood out about him was that he didn't have this statesman-like voice, it wasn't deep or commanding, quite the opposite in fact.  Lance told me that, knowing what he now knows about Lincoln, he would've played him like an auctioneer with a fast, squeaky, high pitched voice.  He then proceeded to give me an impromptu demonstration of this character and I just cracked up!  Me and Geoff Freeman both!  It was so funny.  (I think) Lance said it was filmed in the deep South and that the sight of him walking down those streets dressed as Abraham Lincoln had a tremendous effect on people there.   He remembered a young black guy on a bike, stopping to circle around him, saying 'Emancipation and all that! I love that man!'  That there was still that memory about the guy on the psyche of the people after all this time!

Well four transcripts later I've finally got a lot of my interview with him down on paper.  I was sorry that I couldn't ask about more of his films and roles.  And there were so many more questions I wanted to ask him about his life!  He is an intriguing man who has had an interesting and diverse life with a fascinating story to tell.  All I can hope is that we get to hear even more of it in the years to come!

 

Read the other interviews in this series:

The Transcripts  - Part 1 :  Alien vs. Predator

The Transcripts  - Part 2 :  Frankly Speaking

The Transcripts  - Part 3 :  A Passion for Acting