The Invitation

In The Invitation, Henriksen is "a writer who's very rich and famous, lives on an island - all that kind of thing. He's drying up, so one day he leaves home without money, without credit cards, without anything, and makes his way down to South America, where he has a near-death experience. When he comes back, he's changed, and he invites everyone who's important to him to a dinner at his house. I won't spoil it by saying anything more, but it turns into quite a thriller. It's one of the best scripts I've ever read - that's what made me want to do it."   In fact, Lance owns half the film.

Copyright interview in TV Guide Online 2000

Lance was introduced to this opportunity by Patrick Ramsay - the sound engineer on Millennium. "He sent down a script, which he wanted to make, and it was unbelievable. It was so original. I said there was no way I couldn't do it. The script had some problems, so for a month the writer, Pat Bermel, Patrick and I sat down and hashed it out until all of us knew exactly where it was going. It was less money than I've ever made in my life, but I do own half of it!

"I play a writer, like Stephen King, who's hit a wall. He's just written so much, and is so isolated, that he's burned out. He just doesn't have an ounce of life left in him, so he decides to get away from it all. He leaves his credit cards and money and just goes off - and ends up in the Amazon. He meets a British guy and they travel together. "

The Brit is killed by an Indian Tribe (who think he is rabid when he is brushing his teeth). Lance says his character, Roland Levy, "goes off at the deep end, and ends up in the mountains of Peru. A Peruvian shaman gives him a drug which should have killed him, but it doesn't - it opens him up. The shaman sends him back home to die; although the drug should have killed him, he was dying anyway. So Levy goes home, invites all of his closest friends to dinner, and tells them the story. They say, 'God I wish something like that would happen to me, and Levy says 'Do you realy mean it? It has, because I've already poisoned you.' And that's where the movie begins. It had the budget of maybe one Millennium show. But we all rehearsed for 2 weeks before, and it was an actor's dream. You can get in there and nurture your character. That's what I really got into acting for."

SFX, July 2001

"That movie, the conditions were right for all the people involved.  We sat around the table the first meeting and i said "Let's trust each other.  The essence of this movie is that we trust each other to go as far as we wanna go in an honest way and support each other while we're doing it.  That's what we've gotta do or we're not gonna have a movie. " I gotta tell you the material made demands that are just dangerous,  and if they worked out we were gonna be somewhere, and if they didn't it would only be because we didn't take the chance.  And it was there.  Wait 'till you see this movie, man, I'm telling you.  I'm proud of it."                         Videoscope Winter 2002