Considering what happened after the last time they appeared on screen together it’s a wonder Sylvester Stallone would consider working with Dolph Lundgren again. While shooting the boxing scenes for Rocky IV, the movie that made the 6′ 5″ Lundgren a household name, the Swedish actor hit Stallone so hard the Italian Stallion’s heart slammed up against his breastbone and began to swell, limiting the oxygen flow throughout his body.
An eight day stay in intensive care cured the problem, but may also explain why Stallone waited twenty-five years to invite Dolph back into the ring. The pair, along with action movie legends Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jason Statham (and that’s just the Ss!), star in The Expendables, an all star all action movie opening on August 13.
When asked why he’s reteamed with Stallone after so many years Lundgren says, “Well, first of all Mr. Sly Stallone. Anything he writes and directs is something I’d be interested in doing.”
He was cautious, however, of keeping up with some of the younger members of the cast. “All my roles are tough physically, but this one was different because I knew I was up against people like [former NFL footballer] Terry Crews and [wrestler] Stone Cold Steve Austin. Not small guys and pretty rough and developed so I thought I gotta do more weights. So I did a lot of weights for my upper body to get a little beefier. My arms were still smaller than Terry Crews, but I think I was somewhere up there.
“Physically, I do a lot of martial arts fighting, and that is pretty much what I did for this film although I can pretty much handle the fighting at any time.”
Lundgren has been practicing Kyokushinkai Karate (a Japanese style of martial arts) since age fourteen, has a third degree black belt and next year, at age 54, plans on getting his fourth degree and will do a demonstration at the world championships in Tokyo.
As a child he says the study of karate helped him to develop self confidence, discipline and a sense of who he was. Today he finds the practice aids him in keeping grounded and is “an antidote to Hollywood and the trappings of that lifestyle. It takes discipline, etiquette and you have to have a certain outlook on life that is simple and elegant. It’s not a self centered or egocentric type of sport.”
Lundgren still works out four or five days a week and has no plans to slow down on his work schedule of pumping out one or two action films a year. “It’s a way of making a living for me because people want to see me do it,” he says. “In an action movie you can have fun and be a kid and play with guns and cars… and a few beautiful women if you’re lucky. At the same time when you are directing you get an intellectual challenge as well because you are making all the decisions about music and editing. It’s is a great job. It’s hard work but very challenging and very rewarding.”
John Waters listens to Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s Monster Mash every day. He claims dancing to the song keeps him happy.
“It’s even more fun to do with Kleenex boxes on your feet,” he says. “Howard Hughes used to do that. I was fascinated by that. I thought, ‘Why did he do that?’ until I put them on one day. Do the Monster Mash in Kleenex boxes and you will not need Prozac or any kind of drug. It will put you in a good mood even if you have chemical depression.”
The 64-year-old Waters, a provocateur once labeled “The Pope of Trash” by William Burroughs, is best known as the twisted mind behind Pink Flamingos and Hairspray, but he’s also a journalist with writing credits that range from pieces for Rolling Stone to Vogue.
On the surface his latest work, a book titled Role Models, is a compendium of pieces on people he admires—that’s everyone from Johnny Mathis, who Waters says is ”beyond fame, beyond race, beyond trying too hard” to Esther Martin, a foulmouthed Baltimore bartender—but what emerges from the pages is something different.
“It is really my memoir,” he says, “it is about me but it is told through other people. They had to relate to my life in some way. They had to lead extreme lives in a way I could relate to mine. Perhaps something awful happened or something good happened, or [they had] great success or great failure or notoriety.”
The spotlight he shines on his subjects also illuminates the man behind the words. The one-time “Pope of Trash” is revealed as a sharp-tongued, but loyal and compassionate friend.
Take, for instance, his 14, 000 word defense of Leslie Van Houten. As a nineteen year old Van Houten, under the spell of Charles Manson, stabbed Rosemary LaBianca sixteen times. Waters befriended her twenty seven years ago. “I told her, ‘I’ve known you for a long time and you are a role model to me, to [be able] to get through this terrible thing that happened,” he says. “Can she ever get better? Can she ever survive the terrible crime she was involved in? And I think she has and I think she deserves a second chance. This is my letter to the parole board.”
We also learn of his taste for people on the fringe, whether they be pornographers like Bobby Garcia, who shot hundreds of videos of himself having sex with Marines or Zorro, a legendarily drug addled Baltimore stripper. Waters treats them all respectfully and notes that he would be hurt if they took offence to anything he had written about them.
“I find people’s personalities fascinating,” he says. “I do try and understand everybody and that’s what this book is about. These people have had it worse or better than me and they’ve had to be brave and bravery is a complicated word, but they somehow have survived. Each one of those people taught me a lesson in a weird way.”
Given the Hollywood success novelist Dennis Lehane has had in recent years you’d expect him to live in the 90210 area code. No dice, says the blunt speaking author of Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island (which comes to DVD and Blu Ray June 8).
“If you live in LA you’re suddenly that guy,” he says on the line from his home in Boston. “You get lost in it. Everywhere you turn everyone is a writer. Where I live now I’m it, at least for a couple of blocks there’s no other writers.”
Certainly there are no other authors in his area with a tinsel town track record like his. The film adaptations of his novels have put him on a first name basis with legendary filmmakers like Clint and Marty and have earned seven Oscars nominations. But don’t look to him to take all the credit for the success of the movies.
“There are only two things I can take credit for and I’m not being falsely disingenuous or anything,” he says, “I’m just being honest. I seem to write characters that actors are attracted to. I invest a lot in my characters, so my characters tend to have multiple dimensions. OK, there I go. I just pumped myself up.
“Other than that I will only get in business with the absolute crème de la crème talent wise and taste wise. Just look at my behind-the-credits people. Look at my producers; they are people that if you look at the CVs are extremely impressive. That spreads out to other talented people. Who are talented people going to pick to write your screenplays? They are going to pick talented writers. Who are they going to pick to do the director’s job? They are going to pick talented directors. Who are the directors going to pick? They’re going to pick talented actors and so on. That’s really what’s been going on.”
Talented though he may be, he’s never adapted one of his own novels for the screen.
“I’m not particularly interested in adapting my own work. It is just not something that I can do. I’m just not competent. I’m the last person you should trust. I don’t know how to cut. I just spent two or three years of my life trying to get a book to 401 pages. Not 402 and not 399 and then you are going to turn around and say that’s the guy I want to trust to cut it to 135?”
Shutter Island, Lehane’s ominous thriller turned Martin Scorsese film about a U.S. Marshal (Leonardo DiCaprio) investigating a disappearance at the remote Shutter Island hospital for the criminally insane, sprung from two separate incidents.
“When I was a little kid my uncle took me out to one of the harbor islands and pointed out where a mental institution—the skeletal remains were still there—and it just stuck in my head. Many, many years later I had a crazy dream one night. I wrote it all down and woke up the next morning and looked at my notes and those notes are pretty much what Shutter Island is.”
Watching Scorsese work, he says was “mind boggling,” but true to form he didn’t spend much time on the set.
“Sets are so unbelievably boring if you don’t have a purpose on them,” he says. “A caterer is far more important on a film set than a novelist. A caterer, hey man, they give you the food; a novelist is just standing there saying, ‘I thought this up.’”
He’d rather be at home, in Boston. “It continually fuels me plus Bostonians are just funny sons-of-bitches. How else would I get to hear great lines all the time?”
The director of Michael Caine’s latest film, the crime drama Harry Brown, says Caine is the only person in England who everybody loves.
“He is a great Briton,” says Daniel Barber, “and he is admired in Britain by everyone, high, low or whatever as being one of the great Britons. He comes from very humble origins; he is truly a man of the people like very few people are.”
In reaction, Caine laughs, “I dunno. They say, ‘You’re an icon now.’ I say, ‘I don’t know how to do that.’ There’s no lessons. There’s no special icon bar where you go, meet up and learn what to do. I just consider myself lucky.”
The humble routine is part of what makes Caine beloved, but his Harry Brown co-star, Emily Mortimer, adds, “People feel both in awe of him because he is an icon but he is, at the same time, somehow accessible. That’s an amazing combination. To be a big movie star but for people to feel that they know you and that you are a good bloke and you’d be a good person to have a pint with.”
Harry Brown takes Caine back to his roots. The film, about a widowed man who strikes back at the hoodlums who have terrorizing his community, was shot in his old stomping grounds.
“It’s amazing because we were working on the same estate that he grew up on,” continues Mortimer. “A lot has changed since then, but that was incredible for him; an inspiration for him. There’s a big wall in the Elephant and Castle with a big painting of him as his character from Get Carter on it. There were moments when the 76-year-old Michael Caine would walk past this wall in the projects, in the middle of real degradation with this iconic image behind him. Moments like that were fantastic.”
“I always said I come from the slums,” says Caine of the E&C neighborhood where he was born, “and I do, but when I went back I didn’t realize how lucky I was. Because when we were shooting late at night, I’d talk to the neighbourhood boys and I realized I was quite lucky because I had two thing they didn’t have: I had a happy family life and I got an education. So I had two valuable things they didn’t have, and one thing they did have that I didn’t. That was drugs.”
Caine blames drugs for the rise in hoodlum culture that Harry Brown portrays. “In the end,” he says, “they wipe out all feeling for the other person.”
But despite strong feelings on the subject, Caine believes making Harry Brown taught him something.
“This movie changed me,” he said “in as much as I started out thinking, ‘Let’s go out and make a movie about killing all these scumbags,’ and then I met these people and realized they were helpless, just as much as the victims, and they had been neglected and they need help.”
Given Colm Feore’s habit of playing historical figures — he’s starred as everyone from Pierre Trudeau and Glenn Gould to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel on screens big and small — you’d imagine in a movie about the reincarnation of a Soviet politician called The Trotsky, he must be playing the legendary Bolshevik.
“I looked at Trotsky and he had hair, so that was out,” Feore laughs.
In fact, in the film the actor plays the authoritarian principal of Montreal’s (fictional) Jacques Parizeau English School who tries to prevent Leon Bronstein (Jay Baruchel) — a student who believes he is the reincarnation of revolutionary Leon Trotsky — from unionizing the school’s students.
“I was between episodes of 24 so I hadn’t shaved,” he says, “and I thought, ‘Why don’t I just keep not shaving? I’ll present myself to (director) Jacob (Tierney) and say, ‘Would this work for you? I think this would this give us a certain Lenin-esque feel.’ I thought, ‘I’ll go Lenin, he’ll go Trotsky and it will be eerie.’”
Feore — who sprinkles his conversation with words like “supercilious” and self depreciating comments — has more than a passing resemblance to the Russian revolutionary.
“We had this huge Lenin poster behind Jay’s head at one point,” he says. “Jacob framed the shot so that when I turn away I’m perfectly framed in the poster.”
The actor, who jumps back and forth between big budget films like the upcoming Thor, TV work and small films to fill in the gaps was taken by the script the moment he read it.
“To me it seemed very springy,” he says. “It has a bouncy intelligence to it. Particularly since it came from young people. Right now I am surrounded by young people. I have my kids and I think, ‘What would flatter them in reflection?’ If they see themselves as smart and able to change their world, this is a message I would like to be able to send. There is something heroically quixotic about the way Jay’s character forces his way down his path.”
The movie has earned comparisons to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and other American teen comedies, but Feore says it “probably couldn’t have been made anywhere else. The Canadian-ness of this film is our genius for subversion while playing it straight. It’s not tongue-in-cheek. … I like that the gags are layered in and it works on a second viewing. There are political statements under the political statements.”
Despite having the kind of breakout Hollywood success most actors could only dream of — starring in the critically lauded She’s Out of My League, the number-one hit How to Train Your Dragon and headlining Disney’s upcoming Sorcerer’s Apprentice — the patriotic Canadian (he has a maple leaf tattooed over his heart) hasn’t taken up digs in Los Angeles or New York. In fact, he still lives in Montreal where his latest movie was shot.
“It was genius,” he says of making The Trotsky in his hometown. “If I go away to make movies it means I have to say goodbye to my mom, my cat, my friends, my bed, all that stuff, so to be able to go to my house every night and flip channels with my roommates and pet the cat was crazy.”
In the comedy, directed by actor-turned-director Jacob Tierney, he plays the budding Bolshevik Leon Bronstein, a 17-year-old who believes he is the reincarnation of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
“When I talked to Jacob about this I told him I was scared to play a character 10 years younger than me,” he says. “I was trying to leave that behind, but then I came to the Ferris conclusion. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is my favourite movie of all time and I realized that Leon kind of is Ferris in regards to the way he affects change in other people’s lives and goes to war against his principal.”
Baruchel may have used Ferris Bueller as a muse, but to fully round out the character he cobbled together a “bunch of subtle tiles in the mosaic that make up this weird guy.”
First he looked back at himself. “In high school you just care about everything so much,” he said. “I was incredibly impassioned and prone to crying and punching stuff and throwing fits and getting really angry, so I had to channel that.”
Then he added in some physical comedy. “I had this overriding idea that because he’s such an odd bird, there was room for some physical comedy and that’s why I walk out of every scene like a cartoon character.”
More than anything, however, he says he’s thrilled to portray a side of Montreal that rarely gets seen on screen.
“If you watch English movies from the rest of Canada, you’d never know that there are Anglos in Montreal,” he says. “If you watch French movies from Quebec, you’d never know there are Anglos in Montreal. So either way we’re forgotten, but we’re back! Anglo Montrealers are back everyone! We’re coming at ya!”
Writing in The Globe and Mail, theatre critic Ray Conologue said, “Paul Gross… is so good-looking that some women sitting near to me on opening night would forcibly argue that the only thing he could do wrong would be to go home alone afterward.” Mention that to the citizens of Osoyoos, British Columbia, however, and you may get a quizzical look or two.
“I’d go into the 7/11 to get milk and I looked unhinged,” says Gross. “The good people of Osoyoos [located in the southern part of the Okanagan Valley near British Columbia’s border with Washington state] had never seen anything like this so they wouldn’t even sell me milk at the 7/11.”
No, Gross hasn’t been tragically disfigured or succumbed to the ravages of age. In fact, in middle age he’s looking as matinee idol handsome as ever, a fact he tries to hide in Gunless (which opens on April 30, his 51st birthday), by covering his famous face with a mop of matted, dirty hair. In this western comedy he plays The Montana Kid, an 1880s American gunslinger who comes North, finds nobility and becomes, well, gunless.
“You know, there are those decisions you make every once and while that are really stupid,” he says. “I woke up one morning before I went out to BC and I thought, ‘I think he should have long hair.’
“I said to Bill [Phillips, the film’s director], ‘It’ll work. Trust me. If it doesn’t we can just cut it.’ I don’t know if you’ve ever had really long hair or extensions, but don’t. If someone comes up to you on the street and says, ‘Hey I can give you long hair.’ Just don’t talk to the guy. It takes about 112 hours to get them in and they are applied largely with a nail gun. They are just driven straight into your skull and then you are stuck with this long hair. It’s appalling. It gets in your mouth, in your food…
“On top of that, we get out to the set and it was 312 in the Kelvin scale. That’s 45 degrees Celsius. 312 Kelvin. I looked it up. And something went wrong with the hair. It started to mat. Particularly on the right side. It looked like Princess Leia on meth… a cow patty set sideways on my head. We could not untangle it so then we just cut it off. So I had one short side and one ridiculously long side.”
No wonder he got strange looks at the convenience store, but the hair and the trouble shopping for milk weren’t the most difficult part of the shoot.
“The worst thing really was the dust. If you saw pictures of the crew they are all wearing bandanas, masks and ski goggles and the actors are all standing there sucking back clouds of it. It’s like the clouds out of Iceland. They stop planes in this kind of stuff, but we kept shooting.”
Thankfully the dust didn’t last for the whole shoot and Gross developed a fondness for Osoyoos.
“I didn’t know this area of the country existed and I’ve seen a lot of Canada. I encourage everybody to go. It is absolutely staggeringly beautiful.”
The man who made the most technologically advanced movie to ever hit the big screen has just hung up on me. Not on purpose. Calling from his car, James Cameron was defeated by some very simple machinery—his cellphone.
A minute later, my phone rang again.
“Sorry about that,” he said, “it was totally my bad. I was reaching out to turn up the volume and I hit the disconnect, which is right next to it. I have to learn to keep my hands off the damn thing.”
Cellphone and their pesky buttons are one thing, but when it comes to big budget epics with complicated technology, nobody is as hands on as Cameron. Last December Avatar became the highest grossing movie of all time, making $2,712,115,019 on a budget that fell somewhere between $230 million (according to The New Yorker) to nearly $500 million (so says The New York Times).
“We’re very cognizant of the fact that it is a big expensive movie,” he says. “When you make a film at that highest level you know the imagery is going to be quite astonishing. That’s what I’m all about. That’s what my career has been all about, starting with the Abyss, then Terminator 2 and True Lies and Titanic. Every one of these films was decried in the largest way possible as being the biggest budget films in history. [But] as an artist, there is no second position on my throttle. It’s full throttle so it may as well be the highest grossing film in history because I’m working like it is anyway.”
Cameron may be the go-to guy for big budget spectacles, but despite his track record there are no guarantees of success.
“I don’t know if I knew it until it was really out there,” he says when asked when he knew he had a hit on his hands. “I had a suspicion that the film would perform beyond what its opening weekend would indicate. I thought our challenge was not the film itself as much as the marketing of the movie. We didn’t have Brad Pitt or George Clooney. It was an unfamiliar story. We had to create a brand from scratch and we had these characters that were blue and were maybe a little off putting when people first saw them. There were a lot of marketing hurdles. I was much more concerned about the 30-second TV spot than the film. I knew the film played fine.”
Now, just four months after its record breaking theatrical run Avatar and its eco friendly message is coming to DVD and Blu Ray just in time for Earth Day. This is a bare bones release, with no extras. (The “über edition” with extra footage and supplements will be out in time for Christmas.)
“It was going to take until November for us to do good supplement stuff and I didn’t think people wanted to wait until November to see an Avatar DVD,” he says, “so we put the plain wrap version out.
“By the way,” he adds with a swagger, “[Avatar] is the highest grossing film in history and has nine Academy Award nominations so people should acknowledge that that film needs to be in the marketplace before we start screwing around and getting creative.”
In Chloe, the new psychological thriller from Canadian director Atom Egoyan, Amanda Seyfried plays an escort hired by Catherine (Julianne Moore) to test her husband’s (Liam Neeson) fidelity.
Following starring roles in Mean Girls, Mama Mia and the popular HBO show Big Love, this is her first real adult part. It’s a complicated and showy role for the twenty-five-year-old actress, and she credits Egoyan with pushing her to deepen the character by exploring every facet of Chloe’s life.
“It’s a broad spectrum of emotions the audience feels about her,” she says, “and in order to make the audience feel that way you have to play it right and in order for me to play it right I had to have Atom Egoyan.
“Mr. Egoyan,” she continues, “is a genius and he’s what good filmmaking is all about. I know it’s going to be difficult for me to choose my next project based on what I just went through with him. It has raised the bar into a very high place.”
It’s obvious that Seyfried admires Egoyan, but it appears to be a mutual appreciation society. In a separate interview the director called the actress’s audition “exceptional.”
“There were a lot more famous people than her we considered but she was our gal,” he said. “We knew that from the moment we did the audition. There was just something about her. Fortunately in the intervening period she suddenly became a star with Mama Mia.”
Her star was on the rise before they made the film, but on the first day Egoyan had a moment of doubt.
“I have this reputation for hiring very young actresses,” he says, “and the day she arrived in Toronto, I thought, ‘My God, she’s a child. We’ve made a mistake.’ But we needed the separation in age between Julianne [Moore] and her. That was really very important.”
Any doubts were soon quashed when Seyfried went to work, however.
“She’s a really good actress. She really grew into the role,” he says. “It’s about a relationship you have with some actors. You feel like you are doing your job because you are able to ignite something they are capable of expressing. I don’t mean to in anyway objectify, but it’s like working with a beautiful instrument. That’s what she has.”
Considering what happened after the last time they appeared on screen together it’s a wonder Sylvester Stallone would consider working with Dolph Lundgren again. While shooting the boxing scenes for Rocky IV, the movie that made the 6′ 5″ Lundgren a household name, the Swedish actor hit Stallone so hard the Italian Stallion’s heart slammed up against his breastbone and began to swell, limiting the oxygen flow throughout his body.![Waters Interview Oct[1]. 22 (c) readings.org](https://richardcrouse.ca//wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Waters-Interview-Oct1.-22-c-readings.org_1-300x199.jpg)
