Stephen Dorff: The Next Big Thing

But, speaking of dark energy, can Dorff shed light on the rumors that he frequents cool places in which people have been known to flirt with some of the excesses that have laid Phoenix and others to waste? "I have a very crazy mind," he says cautiously. "Life just gets harder and harder, and you've got to be able to handle it without going to a chemical. River's death happened a block away from my house. I've been to The Viper Room, but I won't go there again because there are weird vibes there. It has nothing to do with Johnny Depp [co-owner of The Viper Room]. River could have done that in any building. But I'm not going to live inside a cage just because of how fucked up this city is. A lot of my friends are doing the same drugs, but I don't go near those drugs. I've never done any drugs except for smoking pot. I'm a very self-destructive person; I know that if I did that, I would like it. I have a fear of it. I just hope that I'll never do that, and I don't think I will. I get crazy sometimes and I kiss death in a different way. I party a lot, drink a lot. There's no reason why you can't go out and get fucking crazy, experience open doors without going straight to the 'h.' But stay smart." Dorff's ambition and drive are enough, all by themselves, to keep him focused. "I've always wanted to live fast, to be older than I am," he says. "But I'm really in no rush to be the year's hottest young guy. Hopefully, that will happen with these movies I have coming out."

Among the hotter aspects of Dorff's new movie, Backbeat--which boasts strong work from Sheryl Lee as Sutcliffe's German lover, Astrid--is its soundtrack, featuring raging vocals by David Pirner of Soul Asylum. But audiences are most likely to come away talking about young John Lennon's obsessive fascination with Sutcliffe. Dorff says, "Everybody thinks the fifth Beatle is Pete Best, but Stuart was an incredible artist and visual rock'n'roller, an incredible cult figure that nobody knows about, who had too much stuff going on inside him. We're a lot alike because he was also based on 90 percent feeling, 10 percent words. I don't have a huge vocabulary. I don't understand when someone talks to me in a very intellectual way. Stuart didn't do anything good, but he looked good. That's why John wanted him in the band. It's very timely today, because everything is all about the look. Stuart loved John more than anything, but he needed to show John that John could go on without him."

Making the movie was, according to Dorff, tough going. "There's lots of prejudice against American actors going over to Europe to make movies. Then, too, I wasn't happy with the script rewrites. The people with the money basically wanted a lot of music to commercial it up and a lot of fuck scenes between me and Astrid. I didn't want the scenes to be about fucking, because that's not who Stuart and Astrid were. They're about laughing, painting. At the end of the day, the movie could have been more cinematic. I kept trying to tell the director, but... well, anyway, there's enough good up there on the screen, especially the London-in-the-'60s raw feeling. The real joy I have from the movie is that the real-life Astrid was never the same after Stuart died, and I think I opened her up again, helped her feel more alive."

Since Dorff is talking about affairs of the heart, what happened to his romance with Courtney Wagner, the daughter of Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, with whom he romped half naked in the shower for Bruce Weber in Interview magazine? One hears the affair is on hiatus. Was it those lens-steaming photos that did it? "I say fuck all those motherfuckers that didn't like it. They were jealous. I do what I want to do. I don't care what risk I take. But our relationship has been incredibly difficult. Because of what I do, the kind of person I am, how young I am, how much I give when I'm working, it's just so hard for me. Especially the negative stuff. I wish to God I hadn't met her here in this city, in this fucking scene. I think that has ruined us a lot. When you're feeling down, the shit that's out there, the people that are out there, everyone wants to bring you down. The truth is, me and Courtney share something real. She's the girl I hope to marry someday, when I grow up and when we find ourselves. I think we'll always be in each other's life. I think it's a lot like Natalie and R.J. I remind her a lot of her dad and she reminds me a lot of my mother. When I was in The Power of One, everybody said we looked incredibly alike."

Between meetings on new roles, Dorff's been shooting black-and-white photographs of such sights as the Malibu fire damage, perhaps in preparation for directing a movie. "I want to bring out what I feel in other people," he explains, "to tell a story my way, to get to do my vision.

"I also want to score my movies," says Dorff, whose father is a film and TV composer, "because I always write music for the characters I play. I score each scene based on how I'm feeling and I listen to that music before I do the scene."

Until Hollywood tears him loose from a sound stage, though, Dorff has movies to act in. With typical Dorffian brio, he predicts that S.F.W. (translation: So Fucking What), a media-thrashing, ultra-black satire about two kids held hostage in a convenience store, will be "the cult classic, A Clockwork Orange meets Rebel Without a Cause meets Midnight Cowboy meets Network of the '90s." Has it anything in common with Oliver Stone's movie of Quentin Tarantino's Natural Born Killers script? "Quentin Tarantino's scripts read all the same--this one is a much smarter script," Dorff opines. "Jeffrey Levy is going to be a very big director and this is the greatest role I've ever played."

Dorff carps that "the movie business is all just one big trend, like serial killer movies," and hopes to cut a swath by resisting the temptation to trend surf.

"I don't do what I do to make my quote," Dorff concludes as we're heading for the parking lot so he can take a meeting at a studio across town. "I do it to make people feel something, to make people go, 'Whoa, who is that guy?' I had hype on me from The Power of One and I'm sure I'll have it when these new movies come out. I'm going to do some fucking good movies. I know every movie I make isn't going to be great. But I hope to be great in every movie I make."

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Halle Berry for the Jan./Feb. Movieline.

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