Not sure who Stephen Dorff is? Read on. Hollywood has the hots for this guy. And he has the talent--as well as the ego--to take the town on.
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"I'm going to own this town, be at a place where I've got nobody to answer to. Man, they'll answer to me. When I take a project somewhere, they're going to want to make it." Hey, it's okay by me that 20-year-old Stephen Dorff is so exuberantly, enjoyably full of himself today. Armed with the requisite to-kill-for cheekbones, tumbles of dark hair, boho facial scruff and black Beemer, he's entitled to his gloating. He may, for now, have to suffer such indignities as being recognized more for his performance in Judgment Night or Rescue Me or the Aerosmith video he did than for his richly-praised turn as a South African teenager in 1992's The Power of One. But he's about to be seen to terrific advantage in Backbeat, a groovy, charismatic movie about a groovy, charismatic guy who dropped out of the Beatles before they became the Beatles. And later on this year, he will star in the hip media spoof S.F.W.
I think I've been very smart in the choice of roles I've made," Dorff asserts, as his "rising star" heat waves snag Orso's best patio table for us and the waiters start doing back-flips to please us. Or, at least, him. "There isn't another young guy that has touched the roles that I have done." He cites The Power of One, which he made when he was 17 and which won him scrapbook-worthy reviews and the Star of Tomorrow Award from the National Association of Theater Owners alongside Nicole Kidman. "Did you see it?" he asks of the apartheid epic. "At gunpoint," I answer, "because it radiated PC-ness and nobility." He shrugs. "That's how everybody felt about it, and that's why I'm pissed off nobody saw it. Everybody also thought I was English, a South African. I'm really good at these accents. Maybe that's why my career is such a mystery: I keep playing these foreigners. I mean, where'd I go after that movie? If I had done Carlito's Way, it'd be like: 'Stephen Dorff, American.' But the characters I play are fucking me, in a way." Fucking him as in keeping him from being a movie star? "Yeah. But in the end," he speculates, "my filmography is going to be pretty cool."
Anyone who seeks out Backbeat is likely to go along with that possibility. Playing Stuart Sutcliffe, a cool, mysterious guy who chose to pursue a love affair and an art career rather than to become a Beatle, Dorff gives a moving performance and spouts a nifty Liverpudlian accent. Backbeat and S.F.W. are both strong, offbeat choices for a young actor to make. What other parts has he gone after or been considered for? Dorff just met with Gus Van Sant and John Schlesinger for roles in projects these directors hope to tackle. Is Dorff given pause over the fact that it's been a while since Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy and Sunday, Bloody Sunday days? Says Dorff, "If a director's stale or dried out, if they work with me, I hope to rekindle their flame. There's really no other kid that can handle the scope of what this character should be, unless you want it to play like the way it reads now: really boring." Meanwhile, Dorff turned down the sequel to White Fang because "in the end, no matter what the director and I tried to do, Disney would turn it into just a boy and dog movie." And he passed on Penny Marshall's Renaissance Man. "It's Dead Poets Society in a military camp," Dorff says, rolling his eyes. "It's the most nonsensical movie--I mean, Marky Mark's in it." Dorff goes on to say, "I have zero interest in The Three Musketeers-type stuff. There were other things I almost did, sure. I had an amazing meeting for Scent of a Woman." Which Chris O'Donnell, not Dorff, pocketed. "I brought more of an intense, confrontational kid," he explains, "not someone who just sat there. Which wasn't what director Marty Brest wanted. That movie was designed as an Al Pacino Best Actor Oscar winner.
"There's so many people working today that have gotten so lucky," Dorff continues, doing a Bogart with his Marlboro. "Meaning, this business isn't based on talent. There's so few young people that can do what I do and do it well." Hold on a sec. Even I think Dorff's got the stuff, but doesn't he come off aggressively, if amusingly, cocky for a relative greenhorn? He cracks up as I tell him so, as if he's heard this one before. "To another pair of eyes and ears, I guess I could come off like, 'This guy thinks he knows everything there is to know about everything.' But that is my attitude, I guess. Everybody's entitled to their own opinion about the world. If I'm doing an interview, I always would rather speak the truth to a certain point than make myself into some image that I'm not. There are many soft sides to me, Steve. I'm a very sensitive guy."
Sensitive or not, Dorff certainly has rooted opinions about Young Hollywood and his peers, and probably has some legitimate complaints about what hot-new-things are grabbing the good roles, even if they are lukewarm at best. "You see so many people who are just kind of a bland face that walks off the screen and people go, 'There's a movie star.' In the 'young' category, there aren't many people who are very good. Some people have it, some people just don't."
Okay, let's talk about who, besides Stephen Dorff, has it and who doesn't. Ethan Hawke? "I wasn't with CAA, but I got The Power of One over all the fucking Ethan Hawkes and Sean Astins. It's the actor that gets the job. Big agencies, hype--that's all whack." Emilio Estevez, with whom he did Judgment Night? "I accept him for what he is," he says, with a shrug. "He's got this personality people like. Whatever. I made that movie because my agents at ICM were saying I needed to do something big and commercial; nothing else was going on and I needed to make some money. I didn't play all that bullshit that everybody else in it was playing. It was so simple and stupid, I could have phoned in the fucker." Chris O'Donnell? "A good actor who brought a natural, 'Golly gee,' wide-eyed thing to Scent of a Woman, but I sure don't jump out of my seat when I watch him. And, for this article, I don't want to do boring photos like he did for Movieline." Juliette Lewis, whom I tell him I like, but just wish she'd quit twitching and eating her hair? "I've seen Juliette Lewis too many times. I like her natural ability to perform, but what is that, man, with her hair? It's being scared of letting out what you are." Christian Slater, who recently replaced the late River Phoenix in Interview With the Vampire? "[Producer] Stephen Woolley and Neil Jordan really wanted me for that. But David Geffen [who developed the project] just wants as many big names as possible and he wanted Slater. He is so wrong for the role, because the kid should be wide-eyed and passionate. He'll be going, 'Well, uh...'" Here Dorff does a dead-on sarcastic, nasal Slater riff, then says, "I don't want to be compared with somebody, take somebody's place. The show must go on and it's not anybody's fault what happened to River Phoenix but his."
After a moment, Dorff adds, "I've always been compared to River Phoenix. Similar vulnerability. That's why his death really affected me. He is the only one I grew up respecting, the one guy I looked up to. I was 12 when I went up for Stand By Me, he was 15. And we were just about to play brothers in a movie with Susan Sarandon.
"His death is just such a shame," Dorff continues. "It just goes to show that people aren't really as smart as... well, it's just a shame that he wasn't smart in that area. When you get that far, people can't really talk to you anymore. I've never been able to be told anything. And, like the rest of us, he must have seen that there's a lot of dark energy in this town, a lot of people who wish you down, brainless people, empty facades who make decisions but don't know jack shit."
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.