You've heard of Jean-Claude Van Damme, but have you ever seen one of his movies? While you've been renting Anthony Hopkins/Emma Thompson films, he's been moving up the action-star food chain. Here he talks about the size of his salary, his feet, and his manhood, while offering career advice for Steven Seagal and Sylvester Stallone.
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Jean-Claude Van Damme, snapping his fingers to a crackerjack rendition of "New York, New York" played by the natty lounge pianist at the St. James's Club, tells me he'd rather be hearing him play "My Way." Why? "Let's cut the bullshit," he answers. "'You think you're big. I think I'm big. Because, if we didn't, we wouldn't brush our teeth in the morning or wear the clothes we do. You have to think you're special to respect your soul, your body. You're living your special dream. I'm living mine. I did it my way. That's inspirational."
On-screen, the Belgian-born bone cruncher, best known for such chest-beaters as Universal Soldier and Hard Target, can strike one as a Tom of Finland drawing, a campy, hypermacho hunk out of Jean Genet, made flesh and bone. Not only is he prime sirloin, way dishier than Arnold, Sly, Steven, and Chuck-- ask any girl--he's the one who truly looks as at home in Versace as he does in martial-arts getups. This is no dummy. He worked himself up from pizza-delivery and carpet-layer and bouncer gigs to $600K salaries on video-ready movies to a niche as the world's fourth-biggest action star to an eight million smackeroo salary for his next epic. Now he's got multiple movie deals with both Columbia and Universal. But, I fretted before meeting him, can the product speak?
In person, as it turns out, the 33-year-old Van Damme is a wild card. I've heard he can be cranky and impatient, but not tonight. Mercurial, maybe. One second he's gyrogear-loose, then he goes all bottled up; now he's merrily self-mocking, then icily self-aware. He'll get cozy and surprisingly frank, then duck for cover behind his work-in-progress English. Best surprise yet: he's nearly always out there and brimful of brio.
I met with Van Damme once before this to mess around with a bunch of topics. Some of his responses surprised even me. Such as? Well, such as how he's planning, despite the looks of his new film Time Cop--a $30 million futuristic thriller that marks his 14th action outing--to break ranks with the Arnolds, Slys, and Stevens of the world. Such as what went haywire between him and Hard Target ace chop-socky director John Woo. Such as what the star, who says that over 80 percent of his fans are women, prescribes for peak passionate lovemaking. Such as whether or not he has ever been paid to make love. Such as the pending legal case in which he's been charged with forcing a woman to perform fellatio on him in a French Quarter hotel. Such as why, he insists, he has never romantically entangled with a co-star and why he believes the press never tires of speculating about the size of his . . . well, you get the idea.
But right now, while women in the lounge fuss with their hair as they feign ignorance of his presence, Van Damme is showing me an imperfection, a small mound that protrudes from his otherwise unflawed forehead. "See this bump right here?" he asks. "It's scar tissue. I don't care too much about plastic surgery. Because then I know it's fake. But 'they' want me to have it fixed because it looks obvious in films. I'm thinking about it, but I don't know. I know that I don't care that my hair's got gray in it. Doesn't disturb me at all."
Is this guy, who studied ballet, who won the Mr. Belgium body-building title, and once revealed his diet secret as "chocolate and women," telling me that he isn't narcissistic? "What's narcissistic?" he asks, without guile or irony. After thanking me for filling him in on the definition, he chuckles and says, "I'm a seven, eight on the scale. I've got to be. I'm proud of myself. If I see something going wrong with my body, I want to fix it right away. I like beauty, I like form. Right now, I want my chest and my calves bigger." He juts out his leg before me. It looks as if it's been chiseled from marble. "If my calves were bigger, my knee would look smaller." How about such quick fixes as steroids? Shaking his head, he says, "Never. No drugs, ever in my life. Steroids show in the thickness of the skin. The people doing it will pay later.
"Narcissism," he says, repeating the word, tasting the concept. "I'm a funny guy about that. I want to be, like, around 40. When I am 40, I will look great! Right now, I even try to make myself look older in movies. In Time Cop, we kept putting shadows around my eyes and face to make me look more tired, older. I love Clint Eastwood, and they never respected him when he was doing all the guns and Western stuff. Now, look at all the Academy attention, the good roles. So, I'm on that path. I'm following that path. And I think I'm right."
Breaking out a wry grin, he says, "But I have to, you know, compete with the bozos: Arnold, Sly, and Seagal." I crack up and say, "So, I'm not the only one who thinks of these guys as muscle-bound goofballs?" He makes a great show of confusion, saying, "Bozos, in Europe, is an expression like 'the boys,' cool, happening guys. What does it mean, a 'bozo,' in America?" I'm not sure I buy any of this, but, when I tell him it means roughly the equivalent of a mindless clown, he says, "See, I have to be careful sometimes when I use my language. No, no, I love Sly and Arnold."
Does he not love Seagal, who once offered on Arsenio Hall's show to whip Van Damme's butt? "Well, he's a good guy, but he's too tense. I saw him in Planet Hollywood and I said, 'Hey, Steven, you speak bad about me on TV. Why?' And he goes--" he breaks off, spewing Cro-Magnonesque mutterings, then continues in his own voice. "I said, 'Come on, look, I'm a nice guy. Am I a bad guy?' I shook his hand, he relaxed. Hey, it's okay if he wants to say things. It's not my problem."
Since he's feeling magnanimous toward Seagal, might he offer any career advice to the competition? "What's my right to judge them when those three guys are bigger box office than me?" he protests, adding playfully, "Domestic'' Sure, but how does he size them up? "First of all, Seagal is very smart," he observes. "He's not in good physical shape, absolutely not. He came on the screen playing a macho guy who fights in a suit. Women love that. Warner Bros, really promoted him in Above the Law and the movie didn't do that much, but he became a star on video. I believe he's got some charisma. Now he has to change, to find something new. It will be...difficult."
Okay, now how about the other two? "Arnold is versatile; he can wear shorts, a suit, a Terminator outfit. And he has a body, so he can use that. Look, my lowest budget on a movie was $1.5 million. That's the salary of a makeup guy on an Arnold movie. I'm joking. His secret is that he will bleed to find a good director. Paul Verhoeven, Jim Cameron--good directors and strong people, who go, 'Hey I want my budget, I want this, I want that, fuck you!' Arnold knows that and, once the director takes the job, Arnold gets to show up and enjoy life in his trailer.
"Now, Sly is a fantastic actor," he continues. "I don't care what people are saying to me, people should not judge him badly right now. He has to be a little more loose. You know, when you become so wealthy, so famous, you start to get scared to lose it? Sometimes, it's just good to relax."
When I ask Van Damme whether he finds show business particularly rough on marriage--he's had four wives so far--he says, "Women are very smart. More smart than guys. But, boy, when they love they are so blind. Women? They complain a lot. If you're a bad lover, women will not complain; if you're a good lover, they'll love you like crazy. But if you do one wrong move, like, if I look at that girl over there at the bar, just look at her ...I mean, she's beautiful and I like beauty. What am I supposed to do, look at something ugly? Anyway, I look at a woman and it's like, What are you looking at? Well, I'm looking at a woman. Then it's, Why? Do you want to fuck her? No? Then what's wrong with you? Nothing is wrong, I'm just looking at something beautiful. That's one pressure in this business.
"Two, this is a business with lots of sacrifice. It's past seven o'clock, I'm married, I'm with you. Now, I have to tell [my wife] a story of what's going on. It's trust, you know? But maybe trust doesn't exist anymore. Or maybe only in a few couples. That's why people are getting separated, divorced: missing trust, missing confidence. To be married to any movie star, the partner has to be very strong. Confident. I'm trying the best I can. I like something solid, I like to go home, but I want freedom, too--just to be able to go out and have a drink with some friends. I want a woman who'll say, 'Go, go! Tell me what's going on after. I want to know in the morning what you did. If you tell me everything, I will never be jealous. Even in the worst case, it's okay.'" Does such a trusting soul exist? "I hope so," he says, sighing. "She's somewhere."
Van Damme's currently married to wife number four, Darcy LaPier, the long-legged, former wife of the Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil king. They met, Van Damme tells me, in Hong Kong. "Hong Kong and Paris are the best cities for love," he asserts. "Before making love, I like to have a nice dinner in a nice restaurant with fine wine and a beautiful view. I was in Hong Kong staying on the eighth floor of the Regent Hotel. One night, the phone rang. 'This is Darcy, I'm above you.' Above me? Mentally? Socially? 'No, I'm above you. In the penthouse on the top floor. You climb a staircase to get to it. Can you come up to see me?' I found her, with a big bay window behind her, 360 degree view of the bay of Hong Kong, with the boats going chicka-chugga, chicka-chugga, the music from Bugsy, and champagne. And she said, 'Jean-Claude, make love to me.'"
So, given his own recipe for romance, did he dine before enjoying LaPier's favors? "No," he answers. Just got right down to the business at hand? "Fucking A. I mean, I ate something, but not food. You know what I'm saying?" I've got a rough idea. Has he experienced other memorably indecent proposals? "So many, Stephen," he says, "so many. I can't think of any other that happened right now, because I always look at the future. I'm thinking of the one that might happen tonight, tomorrow." Speaking of proposals, has he ever been paid for his sexual favors? He ponders this one, then says, "No," then, "Yes." Then, "No. Yes. Well, I was not paid. It was for free." He lets out a hearty laugh, crimsoning. "Keep on going, will you?"
I sure will: Has he had any close encounters with co-stars? "I've made love to women who are so good looking, I don't think I could get off on a co-star," he answers, thereby blowing off such screenmates as Rosanna Arquette and Mia Sara. "I've never shtupped a co-star in my whole career. If you sleep with your co-star, she will have no fire in her eyes, no chemistry, because it's like, 'He's mine.' Besides, it's unprofessional to use your name, to use a movie, to meet someone. People are spending so much money to make a good movie, if the co-stars are shtupping each other and then they have a fight in the middle of the picture, it's bad vibes. I could never marry an actress, either. Why? I've talked with people who've done, like, 60, 80 movies; in almost every one, except for maybe the biggest stars, all the actresses shtupped around, if not with the co-star, then with the grip, the electrician. No, no, it's too difficult to be married to an actress."
Or, judging by the way he seems to rivet the attentions of every woman in the room without doing anything, an actor. He smiles at the waitress and says to me, "She likes my shoes," pointing out his pair of hand-tooled boots. "Women are amazingly sensitive to details, like how a man's stitching in his tie goes with a fleck of color in his slacks. You have nicer shoes, Stephen. Now, I look at mine and they look a little cheap. I'm size eight-and-a-half, what size are you? Ten? Eleven?" Eleven-and-a-half, I tell him, with just the right tone of macho braggadocio. "Wow," he says, "you know what they say about big feet." "Right," I answer, "big feet, big shoes." He laughs. "No, 'Big shoes, big dick,' right? I think it's the nose, though, really. But you never know. Ahhh, it's all bullshit, isn't it?"
Well, yeah, actually, but bullshit that's particularly germane to imaginings about all actors, let alone action heroes. So, since he's raised the topic, is his male member a match for his ego, let alone the rest of his pumped-up physique? "I've got a normal dick," he observes. "In America, journalists ask more open questions. In Europe, they've got too many complexes to ask. In Asia, they never ask about it. They would just love to see it." Does he think he might give Asians their wish by showing his all in a big-time movie, such as Stallone toyed with doing in Demolition Man and may do in The Specialist? "Maybe Sly has to do something because people are saying bad stuff about him, like he's got some problems there. So, maybe he wants to say to people, 'Hey, guys, look here!' To me, it's like, who cares? It's not necessary, you know? I believe in fantasy and people have a certain image of you in their fantasy and everyone's fantasy is different. If people see me or Arnold or Stallone naked to the waist, they can imagine anything they want. If you show everything, you give away the surprise."
While the lounge pianist plays a few more Sinatra signature tunes, I ask Van Damme how he handles the fame he's courted so avidly. Religion? Philosophy? "I don't go to church too often anymore," he admits. "I pray at night, in my bed. I should go back to church. Also, I meditate while I train. I can name you five Gods--Buddha, Allah, God, whatever--but it comes down to, if you do something bad to me and I do something bad to you, you know it and I know it. To me, that's God. My guiding philosophy is this: What goes around, comes around. So I try to be nice."
Nice he can be, particularly when we're joined for a spell by Ben, an elfin fellow Belgian. Ben and Van Damme have been buds since they were kids, back when Van Damme was a frail, platinum-haired, eyes-behind-coke-bottle-glasses tyke named Jean-Claude Van Varenberg. They've been friends, Ben says, through "first kiss, first girl, first kick, first fight, first heartbreak, first love. In terms of women, he was a star before he ever made a movie." Ben--older by four years than his friend, who stays, on and off, with Van Damme--observes, "When I was 17 I used to drive my motocross cycle past Jean-Claude's school gates so he could jump on the back and we'd take off with all the fathers of the girls screaming and raising their fists and running after us. Those fathers never caught him. He runs too fast. By the way, has he done any impersonations for you?"
Impersonations? Yes, that's right, Van Damme is an astoundingly acute mimic. "Do Jerry Lewis," Ben urges, and though Van Damme at first protests, the actor finally shoves down his glasses, screws up his eyes, bucks out his teeth and does a dead-on, perfect, hilarious, 30-second capsule of The Nutty Professor. His next imitation may be less recognizable to some Americans, but this one has a point. Ben and I laugh as Van Damme does a prune-faced take on French rock singer/actor Johnny Hallyday, whom Van Damme insists is a "good guy" despite the hypermacho posturing he and Ben could not resist ridiculing when he visited chez Van Damme recently. Says Ben, "He's a fucking bigot, so we shocked the shit out of him, like .. ." He mimes pawing Van Damme then continues, "So we were a couple for the night, just to piss him off. We played it to the hilt, speaking of going to San Francisco and getting married."
But, baiting aside, how does Van Damme, who has a reputation for being anything but a bigot, feel about gay fans? "It doesn't disturb me to have gay fans. Maybe they like me because gay people love beauty in general. They have a high level of taste." I can't help but comment that Van Damme and Ben make one cool, odd couple. "Thank you very much," says Ben, with a slight bow, then, while grinning at his pal, says, "In another life, you'll be my wife, Jack."
The two guys are touching and funny together, especially when they demonstrate for me their ongoing faux-feuding comedy routine--one that's raised eyebrows at Spago and Le Dome--that casts Ben as the cajoling parent, Van Damme as the bratty kid. "Eat your salad," Ben insists. "I don't want to," his famous pal whines. "Eat that salad," Ben growls. Van Damme refuses until Ben hauls off and mock-cracks him across the face. Heads swivel all over the lounge. "Why did you do that," the star wails, barely able to keep a straight face. "Somebody here will see it and it'll be in the Enquirer. VAN DAMME, THE COWARD, GETS SLAPPED."
Ben must leave, but I know Van Damme's remark about the tabloids didn't come from nowhere. Last year, after shooting Hard Target in New Orleans, he was accused by a 25-year-old woman of having strolled, stark naked (and accompanied by Darcy LaPier), into the adjoining room this woman shared with her boyfriend in a French Quarter hotel. The suit charges that Van Damme demanded a foursome with the woman and her boyfriend (with whom, allegedly, they had earlier dined), then forced the woman to perform oral sex on him. Hard Target, indeed.
Although the suit has yet to come up for a legal judgment, Van Damme's blood boils. "You know the expression--?" he asks, breaking off, making the universally-known masturbatory motions with his hand and fist. "Money, money, money. I tell my lawyers, 'Look, I want to go in there and tell them it's not true,' but they say I cannot do that. Why? 'Because you've got something to lose and they have nothing to lose.' But I'm innocent! They say, I know, but you have to settle.' Why? 'You want to go in court and have 12 [jurors] who get paid seven bucks a day, to listen to your blah-blah and to someone else's blah-blah and then make a judgment?' What the fuck is that? Is that the law? Is that what I came here for?"
His voice impassioned, he continues, "That upsets me so much. It's like if I invited you to my room at four or five in the morning and you came to my room. I never pulled your hair. I take you, then, the next day, you wake up and say, 'You raped me.' In Europe, that would never work. It's a bunch of baloney. It would be like, 'Are you crazy? Do you want us to swallow that?' For such a great country like America to have those problems is so sad. The laws are fucked up. I'm a little confused. I love justice, but to let people judge you from a story--because this guy's lawyer speaks so well and tells a good story and this other guy speaks less well and tells a less good story--and the first lawyer wins?" He shakes his head in disbelief and says, quietly, "Justice is great. Truth. I really love truth."
Okay, then, here's an inescapable truth: if Van Damme is to last in the business, at least in front of the cameras, he needs a breakout movie. No one is more aware of this than he. "For all the silly movies I've done, people have treated me very well," he says. "I could not do better with what I was handed. When I came in this country, they signed me for independent, low-budget movies with small companies like Cannon. Dumb stories, I mean very simple stories: the brother dies, I come for revenge, win, people love it, it makes lots of money. These are movies made for $1 million, $4 million--that's the salary of some actors. But now, I have to come out of that cocoon. I really believe I can act. I have to search for good stories, good directors who can really put a plot together. Domestic, I just need one of my movies to break $40 million and have a $15 million opening weekend."
Any plans for such a film? You bet. He enthuses over a yet-to-be-made project, The Royal Way, which is to be directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, who is better remembered for Runaway Train than for Tango & Cash, one of Stallone's abortive breakout movies. Suddenly, Van Damme's enacting the character he would play in this project, to show "how sensitive, passionate and romantic I am." First, he's drunk in dive bars, a physical wreck, a cat's sneeze away from Skid Row; finally, nearly bonkers in the urban jungle, he flees, don't ask how, to the real jungle, where he becomes a king among tribal people. He punctuates his oratory--and me--with pats to my shoulder and knee, almost making me forget how the story sounds like leftovers from Apocalypse Now, Farewell to the King and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.
So far, nobody at Universal or Columbia, to which he owes two more movies each, has proposed that he do anything remotely resembling the Konchalovsky project. He philosophizes, sighing, "As an audience [member], I love what guys like Sean Penn and Robert Downey Jr. do. But, talking studio talk, maybe they should do something more commercial to make sure they have a rich history at the box office. Then go do what they want to do. You have to be careful in this business. And smart."
While waiting for the beckoning call he hopes will soon come from the likes of Oliver Stone, James Cameron or Adrian Lyne--"It's got to happen," he says, like a mantra, "it will happen"--Van Damme expects Time Cop, directed by Peter Hyams, to at least nudge him up on the industry food chain. "With the pride and money we put into the project, I believe we'll succeed," says Van Damme, "because this time I'm not just 'Van Damme' with big ass, big abs, big muscle. I'm not a thing. The part I play would have been good for many different actors, different kinds of actors, than me. It's the first time I know I have a hit story. Of the nine, 10 movies I've done, it's the first time I feel good about one of them." Suddenly, he grows quiet, adding, "Now, a lot depends upon how the studio will push it. Will they put on all those TV ads every 15 seconds all over the country for Time Cop like Warner Bros, did for Under Siege?"
Sure, some are saying that this will be Van Damme's big breakthrough movie, but haven't we heard this song before? Most notably sung for Hard Target, which arrived with an avalanche of John Woo hype that said Van Damme had arrived. "Good director, bad script," Van Damme snorts when I bring up that movie. "That whole thing was a deal. In it, I'm a thing. [Producers and studio executives] know I will open a movie with a $10 million weekend. So, they figure, whatever happens, it's okay, they'll make their money back. They made huge money, but I'm sorry, because it was my name and face on that screen. John Woo is such a nice guy and, absolutely, I'd work with him again. But he has a lot to learn."
Learn? The funky maestro of such frenetically balletic action movies as A Better Tomorrow and The Killer, which got him lauded internationally as a sort of reborn in Hong Kong Sam Peckinpah? "I felt there were problems going in," he explains. "It's like when you're going into a marriage as a couple. You feel something is not there, but you're going toward it, working toward something. But the story--a guy getting hunted by people? Nothing profound. Then, too, in Hong Kong, you can shoot a movie for two weeks, then tell the crew, 'Go home, we'll call you back in two weeks to do another sequence.' In America, that's impossible. The action in the opening sequence was great, but the action at the end of the movie is exactly the same. You have to escalate action through the movie. So many bullets, so many blood bags popping. Anyway, that's his show. I'm out of it."
So, his Woo debut didn't quite cut it, but what if Van Damme's audiences don't care to follow down the roads he plans to head? "Fine," he shoots back. "I'll catch another audience. And then, that audience that was disappointed will catch up with me in the second or third different kind of movie that I do. I have to enlarge the circle. Put me in a love story, maybe with some action, and we will go through the roof because I've got so much attraction with the ladies. Dress me well, of course, put me with a strong lead actress, a musical score like by Morricone, fast-paced directing, lots of steam, lots of smoke, and we'll kick ass."
Wherever Van Damme is bound, bet that he won't go quietly. "When you're very smart," he says, "you don't believe in luck, you believe in logic." Luck and logic played a hand in his landing Streetfighter, a gladiator-type movie he is now shooting, for which he is being paid $8 million because kids surveyed all over Europe and Asia named him the guy they'd most like to see in a live-action version of a top-selling computer game. His salary, he says, has prompted big-name directors to finally give him a tumble. Though he's mum on the subject, one hears that he met with Oliver Stone, for instance, about the now-defunct Al Pacino project, Noriega. But he swears that the big money, the chance that his dreams of real stardom may finally be realized, won't rock his world.
Van Damme says, "They're all big babies in Hollywood--huge, complicated babies with lots of money. So many guys my age in this business have so much money, but so much pressure they're doing coke, doing all kinds of drugs. They don't seem to know something simple: no matter how much money you're making, you only need one car, one house, one shirt at a time."
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Marisa Tomei for the July Movieline.