Val Kilmer: Number One With a Bullet?

Any mystery careers he cares to "out"? He wags a finger, laughing, but no dice. Okay, then, how does Kilmer view himself relative to his Top Gun co-star. Tom Cruise, who's been making hits like Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men, The Firm and Interview With the Vampire while Kilmer's career, until very recently, stalled? "He's got an enormous capacity far all the size of the world that he has wanted." Kilmer offers about Cruise's success. "He's a very conscientious guy, so, if he didn't want that world, he wouldn't have it. I don't, so I won't. My career is bound to be eclectic because my tastes are." For example, he tells me. "I'm interested in four projects I have in development, but the budgets that I ask for, for two of them, are less than the million dollars they've spent on my costumes alone for Batman Forever." With a sigh, he remarks. "They're all impossible movies to make."

Fine, he's got eclectic tastes, but then why would he have passed up the decidedly eclectic Blue Velvet, the David Lynch movie which would seem to suit his tastes to a T? "I was given [a copy of that script] because [at one point] I was involved with Dune," he recalls. "It would have been my first job for damn near a year. So, Dave gave me the script and it was straight-out, hard-core pornography before page 30. I never finished it. I said, 'Good luck, but I can't do this.' It isn't what he ended up making," he says, pointedly. "That movie, I would have done." Suddenly he's off and running about eroticism in films. "Joanne and I both feel what's appealing to us, anyway, is mystery," he tells me. "Sex scenes are almost impossible to do the way I like them, which is when they continue to tell the story, where you're involved uncontrollably in the character's mind. The scenes in The Lover were extraordinary in their intimacy, like those in In the Realm of the Senses. You're involved in the minds of the characters, not just watching sex."

Aside from the fact that he's made so many films which didn't catch fire. I ask Kilmer whether he might have gotten hotter faster, and stayed that way longer, if he hadn't persisted in living where the movie action isn't. For 10 years Kilmer lived in New York, where he worked in theater ("the most fulfilling thing I can do and get paid for"): these days, he, his wife and their daughter live in New Mexico.

Kilmer makes no apology for not living in Southern California, whatever the price. "I feel safer in Johannesburg than in L.A. Violence comes out of the blue here. I've had friends who have been carjacked, all kinds of things. Successful felons, criminals love L.A. It's so big, there's so many freeways to get on after you do your score. Because of its possibilities, L.A.'s the most sorrowful city in the world," he continues. "It had every kind of land just an hour away, could have been the greatest representation of the melting pot, just because of the ease, the weather, the terrain. I have a kind of poignant view about this city. I moved out to New Mexico and go back and forth. I did it without really any concern of losing whatever momentum was or is being gained."

Although there have been rumors aplenty that Kilmer's been clashing with Batman Forever co-star Jim Carrey and even with director Schumacher, it's all par for the course if the stories I've heard of Kilmer's run-ins with moviemakers dating all the way back to director Martha Coolidge, on Real Genius, are true.

"You called Martha Coolidge, did you?" he asks, laughing. Coolidge, nothing, I say. I've heard tales of roaring fits and complete standoffs with filmmakers ranging from producer George Lucas (Willow) to directors Michael Apted (Thunderheart) and Oliver Stone (The Doors).

''We learn, the hard way," he replies, "that you can't change how a film is perceived. I've been out of line on one aspect of the way I've approached work because I just hadn't accepted that as a fact. If I've been hustled, like, 'We'll make these changes,' 'We'll do this or that'-- nothing unique to me, you under-stand, just standard business practice where time gets away--what I never accepted or had any empathy with, from the producer's, director's or writer's side, is that they have stuff they want but don't get, either. I didn't learn until Tombstone that an actor cannot change the tone, the predominant feeling of a film. They killed more people behind the camera on Tombstone than they did at the O.K. Corral. Over 100 people quit or got fired. Somehow, strangely, my character survived all the damage."

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