Val Kilmer: Number One With a Bullet?

Fine, so his story is that he's a changed man nowadays. Still, what happened on, say, Willow? "I thought acting was harder than it is," he says. "At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. Like George Lucas says, 'A movie is a success or failure from the minute you solidify the concept. Execution is 50 percent. It is the primal attachment to a concept that makes the movie work or not work.' It doesn't matter about the press, or who you hired, or anything. If you don't want to see Arnold Schwarzenegger pregnant, you ain't gonna go. I was going a little nuts on [Willow], but that was my style then. I didn't trust that I couldn't have an effect that would be positive [on the finished product]--I was living out a philosophy that what you think has a direct influence on your immediate surroundings." He shrugs, then adds, "I apologized to George Lucas for two years."

So what went down between Kilmer and Oliver Stone during the making of The Doors?

"Jim Morrison is a very important guy in this man's life," he asserts. "I mean, the music helped him from going crazy after he got back from Vietnam--it's a deeply personal thing. In my mind [at the time], the first job that I had in movies that was anywhere close to the theater work I've done or want to do is The Doors. I, unfairly to the business, thought I'd been unlucky until that time. I just learned, fairly recently, how lucky I have been, in that it's damn hard to get a job. The Doors was the first time that I had a role large enough to remain passion-ate for the months of living inside what adds up to, basically, a minute of screen time a day. There's a kind of madness required to be meticulous [when so little film is shot per day]; it's very hard to keep excited. So, the ideas of Jim Morrison, the character, stimulated me. And Oliver is stimulating--uncontrollably! You know, if nothing's going on, he'll say. 'Why is this ceiling here? Rip it out!' And everybody who works for him likes that kind of juice, Oliver Stone's the only director I've worked with [who] kind of takes on the character of a film or the characters in it. While the style of the Doors' songs, and the character of Morrison, was about waiting, waiting, waiting to explode," he says, letting fly with a deep chortle, "we were never waiting. I just think we sometimes damaged what we were filming, 'cause we moved so much."

When pressed for an example. Kilmer recalls, "I had my own long hair for The Doors, but then [we had to shoot] the period of the movie where Morrison's much younger, with short hair. So, I gotta pile all this hair onto my head, pin it down, then put on a short wig. At the end of the film, Morrison's hair was supposed to be frazzled--which would've destroyed my real hair-- so, again, [my hair was piled up, and] I had a long wig on. [Cinematographer] Robert Richardson used these white lights, 1 forget what they're called, that actually made whatever they hit so hot it would glow. What you're actually seeing is the heat. Well, they melted Ray Manzarek's organ--his real organ, that he brought in-- while Kyle [MacLachlan] was playing. When the heat from those lights went through my wig and hit the pins holding up my real hair, my head was being fried. So, while / was trying to capture something esoteric about Morrison, that he was an existentialist who didn't believe in existentialism, my head was being fried!"

Presumably, playing Batman and his alter ego. Bruce Wayne, has been a snap by comparison, right? "Well," says Kilmer, "it is kind of easy to go out and subdue the bad guy, yes--I mean, my preparation as an actor is lo get dressed. That does make it much easier to go to work. Yet, there are truly comic perversions to doing Batman Forever." Such as? "The suit shrinks." he replies, referring to the rubber muscle number that, some say, hastened Michael Keaton's exit from the movie series. "Wet suits don't shrink, but this particular kind of rubber does after two weeks. If my grandparents were alive, I'd spend much more time with them because [wearing the Batman costume] is like being old, at least from what I hear about being old from elderly people. You feel young, you don't stop feeling or reacting in your mind, but your body just doesn't do things at the same speed. Plus, you can't see. Or breathe. For no reason at all, you can't find things. Your joints ache for no reason. And you can't hear anymore." Are we talking about the elderly now, or about being trapped inside the suit? "They were all quite passionate about telling me the improvements [they'd made] before I put the costume on," Kilmer goes on lo say. "I really don't know how Michael [Keaton] did it. It's 140 degrees in there.'' Suddenly. Kilmer breaks out into a hilarious, full-throated version of "What I Did for Love."

When he's through. I ask how the guy who once quipped that leather pants killed Jim Morrison has managed to give a performance while encased in this Batsuit from hell? "With my lips," Kilmer drawls. "Occasionally, with a nostril or an eyelid." And what, exactly, does a superhero wear under his supersuit? "Nothing." he says, shooting me his best Clark Gable macho grin. "Buff. man. He's dedicated. Batman, I tell you."

When I ask what Kilmer thinks is behind the gossip that he's been feuding with co-star Jim Carrey--talk that started on TV's "Hard Copy" and which was later rebutted by director Joel Schumacher in Liz Smith's syndicated column--he replies. "I don't know how that started. When those stories came out, I'm not sure, either we hadn't actually met or it was our first day together. Anyway, I later went over and said to [Carrey], 'This stuff's coming out. Don't know why." And he doesn't know why he's getting all this stuff written and said [about him], either."

I wonder how Kilmer, who claims he's better prepared for the success Batman Forever may bring than he's ever been before, would have handled himself had he landed and succeeded with roles he missed out on, like, say, Interview With the Vampire or Crimson Tide? "The only distress I've had [about movies I haven't made] is when I discard the reality of what the job entails, look at it subjectively and say, 'Shouldn't I be able to do that?' But it never adds up to regretting what I've experienced instead of those other movies, no." About Vampire, he says, "I love that director and would have done that job if they had asked me to. They did a poll on one of those on-line computer services and I came up as the guy the computer nerds wanted to do it. That didn't mean anything to me at the time, though, because I hadn't read the hook."

Warming to the topic, he volunteers, "I started off my year saying to my agent, 'I've never been in a movie with someone older.' I don't think there's any actor my age who hasn't done that style, whatever you want to call them, 'buddy movies' or whatever. I would love to work with Gene Hackman and nearly have three or four times. Crimson Tide went around forever, but it's hard to feel, like, a loss when they chose a black actor. I couldn't say, 'I could do that!'"

Up next for him is a role alongside Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Michael Mann's cops-and-robbers thriller, Heat. It's a small role, and I've heard that Kilmer's accepting it sent some of his advisers into apoplexy because they consider it too small after Batman Forever. Others say it is small even in comparison to Dead Girl, a movie with such a low profile Kilmer doesn't know its whereabouts. "I haven't seen it and I'm longing to," he claims. Cupping his hands over his mouth, he shouts, "Adam, where are you?" referring to writer-director Adam Coleman Howard, for whom Kilmer played the son of a Malibu shrink who has run off to produce a movie, leaving his kid to deal with his patients. Kilmer says he's not sweating it. since, for him, it's the role, not the movies. "There are only three reasons to do a movie: the cast, the director, the role." he announces. "Like I say, you live in a minute of screen time, but to prepare for that minute takes much more than a day. You'd better be excited about what those moments are, even if they're the hardest moments. Or the smallest."

One final question before he's back to rehearsals for Heat. Why did he refuse to be photographed while smoking, on moral grounds, for the shots that accompany this article, yet so enjoy posing with a gun? "I'm better at taking pictures if I can think 'props,'" he explains. "Like. I came to the photo shoot with my briefcase from Heat and your editor said, 'What's in it?' I went, 'I got beads. I got a gun,' and he said, 'Well, let's take some pictures with that.' It's very stylized, gang, right? It's not like it reads, 'Go shoot somebody!' Under-stand?" Almost, Val, almost.

___________________________________

Stephen Rebello interviewed Denzel Washington for the May Movieline.

Pages: 1 2 3