Meet Bill Pullman

"We want our movie stars to be more than we are, and maybe being married with children makes them realize that you're just like them."

"I'm not sure I'm really a guy for the '90s. Not that I know what a '90s guy is..."

'I read that Roseanne said there isn't any New Man. The New Man is the Old Man only he whines more."

"Oooohh, she's harsh. And who knows what a '90s woman is? Sometimes it just feels like the whole world's holding its breath, waiting for the millennium. But there are things that are so out of style now. I'm not sure you should get points just for doing what's right. And that's not to say that I can't be disrespectful and ungracious. But I think you have to know in your soul what you're doing."

"Look at it this way: when good manners come back in, which they will, you'll be well ahead of the curve."

Pullman rolls his eyes at me and goes off to shoot another scene. When he comes back, he looks almost as beat as I feel. It's near mid-night now, and we both have our heads cradled in our hands.

"Independence Day..." I finally mutter.

"Big movie," he says, "Lots of fun for me. I play the President of the United States, and the world is being attacked by aliens on the Fourth of July. I used to be a fighter pilot..."

"You were?" I ask, sitting up in amazement.

"No, silly, in the movie."

"So it's basically your boy-meets-aliens, boy-saves-the-world kinda movie?"

Pullman starts to laugh. "Exactly, When I was a kid and I'd go to a matinee on Saturdays with my friends, we'd come out and run all the way home pretending to be shooting each other. You'd hide behind a telephone pole or a tree, and pretend that your arm was a gun. Well, that's what Independence Day felt like. In order to save the world, I have to get back in a fighter plane. I mean, this is any boy's dream come true. I'm galvanizing the troops before dawn, making a speech, saying, 'The Fourth of July is no longer an American holiday, it's the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night, we will not vanish without a fight.'" I mean, c'mon, this was the speech I was saying in my head when I was 12. I saw recently that they've made a doll of my character, which is hysterical. The doll's forearms are three times the size of my actual wrist."

"And the Lynch film?" Pullman just finished starring in the first movie David Lynch has directed in eons, Lost Highway.

"I was brought up in a very small town in upstate New York. We lived on Main Street, and my dad was a doctor. And this idyllic setting held some very dark corners. Working with David Lynch, getting to know his psyche, and getting inside the character in Lost Highway felt so connected up to my past. Benign on the exterior, seething on the interior. My dad was also the town coroner, so we saw all these dead bodies ..."

"When you were a kid?"

"A teenager. My father would bring us along. I remember that when my mother had colon cancer, my father took us down to the basement of the hospital and pulled out a tumor in a jar to show us. And he's holding it up, he's kinda laughing, like a scientist. He said, 'See, it's kinda like congealed hamburger.' I mean, that's like David Lynch, that combination of strange, funny, macabre, all in one. So working with Lynch felt very much like going home." I see.

They call Pullman back to shoot a scene, and this time I do fall asleep. I wake to Pullman shaking my shoulder. "Come with me," he says. I'm not capable of arguing. He leads me downstairs, to a cream-colored Cadillac, and when the driver jumps out, he says, "Please take my friend back to her hotel."

When the driver drops me off, he turns and says, "He's quite a guy, that Mr. Pullman, He's the nicest guy I ever drove around."

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Martha Frankel interviewed Richard LaCravenese for the April '96 issue of Movieline.

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