Christopher Walken: Greetings from Planet Showbiz

Q: One of your films, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, was spectacularly unsuccessful. Why did this picture have so much trouble?

A: It took twice as long as it was supposed to take. You look at that movie and you can see in certain scenes that the actors, including myself, have been there so long doing the same thing that they don't even know where they are. There is a look on faces in that movie that's, "Where?" "Who?" "Was I born in Montana?" "Am I ever going home?" And because it was not shot in sequence, you see some scenes toward the end of the movie that were shot in the beginning and everybody is full of juice, and then it's 10 minutes later in the movie but it was shot five months later, and the actors are different weights, shapes, and they have that "Where am I?" look.

Q: After you finished that film, you got into a bad fight on the street where you live in Manhattan. What happened?

A: Right across the street from where I live, some guys had a boom box and it was really loud. I was walking to the store on the corner and I said to one of them, "Turn down the music." I don't think I was nice about it. The other guy started swinging at me. I was protecting myself from him when the first guy took a stick from the garbage can and broke my nose with it. He could have knocked my eye out, that's what pissed me off. He didn't give a shit.

Q: You live near Hayden Planetarium. Have you ever looked into telescopes and searched the skies for UFOs?

A: I did a few years ago. I was a member of an amateur astronomy club. I once rented a house in L.A. that had a telescope and there was a house across the way where they made porn movies, a lot of girls running around in teddies. The permanent residents wanted to get them out, but to me it didn't matter. I had my telescope.

Q: What's the strangest thing you've ever personally seen?

A: James Brown in Tel Aviv. Israeli rock fans don't sit, they stand while the music is going, thousands of them. It was a completely drug-free rock concert, totally square. James Brown was up there, he had the cape, the high shoes, but he was old already, and he wasn't doing the old James Brown stuff. It was the weirdest thing I ever saw outside of a live show in Copenhagen where couples would come onstage, all very civilized, and then they showed a porn movie of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in which all the dwarfs were doing her, then the devil came at the end and the wicked witch and it became an orgy--all very well done. I could have bought it for $75 but somebody said to me, "Don't take a chance, you'll get into trouble coming into America." I got intimidated.

Q: Are you easily intimidated?

A: Yeah, I can be intimidated. By anything.

Q: Didn't you used to watch porn movies with friends when you were younger?

A: Yeah, on the side of the icebox. It's a perfect place.

Q: So you still call refrigerators iceboxes?

A: I'm coming from the '50s. It was real film, 16 millimeter, which would crack and bum and you'd fix it with Scotch tape. The guys in the film would have their shoes and socks on. But I don't find porn very sexy, it's too much information.

Q: Do you recall saying, "Pornos are like looking through a keyhole, and maybe that's what all movies are all about"?

A: I find it hard to believe that I said that. Maybe I did. But I don't think that looking at movies is like looking through a keyhole. When you look at a great painting, you see the world that exists within that frame. It's like Michelangelo said about the David statue--it was there, he just took the stone away. A movie director or a painter puts something within its frame that is its own world. A good movie changes you a little bit. I'm not sure pornography can do that.

Q: Didn't you once write a script about the porno star John Holmes?

A: Yeah, it was the last night shooting King of New York and Abel Ferrara and I were sitting at four a.m. and this guy handed me a Village Voice article about John Holmes. He had died already. He was this simple guy whose father was abusive, and he came to L.A. to work as a handyman, and he never realized that he had this great gift. [Laughs] He didn't even know that everybody wasn't like him. It's sort of a funny story, [although] he ended up stealing radios from cars and he died of AIDS. I told his story in my script but I gave it a happy ending, a dream thing where he's very sick and stumbling along and goes back to his apartment and he has this fantasy life with this Donna Reed wife and kids and dog.

Q: In your script, do you show his dick?

A: No, nothing like that. It's a nice story. Basically it's about the curse of a great gift. It's like Mozart. [Laughs]

Q: Another icon whom you've written about is Elvis Presley. Why is the public so fascinated with him?

A: Because he really was great and he died young. I worked with an actor who told me a funny story about Elvis. He was in this movie, one of those beach things, and he asked Elvis if he wanted to play touch football on their day off. Elvis agreed and said he'd bring some guys with him. A bus came with Elvis and his guys all in professional football outfits, helmets, padding, and they went out and played the guys who had nothing on. And his guys wouldn't let anybody near him. [Laughs]

Q: What did you think of his films?

A: They're all worth watching--_Jailhouse Rock, Blue Hawaii_. I always liked it when he played a simple cowhand, like he was just a regular guy working with the other cowhands. And he looked exactly like Elvis. He was the first actor to get $1 million.

Q: What's your favorite Elvis song?

A: "Are You Lonesome Tonight." That's the one.

Q: What inspired you to write and perform in a play about him?

A: When I was doing Batman Returns I had a house and was living very quietly, reading the tabloids from the supermarket. One day there was this picture of Elvis as a middle-aged woman with great big knockers. The story said he had changed himself into a woman. So I just took it from there. I invented this story where he's not dead, he's in limbo with his twin brother. He had a twin brother who was stillborn. So I stuck him in the play, only his brother is a little younger and better looking and he hates him. And he's trying to get out of limbo. Finally he decides to come back as a woman who works in a diner and is married to an overweight truck driver. That was the last scene--I came out in drag with great big boobs, and my husband was sitting with his feet up watching TV and drinking a beer. I did it eight times a week, and six times a week it was funny and twice it wasn't. Doing the Elvis play was the hardest thing I ever did, but I noticed that immediately afterwards, so many things were easier. I've had a couple of times like that, where you just get so scared and so defiant of being scared.

Q: Why so scared?

A: Every time I got really scared I'd say to myself, "Who cares? That's the way it goes." I must say that saved me. Because when I thought, "Oh my God, my friends are gonna come, and I'm 50-something years old, and the critics are coming..." then I thought, "Who gives a fuck?"

Q: What bothers you about things said of you?

A: Nobody's ever said anything that's hurt me. Being called creepy doesn't hurt me, but it makes me wonder what people are seeing. I read a review of The Prophecy--I'm a lot of fun in that movie, I enjoyed playing this angel who's furious at human beings and just kicks the shit out of everybody. But anyway, I read this review and the critic said something that had nothing to do with my performance. When I read something like that I wonder what the guy's seeing. How could his impression be so different from mine?

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