You know Michael Biehn, or at
least you know his roles. He’s been in some of the iconic films of
the past few decades.
Biehn protected Linda Hamilton
from the murderous android from the future in The Terminator.
He was a tough future marine taking out space creatures in
Aliens. He was a crazed gangster in Tombstone. He was
a Navy Seal in The Rock. He was Anne Hathaway’s dad in
Havoc.
In recent years, Biehn has been
getting more and more into independent filmmaking. Oh, sure he
still does a decent amount of big-name projects to keep his feet
wet, like for example he was in Robert Rodriquez’s Grindhouse
entry Planet Terror or the soon-to-open 80s comedy Take Me
Home Tonight. However, he has also been appearing in a quirky
variety of smaller films from the recent Psych: 9 to
Streets of Blood to the upcoming The Divide.
He has also decided to make the
jump behind the camera. Last year he made his directing debut with
The Blood Bond. He is currently finishing The Victim,
his second film as a director, which he also wrote and costarred in
- with his girlfriend Jennifer Blanc (Blanc also produced the film.)
Biehn just loves working. In
fact, he is constantly taking on new roles in a wide variety of
films. He recently called me to discuss Bereavement, one of
his latest films to be released and his first true horror film.
Still, at the beginning of the interview, he candidly admitted, “You
know, Jay, to tell you the truth, it’s been quite a while since I’ve
done it. I think I’ve done about ten movies in between, so my
memory of the experience is not going to be as good as it was if you
were interviewing me right after I finished.”
Ten films in
three years.
Just like a
shark, Michael Biehn has to keep moving.
And move he
does, building a fascinating and varied body of work and getting the
chance to work with some of the great talents in Hollywood. In
fact, he has been in three films by James Cameron, arguably the most
popular director of all time, after having helmed the first two
Terminator films, Titanic and Avatar.
“I’ve always had a great
experience with Jim,” Biehn says. “I caught him early in his
career. He was always like a kid in a candy store. Very smart,
obviously, knew everybody’s job on the set better than them. I’m
glad he can’t act, because I think he would do that, too. He’s
intense. He works sixteen hour days. But, he’s one of these guys
that is really fun to watch make movies.
“He, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin
Tarentino, Billy Friedkin, Michael Bay – all directors that I’ve
worked with that are just really brilliant and fun to watch,” Biehn
continues. “Jim seems to have a reputation for being difficult on
the set – when he did Titanic and True Lies – but I
never really saw that in him. I worked with him in his early years
and it seemed to me like he was just having a lot of fun. He used
to bring us in – a lot of directors don’t want to show you the
footage, don’t want you to see dailies, because they think you’ll
change your performance and that kind of BS – and Jim used to always
say, ‘Come look at dailies. I’ve got this scene cut together. Come
look at this.’ He was very enthusiastic about keeping his actors
and the rest of the crew involved in screenings of a cut scene of
tech noir out of The Terminator, rough cuts, special
effects shots. Take you down to the special effects studio; show
you what stuff was going to look like. He was very excitable at the
time and very fun and seemed like he was having a great time.”
Still, when he was starring in
The Terminator, it was
simply supposed to be a low-budget action film, much like
many of the other ones he has made since. Biehn
acknowledges he had no clue it would become a pop
culture phenomenon.
“We didn’t really think it was
going to…,” Biehn says. “I didn’t know at the time that it could
ever end up being a deal that ended up having four or five sequels.
We had fun making it, but no, we didn’t have any idea.”
Of
course, Biehn had already caught Hollywood’s eye long before that
mega-hit.
Odd trivia fact: his first film
appearance was an bit performance as a high school basketball player
in the classic musical Grease. However, he first really
turned heads as an obsessed admirer of an aging
actress played by screen legend Lauren Bacall in the early
80s thriller The Fan.
Since then he has been in dozens
of films and television performances, often playing crazed tough
guys – which is kind of funny to Biehn, who is nothing like that in
real life. In fact, Biehn says he felt the most kinship to a
character he did in a film that almost no one has seen.
“There’s a film that I did that
people really do not know very well,” Biehn recalls. “It was a
little movie that I did for Billy Graham, actually, the evangelist.
He has a film company. His son Franklin Graham produced a movie
called The Ride and it had a Christian theme to it – about an
alcoholic [who] finds God. It is a very small movie that we made in
Phoenix about ten or twelve years ago. That portrayal of that
character really is like me. I am an alcoholic. I’ve been sober
now for three years. There was kind of a sense of humor about the
character. He’s kind of charming, he’s fun, but he gets angry.
That character is more like me than any other character I’ve ever
played before.”
This is not to say that Biehn
doesn’t enjoy playing characters that are very different than he
is.
“I liked all the characters I’ve
played,” he says. “I never have any trouble getting into the
characters that I play. But, sometimes I’ve had to make some tough
decisions about working. I’ve had to take jobs that I didn’t want
to take, for the money, for my children. Those are the kind of
things that are really difficult to work on. When you really know
the material is not very good and you’re trying to make the best of
it. Lipstick on a pig or polishing a turd, however you want to
describe it.”
Still, one of the nice things
about Bereavement was that he again played a character who he
could relate to. In the film he plays a concerned family man who
takes in his teenaged niece (played by Alexandra Daddario) when her
parents are killed in an auto accident, only to find he has to
protect her from danger close to home. Writer/director Stevan Mena
had targeted Biehn as his fantasy actor for the role, saying that
Biehn always plays the coolest guy in the room and that it would be
fun to put him in a situation that audiences normally would not
expect of him.
“I liked the whole experience,”
Biehn says. “I liked working with Stevan. As far as the character
goes, he was somebody that is really more like Michael Biehn than
the characters I play. I seem to have been kind of typecast over
the years as a DA, a cop, a Navy Seal, a Marine – always these tough
guys. Tough Army guys and stuff like that. I’m not really
that way at all. So it’s nice to be just a normal person
and to be able to play a loving and caring person as compared to a
hysterical and/or angry and/or insane killer. It’s kind of fun.”
Bereavement was a prequel
of the film Malevolence, a horror film released several years
ago by Mena about a serial killer who lived in an abandoned
meat-packing plant in the middle of the country.
When some people stumble upon his lair, the
killer goes about violently removing them all from his home.
Biehn had not seen
the earlier film before he was approached for the new project.
“I wasn’t aware of Malevolence,”
Biehn admits. “Really, the reason I got involved with the
movie was I’d never done a horror movie before. They made that
offer to me and I went out and rented Malevolence. There was
something about the way that it was shot and lit that I thought was
really extremely well done. Again, horror stories are kind of not
my thing and violence and so on and so forth is not quite my thing,
but it was so beautifully shot and beautifully lit that I knew that
Stevan had something. I knew he had talent. I gave him a call and
we talked for a while and I decided to do it.”
As an actor who has worked with
some of the biggest names in Hollywood, he was impressed by Mena’s
passion and skill at filmmaking.
“I liked him,” Biehn says. “First
of all, he’s got a very good sense of humor. I don’t think he takes
himself all that seriously. I think he takes his work very, very
seriously. But what I liked about him was there’s a lot of guys
around that take their work very seriously, and are very talented,
but they take themselves very seriously too. He doesn’t. He can
poke fun at himself. I had fun with him. There are a lot of
directors I work with that are so intense and so driven that they
are fun to watch, but you don’t really get to interact too much with
them. I used to joke with him about shots and stuff that I didn’t
think would work. I would joke with him, ‘Well, that’s going to end
up on the editing floor. You’ll never use that.’ He’ll say,
‘You’ll see, you’ll see.’ I had a good time with him.
I haven’t seen the movie [yet], but if it has the same style as the first
one, I’m sure that it looks pretty good. He’s a guy that has got a lot of talent, but doesn’t walk around with his
chest stuck out. I had a lot of fun with him.”
Biehn was also impressed by his
young co-star, Daddario, who has since the filming taken significant
roles in Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Hall Pass and the TV
series White Collar.
“The
thing about star quality,” Biehn says, “you know there are a lot of
pretty girls in Los Angeles. When I met her, there seemed to be
kind of a depth to her. Then when I worked with her I felt she was
a really good actress. I kind of thought it would take a while, but
I thought she was going to make a splash somewhere along the line,
because she’s not only beautiful, she was very talented.”
Daddario
enjoyed the experience of working together as well, saying, “He’s
great. He’s a wonderful guy, very professional, really nice to talk
to.”
There is one very disturbing
undertow in Bereavement. In it, a small child is witness to
some horrific murders in the slaughterhouse. Though he did not have
any scenes with the child (“I was basically in and around that house
most of the time, [or] driving her to school.”), Biehn was
conscientious about the fact that a child actor was being exposed to
such graphic material.
“Well what happens to us happens
to us at the end, that was more of a grown-up thing,” Biehn
acknowledges. “That’s something that I think you need to speak to
Stevan more about, because I didn’t really get to see him at a
certain perspective. I think being a child actor is a very, very
difficult deal. I’ve been working with child actors for years. Not
even, wholly in bad circumstances, but when you take a child and you
put them for a month away from home – even if their mother is with
them – and they are away from school and they’re just with adults,
all day long, every day… if they happen to work a lot, they end up
really not having a childhood.
“I don’t really envy children that
worked in the business at all. It’ll be four o’clock in the morning
and everybody is sitting around smoking
cigarettes talking and here is this little twelve-year-old boy or
seven-year-old little girl sitting there. I just don’t think it’s
very healthy for children, under the best circumstances. And
obviously, a lot of them have turned out not too well. You take a
guy like Kurt Russell and Ron Howard [who thrive after child
stardom] – but there are a lot
of stories that go the other way, too.
I’m not a big fan of children working in pictures. I just don’t
think it is good for them. I would never have my [child do it] …
unless I had a child that demanded it, you know. ‘I want to do it.
I want to do it. I want to do it. I have to do it. I have to do
it. I have to do it. It’s something I have to do. Daddy, I have
to do it.’ Then, I guess your role is different, but I certainly
wouldn’t direct my child into anything like that until they got of
age that they were out of school.”
As Bereavement is being
rolled out to theaters across the US, Biehn is looking forward as
well as back. While he is happy that the film is being
released, he is also excited about a couple of other films he has
coming soon.
“I did a movie called The
Divide with [director] Xavier Gens, who directed Frontiers
over in France and he shot The Hitman over here.
Although he wasn’t very happy working with the studio, it made $90
million. The next movie, he decided he didn’t want to work with
studios anymore, so he did this movie The Divide. It’s
basically about seven or eight people who get shut into a bomb
shelter after a nuclear holocaust of some kind. It’s kind of a
Lord of the Flies-type of story. It stars Milo Ventimiglia
[Heroes] and Lauren German [Hostel: Part 2]. And
Courtney B. Vance is in it. Rosanna Arquette. Myself. And a
really, really brilliant actor out of Canada named Michael Eklund.
That’s a really, really, really good movie. I’ve seen it. [It’s]
just psychologically brutal – a lot of great performances in it.”
Biehn
was also putting the finishing touches on his own
film The Victim
while this interview happened – literally, he and his girlfriend were
sitting in a car outside outside of his foley [sound effects] guy’s
office as we wrapped up.
“Myself and my girlfriend Jennifer
Blanc just wrote and directed – I wrote and directed and starred in
it and she produced and starred in The Victim. Anybody can
go to
Grindhousethevictim.com and check out that. I’m in post on that
right now, as a matter of fact I’m going to go in there and
work with him. We should have that finished February 23rd and we’re
going to try to sell that. I’m very excited about that one….”
The movie was inspired by Biehn’s
appearance in director Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror
(“which is I guess as close to a horror movie as I ever had gotten
to other than Steve’s movie”). Planet Terror was half of the
ambitious retro Grindhouse double-feature with
Rodriguez and Quentin
Tarantino each contributing a movie which paid tribute to 70s sex-and-violence exploitation
films.
“I
promised myself I was going to make a grindhouse movie at some point
after I finished working with him,” Biehn recalls. “I finished
working on Planet Terror and ended up doing a television
series and forgot about it. When I was doing The Divide, I
was in a coffee shop and I saw somebody reading Rebel Without a
Crew, which is Robert Rodriguez’s book. I said to myself I’m
going to reread that book and go make a movie. So that’s what we
did. I decided to make a grindhouse exploitation movie.
“I asked myself, okay, what do I
really need to make this movie? I figured I need some hot chicks,
sex, dirty cops, drugs, a little bit of violence, a little bit of
torture, a little bit of action, and, well, I’ll just throw in a
serial killer. So that’s what I did. I wrote a story around those
elements and we went out and shot it in twelve days and we’re really
happy with the way that it turned out.”
