|
|
|
SHOUT Magazine - August 2001 |
|
Since he's returning from a costume fitting for the Public Theater's celebrity-soaked production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull in Central Park, perhaps he'll arrive in turn-of-the-century garb, eerily saccharine. "It must be pleasant to be even an insignificant author," he might say with a smirk, echoing Peter Sorin, his Chekovian alter-ego. Sitting in Joe's Pub on a sweltering morning in June, adrift in a sea of upturned tables, swimming in the aroma of glass-cleaner and cigarettes, the appointed hour arrives. Walken - Christopher Walken - waltzes in wearing unpretentious rehearsal gear: a black tee and black cotton pants with an elastic waist. He even took the time to put on a black blazer, which, along with a smile he wears on his stubbled face, is enough to take the edge off. Barely. "We should have done this at a restaurant," he says, resting characteristically on his syllables. "We could put it on your expense account. Of course, then, the whole point would be to eat, not to do an interview." It turns out Walken did a lot of eating as he grew up in Astoria, Queens. The son of a German baker, young Christopher cut his teeth on sweets and pastries, helping out - between TV gigs - at his father's bakery. It was his duty to squeeze the jelly into the doughnuts using an enormous device with a plunger and two needles. Just try psychoanalyzing that. Decades later, he doesn't much care for sweets (note the unsugared tea in his hand), but food remains more than a passion. "I always tell people that if I disappear, I'm in Venice," he says, circuitously describing the making of the film The Comfort of Strangers, which costarred Natasha Richardson and was directed by Paul Schrader. "I lived in Venice for a couple of months. I know the streets; I know the little things. I know where to find the two Chinese restaurants. I found this place where the gondoliers eat, you know, where they just don't stop bringing food," he reminisces. "Those two-and-a-half hour lunches. "The problem is, when I go to Italy, I can gain 15 pounds in one week. I've done it. For an actor, that's not so good. It's better, when you're an actor, to go some place where the food's not so good. Next time you see [The Comfort of Strangers], check. I'm pretty porky." It may have continued with his brother's restaurant, the Walken Café in Astoria, but the actor's food fetish doesn't stop there. He likes to cook - "the so-called Mediterranean diet: fish, vegetables, olive oil, not too much butter" - and says he has even toyed with the idea of hosting his own cooking show. "The thing is, I'm not a great cook," he offers modestly. "But it doesn't matter. Part of the thing about cooking shows is that it's just interesting to see somebody do something. You almost can't go wrong. If you watch one, and you time it, they do 18 minutes and the rest of it is breaks. So if you can keep people amused for 18 minutes, you've got a cooking show." This is no fleeting aspiration; he's put in the hours. "Oh, I've got it checked out. The problem is, what if it became popular?" Walken asks rhetorically. "That would be the end of me. You know, to get famous for something on TV, that's very tricky." I inform him that he's already famous, having made over 70 movies - even winning an Oscar. "That's different, you know. I don't have my own show." But imagine if he did. Would he draw on some cinematic forebears, like the cooking scenes from The Godfather or Goodfellas? What would he do with the rows of gleaming knives, the open flames? Actually, Walken's influences are just slightly tamer. "Julia Childs was the best, " he gushes with the zeal of a schoolboy. "But they're all interesting, I love 'Iron Chef.' I love that. They dub it, so it's a little bit like a Godzilla movie. The Iron Chef's making seven courses and every one of them contains peaches. Mackerel and peaches. Disgusting, you know. Tofu with peaches. That's a really good show." Walken's show would be more of a variety act, though. An assistant, maybe some scantily clad girls. "Remember the Dean Martin show with the Gold Diggers? You know, any time something wasn't interesting , these girls would run on," he recalls. "They say that was part of his shtick." You're forgiven if you think that all of this is slightly out of character. The thing is, for all the typecasting, the 58-year-old Walken doesn't have a set character - and he's never been one to take himself too seriously. He started his career, oddly enough, in musical theater and television - at the age of three. "My brothers and I were in show business, in the early '50s. New York was very big with live TV, you know, and we did all the things that kids did," Walken explains. "On television shows, we were more or less like furniture. Put 'em over here, put 'em over there, and so I grew up in that." His heart, though, is in musicals and dancing. "Musicals are my education; they're what I know - both in what I did as a kid for a living, and in what I went to see," Walken recounts. "Musicals still affect the way I do things now." And if you're finding it hard to imagine Captain Koons - the Vietnam vet who hid a silver pocket-watch up his ass for two years in Pulp Fiction - singing and dancing, look no further than MTV. Walken puts in a bizarre and inspired performance, dancing off walls, in Fatboy Slim's video, Weapon of Choice - directed, of course, by Spike Jonze. "It's a catchy little thing," Walken says of the video. "Spike Jonze called and I've done a couple of films where I've danced, like [the musical film] Pennies From Heaven, so he must have seen that." Still, musicals were more than an education, and dancing more than a skill Walken can flaunt on MTV. Musicals inform his entire acting technique. Often, he works little dances, small flourishes, into the characters he plays. And though it may seem as though he pursues his roles through intense, method-styled outpourings, Walken describes his process in more prosaic terms. "I'd have to say that I approach everything, movies included, in terms of not making any bones about the audience," he confides. In musicals, the audience is there, you acknowledge them, you talk to them - they're in the room, they're part of the show. I can't get that out of my head." Sitting in a room with Walken, being part of the show, this insight clicks. When he speaks, there are more than just words - there's a subtle nod to the listener. You are under my spell. He has a way with language, for outrageous dialogue; he plays with words, chews them up, and holds them on his lips before expelling them. "I have this theory about words," he says. "There's a thousand ways to say 'Pass the salt.' It could mean, you know, 'Can I have some salt?' or it could mean, 'I love you.' It could mean 'I'm very annoyed with you' - really, the list could go on and on. Words are little bombs, and they have a lot of energy inside them." Given Walken's New York City upbringing, it might seem that performing Chekhov in Central Park would be a homecoming of sorts, a triumphant return to the stage that nurtured him in years past. Walken knew the Public Theater's charismatic founder, Joe Papp, and even starred as Trigorin in another production of "The Seagull" at the Public in 1980. Indeed, it was Papp who gave Walken some of his early breaks. "I go way back, way back with him. And then at one point, my career was just - you know, nothing was happening. And I went to [Joe] and I said, 'Nothing's gong on, I'm collecting unemployment,' and he said, 'Don't worry, I'm gonna put you in three plays in a row,' and he did. He was an amazing guy." Walken recalls. Papp cast him in mid-'70s productions of "Troilus and Cressida," "The Tempest," and another play Walken was reluctant to mention. "A Scottish play, you know, the one whose name you're not supposed to say. "I played Him," Walken intones, referring to MacBeth. Impressed as he is to work at the Public again with actors like Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Walken shrugs off any intimation that he’s rekindling a spark from his youth. "I like working in the movies. You know, I spent so much of my early life doing [theater], Summerstock, tours, and so on," he says. "I know what you mean, but it doesn't have to be a choice for me. It can be more a matter of what turns up. "And when something great on the stage comes up, it's kind of like this. You know, it comes out of nowhere and it's very interesting and it's sort of like an offer you can't refuse," he says, pausing. "That's the way I usually do things. I just take the best thing. 'Cause I got nothing else to do. I don't have any hobbies; I don't have kids. I don't do anything else. So my theory is to just keep going." A testament to the theory is Walken's prolific career, including collaborations with the likes of Tim Burton, Mike Nichols, Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen...the list goes on. Even if he's usually cast as something between a quiet sociopath and a tone-poet gangster, Walken has worked up quite a varied resume. "I play a lot of twisted people," he admits, laughing with only a hint of menace, revealing a dark side that, time and again, has been so competently exploited by the director Abel Ferrara, whom the normally reserved Walken doesn't shy away from calling a close friend. "Abel is someone who, when he comes to my house [in Connecticut], always gets speeding tickets," says Walken, who is reputed to drive very slowly on the open road. "One time, he got three tickets. He shouldn't do that, I always tell him." The two have worked together on The Addiction, The Funeral, New Rose Hotel, and most notably, King of New York. "That's a good movie," Walken exclaims, jumping into a whole different octave. "You know, just this last weekend, it was on, and I hadn't really seen it since [we made it], and I thought, 'That's a good movie." Since he played the lead role - a drug lord who turns into an utraviolent Robin Hood, giving his proceeds to the poor - it might seem like puffery, but Walken's praise, given the eleven years that have passed since the film's release, appears genuine. "The King of New York is a really interesting gangster movie because it puts together elements that you don't normally see, like the loyalty, the love between him and this tribe. It's fascinating." But Walken's most ironic role may be as Nick in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, for which he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. His compelling performance takes us from a star-crossed marriage proposal on the eve of war to the shell of a man playing Russian Roulette like a zombie-prizefighter in the back alleys of Saigon. It's the breadth of the role - making Nick a normal guy and then stretching him into a twisted, suicidal maniac - that hints at what Walken can do if he's given the opportunity. One thing Walken has rarely had the opportunity to do, though, is play a romantic lead. More to the point, he's rarely had the chance to shoot sex scenes. But that doesn't mean he's not accomplished in such things - or isn't willing to experiment. He got to steam it up a bit with French actress Carole Bouquet in the oft-forgotten film A Business Affair. And in Donald Cammell's 1995 film Wild Side - lesbian love story in the form of a film-noir spoof - Walken plays the philandering husband opposite Joan Chen, who herself develops a taste for his call girl, Anne Heche. The result, in the unrated version, is that Walken and Heche share some onscreen moments that only they can fully describe. Suffice it to say that there were no body doubles involved. "Is that the one where she sites on my face?" he asks. When asked how long that scene took to shoot, Walken replies, "We did that for a while. You remember, she ties me up with, like, a rubber hose, too." Hamming it up, a grin on his face, he continues. "It's true, they pay me for that. You have to get up very early in the morning though." Waking up early has been a small price to pay for a career that spans more than 50 years - from high tragedy to camp comedy. It's clear hat Walken never found any other hobbies because this is what he does, this is what he loves. While he may eventually cook up a hilarious storm on TV, Walken will never leave the big screen. For him, it's a dream. "You know, there's something about when we go to the movies, to theater - we know what we're doing," he explains. "We know we're watching people have fun, basically. That fun is contagious." Reprinted with the permission of Shout Magazine |
Walken and Talkin' Let the man himself take you on a talking tour back through cinematic history - and while you're at it, hone that impersonation. It's embarrassing. Suicide Kings (1998) Charlie Barret: Guys, if I don't bleed to death pretty soon, I'm gonna die of boredom. Excess Baggage (1997) Uncle Ray: Am I such a bad guy? Have I hurt you? Have I shot you? In the groin? The Funeral (1996) Johnny Tempi: I would say life is pretty pointless, wouldn't you, without the movies? Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (1996)
The Man With the Plan: She's a 10, Jimmy. She's a world unto herself. She can't nurse worth a shit but I keep her on, because even though I can't feel it, I know I get erections in her presence. The Prophecy (1995)
Gabriel: I'm an angel. I kill newborns while their mothers watch. I turn cities into salt. And occasionally, when I feel like it, I tear little girls apart. And from now till kingdom come...the only thing you can count on...in your existence...is never understanding why. The Addiction (1995) Peina: I'm not like you. You're nothing. That's something you ought not to forget. You're not a person. You're nothing. Pulp Fiction (1994)
Captain Koons: The way your dad looked at it, this watch was your birthright. He'd be damned if any of the slopes were gonna get their greasy yellow hands on his boy's birthright. So he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide something: his ass. Five long years, he wore this watch up his ass. Then when he died of dysentery, he gave me the watch. I hid this uncomfortable piece of metal up my ass for two years. Then, after seven years, I was sent home to my family. And now, little man, I give the watch to you. True Romance (1993)
Clifford Worley: Who are you? Vincenzo Coccotti: The Anti-Christ. You get me in a vendetta kind of mood, you tell the angels in heaven you never seen evil so singularly personified as you did in the face of the man who killed you. My name is Vincenzo Coccotti. The Comfort of Strangers (1991) Robert: Let me tell you something. My father was a very big man. And all his life he wore a black mustache. When it was no longer black, he used a small brush, such as ladies use for their eyes. Mascara. King of New York (1990) Frank White: From now on, nothing goes down unless I'm involved. No blackjack, no dope deals, no nothing. A nickel bag gets sold in the park, I want in. You guys got fat while everybody starved on the street. Now it's my turn. Communion (1989) Whitley Strieber, describing the aliens who probed him: Little blue fuckers, about this big. Biloxi Blues (1988) Sergeant Toomey: No, son. You've got a problem because you don't know Army terminology. The place where a US soldier goes to defecate, relieve himself, open his bowel, shit, fart, dump, crap, and unload, is called the latrine. The la-trine, from the French. The Deer Hunter (1978)
Nick, about his hometown before leaving for Vietnam: You know somethin'? The whole thing - it's right here. I love this fuckin' place. I know that that sounds crazy. If anything happens Mike, you don't - don't leave me over there [in Vietnam]. You got, you gotta...Just don't leave me. You gotta promise me that, Mike. Annie Hall (1977) Duane: Can I confess something? I tell you this because, as an artist, I think you'll understand. Sometimes when I'm driving on the road at night, I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly head on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion, the sound of shattering glass, the flames rising out of the flowing gasoline. Alvy: Right. I have to go now Duane, because I'm due back on the planet Earth.. |
