CLOSE TO 200 LIVES PART II

CCF: You mentioned your education background. I understand you actually taught yourself to read from reading scripts?

LH: Yeah. Yeah, I did. That was a big chore because I was surrounded by a lot of very sophisticated people and I wanted to get into acting. Acting is all about writing and I thought it was about being. I didn’t realize that everything was hinged on the written word. I thought, “Oh God. This is going to be a big fucking nightmare.”

CCF: Right.

LH: Again, doing it slowly is how I did it. But I was a really good liar to start with. So I created all kinds of things to front for the fact I couldn’t read for shit. I’d say things like “I’m dyslexic” or “I need glasses” and I would even get outraged and say “Why do I have to read my own language, it’s my own language. You want to corrupt me.”

CCF: (LOL)

LH: All these kinds of excuses. But slowly... And now I’m educated.

CCF: That’s great though, that you were able to do that. You had actually been acting for a little bit before then. How did you first start get started?

LH: I actually went into the Actor’s Studio when I was 16. I went there and couldn’t get in. They would have nothing to do with me. You could hardly hear my voice and I was just doing it on guts alone. Then I realized, “I have to come back when I’m a man. That’s alright with me. There’s no big rush here.” I knew I was going to do it. So I went on with my life and I was painting and doing all kinds of things. But what I really found is I was acting a lot of things in my life. When I was painting I was doing belly jumps up from the horse’s mouth. I was doing it all, in a sense, creating characters. So when I got into acting it was really about wanting to live a 1,000 lifetimes. I think one of the things that really upset when I was young was I went and saw a movie with Mario Lanza where he played Caruso. In the movie he’s young, he’s finding his voice, everybody in the town likes him, then he becomes famous and his neck blows out singing on the stage and he dies. I thought, “Oh my God, They’ve told his whole life in a little over an hour.” It was horrifying to me that any man’s life could be told in such a short time. My reaction to that was, “I’ll live a 1,000 lifetimes then.”

CCF: Hmm.

LH: That was the seeds of it.

CCF: To me, you’ve had a really fantastic career. But I’m glad to see you are not slowing down. It looks like you have a lot of things still going on. You are one of those guys that as soon as people see you, they recognize you and they think of all these films, most of the time they can’t really place who you are.

LH: Right.

CCF: Does that ever get to you being one of those kind of guys?

LH: No, no, no. Not at all. Things are radically changing as we speak. There’s a phenomenal thing I’ve done recently. My agent called me one morning about a month ago and said “Lance a script just came in and you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to read this and you’ve got to do it. There is no way around it.” So I got the script about a half hour later, because he emailed to me. It was only 20 pages. This character was so good and so right for me. There was no money involved, hardly any. I said, “Yeah, I want to do it. I definitely want to do it.” About a week later I started. The guy’s name was Joe Bauer. He’s been in the industry forever. He’s done special effects and everything else. He decided “I’m going to make my movie now. I’m going to shoot the first 20 pages of the movie.” It’s the opening scenes of the film, but I didn’t know that. All I knew was we were going to shoot this short. When I got to the set and started working, Joe told me what his plan was. The plan was to shoot the opening of the film and then raise the money for the rest, like a $30 million movie. I thought “Well, I really stepped into something wonderful here,” and it turned out that he was so precise, and had it so figured out what he was going to do and what he wanted, and I loved the character, so we bonded and we shot something good and in a matter of weeks I’m going to see the finished product. That’s the kind of things that happen, so whether or not people know me... You can’t hit a home run without a bat. Inevitably what is going to happen is I am going to get a movie that really shows what all the years have taught me and brought me.

CCF: Right.

LH: And that will happen. I don’t even worry about it. I don’t fight for a career. I just do what comes in front of me. There’s a line a guy said to me at dinner one night. I was trying to explain to him what my life was like because I never knew where the next movie was coming from or where I would be doing it. I have a very unusual income because there is nothing you can depend on. The phrase he used was “a kiss in the dark” because you never knew where it was going to come from or who or how it was going to happen. Again, that kind of thing has happened ever since I’ve been in this business. I did another movie down in Texas recently. It was a tremendous film. It’s a two character film - a father and son. They are in the wilderness together and they are trying to heal the wounds of their relationship. It gets into an almost science fiction horror thing, but it’s very, very different. It’s a really original piece. It’s called “Wilderness” or right at the moment it is. They just locked the film and it’s looking really good. Also, just recently I finished a surfing movie (“Beautiful Wave”).

CCF: Hmm.

LH: We shot it here on the coast, up in Santa Cruz and down in Cabo San Lucas. It’s a good film. Again, I keep getting tied in with these original, passion movies from these young directors and I’m really enjoying it.

CCF: Right. LH:

Whatever anybody thinks about me, whether I made the grade as a star or any shit like that, that doesn’t matter at all.

CCF: Yeah.

LH: That’s all from the outside and has nothing to do with me.

CCF: That’s the attitude to take with it. I’m glad to hear that. It seems like sometimes whenever people have been in any industry for several decades they get burned out and don’t have that same passion that got them to do it in first place. It kind of sound like you are still in that place.

LH: Yeah, I’m loving it. I just worked with Hal Holbrook... (LOL) This is another movie... It’s called “Good Day for It” and it’s with Robert Patrick, Hal Holbrook and Kathy Baker. We all were in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania doing this gangster movie. Hal Holbrook, I don’t know how old he is, but the man is still as excited about acting as he ever was. So it was really terrific.

CCF: Every time I see you and I’m sure I’m not the only one, I say, “Oh, there’s Frank Black!”

LH: (LOL)

CCF: And even when they asked me if I wanted to talk to some one from “The Penitent Man.” I hadn’t watched it yet and I didn’t recognize any of the names right off the bat. Then I was like “Oh, Frank Black. Yeah.” With “Millennium” and that role, you definitely got some of that notoriety. Do people often recognize you as that character?

LH: Yeah because you were in their home.

CCF: Yeah.

LH: I was in their home once a week. That’s pretty intimate. Yeah, people do. (LOL) I understand what you’re saying.

CCF: You’ve been in a lot of great movies and had a lot of fun parts I imagine. We were talking about technology earlier and you were just talking about how you had just shot this with this guy and turn around now and you will be seeing it shortly and hopefully bigger things will come. This is all so completely different from how things were when you first started. What is that like having seen the process of film and the speed of actually going and doing and seeing a final product?

LH: Well, I’ve done some green screen stuff recently. There’s a guy that asked me to be in this green screen show. It’s only on the internet, but it really was a lot of fun. I walked in and they asked me if I was going to have a problem with it. I said, “No, absolutely not.” Green screen, you have maybe a couple chairs or something, the green screen is behind you, and they add in everything later. I said, “That’s the same as when I was on Off Off Broadway In New York.”

CCF: (LOL)

LH: Back then, they painted the sets black, we had one chair and we did a whole play. So there’s nothing different about it. The camera is doing something different and what they add to it is different. But there is no real difference. The other aspect to this, and it is very logical to me and it was a very smooth transition, which was I felt film from the very beginning should have been more portable. I remember, I’m not dropping names, but when we were doing “The Right Stuff,” I was sitting with Francis Coppola at an outdoor restaurant in San Francisco. He was talking about disposable cars and that digital cameras were going to come out and kids were going to be able to make movies and all this stuff. And I said, “It’s perfectly natural. The technology will be used. Humans, if they’re nothing, they’re certainly able to adjust really quickly to new tools. We’re tool makers. That’s what we do. We’re brilliant at making tools.” So it’s all been very logical to me. The other thing that I like is when you look at a movie like “Aliens,” that movie has no CG in it. It has some miniatures, but everything else is real. That movie still holds up. It doesn’t fall apart. It holds up better than some of the older movies made after that. Jim (Cameron) was light years ahead of a lot of people and what he saw film was able to do. But yeah, I’ve been part of it. Again, I just write it down to something simple that I can handle that we are brilliant tool makers and there is nothing more to it than that.

CCF: One of the projects you were involved in recently that to me is one of those unique films that I think there is going to be more things like it, that was “Godkiller.” I haven’t seen it yet, but I am excited about it. That was voiceover work and I know you have done some other things...

LH: Yeah, a lot of it.

CCF: But what did you think of that project?

LH: Again, it’s a young guy (Matt Pizzolo) with a passionate idea, creating new fantasy worlds and new ways of dealing with all their frustrations, issues, longings and all that stuff. That’s the human condition. That’s pretty cool.

CCF: You’ve talked a bit about these various younger guys and their passions, is that really where you see yourself enjoying projects the most? If you look at your career, it seems like that is kind of what you have taken to. You mentioned Jim Cameron and there are many other great directors you have worked with... Is that something you seek out or is it a natural “it comes to you, you come to it”?

LH: It’s a natural progression. With Jim almost everything he does is a passion project because he’s making new tools all the time. I remember when we did “Piranha 2,” which was his first movie, we were down in the parking lot with this Italian crew making miniature boats so we could blow them up. He was up in his room making rubber fish.

CCF: (LOL)

LH: The company wouldn’t give him enough money, so he did it anyway. (LOL)

CCF: Right.

LH: Nobody gives up. You don’t give up because you don’t have everything you need. Just create a new tool for it. (LOL) My favorite thing in “Apollo 13” is when they have to create that air thing to take the carbon dioxide out of the air and they have to do it with what they got.

CCF: Right.

LH: They do it with duct tape and some odd part of the folder of their checklist. (LOL) It’s great shit. I really respond to that stuff.

CCF: Yeah, I think it really translates on the screen too when people are creatively solving problems, instead of just throwing money at problems.

LH: Right. Right. Exactly. There’s another aspect to that too though. Remember with a low budget film you can not compete with the big boys, so what are you going to do to bring to the screen some interest. So that’s the challenge. Some get it and they take some chances at the risk of failing on their faces. Others don’t take the chance. They just try to sneak it by and the audience goes, “Oh, come on.” We’re sophisticated now with what we see and how much we see.

CCF: Yeah, which brings me back to “The Penitent Man” because it’s very cleaver in the way it’s written. It’s a sci-fi movie, like I was saying, a sci-fi thriller, basically written like a drama. But it is a thriller.

LH: It is. It’s definitely a thriller. The fact that he never uses the word time travel shows how well it is crafted. He actually won best script at The Method Fest. Writer and director Nicholas Gyeney is a young man and I think he is well on his way to making a movie that will knock the socks off of people. This is an early film of his, so it’s very exciting. I really enjoyed being a part of it.

CCF: I’m going to let you go here shortly, but I just wanted real touch on this... All of these great movies and franchises - “The Terminator,” “Aliens,” which you mentioned, the “Predator” franchise, “Hard Target” - all of these classics now that you were apart of, and it doesn’t have to be any of those, as far as your career, what are the highlights for you and the moments you were really proud of what you have accomplished and been apart of?

LH: That’s the hardest question in the word because I’ve done about 180 films...

CCF: (LOL)

LH: And out of them, maybe 25 percent of them were alimony films, which means you take a job because you’ve got to pay your alimony. But most of the other ones were, and this the best way I can describe it, adventures, man. They also were all turning points in one way or the other. I think the real turning point was “Aliens” because I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to just serve the movie any more. Earlier I had been doing these roles and kind of just serving the film and not doing the kind of work I knew I could do. I thought when I do “Aliens,” I am going to work it a certain way and if it’s not there when I see the movie, I’m not going to act any more. I’m going to bow out because I just don’t want to be me over. I just don’t want to do it. And when I saw the film, it was there. So I said, “Okay, that’s it, I’m never looking back. I’m just going to keep working this way.” So that was critical. As a result I’ve had so many adventures in film - “Powder” and “Stone Cold,” working with John Woo on “Hard Target” and all of these different great directors. I found a kindred spirit with these guys. Some are from China and all these places, but we’re speaking the same language when we’re working and it ends up being a defined adventure. It’s very hard to choose one, but “Aliens” is the one that was a turning point, a major one for me.

CCF: Well, cool. I’m very happy to talk with you. Like I said, you have a great career and I’m glad to see you’re just moving along with that same passion. This was very awesome talking with you.

LH: Hey, thank you very much man. I think the one thing that is left, that is a goal, I really want to do a comedy.

CCF: Hmm.

LH: I don’t mean a stupid comedy. I think situations are funny. I don’t think I’m funny, but I think situations are and I long for the day I do a character in a comedy.

CCF: Right.

LH: That would be fun. I worked with “The Slammin' Salmon” just in a small way. I loved it. (LOL) You know the film “The Hangover”?

CCF: Yeah.

LH: What a funny movie man. That is just what I am talking about. That is just hilarious. I love that film and that’s the sort of thing I want to do.

CCF: (LOL) I am sure there are plenty of people with comedy scripts out there that would love to have you. I’m sure that will happen and it will work out well for you. It seems like no matter what you are apart of it, you help bring something to it to really help elevate it.

LH: Buddy, that’s a compliment. Thank you very much.

CCF: I’m glad they sent me “The Penitent Man” and again, it was really nice talking with you.

LH: Same here buddy. Take care.

CCF: Yeah, you have a good day.

LH: You too.

CCF: Bye.

LH: Bye Bye.

- CCF, June 2010