Walken-Articles and Interviews
 

HoBO Issue #7




Christopher Walken and the Productions of Time

By Brian Hendricks

"Eternity is in love with the productions of time." William Blake
" It's very important to get up in the morning and have work, have a purpose." ChristopherWalken

Christopher Walken would love to be cast as a nice guy. Someone with a wife, some kids, maybe a dog and a picket fence. And with a filmography of over one hundred film and television productions and over sixty years of putting himself out there, can we think of anyone more deserving? Starting as a child actor in television in the early 1950's, Christopher Walken came into major prominence in 1978 with his Academy Award winning performance as Nick Chevotarevich in The Deer Hunter. Since then he is likely best known for playing psychos, villains, fallen angels, self destructive maniacs, mercenary hitmen and heavies of all descriptions. He has established himself as someone who can evoke the dark side of human behaviour by just being on screen. But along the way he has also taken on many of the roles written by major playwrights, done a lot of dancing and character acting, and as the patron saint of the cowbell, has made us laugh. Really laugh. He almost crossed the line in Paul Schrader's The Comfort Of Strangers and went on to become a caring father in Catch Me If You Can. He danced in MGM's last musical, Pennies From Heaven, and danced Weapons Of Choice into the world's favourite music video. He fired the last bullet in The Deer Hunter, and reawakened the cowbell on Saturday Night Live. So how about a role as a family man, maybe a retired dancer living quietly in the suburbs? And suppose some people from his past show up and well, surely there is a way to keep it friendly!

Christopher Walken has been dodging bullets and avoiding head on collisions for a very long time and shows no signs of slowing down. As much as anything, he is the consummate working actor who loves what he does and does what he does better than anyone else. He can be scary, lost, violent, suicidal, unpredictable, powerful, dangerous and evil, and he can be stoic, elegant, graceful, vulnerable, sophisticated, and very very funny. We approached Chris for our 'Time' issue because he has stood the test of time, his persona is timeless, and he has really produced, over time. Recently seen in The Wedding Crashers and Click, some of Chris's latest projects will include the upcoming Man Of the Year, Balls Of Fury and Citizen Brando. We talked to Chris by phone from Vancouver.

Ring ring

— Brian– Hello

— Christopher - Hi, how are you.

— Hi Chris, how are you doing? How's the weather in New York this morning?

— Actually I'm in Rhode Island. The weather is pretty nice. Where are you?

— I'm in Vancouver.

— It's nice there. Lots of good Chinese restaurants.

— I guess you've probably been in a few movies out this way eh?

— Yeah, it's a beautiful place.

— Good, so listen I wanted to thank you first of all for your time on the interview and for gracing the cover for our seventh issue of Hobo magazine. I'm the senior editor of the magazine but I also teach film at the University here.

— You live in Vancouver?

— I actually live in Victoria, which is the capital of British Columbia. It's on Vancouver Island.

— I don't think I've been there.

— It's about an hour and a half ferry ride from here. Victoria would be half a million people or so. I teach film over there and I have many students that define films by the fact that Christopher Walken is in them.

— Oh really?!

— I think you've almost got your own genre, regardless of the film, people are captivated by the performances and the roles that you have played over the years.

— Thank You.

— You're very welcome. The editorial that I wrote for this issue is in memory of time. I'm playing with this whole idea but it's hard to get your head around the concept of time.

— Of time?

— Yes, in all of its variations. In terms of this interview, I wanted to filter some of my questions through the idea of how time applies to acting, to your own memories and to the fact that you've been entertaining people now, for what, 60 years?

— Yes, that's true! I was one of those kids. My two brothers and I started when we were young. I think it had a lot to do with television getting started in New York City, where I grew up. TV really, was born in a six-block area in New York City in the late 40's early 50's. Everything was live then. Videotape hadn't been invented yet. I don't know how many shows there were but there must have been maybe ninety live shows every week from New York.

— Wow.

— Some of them were only fifteen minutes. They had fifteen minute TV shows then, and they were very family oriented. During the holidays they used a lot of kids. We weren't really actors back then, we were just there. Sometimes you might see a lion. Kids also learned how to sing and dance then. It was a very different world back then. I don't think that even exits anymore.

— I had the opportunity to work on a film set with Sid Caesar years ago. I had lunch with him every day and got to hear his stories.

— Oh wow, good for you.

— It was amazing.

— He is! He is one of the great geniuses of that time.

— Yes, I think so too. Do you remember The Wonderful John Acton?

— I was in a show called The Wonderful John Acton. John Acton would probably have been of my age now and I was his grandson. I think he had a grocery store back then. TV was very family oriented in those days. Even though it wasn't reality based. They were these ideal family productions.

— It was such an interesting era wasn't it? There has been such a change in people, in entertainment and information.

— Yes, it was quite innocent back then. Television was this new thing that was catching on so fast. I remember because my brothers and I were in show business and our family was one of the first to have a TV set. I remember, it was a great big blond wood set with a tiny screen. At first neighbors would come over to see the TV set but pretty soon everyone had one.

— So interesting, the time when television was replacing radio. I guess radios would be built into the television sets?

— That's right. There were also some that you would just flip the top open and there would be a record player.

— As time goes on, do you find yourself becoming more nostalgic in terms of thinking back to those childhood days?

— Well, a lot has happened since then but I do remember all of that very clearly. I keep thinking if somebody wanted to sit down with me for a while, I would tell them all about it and I think it would be an interesting thing. It really is, until videotape happened and things changed yet again. Until then, there was a period of about ten years where television was this unique thing that never happened again also because the novelty wore off I guess. Every night at around eleven o'clock, when I was a kid, the two or three TV stations would sign off and the star spangled banner would appear and then it would just be fuzz until the next morning. People would even watch the test patterns you know?

— (Laughs) That's right. Maybe that's how people in the 60's got into meditating; they started watching test patters on television sets. An interesting time to go back to.

— I do remember it all very clearly.

— Have you ever thought of putting those memories down on paper?

— I don't have that particular discipline, but I think that if I found myself sitting down with someone who was a writer I could tell a lot of stories.

— I bet. I'm just thinking of some of the personalities back then like Jerry Lewis, Judy Garland and Andy Warhol, a who's who of this whole history.

— That was way before Andy Warhol. There used to be this show called the Colgate Comedy Hour. When Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were still together they used to appear on that. There's a kinescope of Jerry Lewis doing a skit and I'm in it. Somebody found it and showed it to me. I remembered doing it very clearly. It was at this place called the Central Theatre that used to be the twin theatre of Radio City Music Hall, an enormous place that isn't there anymore. They used to do a lot of interesting TV things from there and I remember seeing it. The striking thing about that clip, and the most shocking to me, when I saw it myself is that I haven't changed a bit since I was ten. I have not changed a bit! The same voice, and I mean it's almost as though I was still there. It is very amazing.

— It is amazing. I think there is a sense of timelessness to your persona and that's what has allowed you to continue to invent and reinvent yourself but also to stay in people's minds. You are dancing through time.

— When I saw the clip, I wondered whether everyone would feel that way seeing themselves at ten years old but it was shocking that I had the same voice and the same attitude. It was very nice to see. I was watching some videotape where they used to put movie cameras through a TV screen and it was kinescope. I think it's the way a lot of the early shows like I Love Lucy were done on film and then shot on TV as film.

— The idea of film and recording one's own past is an interesting one. I remember when my kids were young I had a video camera. If they did anything interesting and I didn't have it on film I felt disappointed. It drove me crazy! It felt like you were recording life rather than living it. Nice to have some recorded memories though.

— Well, when I see old home movies my father made with those wind up cameras, it's really very powerful.

— Speaking of your father and speaking of memory, if you walk by a bakery does your sense of smell trigger something? Is there some sort of Proustian thing that happens where you're able to go back in time? Do you find that happens to you?

— Sure, you know the Kaufman Studios in New York is in Astoria, Queens, and it is just three blocks from where I grew up. I've worked there a number of times and at my lunch break I sometimes just walk into my old neighborhood.

— Right, so it's all right there.

— My father's bakery is now a hardware store but you know it's sad. The neighborhood has not changed one bit and yet some of the things have.

— I know you do some cooking. Do you bake at all?

— I never got the knack of baking but I do like to cook. I think it's because I'm not a dessert eater that I like to cook other stuff.

— You try to avoid the sugars?

— I try to stay away from desserts but I do like the carbs.

— I have a quote here from Tennessee Williams where he says "When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous, I am only really alive when I'm writing." Acting is really a form of writing, and in terms of your own work ethic and your need to constantly be engaged with all the research you do, all the thinking and the preparation. Do you find that life is posthumous when you're not on a project?

— I think anybody who's lucky enough to enjoy what they do for a living,, no matter what it is, has a great sense of having a great day at work. That's really the most enjoyable about it is to think that you've done whatever it is that you've done and it's good. It doesn't happen a lot but sometimes when you're making a movie you'll have one of those days when you're going home in the car afterwards and you think that was really terrific! You know it's going to be good and there's nothing like it. I guess it is the same as when you write something you read it and you think that's really good!

— If you're doing a series of takes do you know when you've nailed it?

— Absolutely! I know when it isn't working too. If I feel like I've done a good take and I take a look at it, it's usually a good take. If I think it wasn't such a good take, it's usually not as bad as I thought it was but it's not that good either but usually if I think it's a good take then it's always a good take.

— What about during rehearsals? Or when you are preparing? Have you had moments when you've absolutely nailed it and not been able to recreate that when the cameras have been rolling?

— That's a good question. Rehearsing and good movie editing has to do with being able to rehearse while the camera is running. There is something spontaneous about it and there is something that happens when you go with it. At least that's way it is for me. I think that the editor is terribly important. I don't usually try to repeat takes. I try to do one this way and then a little differently. Make one take light, one serious or do one faster and do one slower, then the editor can make something interesting out of that. I don't usually go at a take the same way twice.

— What about that time period between action and cut? Does that always produce a bit of an adrenalin rush or a change? Have you got used to getting into a meditative state? Or are the pressures of time always there?

— I think that action and cut are these concepts that do more harm than good. A lot of good directors understand that action and cut are these declining things that are sometimes inhibiting. There isn't an exact place where you start and stop. Sometimes the person with the clapper, on action, they whack it so hard that it takes two minutes to recover. I always ask them to be very gentle with the clapboard. Sometimes with very good directors, when the scene is over often they might not say cut because very interesting things will happen. In other words the thing lives on. Something interesting will happen and somebody will make a mistake, somebody laughs, the possibilities are really endless

— I'm sure with your reputation, your longevity and your professionalism, all the directors you work with are respectful, and allow you to work within your method?

— They just want you to do your best and keeping it, in acting class terms, "in the now".

— I know your range is so amazing as far as being able to play the comedic roles and the more tragic roles and the villains etc… but do you think there is any kind of male character that you wouldn't be able to play? Have you ever looked at a role and thought, there's no way that I could get my head around that person?

— Sure, but it has more to do with what people don't ask me to play. There are lots of roles that I would like to play but people don't seem to want me too. I don't think I've ever played the guy who gets the girl. I don't think I've ever played a wholesome family man with a house, and a wife, and kids and a dog. I haven't played those; I haven't gotten a good Fred MacMurray part yet. I would love to do that but people just don't ask. I once had a conversation with Roger Moore who's a friend of mine, and a wonderful man. We were about to do this scene in which he was the hero and he was going to kill me. We were sitting in the chair ready to go on and he's "You always die!" I said, "Ye ah, pretty much!" he says, "Well, I've never done that" I responded by saying "You know, you should really play a villain sometimes". He said, "I'd love too, but nobody ever asked me". I think all actors have that yearning to play things that people don't ask them to but I don't know why that doesn't happen. Roger would make a fascinating villain; it would be such a surprise.

— Absolutely, I think you'd make a great leading man.

— Maybe not a leading man, but I could certainly play someone who is an upright citizen because, in fact, I am. It would be an interesting surprise for an audience to not see me take over the world or something.

— I've read that you aspire to be acting in an Ibsen play by the age of 92. So there's lots of time left to pursue a whole new range of characters.

— I don't know about Ibsen but I would like to be working when I'm a very old man. In fact in Europe actors do that. There is a story about John Gielgud, it was his ninety something birthday and they wanted to throw a big party for him and he had to decline because he was on location making a movie. That's really what I want, I want to be employable my whole life.

— I look up to people like Bertrand Russell, Picasso, and Frank Lloyd Wright, who worked into their 90's and loved what they did. The idea of retirement often seems like such folly doesn't it?

— I think so, it sounds like its not very good for you to retire.

— So much of filming is waiting. Actors have said they act for free and that they get paid for the waiting. You have obviously been able to manage that over the years, in terms of just being able to not feel like you're wasting time.

— Well, there's an aspect to making movies that has to do with waiting. I think it must be similar to what athletes have to deal with. In terms of their training, the discipline, their concentration has to do with performing their absolute best within a very limited amount of time, whether it's a foot race or a basketball game. They do what they do best in a very given amount of time. It isn't like most people who go to work for eight hours a day and then go home. Their responsibility is more spread out. Some of the best things that I've ever done in the movies were scenes where there was only a minute or two of the camera rolling, something happened and it was wonderful. You want that possibility to be there. Hamlet says, "The readiness is all". It is 'being ready to go'. It's all a kind of balancing act but it's also just part of the business. One of the reasons why I enjoy doing independent movies is because they never have that much money and they are compelled to do things quickly. In movies the more time spent making the movie usually the more expensive the movie is, and so a lot of the movies I've done are four weeks. Four to five weeks is a wonderful amount of time to be making a movie because there isn't a lot of sitting around. You go to work everyday, you have a day off, you rest and then you work. It's that kind of intensity which is energizing. I've been on a movie that took eight months to make and it's more difficult to sty focused. When you watch movies you know took a long time to make and you can see the actor in one scene walk out of the door and the next time you see him he's gained twenty pounds. Well that's because he had a month off! And that happens a lot.

— I bet.

— It's fun to make movies quickly and some of those great movies that everyone loves like the Bogart movies for instance, like Casablanca. I think that was a six-week shoot. They made Casablanca in six weeks!

— Isn't that something?

— In those days the studios made movies like you would build a car. Six weeks was a full schedule. A lot of those great movies that every one loves, that have people like Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn were six weeks. They were also working on soundstages. I wish every movie I made was on a soundstage. You have the ability to not have to worry about the clouds, a helicopter flying over in the middle of a take, rain or whatever. They made these movies on soundstages, on very controlled environments. You would walk out of the door and go right to your dressing room. I love that.

— I know that you do. For you to be able to get yourself into these personalities, I know that you like to keep your life very ordinary and very controlled and that you don't like too much uncertainty.

— No, I like to know my lines and I don't like to act outdoors.

— What about turning characters off and on? I have to tell you I was a film student back in '79 and we were all waiting for Apocalypse Now to come out. When Deer Hunter came out and I went to the movie three nights in a row. I would have been about twenty-one years old and I cried every night at God Bless America, even though I'm a Canadian. The movie just had this ridiculous effect on me. In terms of your role in that film as Nick, was there any preparation you went through when that film was done? Did Nick stay with you for a while or were you able to move on?

— That movie was of course a milestone for me. It made a big difference in my life. It really bought the house that I still live in. It was a tremendous opportunity and a great piece of luck to be there. I had already been in show business for a long time, but then to have that film happen, to experience the places that we went to, work with people like Meryl Streep, Robert de Niro and all those actors. Just living in Bangkok, in the jungle and then in the mountains was a tremendous experience. Actually, a lot of the hunting scenes were shot not far from where you are, on Mount Baker in northern Washington State.

— I can see Mount Baker from here actually!

— It's a beautiful place and the results, as you say, are so good. The movie has emotional power.

— Yes, it really does.

— Some movies have such emotional power. Last year I was in Toronto doing Man of the Year. I went to see Brokeback Mountain, and there was something there I couldn't really explain. It was very affecting and it got to you, some movies can do that to you.

— Yes, I guess a lot of your roles come in, you prepare, you do your job and you're on to your next thing. In terms of some of the darker characters that you've played, you don't need to carry that with you after the fact.

— No, and I don't think I've ever played one of those twisted people without a certain bit of distance from that and that is maybe why I am able to do it repeatedly.

— Yes.

— I once sat on an airplane next to Walter Matthau. He is one of my heroes, this is years ago, and we did that thing on the airplane when people just sit and don't look at each other. Then the plane took off, and we're sitting there and he turned to me and said: "I know who you are", and I said: "Oh great." "You're my hero, because you're the guy who plays all the 'mishuggeneh', which means crazy in Yiddish. You have to have your feet firmly on the ground to play 'mishuggeneh' all the time. And I thought he was absolutely right. I think that when I play these villains, these twisted people; I bet that I always have a little bit of a sense of humor about it.

— I was thinking of comedy as simply a funny way of being serious, but in some ways stand up and horror films are similar in that we are a bit scared as to what the person is going to say or do next. I was thinking about that in terms of your ability to play evil but also to embody what I consider the absurdity of evil, that villains are intrinsically funny because their stance on life is so ridiculous, or just so wrong.

— That's an interesting thing to say because I always felt that there is some strange dance going on, kind of a tandem thing between what's funny and what's scary. They are almost like siblings. It's interesting that funny and scary seem somehow to be related

—You seem to be able to present evil and horror in a way that we are allowed to experience it but also be sort of comforted or amused by it.

— I think that my real training, the training that I have from practical work came of course from when I was young. And that young time I spent was a lot in theatre and a lot in musical comedies. And in musical comedies, the audience is another character in the show. It's almost Elizabethan. The actors will very often speak directly to the audience. There is that back and forth. Nobody is pretending that the other one isn't there, and I think that I carry that with me into the movies. I know that I am in a movie, and people watching me know that I know that I am in a movie, and there is a little bit of a wink and a nod between us. It's acknowledging the audience.

— Your role as a dancer, and I know that that was sort of your first love, and that whenever possible you try to work some dancing into some of the roles that you play, and of course your dancing in what's now acclaimed as the greatest music video of all time, 'Weapons of Choice'. That's the other thing as far as what your appeal would be: We can see the dark side but we know the other side. It's almost as if 'He danced' would be a good epitaph for yourself. There is nostalgia there, and a grace, and a charm that I think is lasting and eternal.

— That's a great thing to say. As far as dancing in movies, and I am not talking about the video, that's a thing by itself, but working a little dancing into the movies, I think I almost have to stop doing that. It gets mentioned, and I don't want to be monotonous. Maybe I am going to drop it for a while.

— It would be a shame, but I know what you're saying. You were in the last musical that MGM ever did, 'Pennies from Heaven.'

— That's right, the last musical, the studio was still MGM, that big water tank with the lion logo on it. I remember that they do the sound session for tap, and to get the taps clear there was this small studio with a parquet wood floor about eight feet square, and the room itself had this musty, really old kind of damp feeling, and it was the parquet floor that all those guys used. Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire and Donald O'Connor all did their postproduction there, and it was all worn out. Talking about memories!

— And I am sure there is a part of you that would have liked to have lived in another time and been in musicals.

— Yes, I think if I had been born twenty-five years earlier and had been in the movie business, I probably would have been in some musicals.

- If you could pick one of these four directors to spend a career as an actor with: Charlie Chaplin, Orson Wells, Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick?

— Well obviously all of them are people you would want to work with, but I think it must probably have been a lot of fun to be around Orson Wells. My favourite readings, books about the movies and about actors, and I read all the biographies, and history, and I love the stories, there are very good books about the studio moguls, Sam Goldwyn has a very good one, another pretty recent book about Louis Lumière and the Last Lion or something like that. There are some fascinating books, there is one about the making of Casablanca, where nobody seemed to know what was going on, and they made this masterpiece, changing the script everyday. But I think to be around Orson Welles must have been a lot of fun.

— I have a quote here from Chekhov where he says: 'My holy of the holiest is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and absolute freedom, freedom from force and falseness and whatever form the express themselves. That is the platform I would subscribe to if I were a great artist.'

— Well, he's got it right. There was something else he also said, Work, work, that's the thing. To have work is terribly important, and for everybody. It's very important to get up in the morning and have work, have a purpose, when you feel that you're doing something that can grow, and plus if you can make a living at it, it's just the best.

— Exactly. People usually distinguish work from play. That work almost implies that there is a lack of enjoyment, when in fact the idea of work and play could be synonymous.

— They are absolutely hand in hand. It's like action and cut, there is no such thing as work and play. You should enjoy your work. Going to work is my favourite thing, except when it's not going well, then it's hard, but most of the time it's the best thing I do.

— Another thing that Chekhov said: 'The writer should acknowledge that manure piles play a highly respectable role in the landscape and that evil passions are every bit as much a part of life as good ones'.

— Sure. And you have to be careful not to edit yourself too much early on because sometimes something doesn't look as if it's turning up so good but if you keep at it, it can refine itself and turn into something. Woody Allen said somewhere that 'a great deal of life has to do with showing up'. You just go there and do it. That's what I read about writers, the hard thing is to sit down, put the sheet of paper into the typewriter and start. It doesn't matter, just get going, something will start to happen.

— And speaking of Woody Allen, that small but intense role as Duane Hall in "Annie Hall"in 1977, almost 30 years ago now, but that probably led to " The Deer Hunter" and the personas that you are known for now.

— I remember that when I was shooting the Deer Hunter and when we were going to work just down the street, there was a poster for Annie Hall coming out.
So they happened almost at the same time. And somebody once said to me: 'How come you play all these strange people?' And somebody else suggested that it had to do with the sequence of those films, Annie Hall where I decide to drive myself into traffic and Deer Hunter came and I shot myself in the head, and I got a kind of troubled thing going, which is ironic because where I came from was playing silly parts in musicals.

— So interesting, isn't it? Like Walter Matthau said: 'I don't think you play troubled that well unless you're not troubled'.

— I don't think you can keep doing it, you just wear yourself out.

— It's a bit of a stretch maybe, but I'm just thinking as a metaphor that Duane Hall character threatening to be in this car crash, that maybe when people go to the movies to see you, it's almost like there is that sense of potential menace of the unexpected or surprise, like a car crash waiting to happen.

— They've probably gotten used to me being up to no good, or that I am going to do something awful, but it would be nice to defy those things occasionally once in a while. That's why I need that part in the house with the wife and the dog and the kids.

— In terms of being able to take the very known persona within all the movies you've done with directors such as, Quentin Tarantino, Abel Ferrara, and Paul Schrader, who've cast you as the menacing character, and now as patron saint of the cow bell in your Saturday Night Live stuff, one kind of serves the other obviously, but people are so delighted at seeing you sending your own persona up. Are you having as much fun as we are, taking those performances in?

— Sure. It was an interesting, unexpected turn. Saturday Night Live made a big difference. I didn't know at the time. It is difficult to understand the pervasiveness of television. There was a time after I had done that cowbell skit when I happened to be going all over. I was in Australia, in South East Asia, I was in Europe and number of places, then I go back to California, and no matter where I went if I turned on the TV, there would be a comedy channel and Saturday Night Live would be on. There would be these reruns all over the world. I was in a restaurant in Singapore, and this Asian couple was sitting across, and the guy leaned over to me at one point and he said to me: " Christopher, do you know what this salad needs? " And I said " What?" " More cowbell!" The number of people that see television is just enormous. I had done a Hallmark Hall of Fame with Glenn Close about ten or more years ago, and I was in London making a movie and the Hallmark film had been on the night before, and something like eighty million people had watched it. At that time I was reading the London newspaper, and Agatha Christie's Mousetrap, which is the longest running play in the world, was having its forty-two year anniversary. Forty years, eight shows a week, and it was estimated that eight millions people had seen it. So it's this one night of television ten times more people than forty years of actors going to work eight times a week. Television is huge, and I think that Saturday Night Live has really shifted my career in an interesting way. But it's not all positive because I don't want to play goofy stuff all the time.

— Yes, you don't want to just become known as a parody of yourself.

— It's a double-edged thing.

— But it's also the fact that by doing that it's almost like you break down barriers. You can go from playing Gabriel in James Joyce's 'The Dead', to playing the cowbell skit, or to a legitimate character in another film. Just that range. It's almost as if we take it for granted with you but I just think of so many actors that either disappear or just don't have the ability to stretch into those new or different territories.

— Well you have to be good, but you also have to be lucky. No matter what you do in life. Luck is a big deal, luck is very important, and everybody needs it. Acting is a very tenuous thing to do for a living because there are so many factors involved. The whole thing of staying viable for a long time. It's a bit of a balancing act.

— In James Joyce's The Dead, Gabriel says: 'We are living in a skeptical, and if I may use the phrase, a thought tormented age, and sometimes I fear this new generation educated, or hyper educated as it is will lose those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humor which belong to another day'. Is our modern age a different world for you? Have we lost something amidst this abundance of information?

— Well, one thing about the times we live in is the quickness at which the information gets there. I feel sometimes as if I have too much information, and no matter where I turn I'm hearing stuff. There was a time a hundred years ago when it took much longer for people to find out what was going on. It makes life more difficult in the sense that it can be confusing. I think there is such a thing as too much information. The first thing I do when I get a script is I look at it very quickly, I read my own words without necessarily knowing the context, because I don't want to know too much about it right away because I then get all bogged down in what it is supposed to be. Where if I keep a kind of blissful ignorance about it, things happen that I never would have thought of. So when it's put into the context of the story, I've already thought about choices that I wouldn't if I had known all the details. I think that one of the difficulties of being around today is the persistence of details about anything you want. I don't have a computer; I wouldn't know how to work one. I don't even have a cell phone. But with people with computers, I know that if I want to know something and if I ask they can find out anything about anything you want. So it's an advantage, but it's also limiting. You can also be confused by so many choices.

— I was in Philadelphia in April giving a lecture down there on film related stuff, and I hadn't traveled across the States in a while and I was so alienated by all these people in airports with these headsets on, these handless cell phones, and talking to themselves…

— I see people doing that, and I think: "Who are you talking to? Couldn't this wait?"

— I know. There is an urgency there that just doesn't seem to compute somehow.

— Well it's conceivable that someday we'll all be linked up without having to carry a cell phone. We'll be like bees, just all milling around, communicating.

—Computers have really changed the way we operate, and the speed with which we can access and communicate information.

— Well, I missed the boat on computers. I think I was really just on the cusp. If I had been a little bit younger, I probably would have a computer. But when they came along, it looked so boring to me that I just never bothered. But also when something is ubiquitous, it's almost redundant. I don't have a wristwatch either because if I need to know what time it is, I ask somebody. I got stuck in an airport a while ago, and I always carry quarters so that I can use the payphone, and I tried all these payphones and they just didn't work. I guess nobody uses them anymore. And somebody asked: "Would you like to use my cell phone?" There are enough of them around. If I need to know something about something, I say to my wife: "Can you check this out on your computer", and she comes back within ten minutes with the information. I use it, I just don't have it.

— And you're pretty sure that you'll be able to go the rest of the way without getting indoctrinated?

— I think so. There is something really awesome about it. And not only that, it would be like trying to learn the piano. Why would I take up something that any ten year old can do better than I do?

— I know something can be said about that for sure. I know that you read a lot of scripts. I learned that when you go through a script you immediately remove all the punctuation?

— I do. I never paid attention to that.

— Would there would be a difference between doing theatre where you have to honor the writer, or the writer's intentions perhaps more than in a screen play?

— Not really. Dialogue is dialogue. If you have a speech to make, just say it. There are as many ways of saying it as there are actors. Somebody once said that there are as many ways to play Hamlet as there are actors. I think that's true. Each of us expresses ourselves with words in a very individual and different way. Everybody does it differently. The words are still there but the punctuation sometimes is an imposition.

— I like the idea that there are really four films within every film. There is the film that's written, and there is the film that's cast, and there is the film that's directed, and there is the film that's edited, and it kind of takes on a different life with each one.

— Quite right. I think that the editor really is kind of an unsung hero, because a good editor is such an amazing thing. It always helps when everything else is good, but a good editor can …

— For a writer, everybody is important, but in some ways, the writer's closest ally is the actor, because if you take a piece of writing, a monologue that someone has written, you can find as many different variations on it, or different ways of finding subtext, or even things that the writers had no idea that they were actually putting down.

- Sure. Very often in a movie, when I look at it, there is what is obviously in the script, your big scene, your showdown with somebody or whatever it is, you've got the juiciest dialogue, and it's your big scene, but it's curious that very often it's not your big scene. Your big scene is something you didn't even know was there, and it's very surprising; you know it when it happens.

Time literally flies! My hour of tape runs out. One must appreciate the irony that a conversation about time would end so abruptly. Chris graciously offers an opportunity to call back later but what with deadlines and transcription time and page counts we decided to leave it here. Makes me think that a smart writer might want to sit down and get the whole story from one of the more versatile and interesting actors and personalities of the last sixty years. Christopher Walken, the working actor, dancer, villain, comedian and troubled soul, has stood the test of time and we look forward to the third act. More menace, more cowbell, and just maybe a white picket fence, a wife, a family, a dog…



 

Playboy Interview (1997)

A candid conversation with the spookiest actor on film about why he gets all the weirdo parts, what really happened with natalie wood and his secret regimen to prevent baldness.

People who know him only from his films usually ask the same question: Is Christopher Walken really as weird as he seems?

They're curious because (a) he looks otherworldly, (b) he speaks in a strange, clipped manner often parodied by comics, (c) he specializes in playing bad guys, often in especially chilling and original ways, and (d) he's been around for as long as anybody can remember but has never quite gotten his due.
So they'd be surprised to see how laid-back Walken is when confronted by a messy situation created by Abel Ferrara, who directed him in "King of New York," "The Addiction" and "The Funeral." Ferrara has entered Walken's West Side brownstone apartment on a rainy New York afternoon. Walken suggests the director remove his wet shoes before stepping on the soothing green Chinese rug in the living room. The two men are contrasts in style and manner: Walken is neat, meticulous, groomed, studied; Ferrara is unkempt and anxious. Walken observes the trail of blood Ferrara leaves as he steps from the wooden floor onto the expensive rug. When he points out the blood, Ferrara says he must have stepped on some broken glass on Walken's floor. Walken is incredulous. His home is so spotlessly clean you could eat off his floor without finding a piece of lint, let alone a shard of glass.

"He must have cut his foot before he came," Walken explains to his wife, Georgianne, after Ferrara leaves. "His sock was all bloody."
"I'll send the rug out," Georgianne says, "but you know how tough it is to remove bloodstains."
"So we'll be able to point out that this is where Abel Ferrara bled for his art," Walken says, laughing.

In his kitchen he starts cutting up brussels sprouts to relax. When he's done he wipes already spotless counters with a cotton dish towel. "I can't stand mess," he admits.

His face is beginning to wrinkle. Bags are forming below his eyes. Walken is thin, 175 pounds on a six-foot frame. When he talks he pokes at his hairline with his fingertips in some strange ritual that has something to do with either stimulating the roots or tapping his brain for inspiration. He also briskly strokes his cheeks and neck with the backs of his fingernails as if trying to scrape away any loose skin. When he's not wiping counters and tables clean, he's constantly using his hands to play with his face. But there is something else about this unique actor, whose face has sent chills down the spines of audiences. He is very funny, with a droll sense of humor. He also has a great, inhaling laugh. When he tells a story and it has a punch line, he tells it with gusto. And then he laughs. This aspect of Walken comes as a surprise, because his public image is of a man who might be crippled from the neck down, as he is in "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead," but who can still force Andy Garcia onto his knees in quivering fear. He may not be able to unzip his own pants, but he's perfectly capable of instructing one of his movie goons to do that for him, and then take out his dick so the guy he's tormenting can suck it. That's the Chris Walken we've grown to love. As a "Los Angeles Times" reviewer observed, Walken "can embody pure, scary evil better than just about anybody." And "Film Comment" noted that if there is such a thing as menacing vulnerability, Walken has personified it: "He understands scary-funny better than anyone."

He has been influenced by show business his entire life, so much so that he marks time by what was playing in theaters, who was on TV, what he was doing at the time of a star's death (when James Dean died, Walken was at a roller-skating rink in Queens). He was born, he points out, on the opening night of "Oklahoma!" -- March 31, 1943. His father was a baker, his mom a woman so enamored with show business that she pushed her three sons into crossing from Queens into Manhattan to study at the Professional Children's School, then took them on stage and television auditions. The brothers learned to dance, to playact and to stand behind Milton Berle or Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis or Jackie Gleason whenever some kids were needed as background for a TV skit. "Those guys were kings," Walken recalls fondly. "They were big stars and they were treated that way."

Until he danced for a nightclub singer named Monique Van Vooren, Walken went by his given first name, Ronald. But that changed after he told the chanteuse he didn't like the sound of it. "She tried out some other names on me. One night she called me Christopher and I kept it." His first dramatic role was as the king of France in a Broadway production of "The Lion in Winter." He was almost fired for having the shakes, but he somehow managed to calm down enough to keep the job. Other plays followed, and Walken honed his talent doing everything from Shakespeare to David Rabe. Actors still talk of how he crawled on his elbows like a crab in "Caligula" or how he played Stanley Kowalski for laughs in "A Streetcar Named Desire" because he didn't want his performance to be compared with Marlon Brando's. "It was a stitch," he says, "but a lot of people criticized me for doing that. But what the fuck was I supposed to do? I never was Stanley to begin with." The movies came somewhat late for him -- he was 26 when he got a bit part in a film called "Me and My Brother." He followed that two years later, in 1971, with "The Anderson Tapes." It took five more years before he landed a role in Paul Mazursky's "Next Stop, Greenwich Village." Then came "The Sentinel" and "Roseland" before Woody Allen cast him as Diane Keaton's demented brother in "Annie Hall." But it was Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" that made Walken a star -- he landed an Oscar for best supporting actor for his portrayal of a battle-scarred Vietnam soldier. The first real money Walken made as a movie actor was for "The Dogs of War," in which he played a mercenary attempting to oust a dictatorial government. In 1983 came "Brainstorm," a film remembered because its star, Natalie Wood, fell off a yacht and drowned one evening while her husband, Robert Wagner, and Walken sat in an onboard room. For years reporters have tried to get Walken to talk in detail about the event. Until now he has refused.
After "Brainstorm" came more movies: "The Dead Zone," based on Stephen King's novel, the James Bond film "A View to a Kill," "At Close Range," "Biloxi Blues," "The Milagro Beanfield War," "Homeboy," "Communion," "King of New York," "The Comfort of Strangers" and "McBain." He was a villainous tycoon in "Batman Returns" and the evil movie producer in "Wayne's World 2." His scene with Dennis Hopper in "True Romance" took that movie to another level. Walken also appeared in "Pulp Fiction." His latest film is "Excess Baggage," with Alicia Silverstone.

He's been married to casting director Georgianne Thon for 28 years. They have a house in Wilton, Connecticut as well as the apartment in Manhattan. When he's not working (which is rare), Walken likes to cook, paint and observe his cats.

We sent Contributing Editor Lawrence Grobel (whose last interview for us was with author Saul Bellow) to find out what makes Christopher Walken tick. Grobel reports:
"Walken is most comfortable standing in the kitchen, peeling vegetables and cooking meals. We stood in the kitchen of his rented house in Los Angeles for three hours at a time over five days, debating whether or not his behavior was obsessive (I said it was; he didn't think so). In his apartment in New York I finally got to sit on a couch in his living room, where we shared a bottle of red wine and went over his latest appearance on 'Saturday Night Live.'

"In a moment of clarity he marveled that when he turned 53 he celebrated his half a century in show business, a claim few actors in the world can make. He still worries when he completes a project and doesn't have the next one lined up, and he compared his career to a roller coaster. 'I've come and gone a number of times,' he said. 'It's not that I went away, but I became much less visible. Then I do something and I'm back.'"He's so funny and such a natural storyteller that it's sometimes easy to forget that he makes his living playing some of the most chilling characters known to movies."

PLAYBOY: How do you feel when you read an article about yourself that begins: "There are lots of spooky actors in the world, but none more spooky than Christopher Walken"? Or, "Christopher Walken is the creepiest man on the screen"?
WALKEN:: I hope I'm not creepy. Creepy is not a mammal. Creepy is like an insect. Spooky is OK. Racehorses get spooked, they're emotional.

PLAYBOY: Still, spooky doesn't often translate into heroic or good-guy roles.
WALKEN:: I am a good guy, no doubt about it. Just ask my family. Whatever you are in the movies comes from what you actually are. One thing an actor does in his life is to try to find the pure place.

PLAYBOY: So you would like some romantic leads?
WALKEN:: I'd like to be acting, and acting in ways that surprise people. If that would be a surprise, sure.

PLAYBOY: And how would you describe yourself?
WALKEN:: Unexpectedly conservative. Anybody who gets to know me is surprised. My life is quiet. I like it that way. I'm very sensible and pragmatic. If somebody were to do the story of my life, not that anybody would, it would be about my wife and me around the house. It would be like watching paint dry.

PLAYBOY: What does stardom mean to you?
WALKEN:: I don't know what stardom is. Somebody once said to me, "I saw you in this play." And I thought, Wow, somebody saw me, because only about three people saw that play. I felt very famous. I've always been recognizable, even before I became famous. The way I dress, my hair, I stick out a little.

PLAYBOY: Would you consider yourself flamboyant?
WALKEN:: A little, yeah. Garish. Especially when I was younger -- I was always a bit exotic. Never wore a hat because the hair was more important.

PLAYBOY: You seldom get top billing. Why is that?
WALKEN:: Usually the villain is the supporting actor. But you know that before you make the movie; that's all decided by your lawyer. Whenever I go to do a movie, my agent and lawyer always fight for things. One will say, "If we don't argue about the billing it will be easier with the money." And I'll say, "Yeah, right." And then the other guy will call me and say, "Look, Chris, you have to put your foot down. We have to fight for this." And I'll say, "Yeah, right." So then they argue, and usually they know what I want, which is basically: Take the job, who cares? It's much more important to stick around. Being an actor is hard. So many people want your job.

PLAYBOY: It's been said that you bring to your roles a special way of seeing pain that other actors rarely come close to. Do you understand this?
WALKEN:: I hope I bring a special way of seeing something. People are so mysterious, you can't ever really know anyone. I never know what anybody's thinking. When my nephew was five and his mother was going to have another baby, he said to me, "Uncle Ronnie, my mother and father think I'm upset because there's a baby coming. I want you to let them know that I'm not, that I'm looking forward to it, because I've been lonely." That's at five!

PLAYBOY: Are you always Ronnie to your friends and family?
WALKEN:: Oh yeah. My wife, people who knew me as a kid, sure. Anybody who met me after I was 25 calls me Chris. I asked my agent if I could change my billing to Chris Walken. It's what everybody calls me, and it takes up less space. It's easier to say. But people don't like change. Producers say, "If I paid for the full name, I'm getting the full name." Why can't I go to Chris? I wish Playboy would use Chris.

PLAYBOY: OK, Chris, are you concerned about your roles as a bad guy capable of killing children, friends or co-workers? You have said you tend to play mostly villains and twisted people because of the way you look. Do you think you look evil? Is there a concern that you might become a parody of yourself?
WALKEN:: You know what I think it is? I've been in show business since I was three, and it has left its mark on me. I come from the planet Show Business, not Hollywood -- I didn't know anything about that until I got older. But I came out of show business: The way I talk, the way I think, the way I look -- those things make me good for certain kinds of parts, somebody from the outside, from the border. When I was young I never knew anybody who wasn't in show business.
Remember Brandon de Wilde? He was a great-looking kid and a big star, he was in Shane. I went to school with him. He taught me how to tie a necktie. I was in class with Marvin Hamlisch. I knew him when I was seven. When he was ten he had already written an opera. Tuesday Weld used to come to our house. Sal Mineo was in school with Elliott Gould and my brother. Sal was a bigger star than anybody. He had an older brother named Vic, and these guys wore suits, had bodyguards, played cards on the weekends. These guys were 40 when they were 16. I was always at the edge, looking on.

PLAYBOY: Were you jealous of their success?
WALKEN:: I don't have a big jealous streak. But sometimes I feel depressed about not being better.

PLAYBOY: Did many of those showbiz kids continue like you did?
WALKEN:: Not many. It's unusual if they're still in the business. They grew up and had something else they wanted to do. But not me. I got to be 25 and realized I was in show business whether I liked it or not.

PLAYBOY: Is that when you made the transition from musicals to dramatic stage roles?
WALKEN:: I knew I couldn't stay in musicals. Even if you are great at it, there's only so long you can do it, like an athlete. I was in a musical and a casting agent saw me and asked me to audition for The Lion in Winter, which was a play in New York before it was a movie. I got the part of the king of France. It had great actors in it: Robert Preston, who was like Booth, a great American actor; Rosemary Harris; Jimmy Rado, who later wrote Hair. It was a good show. Preston was sweet to me. He used to say, "Don't worry, just enjoy yourself. Don't stand in the wings and say your lines over and over before you go on. You know your lines -- just relax." And I'd grit my teeth and say, "Yeah!" Anyway, I'd go out there and pour a cup of wine and hand it to somebody, and my hand would be shaking so hard that the wine would jump out of the goblet. I really stunk. People would come backstage afterward and say to me, "I'm sorry." And one night after the show the producer asked me to get a bite to eat and took me to this Greek restaurant. He said in the middle of our meal, ."We're going to have to let you go." I said, "I know that. But give me three days." He said OK. Within those three days I got my shit together.

PLAYBOY: Why stay with acting if it made your hands shake?
WALKEN:: What else could I do?

PLAYBOY: You won a Clarence Derwent Award for that play. What did this mean to you?
WALKEN:: I had gone from tap dancing to getting an award for being an actor in a play I nearly got fired from. This showed me things weren't so bad after all. I got a job as Romeo and I had never read Shakespeare. I'm convinced I got that job because somebody had seen me wearing tights in The Lion in Winter and thought I could play Romeo. It's dopey, but I think that's what happened. I was terrible as Romeo. And I got the worst reviews ever.

PLAYBOY: Do you have many actor friends? When you're working here in Hollywood, who do you see?
WALKEN:: I know people here like Harry Dean Stanton. I'm trying to think of who else actually lives here. Oh, Jon Lovitz. [Laughs] I'm 54 years old. You ask, "Who do you know?" I say, "I know Harry Dean Stanton."

PLAYBOY: What playwrights are you most comfortable with?
WALKEN:: My best work onstage has been in Tennessee Williams' plays and in Chekhov's. American stage actors for some reason go very well with Chekhov. Some sort of temperamental thing. And Williams was the great American playwright of my time. One thing I know about playwrights: Every character they write is them. Shakespeare wrote all those characters, and somewhere in his head he could imagine them. It's the only thing good playwrights and bad playwrights have in common: Their characters are basically them.

PLAYBOY: Does that hold true for actors who write?
WALKEN:: Sure. I've never met an actor who hasn't written a movie. I've got volumes of them. Cabdrivers write screenplays. My dentist told me he wrote one.

PLAYBOY: Did he give it to you?
WALKEN:: No. But he wants to. I think I said to him, "I don't want to know about it. What's it about?" "It's about a dentist." They don't make movies about dentists!

PLAYBOY: Has anybody ever read any of your screenplays?
WALKEN:: No, because they stink! [Laughs] I've got a trunkful of shitty scripts. When I finish one I say, "OK, that's pretty good for a lousy rotten actor."

PLAYBOY: What was your mother's fascination with show business that led her to encourage you in that direction?
WALKEN:: It was different in those days. There was a thing called the Stage Mothers' Society, 300 women who had kids. There were three professional children's schools that catered to those kids. I went 12 years, from the first grade until I graduated from high school.
We went to dancing school on Saturdays and it was as much a social event for the mothers as it was tap class for us. They would all sit and drink black coffee and smoke cigarettes and argue. I don't know about what, but I remember big arguments. It was pretty tough.

PLAYBOY: Were you a good student?
WALKEN:: I was never good in school. I didn't like it and always resented having to attend.

PLAYBOY: Why?
WALKEN:: I don't have children, and I know the law makes you do things, but I think you should basically teach a kid to read. A little arithmetic, a little writing, but if you can read, that's the big thing. That's the biggest thing my education gave me.

PLAYBOY: If you had kids, would you encourage them to go to school?
WALKEN:: No, I wouldn't. I think school may do as much damage as good. It did to me. It was just something you did every day. It was taken for granted. You waste tremendous amounts of time.

PLAYBOY: You apparently felt that way about Hofstra University, which you left after a year.
WALKEN:: I mean, it wasn't Harvard. I was in a play by Archibald MacLeish, J.B., when I was 16 or 17. I was about to get out of high school. One of my teachers said, "You're working with Archibald MacLeish?" He was teaching at Harvard. She said, "Why don't you ask him to put in a word for you? You could probably go to Harvard." I didn't want to go to Harvard.

PLAYBOY: What musical did you leave college for?
WALKEN:: Best Foot Forward. I was 19, making $55 a week. Liza Minnelli sang a song for this investor -- she made quite an impression. That's how we got the money to do the show. Her mother threw a 16th-birthday party for her, and the cast was invited. I danced with Judy Garland.

PLAYBOY: Wasn't it at this time that you met Anthony Perkins, who gave you some essential advice about your hair?
WALKEN:: Right. He had a great head of hair. He said the reason men go bald, aside from genes, is that as they get older, the scalp gets tight, the blood gets cut off and the follicles die, particularly with stress. He knew a lot about it. He said that women have a layer of lanolin under their skin that men don't have that keeps their scalps loose. He told me what you do is pull your hair forward five minutes a day, and I've done it every morning since. You take your whole scalp and just pull it pretty hard, yank it around. I heard that Kennedy, when he was in the White House, had somebody come in every day and do it for him. He had a great head of hair.

PLAYBOY: What other beauty secrets do you know?
WALKEN:: If you've got red eyes from staying up too late you should put warm, wet tea bags on them. It's very soothing.

PLAYBOY: After Best Foot Forward, you did the road show of West Side Story, during which you met Georgianne Thon. Describe that meeting.
WALKEN:: She played my girlfriend in the show, so we were together every day, touring on the road.

PLAYBOY: Was it love at first sight?
WALKEN:: She was a fox. She is a fox. We loved each other right away. We've been married 28 years. I was 22 when we met.

PLAYBOY: Why haven't you had kids?
WALKEN:: I never had it checked out. My wife and I were never interested in having kids. We're both relieved that we don't. We've been careful, and we've deliberately avoided it. Until I was 35 I moved around all the time. The truth is, I don't really enjoy the company of children. When I'm with them I think, Gee, I wish this would end so I could have a conversation or something.

PLAYBOY: Is your wife your best friend?
WALKEN:: Definitely.

PLAYBOY: She has said that she stays away from you when you're playing darker roles. True?
WALKEN:: She's told me that, too.

PLAYBOY: You must not be seeing much of her lately.
WALKEN:: There are some roles that are difficult for her. People won't say, "Come on, honey, let's take the kids to see The Comfort of Strangers." That's not going to happen.

PLAYBOY: You've said that your character in that movie got to you. In what way?
WALKEN:: I did something I never do for movies: I deliberately gained weight, 20 pounds. And I don't do things like that for parts. I don't like to be fat. I felt lousy.

PLAYBOY: You called your character a terrible man and said the fact that sex equals death in that movie scared you.
WALKEN:: He and his wife did make that equation, yeah. And not in a funny way, like Woody Allen might do. That is the most mentally unhealthy person I've ever played, which says a lot.

PLAYBOY: You played a pretty unstable guy, Annie Hall's demented brother, for Allen .
WALKEN:: Somebody at a press conference came up to me and said, "I know why you get these strange parts. It's because you did that Woody Allen movie." I thought, Could that be? Everybody saw that movie, in which I played Duane, who wanted to drive into oncoming cars. It could be I got the part in The Deer Hunter because of that.

PLAYBOY: The Deer Hunter, it's been written, established you as an intellectual James Dean. Do you buy that?
WALKEN:: No, certainly not.

PLAYBOY: Many saw it as a political film, but you didn't. How come?
WALKEN:: Because I see movies as movies. But if you want me to be more specific, I don't think it had anything to do with being about a particular war. It had more to do with young men's romantic notions of war, the idea that war's an adventure. They think they're going to go and have a good time, get out of the house. In reality, though, they get their legs blown off. But you could have made that movie about cavemen. It's really more about young men's naivete concerning war.

PLAYBOY: Where did you stand on the Vietnam war?
WALKEN:: It's maybe not a good thing about me, but I have never paid attention to what's going on in the world. I knew peripherally, but I had no views.

PLAYBOY: What about your brothers?
WALKEN:: My younger brother volunteered to go, and he went for four years. He was in action in Vietnam. He never talks about it, but I have a feeling he was in rough stuff.

PLAYBOY: What did he think of The Deer Hunter?
WALKEN:: He's never talked about it.

PLAYBOY: How uncomfortable did it get shooting in the River Kwai?
WALKEN:: There were little things nipping at our legs. That's why I liked making Nick of Time -- it was all inside the Bonaventure Hotel. You'd go to your room for lunch, go back downstairs and get to work. That's the way to do it. The Deer Hunter was in the jungle, with lizards, spiders. We stayed in this hotel, and at night there'd be a noise. You'd turn on the light and there would be a lizard on the wall, white with big orange dots on it. I'm very squeamish about that stuff. I don't like bugs. But it got to the point where I'd hear a noise, turn on the light, see something on the wall, turn off the light and go back to sleep.

PLAYBOY: Did you ever smoke opium in Thailand?
WALKEN:: Somebody gave me some and I didn't know what to do with it, so I ate it after we finished the movie. I stayed in Thailand for a while and went up to this place called Pe Lot. It was like a town in a Western, with wooden sidewalks and guys carrying guns. I ate the opium and got very, very sick. It was an intestinal thing. When I got back to America I saw a doctor, who said that they mix the opium with water buffalo shit and that I had some bacteria in my stomach. It lasted a long time.

PLAYBOY: What were the Sixties like for you? Did you go through a drug phase?
WALKEN:: Sure.

PLAYBOY: Did it affect you?
WALKEN:: Yes, but it affected me for the better. It's the reason I don't do it anymore and wouldn't even be inclined or tempted. When it stopped being interesting, I stopped being interested in it. It was a relationship. We gave up on each other.

PLAYBOY: You never had a bad acid trip?
WALKEN:: Oh sure, sure, and when that happened I stopped. I don't even hear acid mentioned anymore. But it was commonplace then. It's like smoking cigarettes -- there was a time in my late 30s when they started to make me feel sick, so I quit. I'm very lucky that way. There's a point where your body and your mind say what you should do, and if you ignore that, you're a fool.

PLAYBOY: How good was winning an Oscar for The Deer Hunter?
WALKEN:: I remember exactly how good. We went to the thing and there was a little party afterward and we sat with Meryl Streep and her family, then went back to the hotel early. The management had sent up a bottle of champagne, my agent was in the room with a couple of people, I was holding the Oscar. Then everybody left and we went to bed and I said to my wife, with the Oscar in my hand, "This is a house." And it was. I was holding our house in my hand -- I knew that's what it meant.

PLAYBOY: Another controversial film for you was Brainstorm, which was delayed when Natalie Wood drowned after falling off the yacht that you, she and Robert Wagner were staying on. You have maintained a strict silence about the incident ----
WALKEN:: Out of respect for the family. It's not my place to talk about that. The other thing is, there really is nothing to talk about. Anybody there saw the logistics -- of the boat, the night, where we were, that it was raining -- and would know exactly what happened. You hear about things happening to people -- they slip in the bathtub, fall down the stairs, step off the curb in London because they think that the cars come the other way -- and they die. You feel you want to die making an effort at something; you don't want to die in some unnecessary way. What happened that night only she knows, because she was alone. There were four of us on that boat, not three of us. There was a captain too. She had gone to bed before us, and her room was at the back. A dinghy was bouncing against the side of the boat, and I think she went out to move it. There was a ski ramp that was partially in the water. It was slippery --I had walked on it myself. She had told me she couldn't swim; in fact, they had to cut a
 swimming scene from the movie. She was probably half asleep, and she was wearing a coat. She apparently moved the boat around, slipped, hit her head, fell into the water. She was discovered separate from the boat: Why would she get into the boat, then get out of it and into the water? She couldn't swim. She hit her head, went into the water, the boat floated away, she floated away. In the meantime, we were sitting in the living room, the three of us, talking. And I remember distinctly that about 45 minutes after she had gone to bed, R.J. went down to her room, came right back and said, "Natalie's not there." And then the Coast Guard was called.

I feel funny talking about it in such detail, but the fact that she had gone in the dinghy the night before made it sound like we were on the high seas. We were 50 feet off the beach, moored to one of those balls, and there were boats all around. It was a drizzly night, so it wasn't like people were sitting out on their decks. But there were a lot of people around. There was a hotel with a restaurant on the shore. She had gone there the night before to call her kids because the phone on the boat wasn't working. The first assumption was that that's what she had done. She was very spontaneous. The idea that she had gotten into the boat to go call her kids was not far-fetched. The first reaction was: I hope everything's OK. But then time passed.

PLAYBOY: Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles County coroner, reported that an argument between you and Wagner may have been the reason she went off by herself.
WALKEN:: Wasn't that guy Noguchi kicked out as chief medical examiner for being an asshole?

PLAYBOY: He said you guys were fighting.
WALKEN:: I remember that. There was a quote in the paper from me saying I didn't recall the coroner being there. How the hell does the coroner know what was going on?

PLAYBOY: What was reported in the Los Angeles Times was that you and Wagner "argued heatedly aboard an anchored yacht" on the night that Natalie Wood drowned. "It may have been the reason she left the two men."
WALKEN:: She left to go to bed. And there were three of us. Noguchi was a bad man. How would he know? If a policeman had said it, it would be one thing. The police thoroughly investigated the whole thing, everybody was questioned. If there had been anything wrong, certainly the police would have looked into it. The story I just told you is the absolute truth. Nobody can know, but I believe she went to move that dinghy, slipped, fell, hit her head and died. Not a good way to go. The woman was not self-destructive. Everybody cared about her. This is the first time I've ever talked more than two minutes about it.

PLAYBOY: When did they find the body?
WALKEN:: A few hours later.

PLAYBOY: What was your reaction?
WALKEN:: Oh man, forget it. My reaction was for R.J. To receive that kind of news.

PLAYBOY: Have you two seen or talked with each other since then?
WALKEN:: I bump into him occasionally, and, you know, it's sad. He married her twice. They really were a glamorous couple.

PLAYBOY: Were you close to her?
WALKEN:: They were very nice to me. They invited me to their home. We had a lot of fun. To have something like that happen to someone who really was loved and who was legendary -- the sadness of it makes it hard to talk about. I was in a restaurant about a year ago, and there was a young, beautiful girl. I was looking at her and somebody said to me, "You know who that is? It's Natalie's daughter Natasha." There was a resemblance.

PLAYBOY: Did you ever talk to Wood about her early films?
WALKEN:: I did, yes. She talked about those people. She had dated Elvis. She was Elvis' girlfriend at one point. She talked about what a gentleman he was. She knew everybody.

PLAYBOY: Elvis is someone you've been fascinated, almost obsessed, with since you were a teenager. When was the first time you laid eyes on him?
WALKEN:: I was about 15. I asked this girl to go to the prom and she said she would but that she had a boyfriend, an older guy. Then she took out her wallet and showed me a picture of this handsome guy with the hair, the teeth, who looked like a Greek statue. I thought, All right, and then I asked to see it again and said, "This is not a photograph. You cut this out of a magazine." She got farmisht and said, "Yes, you're right, I did. I'm so madly in love with him. His name is Elvis Presley." She went with me to the prom. I had her in a compromising position. That's what you get for lying.

PLAYBOY: How did Elvis' look affect you?
WALKEN:: I saw all his movies. I still comb my hair like his to some extent.

PLAYBOY: You played archetypal bad guys in A View to a Kill and Batman Returns. Are they more like cartoon villains? Way over the top?
WALKEN:: Yeah, sure. Those were costume movies. In the Bond film I had my hair dyed an impossible yellow color, and that became my motivation in a lot of scenes: I had a secret subtext, which I never discussed with anybody. Every time I had a scene with somebody I'd be thinking: What do you think of my hair? Do you like my hair? Do you like what they did to me? That they made me look like this? So next time you see the movie, every time I torture somebody I'm really thinking, You see what they did to me with this hair?

PLAYBOY: Did you really ask Batman Returns director Tim Burton for cuff links made out of human molars?
WALKEN:: I didn't ask, but it's an example of what a really good director he is. At the beginning of the shoot I was standing with him, waiting for them to light the set, and I said that in The Great Gatsby, Gatsby and Nick Carraway are having lunch with the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim, and Nick notices that Wolfsheim is wearing cuff links made out of human molars. Burton calls over his assistant and says, "Get him cuff links made out of human molars." Within half an hour the guy comes back with them, and I wore them throughout the movie. It's something the audience wouldn't know, but Burton knew it would be good for me to have them.

PLAYBOY: Didn't Sean Penn also know what would be good for you when you acted with him in At Close Range?
WALKEN:: Yeah, he really scared me. You can see it on the screen, because he did it very quickly. In the middle of the take, he ran off the set and I heard him say to the propman, "Give me the other gun." When he came back I was concerned that this wasn't the gun he had left with. Who knows? He's acting like some crazy actor and pointing it at my face, and it really scared me. It was near my eye.

PLAYBOY: Why did he do it?
WALKEN:: Because he's a good actor. That's what good actors do, they help each other. It was an empty gun -- he knew exactly what he was doing. He just wanted to scare me, which is what he did. I got mad afterward and yelled at him, then I said thank you. It's great when actors do that for each other. It's very generous.

PLAYBOY: Penn said that you had poetry in your blood, though it was hard to know whether it was angelic or satanic.
WALKEN:: That's a lovely thing to say. If you can play one, you can play the other.

PLAYBOY: What about believing in one or the other?
WALKEN:: Heaven and hell? No. Afterlife, absolutely. I don't believe in death. I remember standing as a child at my uncle's funeral, looking at him and thinking, I don't believe it, it doesn't make any sense. And I still feel that. The other night I was watching a movie on TV and there was an actor in it I really like. Then it crossed my mind that he's dead. But he's not dead; there he is, you know? Life is so amazing to me that I find it hard to believe it stops.

PLAYBOY: You sound a bit like Whitley Strieber, who wrote about being abducted by aliens in Communion, in which you appeared in which you appeared when it was made into a film. Did you get to know him?
WALKEN:: Yeah, it was interesting spending time with him. We went to his house once. Talk about eccentric guys. He had about a dozen people there who claimed to have been abducted. They were regular people talking about waking up with six hours missing or with scars.

PLAYBOY: You've said he's like a radio show -- he does the sounds, the screams. Is this in a one-on-one conversation?
WALKEN:: Absolutely. All you have to do is say, "Whitley, did you really get abducted?" He'll pretend at first that he's reluctant to talk about it. He's so bizarre. I asked him what happened once they got him in the spacecraft. His voice starts to shake a little, then he gets into it. He goes, "No, no!" [Laughs] He does sound effects. This guy, he's his own show.

PLAYBOY: You were friendly with Andy Warhol. Did he ever want to take your picture or paint you?
WALKEN:: No. Andy Warhol was famous for being reticent, but whenever I was with him we talked about movies, New York, show business. He was very congenial, very intelligent, big mind. He never said anything silly. He said things like "I believe tomorrow is another day." Which is silly, except when he said it you could see the mind behind it. I always thought he was rather droll. He was certainly unique.

PLAYBOY: Warhol mentioned you in his diaries a few times, often having to do with a reporter named Tinkerbelle. Do you remember her?
WALKEN:: Yeah, sure, I knew her. She's gone.

PLAYBOY: Warhol wrote: "She was saying how she makes out with everybody she interviews, that she was making out with Christopher Walken and that his wife was getting upset." How did your wife know?
WALKEN:: I never knew Tinkerbelle that way. I knew her from the days I used to go to the clubs. I used to see her at Studio 54.

PLAYBOY: Do female reporters often come on to you?
WALKEN:: No. I wouldn't mind, but ----

PLAYBOY: Warhol wrote his entry for January, 19, 1979. "Tinkerbell said how could I tell people that she'd given a blow job, and I told her I didn't tell anybody, that I didn't even know.
WALKEN:: Look, I don't know, these people, really -- there are things you can say about me, but I'll deny that one absolutely.

PLAYBOY: On March 14, 1985, Warhol wrote, regarding you and actor Mickey Rourke the night of Dino De Laurentiis' dinner at Alo Alo, that before Rourke left with some girls, "he and Chris Walken kissed each other goodbye on the lips so tenderly, it looked so gay. And Chris Walken was really drunk, he said he was tired of his hair, he'd dyed it blond, and it needed retouching."
WALKEN:: [Laughs] I remember Mickey was there. He handed me some sort of strange green drink. Actors do kiss one another, I don't think on the lips. I don't think there's anything going on between me and Mickey. Sounds like a nice book.

PLAYBOY: In 1973 you said in After Dark that you thought of Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice as bisexual, "and I suppose that's how I think of myself, too. I'd hate to think that I was harnessed to heterosexuality . . . my head is bisexual."
WALKEN:: Did I say that? I think an actor's head has to be not bisexual but asexual. I like the term actor, it's genderless. I call actresses actors. An actor has to see as many sides of the story as possible. That's probably what I meant. But that production of Merchant of Venice had a gay bent. The director wanted it that way.

PLAYBOY: What does your wife think when she hears or reads these remarks?
WALKEN:: My wife is so used to me. She's heard people say many things about me.

PLAYBOY: Is it true that until you were 35 you never earned more than $11,000 in a year?
WALKEN:: That's right. That was my top pay for a year until I made The Deer Hunter, for which I was to be paid $14,000. But it took longer than it was supposed to, so I made $25,000. I told Michael Cimino there was this great Cadillac that I wanted, but he didn't give it to me. I've always liked Cadillacs, but I don't like to drive.

PLAYBOY: So when did you finally make money?
WALKEN:: Right after The Deer Hunter, when I did The Dogs of War. That was the first time I was the main character.

PLAYBOY: Have you ever made more than a million dollars for a film?
WALKEN:: No. I made a million dollars once, but never over a million. I don't pay an awful lot of attention to money.

PLAYBOY: If your films haven't always been successful, your two appearances on Saturday Night Live have been. What kind of feedback do you get when you do that show?
WALKEN:: It's very good, people think it's funny. They remember certain skits. The most popular one is the Continental. A lot of people remember the stalker. We did a James Bond skit in which I played a bad guy. I was designing a shark tank, and I was going to throw people in.

PLAYBOY: Do you think the show can ever return to its early glory days?
WALKEN:: I don't know. I've been watching it as a fan for 22 years. Naturally when I think about the time I watched every week, it was in the beginning, with Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin. That was an amazing time. When Belushi would do the news and go insane, or do takeoffs on Sid Caesar or do the samurai, or Steve Martin would do his Egyptian dance, that was funny stuff. There was that white-hot thing when somebody gets very big overnight. I remember running around the halls of the Chateau Marmont with John Belushi, who lived there. I used to live on the sixth floor. There were a lot of parties in room 54, which is a nice, big suite facing Sunset.

PLAYBOY: Legend has it that the SNL parties were heavy on drugs, with plates of cocaine on tables.
WALKEN:: Honestly, that's like a movie. We had a scene in King of New York where there was a plate of cocaine, but I have never seen anything like that in my life. It was much more people sitting on couches, passing joints. I don't know if it's still like that. I hear all kinds of things about what people use. It's changed. The pills that put you in an ecstatic state -- people didn't used to take pills. And I've heard that heroin is getting cheaper. That sounds pretty nasty.

PLAYBOY: Is there a lot of jealousy among your peers? We've heard that you get jealous of men but not of women. True?
WALKEN:: Not as an actor. In life, it's a guy taking away your girlfriend. Nowadays, getting older, I find myself around guys who are annoying because they're a little too young, a little too good-looking, a little too sure of themselves. I'm like that with my wife. The other day we had a driver who was a young, good-looking guy. He was talking to her and I thought he was a little cocky and flirty. I found myself staring at him, like, Kid, should I eat you from your toes or from your nose?

PLAYBOY: Are you glad that you are not a woman?
WALKEN:: I'm glad I'm not a woman for a lot of reasons. Guys have a better deal, that's all there is to it. In every way. It's just better to be born a boy child. I'm not saying that men are better; it's just that men and women are very different. There is no comparison in terms of anything. That whole thing of giving birth? That's a frame of mind that's impossible for a man to know. Getting a hard-on, that's something a woman will never understand. It has nothing to do with more or less or better or quality of mind, but it's like men have a better agent or something. They come into the world with a better shake at a career and all sorts of things. John Gielgud just had his 93rd birthday and had to rush off to do a shoot somewhere. So he's working. That's what I want. I want to do a Pinter play when I'm 92.

PLAYBOY: Do you ever worry about that not happening? What is your greatest fear?
WALKEN:: I'm afraid of crazy people. I'm afraid of speeding cars. I'm afraid of accidents. I'm afraid of disease. I'm very nervous getting on the L.A. freeways with a driver. They drive so fast that if something were to happen you'd be creamed. The 50-mile-per-hour limit was very sensible.

PLAYBOY: What's the most scared you've ever been?
WALKEN:: The time I was trapped in an elevator with an 800-pound gorilla.

PLAYBOY: Seriously.
WALKEN:: Baudelaire once said, "I have felt the wind of the wings of madness." That happened to me once in my 40s and I got really scared.

PLAYBOY: Did you need professional help?
WALKEN:: I tried that once, two or three visits. He was a very nice man, and I said to him, "I don't think this is the thing I should be doing." And he said, "I think you're right." You have to have a sense of yourself and a perspective on life, sometimes taking a broader view and realizing you can be more daring with your mind, not be so afraid, just dive in.

PLAYBOY: How far in does your mind take you sometimes?
WALKEN:: That's the problem -- I found in my life that I was the least interesting when I was introspective. I did the least interesting work, I was the least interesting to be around. But a lot of my troubles were absolute bullshit compared with people who have cancer or have had something happen to their family.

PLAYBOY: Well, feeling the wings of madness is pretty serious.
WALKEN:: Yeah, but all sorts of dopey people go crazy. Going crazy has a certain amount of vanity connected to it. Realizing there's a sort of self-centered, whining thing in you -- just be brave. Somebody said to me once, "We're all dealt a hand." Some people get dealt better hands than others. That's why it's no good to be jealous of others. Everybody's at the center of something. The most you can do is to be your own unique self.

PLAYBOY: After spending some time with you, it's impossible not to notice how fastidious you are. Are you obsessed with cleanliness?
WALKEN:: It's funny you say that. To me it's an absolute necessity. Everybody should be that way. Cleanliness is a good thing. I'm very clean. I don't like things that aren't cleaned up. But I hardly use soap at all. I don't use a lot of soap because it makes me feel sticky. I don't like to use it in my hair -- I usually just run it under the water.

PLAYBOY: Which housekeeping chores do you do?
WALKEN:: I do most of the cooking. My wife cleans. When I'm in a hotel I make my own food and I clean up, too.

PLAYBOY: Why is everything good fattening?
WALKEN:: That's not true. The food I eat is good, and it's not fatty. I'm sort of a Japanese-Italian cook. In California you can get Chilean sea bass, which I can't get back East. The Chinese say there's only one way to cook fish -- steam it. I take my collapsible steamer with me wherever I go. I cut the tops of leeks and steam them soft, then lay the sea bass on them and add a little dill, salt, pepper. When you take it out the sea bass flakes off in slabs. Absolutely divine.

PLAYBOY: Do you chew gum?
WALKEN:: No.

PLAYBOY: Eat chocolate?
WALKEN:: No. I don't do sugar. It has a chemical effect on me. There are very few things that get me tense. I can drink a lot of coffee. But if I have half a soda I get wired.

PLAYBOY: How superstitious are you?
WALKEN:: Very. About everything. Not the standard stuff. My superstitions are mysterious and very powerful. They do not have names. I pay attention.

PLAYBOY: Tell us a little more than that.
WALKEN:: I can't. You're saying don't be mysterious about something mysterious. What I'm saying is, if I have a feeling, I obey it.

PLAYBOY: If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
WALKEN:: I'd be more entrepreneurial. I'm lazy. I wish I could be more of a business guy. I admire that. I read the business section of The New York Times every week. I'm amazed by guys who understand how companies are run. Managerial types of things. It's so foreign to me. It's being like a general, which is sort of what directing is. Having a finger in many different pots and pies at the same time.

PLAYBOY: Well, we've come to the end. Is there anything you regret talking about?
WALKEN:: There was one thing that bothered me, and it was my fault: when I said I'm 54 years old and the only person I know is Harry Dean Stanton. It's the only thing I said that I wish I hadn't because it's not nice to Harry Dean, and I didn't mean it that way. It's actually sort of the truth, but I don't want Harry Dean to take it the wrong way.

PLAYBOY: Harry Dean should be honored to be in such exclusive company.
WALKEN:: You think?





 

Premiere 1996
Walken on the wild side

He used to be a liontamer, he drives too slowly and, he assures Adam Higginbotham, he’d only do a parachute jump if it took him behind enemy lines. And his real name is Ronald.

In 1959, WHEN CHRISTOPHER WALKEN WAS 16 YEARS OLD, HE didn't quite know what he wanted to do for a living. So he joined a travelling circus and became a lion tamer. Don't ask how. Don't ask why. The important thing is: he was there, in a circus run by a man named Tarryl Jacobs, with boots,jodhpurs, redjacket and whip. Billed as Tarryl Jacobsj unior by the childless impresario, the young Walken would be left in the lion's cage at the end of "dad's" act, and all the lions but one would file out. Then Chris would crack his whip and the remaining beast, a tired, toothless lioness called Sheba, would wearily rise up on her podium and emit a feeble growl. The audience always gave him and Sheba a big hand.
In 1996, splayed awkwardly across an armchair in the lounge of the Chateau Marmont hotel, Walken laughs and licks his lips, illustrating the storv with exhausted-lion and whip-raising gestures. And then he stops, considering the freakishness of the image.
"I just did it for two months. It was very weird. I was a kid. But that was interesting. That's where I come from. True story. Tarryl Jacobs -"dad" - would take his shirt off; and... it was like lions had been chewing on him for 25 years. He wasjust shredded all over the place. And that's what he did for a living. I don't know..... .1 guess he wasn't a very good lion tamer." Again he trails off; staring vacantly around the room. The tale, and the past it hints at, are perhaps what leads him not to take himself too seriously.
"Absolutely. And also never to take a job like that again."

CHRISTOPHER WALKEN IS A VERY weird person. He is spooky, monosyllabic, unfriendly.
He shares many qualities with the characters he plays on screen - and they, by and large, are killers, gangsters, psychos, freaks and straight-up loonies. Walken is the guy who blew his brains out in TIze Deer Hunter. He is the remorseless drug lord in King Of New York. He is the man who executed Dennis Hopper in True Romance. He has an icy, alien air of distracted menace. Being in his company is like sharing a lift with Satan. He is deeply creepy.
That, at least, is what most people believe. Including his publicist. Fotry-eight hours before the interview is due to begin, the phone rings. There is a problem with travelling to the photo studio in Mr Walken's car. "What you have to understand," crackles the strained voice from LA, "is that Chris is a very strange man. You know that character you see up on the screen? Well, that isn't a character. That's what he's like in real life. You can't go in the limousine with him. I can't go in the limousine with him."
Everybody, it seems, knows that Christopher Walken is King Weird.

BUT THE MAN WHO GLIDES SMOOTHLY INTO THE LOBBY OF THE Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles has neither the demeanour of a contract killer nor the manners of a sociopath. He is polite. He smiles. He has a sense of humour. He tells anecdotes. He has exquisite comic timing. But there is, undeniably, something strange about him. While his personality is plainly not that of the characters you see up on the screen, his gestures and mannerisms are: the shark's eyes that slide away from your gaze at the last moment; the blank stare into space; the thin smile that twitches on his lips as he listens to what you have to say; the flat, disinterested voice that makes even the most sincere statements sound sardonic and threatening; the reptilian lip-licking; the hand semaphore. All the things that go into the creation ofthe callous gangster, the psychotic angel or the demented industrialist are right here in front of you.
It's not difficult to get Walken talking. He's affable enough. But you can't really have a conversation with him. The disconcerting batter, ot pauses, stares and off-kilter rhythms that characterise his speech make that almost impossible. Ile leaves sentences hanging in mid-air. deliver, ideas via a halting verbal cut-up technique. and says things like "I think that's very amusing" in a way which leaves you in no doubt that what he really means is "I'll have you killed."

AT FIRST, THE MAKERS OF THINGS To Do in Denver when you’re dead weren't sure who to cast in the part of the malevolent, paraplegic. wheelchair-bound mafioso The Man With The Plan. He can't move. yet for whole scenes Andy Garcia's character is required to stand there and watch him - through pages and pages of dialogue. And he must feel compelled to watch.
"He's sitting there - a head," says director Gary Fleder. "How manv guys out there can do that? Nicholson can do it. Probably Pacino. And then Chris Walken's a guy who can do it time and time again. You can just sit and watch him speak."
Nonetheless, they hesitated to use him because he's played the captivating bad guy countless times before. In the end, they couldn't believe what they got. "He really out-Walkens Walken," says Denver writer Scott Rosenberg. "He's just so out there."
What is it with him? The mannerisms. The look. That hair. The intensity of his evil screen presence is derived direcdy from his evervdav bearing. He is pleasant, but the othemess of his delivery does occasionally verge on performance. When he orders a glass of grapefruit juice, it seems possible the waiter will return offering the drink, the keys to his car, the deeds to his house, all the money in his pockets and the plea to "Just leave the kids out of it, OK?"
"My personality," Walken suggests, "is affected by the fact that I grew up differently from most people. Strangeness equates into villainy very easily. Just as a phobic thing. If you don't know what it is, you fear it. But I don't feel strange. I really don't feel strange."

THE COMMON PERCEPTION OF what Walken is like in real life is simply the wrong way around. All the frightening alien qualities vou see in the movies are real. The personality that informs them is not. The fact is not that Christopher Walken is like his characters, but that his characters are like him. He doesn't mean anything by it. That's just the way he is.
And the reasons he came to be this way are not what you might expect. Walken and his contemporaries - Pacino, De Niro, Keitel -have built careers around brutal depictions of grim reality. But Walken is the only actor of his generation who would call himself „a performer“ And he's certainly the only one who describes himself as working in „show business“. If he's a bit odd, it's not because he suffered years of unspoken terrors on the streets of the Bronx. It's because he's a survivor of a world long gone. Because Christopher Walken began performing at the age of three.
"I grew up in show business," he says. "And it made me different."

BACK IN LATE-'405 NEW YORK, THINGS WERE VERY DIFFERENT INDEED.
For a start, Christopher Walken wasn't even called Christopher. He was born in 1943 and named Ronald, after Ronald Colman. He had two brothers: Glen and Ken. They lived in Astoria, Queens, where their father ran a bakery. Their mother, a vivacious, outgoing woman who might otherwise have been a performer herself decided her sons should be in showbiz. Catalogue models as toddlers, they quickly graduated to TV, playing bit parts in the genesis of modem television: over 90 live TV shows went out every week from Manhattan, and Ronnie was there. He was on Howdy Doody, Philco TV Playhouse and Thle Colgate Comedy Hour.
By the time he was seven, he'd wander around the studios and find grown women dressed as cigarette packets. Or pass monkeys riding motor scooters. By the time he was ten, he'd already appeared on screen with Dean Martin, Sid Caesar and Jerry Lewis. It was a strange place - a naive and surreal area of conformist fantasy in which America created an image of what it wanted to be.
"In those days all TV was See the USA in your Chevrolet'," says Walken. 'It was so family- oriented and wholesome that they used kids like furniture. The',"d have a scene and - particularly in the holidays -they'd just stick a bunch of kids in there. They just had us there because everybody loves kids. It was an unusual childhood. but it was a great one. A total education of another sort."

FIFTY YEARS IN SHOW BUSINESS HAVE MADE CHRISTOPHER WALKEN peculiar in many ways. He has never learned to swim. He has never been to a ball game. He's hard pushed to think of any close friends, except for his wife, who he's been married to for 27 years. He only reads the paper on Sundays. At home, he channel-surfs on cable, looking for old black and-white movies to watch.
"I don't have any hobbies. I don't have kids.... .1 have cats. I'm not really interested in too many things except my work. Whatever the best thing in front of me is, I usually take it. Because it's either that or sitting around at home, and I can't stand that. There's no scheme to it, what I do. It's, Have I been sitting around at home for two weeks? If I'm in the house for two weeks, I would, you know... I would play... anything."
On location, Walken always shops for his own food. He puts on a baseball cap and goes down to the supermarket. He hardly ever eats in restaurants. He doesn't want anyone else touching his food. He wants to know where it's been.
"I can't believe the things people eat. Pariticulary in this country'. The way we eat is just unbelievable. I wish this whole country would eat better. I figure a lot of diseases would diminish, don't you?" He sighs and looks away. "Americans with fast food it's. . . too bad." But if he does go to the supermarket, he has to get someone else to take him. He has a black Cadillac from which he's had all the chrome and markings removed. It looks just like a hearse. But he doesn't like to drive it much. When he does, he drives so slowly that other motorists blow their horns at him.
"And they scream as they go by. I drive very carefully. Listen, you know, I'd rather take chances in my work. I don't need to take any other chances. You would never get me on a motorcycle. I seriously doubt if I will ever get on a horse in a movie again. They're dangerous. There are things that are dangerous; you shouldn't do them. I mean, I look at someone bungee jumping, and I think, There goes another ass-hole. Or parachute jumping, for that matter. Unless you're dropping behind enemy lines, I really don't see the need for it."
He gazes around the room, and his stare comes to rest on the back of my hand, where there is an address written in black ballpoint.
"That's not permanent is it?" he asks, with concern. "People really do that to themselves, don't they?"

WHEN HE WAS OLD ENOUGH, Ronnie's mum sent him off on the subway to the Professional Children's School in Manhattan. Most of the pupils were girls ("it was like I had 40 sisters") and those that weren't were not your average brattish stage-school wannabes. Little Ronnie went to school with Sal Mineo, Frankie Lymon, Brandon De Wilde and Marvin Hamlisch. Marvin wrote an opera at ten and went on to become a phenomenally successful songwriter. Walken still knows him today. Frankie was 14 when he and his group The Teenagers had a huge international hit with "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" But he was a heroin addict by 15; at 26, he was dead. Brandon played the kid in Shaize at ten and, one day in the men's room, taught Ronnie how to knot a tie. But his career tailed off and he died in a car crash at 30. Sal was in Rebel Without A Cause and Giant, but hardly worked after that. He drifted into darkness and obscurity and was stabbed to death at 37.
"It is," says Walken flatly, "a tough business."
After school, and on the weekends, Ronnie would go to the movies with his friends in Queens. He'd spend all day Saturday - from ten in the morning till four in the afternoon at the pictures. There would be 20 or 30 cartoons, three features and a serial Charlie Chan, The Molemen or, a particular favourite, the westernThe laughing Man. A Lone Ranger clone, the Laughing Man would walk into a saloon where the bad guys were playing poker. His knife had a picture of him on the handle, and when he threw it into the table, it would quiver, animating the picture into a laugh. "And then he would, of course, destroy them all."
The features themselves were almost always war movies The Bridges Of Toko-Ri, Battle Cry or Pork Chop Hill. Anything with Aldo Ray was always good. Afterwards, the kids would adjourn to a nearby vacant lot and re-enact the story, crawling around in the dirt. Ronnie usually took the Aldo Ray part: "I was sort of heroic, sure," Walken says, somewhat defensivelv. "I was never the bad guy. I was always gonna take that hill!"
When he was 14, Ronnie saw Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show. He loved everything about him - especially his haircut. As soon as he could, Ronnie changed his hair to be more like The King's. It's stayed the same ever since.

OF ALL THE TICS, EXPRESSIONS AND SIGNIFIERS THAT MAKE WALKEN'S characters so mesmerisingly dark, the one at the heart of the black hole of menace is The Look. In all his most outstandingly grim moments -Frank White in Kirg of New York watching his treacherous lieutenant plead pathetically for his life; Vincenzo Coccotti in True Romance torturing Dennis Hopper; The Man With The Plan making his deep displeasure felt - he will half smile and glance away. Mid-sentence, his eves slide sideways and amusement plays on his lips. It's as if when he looks at you he already sees a dead man and is daydreaming about what spectacularly unpleasant things he's going to do his next victim. There's a supercomputer of evil in there behind the eyes, calculations and machi-nations beyond anyone's understanding. It's this cold-hearted, inhuman superiority that makes him so compelling. Mention this to Walken and he laughs. Mid-sentence, his eyes slide sideways and amusement plays on his lips. "I'm thinking about something else. What that could be is that I get suddenly fixated on something and it will interrupt my conversation. Something will happen and I'll get distracted. But that's what actors are supposed to be like - a little like kids, you know? Distraction is good. It means you re pa~,ing attention to what's going on - the way kids are. They'll talk to you and then they go" - he stares distractedly away into space. "It's like, 'Next!"' OK, sure, sure. That's what yoir're like. But the characters. The machination. The superiority. Already seeing a dead man
"I don't think so." He smiles as if the thought has never occurred to him. "It's not in the characters. No. I think ifyou see that, it's me play'ing the part and suddenly thinking about something else. And then I come back to it. Suddenly, something crosses my mind. When I go to dailies and I see that kind of thing, I think that's perfectly natural, that's the way people are. Aren't you that way? When you talkto people aren't you also thinking that you mustn't forget to pick up your laundry?"
Walken is full of this kind ofsruff If it's demystification vou want, he's your man. He prepares for a part by reading his lines in different voices -Italian, Spanish, German, some slow, some fast, some serious passages in a Pee-Wee Herman voice - until he finds a common rhythm. He doesn't consciously develop his characters. He's never met anyone even remotely like the people he plays.
"I grew up with people in show business," he laughs in disbelief "We did not shoot each other. Really. That's the great thing about showbiz - everybodv's really nice."
He has no time for The Method. Hejust turns up and does it. "It boils down to: Can you act? Who cares what you think?"
The reason the set piece between Walken and Hopper in True Roniarice is so effective is that they got on well together offset. "First of all," Walken remembers, "he made me laugh, and that was very important tant in the scene. The fact that I was really enjoying this guy, and then I shoot him anyway. And the same is true of him - he really enjoyed telling me that story. And you could see it was delightful, don't you think? It happens to end with me shooting him in the head. But up until then, wasn't it delightful?"
And if his characters' callousness is often so extreme that it seems funny, there's a simple reason for that, too: "I always know I'm in a movie. Having been in show business all my life, I'd feel hypocritical telling you it was real. That's just the thing I was brought up with. My acting technique comes directly out of musical comedy."

WALKEN WASN'T MUCH GOOD WITH ACADEMIC WORK, SO HE concentrated his teenage energies on becoming a dancer. He went on the road with touring musicals, the cast setting up home in cheap hotels up and down the country, taking their pots and pans and bohemian lifestyle with them. And, of course, he tried lion taming for a while. Then, at 18,just out of high school, when everyone else was leaving to go and take up ordinary lives, he spent a few days thinking about what to do. He'd drive down to the park in his car and gaze into the middle distance. Pragmatically, he thought, What do I like to do? Well. . . nothing. But how could he earn a living? He could be a bartender. He could drive a truck.......
"I really couldn't do anything. I wasn't good in school; but I was in show business. And I thought, Well, what could I do and have more fun? Nothing. So that's what I kept doing."
Just short of completing the first year of a course in English and Drama at Hofstra University, Ronnie Walken left education behind and went to dance OffBroadwav with Liza Minnelli in Best Foot Forward. The following year, he appeared in High Spirits and then in a brief run of the Sherlock Holmes musical Baker Street, in 1965. This somehow led to his first dramatic role, as King Philip Of France in The Lion In Winter.
In the meantime, Walken changed his name. He'd never liked Ronnie. It sounded too dorky. Dancing in a nightclub act with one Monique Van Vooren, at the end of every night's show she would introduce himto the audience. One night she said, "You know, I don't really like Ronnie. I see you more as a Christopher. Do you mind if I call you Christopher?" He didn't. So it was Christopher Walken who took to the stage as an actor, and danced and sang in mwical comedies -"gee golly type of things". In 1969, while they were both appearing in a summer- stock production of West Side Story, Christopher met his 'wife.

IN THE YEARS SINCE THEN, CHRISTOPHER WALKEN HAS MADE A CAREER from being the baddest thing ever to walk across a cinema screen. But it almost didn't happen like that at all. In 1970, he screentested for the Ryan O'Neal part in Love Story. It's difficult to imagine now. It was also, he points out, difficult to imagine then: "That's why I didn't get the part. They knew I wouldn't be any good in it."
He shouldn't have been surprised - he'd never been able to play Romeo on stage, either. Everything he said always sounded a bit sarcastic. In the end, his first film appearance was as Sean Connery's sidekick in the 1971 caper movie TIie Anderson Tapes. He was 28 years old.
But it would be another six years until he'd come to the attention of a wider audience: playing Diane Keaton's deranged brother Duane in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. He's only in the film for a few moments, but in those moments, he talks fixedly to Allen, Annie's visiting boyfriend, about his urge to drive his car into headlong traffic. "And actors tend to do things, and they stick. The romantic guy tends to play a lot of those kind of guys. The funny guy tends to play a lot of those kind ofguys. And the frrst thing anybody saw me in, I talk about dnving into headlong traffic."
Of course, winning an Oscar for blowing his brains out in The Deer Hunter probably didn't help much either. But from that point onwards, it was spooks, psychos and heavies all the way for Christopher Walken: The Dead Zone, Communion, A View To A Kill, Batman Returns, At Close Range, The Comfort of Strangers, Wayne's World 2. Pulp Fiction...loonies all. And the last time he played a hero?
"Never. A famous, big movie actor said to me once, 'Do you die in every movie?' And I thought about it and said, 'Yes.' He said to me, 'D'you know, I've never died."'
"I'm not complaining about playing villains. It's how I make my living. But I'd love to play a hero. I'd love to play James Bond," he says, and then, in a slightly dejected register, "Nobody's going to ask me to play James Bond."

WALKEN NEVER KNOWS WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE HIS CHARACTERS ARE until he sees them on the screen. If he's produced something particularly diabolical, he thinks to himself, Ooh, that's good. "I really do feel about it that way: Oh, that'll get 'em. Ooh, that's a good one. And if I think, Oh, gee, that didn't work, then I get depressed."
Of all his creations, the only one who's ever genuinely frightened him is the one in Paul Schrader's The Comfort Of Strangers - an Italian socialite who wines and dines Rupert Everett and then slits his throat. When it's brought up, it's the only point in our conversation that he looks plainly uncomfortable.
"I don't think I've ever played anyone quite as horrible in the way that it can be deeply unsettling to be in a room with somebody who is mentally disturbed. As much as you have compassion for them, it scares me."
When he was shooting the film in Rome, he was sitting in his dressing room reading a book when he looked up and caught sight of himself in a mirror. He reacted to his reflection as you would if you walked into a restaurant and saw someone you really didn't want to meet. "I looked up and quickly looked away, thinking, I hope he leaves. I hope he didn't see me. But being the villain has its advantages. Since he made King Of New York, he can go pretty much anywhere he likes in the city, no matter how bad the area. One summer Saturday night a couple of years ago, he decided to go to Times Square to see a late show of the Hughes Brothers' ultra-violent Menace II Society.Everybody in the audience was like everybody in the movie. Street people. And they took good care of me. Just kept an eye out and made sure I was OK. 'Cause they'd seen King of New York. I'm a homeboy."

OF ALL THE MOVIES WALKEN has made, one of his favourite is also one of the most obscure: an '80s Israeli musical production ot Puss In Boots. "It's very good. It's one of my best performances. It's a wonderful story - about a cat who gets these boots and becomes a man. In the original story he's just a cat who stands up and talks. But in this, it was this orange- and white cat walking around, and then suddenly it would be me. I had my hair dyed red and I had a moustache and... I really looked like a cat. I sing and dance. It was very funny."
Christopher Walken is reallv not what you expect. He is not, to put it mildly, unaware of the way people see him. When he's shootinga movie, for instance, he'll just put on a reedy, nerdy voice before a take and say, "Is it hot in here, or am I crazy?"
"And for some reason people laugh," he adds. Sometimes he'll just announce that he's dedicating the take to Jerry Lewis. "And for some reason," he says. his face a mask of earnestness. "that makes people laugh also. Because of the way people perceive me, I can def- initely have fun with it."
Despite the cable channel-surfing and the working every fortnight, he has managed to write a play about Elvis, based on the stories he's clipped from copies of The National Enquirer and Weekly World News he's bought on his Supermarket trips. And he's written a script about porn star John Holmes - a project he wants to star in, and Abel Ferrara to direct. When Holmes died of AIDS, he had had sex with 10,000 people. was a free-base cocaine addict and was wanted for murder. Elvis and Holmes are both men crushed by the pressures of fame, who died in middle age. Ferrara is quick to make the link. "Walken's obsessed with Holmes," he said in 1990. "He relates to all this because that's what 33 years in show business is like."

JUST THE OTHER DAY, CHRISTOPHER WALKEN BUMPED INTO AN OLD friend in the street. They're the same age. They've known one another for years. At the time, Walken was on his way to see Things to do in DenverYou're Dead for the first time. So Walken invited the friend along, and they went to see the movie together.
Afterwards, Walken noticed his friend was horrified by what he had just seen. "Jesus Christ." he muttered, "that's the most terrible person I ever saw . . . That's just the most terrible person I ever saw."
Christopher Walken looked back at his friend and said, very reasonably, "Well, thank you."
 

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