You're obviously right at home with the dark comedy that's prevalent in Suicide Kings. In fact, many of the characters you've played seem to be balanced by a bemused, almost mischievous aspect—as if they're pulling a prank that no one else quite gets.
Sometimes actors are smiling at what's going on on the other side of the camera, from the other actors and so forth. These things sometimes end up in the movie, even though they’re not necessarily related to the movie. Somebody smiles and it takes on some sort of unintended meaning in the context of reversing back and forth. But that’s part of movie acting. I read an interesting thing in some book about painters: when Da Vinci had people pose for him he would have in his studio jugglers, musicians, comics. He’d have a show going on. It could be that Mona Lisa is smiling at a monkey.

There’s a whole secret world there—
Absolutely. And it’s part of the relationship between the actor, the director, and the editor. If I had another area of movies to go into, it would be editing. It’s fascinating, taking unrelated bits of film and putting them together in an interesting way that was never intended in the first place.
 

"A chopped-off finger, that’s hard to deal with. I only laugh about it because to me it’s just a rubber thing with a ring on it."

You once did a Saturday Night Live skit where the great mystery of Pat’s gender finally drove you to suicide. It was brilliant self-parody. How do you feel when other people impersonate you?
It’s only happened in the last few years. I’m delighted. It’s very interesting to sit at home and watch the Oscars and have Kevin Spacey do me on stage—and very well. There I am at the Oscars and in fact I’m sitting at home.

I've read accounts of how nervous you were back when you were starting out in film. On this set you were the veteran, the tribal elder. Did you offer guidance to any of the younger actors?
No, they were all very good, and kind of veterans themselves. Good actors, you know, don’t really talk that much about acting. They usually talk about anything but. You know, basketball . . .

Your performance in Suicide Kings is nuanced in a way that creates very different relationships with each of the boys—a look in the eyes, a modulation of the voice—
I suppose that came naturally. I think from the time I was a kid, I tended to behave a little bit like who I’m with. I used to come out of cowboy movies talking like a cowboy, even though I was in Queens. And it would take me half a day to get over that.

The severed finger takes on a whole dimension of its own in this film—a powerful fetish of visceral violence.  
A chopped-off finger, that’s hard to deal with. [Laughs.] They keep it on ice. They sew it back on. I guess I’m okay. I only laugh about it because to me it’s just a rubber thing with a ring on it.

Can you point to one thing in particular that influenced you to sign on to this film?
Well, it was a good part and it had good actors and I liked the director. Aside from that . . . I have a family, but I don’t have children. I don’t have hobbies. I don’t like to travel much because that’s built into my job. So what I like to do is work.

My favorite quote of yours is, "Some of the stuff I do, I don’t understand at all." Do you have a mysterioso side that you just tap into somehow?
I think so. I think it’s something that I’m quite good at—that “don’t ask me” aspect of my acting. I really believe that what actors do together is take the script which they all have in front of them, and make it work. And how they make it work is really . . . like Milton Berle used to say, "It’s bigger than both of us." 

As you get older and wiser is your approach to acting changing?
No. As I get older I get hungrier for work. I got so much time left, I’m very anxious to just keep going.

You’ve had a whole other life in live theater. Is that a world you still try to spend time in?
Yeah, but I did so much of that in the first long period of my career that I’d rather remain making movies as long as I can.

You once said you got a lot of momentum in life from women, yet females play very minor roles in Suicide Kings. Don’t these mostly-male films seem a bit lopsided emotionally?
I don’t do too many of them. I think this movie is by nature a guy thing. That’s the story. If there had been a woman in the middle of all that, she would have said, "Stop this instantly and all you get out of my house." But then there would have been no movie.

Abel Ferrara has said that just to look at you is to realize you’ve “been through some heavy-duty shit.” But it sounds like your life has been fairly satisfying: a very cool childhood, a good marriage, a successful career, and a whole lot of respect from your peers. Is there any serious trauma in there?
No, not at all. I think he might have meant that I grew up in show business, which to him is very scary. But not to me.
 

Production notes:

The first part they had to cast was Charlie Barrett the John Gotti Mafia type. O'Fallon knew the complex role would be the most difficult to cast since the part was about a man who had gone legitimate, yet now he is facing the payback for everything he has done.
The writers had always thought of and pictured Christopher Walken in that role. O'Fallon wanted him too as the Oscar-winning actor as an American icon. The director knew that Walken's evil film image represented corruption and evil. O'Fallon thought the audience would see him and think that he was the bad guy, but they would soon discover otherwise. He wanted to play with the actor's image to the film's advantage.

Walken read the part and agreed to the role. He liked the idea of playing a classic film character like a mob godfather. Walken could interject his own wry, ironic humor into the part in order to make it his own. The thing that appealed to him was playing a man who has a specific and very different relationship with all the young guys.

Walken faced the most difficult challenge in being tied up to a chair through the majority of his scenes. He is the type of actor who moves his body a lot. Walken  especially likes to use his hands, but all of that was out for this film. It was difficult at first for him not to be a physical actor, but he very quickly hit this stride.

Peter O'Fallon knew when he read the script that the part of the gangster who loves expensive shoes had to go to Denis Leary. The actor agreed to star because he liked the role reversal. Leary thought it was cool that he and Walken are crooks, yet they are the good guys in the film.
O'Fallon next had to cast the group of boys who kidnap the former mobster. Because Christopher Walken agreed to star in the film, Jay Mohr, Sean Patrick Flanery, Johnny Galecki, Jeremy Sisto and Henry Thomas all clamored to work with him.

When he got the part, Galecki told the director, "I would have paid to be in the same room as Walken just to breathe the same air." The rest of the cast felt just honored to work with him. At the first rehearsal, Walken arrived on time while the other actors were all late.
Walken pulled out his script and every word had a note on it about what he wanted to do. The others were all amazed. The next day all the guys were exactly on time, and they too had put notes all over their scripts. Since most of the film takes place in a house, the guys all got to know each other really well.

When things got tense during the thirty- four day shoot, the guys would try to come up with impressions of Christopher Walken. Jay Mohr seemed to come up with the best ones, but he had parodied the actor on a "Saturday Nicht Live" skit called "Christopher Walken's Psychic Friends Network."--

         

"Christopher was also extremely enthusiastic about the film," Sisto said. "He's a legend. He's brilliant. You are definitely a little intimidated just by that alone. You're also intimidated by the fact that he's such an elusive guy. You can't really figure out what he's thinking, ever. There were definitely moments where you stopped and said, 'What the hell! I'm acting with Christopher Walken.'"

Christopher Walken kind of set the tone of professionalism with all the other actors," O'Fallon said. "So between all five of them they ended up just complimenting each other and being competitive, but being competitive in a really healthy way. Christopher is who Christopher is. He's an icon and there were a lot of times [when he was] telling stories and cracking jokes and [had] all of them at his feet. Pretty impressive actually. It's a great thing to watch and be involved with."

Galecki said, "[Walken] likes to kind of think aloud and lets you know where his thoughts are and where he's at in a scene either mentally or emotionally and lets you know where he's going with it. A lot of those thoughts that he spoke aloud became lines and were left in the movie and gave us the freedom to do the same. In every scene there is some ad-libbing at the very least. This was much more fun and much more satisfying (than I Know What You Did Last Summer which he starred in last winter)."

O'Fallon said, "I actually encouraged [improvising] as long as they were within the bounds of what we were trying to do."

"He filmed so much footage that he really could have cut together any film that he wanted to," Sisto said. "He could cut together a more dramatic one or a more comedic one. He really tried to get as many options as he could."

All of the improvisation and changes actually changed the face of the film, said the director. "As it went on, I was amazed how much it changed from the initial vision," O'Fallon said. "When I first got involved, I started adding the dark elements to it and then the further we went on, the darker it seemed to become."

"It's a problem for an actor like me because, you know, I move my body a lot and like to use my hands. I'm very physical, so it was peculiar not to have them to use," Walken said.

Galecki said, "It's an impressive acting feat for Chris ... to be that expressive with that little to do, especially with his hands tied up."

"I love seeing him tied to the chair and seeing him have to work his magic ­ having to use all his tools," Sisto said.

In addition to being a dark comedy, Suicide Kings turned out to be an actors' workshop, an experiment in male bonding and an independent filmmaker's and a group of young actors' opportunity to break into the industry.

"I ultimately saw it like a really great basketball game as opposed to a street brawl," O'Fallon said. "When everything is working well and everyone is passing the ball. It was good. It was actually really fun. It was, by far, the best in guy bonding and testosterone that you could imagine."

                                                                             Walken at Work

Talking with Christopher Walken about Suicide Kings, a movie he steals sitting down.

It's not often that an actor gives one of his best performances while taped to a chair, but that's what happens to Christopher Walken in Suicide Kings. The veteran creep-out artist plays Charlie Barrett (formerly Carlo Bertolucci), a retired mob boss who is kidnapped by a group of moneyed youngsters in the hopes that he can be persuaded to help one of them retrieve his kidnapped sister (said method of persuasion involving, among other things, the severing of one of Barrett's fingers). While the movie doesn't always work as a whole, Walken's wickedly deadpan performance is a solid center for a movie that badly needs one.

What emerges most strongly from Suicide Kings is a sense of the class divisions between the former Mafioso and his wealthy abductors. As he slyly turns them against each other with a few well-placed words, Charlie tells his captors the one thing his hard life has taught him: "You can't trust each other, but you can trust the word on the street."

Speaking on the phone from his Manhattan apartment, Walken comes across as the old-fashioned kind of actor, one for whom acting is, first and foremost, a job. The baker's son from Queens shares with Charlie Barrett a working-class upbringing, and a brief glance at Walken's list of credits confirms the phrase he repeats several times during a brief conversation: "I like to work."

For Walken, Charlie Barrett is "kind of a good guy, a man of principle. He had a very spotty youth, but he was very intelligent, hard-working, and people respected him. He wasn't in the right business, but he made his money and got out." Despite his disreputable past, Charlie emerges as the movie's moral conscience, and even, says Walken, as a "father figure" for his captors.

With his air of ironic detachment and half-lidded cunning, Charlie Barrett is in some ways the über Walken role, the perfect distillation of a c.v. rife with shady characters and psychos. (In a less pronounced way, it's the equal of Jack Nicholson's performance in Batman, or Al Pacino's in The Devil's Advocate.) Does Walken ever get tired of being offered the same old roles? "I would like to do different things," he says, "and sometimes I do. But I like to work, and the fact that they want me for something is good." -Sam Adams