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Bryan Layne: I believe I’ve spoken with somebody involved in just about every major aspect of THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM this week.

Lance Henriksen: That was a very unusual experience. We were shooting at a castle in Italy and I was stuck there for a couple of months. So, I started living that character and it was just very bizarre. The problem with it was that the character of Torquemada was an insane guy who wrote a hundred books on how to torture people, and after awhile it started getting to me. There was an actual Dominican monk who came to the set one day and I asked him why this guy wasn’t excommunicated. I felt that Torquemada was as bad as Hitler. The monk said he was a very important theologian and I almost kicked him in the ass. I was so mad. I was like, are you kidding me? You forgive everything! It truly was bizarre.

B.L.: How about new things you have coming out, anything there you’d like to talk about?

L.H.: Oh yeah, I have a lot of films coming out. I did a film with Ed Harris, Renee Zellweger, Viggo Mortensen and Jeremy Irons. It’s a western called APPALOOSA and we finished that one about three or four months ago in New Mexico. Ed Harris is a good friend, but he’s also a terrific talent. He wrote it, he directed it and he’s in it. He was the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral in this particular movie. I also just did a new movie for Hallmark called LADIES OF THE HOUSE, which was great fun to do and it was a wonderful script. I did SCREAMERS 2. I’ve been very busy and I can’t even remember them all. I’ve just been doing all kinds of work. If you check me out on IMDb, they don’t even have them all listed on there yet.

B.L.: Do you remember some early films that might have influenced you?

L.H.: When I was a kid, I would run away from home a lot and I would go to the movies. When I say ran away, I mean I wouldn’t ever go to school; I hated school. I ended up watching a movie called THE BIG SKY with Kirk Douglas and they were going up river on barges. I remember seeing that one for eight hours straight. It was back in the day when you could sit through a film over and over again. I even got camping gear and put it under my chair like I was on the voyage with them. I think that was the beginning of it all because I was a method movie viewer. I was just raised around films. Also, back in that day, comic books were very different than they are now. There was TALES FROM THE CRYPT and all these really gory comic books that frightened the parents. I remember a time in America when they started burning those. Parents would grab boxes of comic books and burn them because they thought the kids were getting corrupted. They really were radical and they were meant to be subversive. I used to read them all the time and that all influenced me because it set your imagination to work. I think that’s why school was so boring to me. Because they would talk about stuff that I thought I would never use. I had no interest at all and would just stare out the window all day.

B.L.: How did acting become a career choice for you?

L.H.: I went to The Actor’s Studio when I was sixteen because I’m from New York. I lived there and I was a street kid, a shoeshine kid. I went to The Actor’s Studio because I wanted to study there and they turned me away because when I was sixteen… I looked twelve. I went back when I was thirty and I finally auditioned for them. That’s where it all started and I became an observer. When I got into acting I had a rough time because I couldn’t really read. It would take me a day to read a page. It was a very slow process, learning how to read and not telling anybody. I was always a pretty good liar about it all, so that was a natural for acting (laughing).

B.L.: Did you ever get busted for your inability to read?

L.H.: Not really because I was good at hiding it. I would say that I was dyslexic. I was intelligent, but just not well versed in it all. I finally got good at it. I would say that I needed glasses to try and hide it. I had a lot of friends in New York and we’d read plays together. When they would ask me to do that, I’d always spend more time on it than anybody else because they were just reading it, I was trying to absorb it. I didn’t realize there was so much writing involved with movies and theater (laughing).

B.L.: So, training as an actor you taught yourself how to read?

L.H.: Yeah, pretty much. It just goes to prove one thing, if people have a will and if they really want to do something… in America you can do just about anything. It’s been proven over and over again in business and everywhere else. There’s no single way to do anything. School doesn’t necessarily produce functioning and active people.

B.L.: You did three important Sidney Lumet films in a row, how did that relationship begin?

L.H.: When I was in New York back in the early days of my acting, Sidney Lumet was one of those guys who only made films in New York. That was all he wanted to do and he loved to use new, young actors. He tried to support them in any way that he could. He would say to a lot of young actors, “Look, this part only works for a week, but I’m going to give you run of the show.” That means you are there and you get paid for the whole movie. We were only going to be paid scale, but still, that meant I could get an apartment. Scale was like a thousand dollars a week back then and that was a lot of money for a young actor in New York. I was waiting tables and getting fired because I was a lousy waiter. I was sleeping on girls’ couches just to have a place to go. So, it was a very big deal to get that job.

B.L.: Your part in DOG DAY AFTERNOON was quite pivotal.

L.H.: Yeah, I killed the guy…one of my friends. John Cazale was a really wonderful guy. We used to get ice cream together. I remember shooting that scene, John was sitting in the back of the van and I was in the driver’s seat. We tried to rehearse it and I turned around to him and said, “Hey Sal, keep the gun up.” We started laughing because what we were about to be filming was just so grim. We laughed for a solid hour and the crew was trying to place the cameras on the hood of the van to complete the scene. It just hit our funny bone. We figured the laughter would dry up and everybody could get some work done, but it really never did. It was fun. We had a great bunch of people working on that film and I already knew everybody in that movie; every one of us had done theater together. That was all Al Pacino’s doing. He’s a real auteur. He loves working with his friends and when you get to know people, your trust level is so high that you can do wonderful work. He was on fire back in those days. It was great.

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