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B.L.: By the time you moved on to CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND had you relocated to California?

L.H.: No, I was still in New York and Steven Spielberg wanted to meet me after DOG DAY AFTERNOON. He just wanted to meet me to see if I was any different from the character I portrayed in that film (laughing). When we did CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, I would say things and Spielberg would look at me like I was quoting lines to a completely different movie. I wanted to throw my jacket over one of the little creatures and capture him (laughing).

B.L.: It always seemed your role in that film was much bigger, but was cut severely.

L.H.: I worked on that movie for six months. I actually learned how to fly airplanes during that shoot. I’d get up at four in the morning and go down to take flying lessons. We were shooting on a big ex-military airport, a giant hangar. I would land at close to eight o’clock right on that runway, get out of the plane and go straight into work. I did all of that because I thought the character would have known how to fly and I was preparing to jump out of an airplane. Spielberg sent one of the assistant directors out to me and he said, “Lance, that’s enough. We’re not going to let you jump.” They had all found out I was going to jump that day.

B.L.: How did your continued collaboration with director James Cameron come about? Would it have been from PIRANHA 2: THE SPAWNING?

L.H.: Yeah, we had met down on that movie. He was working with a really insane producer and I had already worked with the same producer before. So, we had that in common. I got down there and I realized that the budget was about $350,000. We didn’t even have wardrobe. Jim and I were sitting in an outdoor restaurant in Jamaica. A waiter walked by and he was pretty much the same size I was. I bought his uniform off of him and that’s what I used in the movie. I paid the guy seventy-five bucks for his shirt and pants because they had epaulets and a blue stripe down the pants leg. I was playing a harbor cop and I bought the clothes from the guy because I felt it looked similar to a police uniform. That’s how bad we had it. Jim was in his room making rubber fish because they didn’t give him enough of them. We both wound up in the parking lot making miniature boats that we were going to blow up. They had a great Italian crew on that film, but the producer was completely nuts. We had a helicopter that was lent to us by the Jamaican drug police. We were shooting this scene where the helicopter was running and all the rotary blades were spinning. The scene was long and involved a complicated dolly shot. The other actors and I had to deliver a powerful monologue about my relationship with my ex-wife. The producer came up to me and said, “Lance! Lance! If you finish this scene in one hour, I’ll buy you the best meal you’ve ever had.” I had to say, “Why don’t you just go away, man? Get the hell out of here (laughing).” Jim kept fighting with the guy to just let him finish shooting the film. There’s a great story about Jim Cameron and that film. The producer turned that film in to Warner Brothers. They looked at it and turned it down flat. It was on a cassette and Jim took that cassette and re-edited the film. He took it back to Warner Brothers and they said; “Now that’s a movie.” That’s just how Jim is. He will not let up.

B.L.: Could you tell he was going to be what he became?

L.H.: It would be easy to say yes, but let me just say this: the only thing I respond to and respect most is labor. Anybody who puts that many hours in and works that hard, without complaint, has my respect. There’s no doubt about it. I mean, he was my kind of guy because, I’m telling you right now, I’m pretty much the same way. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have a career right now and I would have faded out. I wasn’t one of those actors who looked like Tom Cruise…EVER. Charlie Durning said to me while we were shooting DOG DAY, “Lance, you’re not going to make it until you’re older.” I asked him why and he said, “Because you look funny.” I told Charlie to go to hell (laughing). But anyway, after that movie Jim and I met in Los Angeles and he came over to my house. He was painting the Terminator because he wanted to use the painting as a selling tool for that film. I had read that script and liked it. I thought the whole story was wild and well written. Cameron is one of those guys who’s there on the set before everybody else and is the last one to leave at the end of the day. He’s done more jobs than everybody else on the set, also. He’s just one of those guys. So, it was kind of like, how could you not know he was going to go somewhere? It wasn’t like a soothsayer going, “I see a golden aura around this guy (laughing).” It was his hard work ethic. Everybody seems to think films are easy to do and they really aren’t.

B.L.: You portrayed real-life astronaut Wally Schirra in THE RIGHT STUFF, did you spend a lot of time around him?

L.H.: No, actually I didn’t. I did meet him finally when the film came out. We were at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. We had taken a tour of The White House and then we went on over to The Kennedy Center for the big premiere screening. Wally was sitting next to me and he leaned over and said, “Boy, it looks like they think I didn’t do much.”

B.L.: Is that another film that might have cut out most of your scenes?

L.H.: Oh, sure. My thoughts on this whole subject of getting cut out of films, especially in my early career, is that when they are paying you peanuts – compared to somebody who’s got a major role in it – to cut you out is not very expensive. If they are paying you a million dollars to be in a film, you’re not going to be cut out, I guarantee you. I really liked THE RIGHT STUFF and that one was another six-month shoot. I’ve done a few of those. Philip Kaufman had a vision for that film and it was way before CG and all of that. They worked their hearts out on that movie. Again, for a young actor to be on those sets, to see the effort going into it and being a part of that whole process, it’s a wonderful thing to have happened in your life.

B.L.: Do you find it tougher to portray a real living character as opposed to a fictional one?

L.H.: No, in fact I played President Lincoln for one of the Ted Turner networks and I found out that Lincoln had a very high-pitched voice; a shrill voice and he would gesticulate with his arms. So, he was a little bit funny. I wanted to do that in the movie, but the director said, “Well, this is about the day that Lincoln was shot and the movie is not long enough to get the audience used to that.” If I had gone into the way he’d really acted, throwing my arms up into the air like I was conducting an auction, the audience would have thought, “What the hell?” It would take a really terrific director to pull that off because that’s a lot of work and it would shock everybody. We’re all remembering the other actors who have portrayed Lincoln, like Gregory Peck and those guys with that old style of acting. I wanted to just have at it because I loved Lincoln. I got a book on all of Lincoln’s speeches and read them and, I got to tell you, he was something. When you think about it, the average sentence today is around ten words. Back in that day, the average sentence was around thirty-five to fifty words. They didn’t have television, YouTube and all the other stuff that does their talking for them visually. They were very articulate people and they would get their point across in ethical and moral sentence structures that would give you the outcome of your actions. It was really pretty amazing. There’s another real person I’m going to portray. There was a potter named George Ohr and I have writers, right now, that are working up a movie about him. He was down in Biloxi, Mississippi and was part of the turning point of that era. He was way ahead of his time, a true genius. Picasso would have loved to meet him. He died in obscurity and never made it while he was alive. Now, you can’t even buy one of his cups for less than ten thousand dollars. When I’m not acting, I make pottery here in my studio with my kilns. It’s a true obsession for me and I’ve been doing it since the sixties. I make big thirty-six inch platters and I do it simply for the adventure of it all. That’s one of the reasons I connected so much with George Ohr and I’m excited to get to play him. There’s a thing about acting where it crosses the line into your own life. If I’m doing a role, I’m trying to find something in my personal life that connects with that role. I’m not just reading the words. So, I’m happy to be playing him and I’m going to get this movie made myself because it truly is a passion film.

B.L.: I imagine you encounter this quite frequently, but NEAR DARK still seems to hold up and has generated quite a fan base.

L.H.: There were a couple of elements in that film that helps it stand out. Those characters really cared about each other. I mean, they were horrible people, but they cared about each other in a certain way that was unique to horror films. You got the sense that they were a family. Another thing that was going on was that we referred to ourselves as nocturnal nomads, not vampires. Our world was about a cycle that would go across America and back. We figured it would take about fifty years. So, we had done this cycle so many times that we were getting tired of it; burned out. Our thinking on that film was we were trying to create a type of western. We didn’t use any of the classic vampire stereotypes. You know, like burning up if you touched a cross, that kind of stuff. We were allowed to be creative. In fact, I used something from Elvis Presley. We rehearsed at one point during filming and the director, Kathryn Bigelow, said, “Alright, you guys have to go into this room, but the sun is shining. What are you going to do about it?” Billy Paxton and I were talking and we decided to get tin foil and slap it up on the windows. Then we could go over it with spray paint. We invented all of that stuff during rehearsals, and I learned that from Elvis because he would check into a hotel and immediately put tin foil on all of the windows. It was a wonderful creative process all the way around on that film, but that’s what my whole world is because I’m desperate to take chances. I like to have an adventure with my portrayals. I’m not just in it for the salary.

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