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B.L.: Let me ask you about a character actor I always dug and you’ve worked with him a few times in the past. He’s since passed away, but how was working with Brion James?

L.H.: Oh yeah, Brion (laughing). I did a movie called THE HORROR SHOW with him where I played a cop and he was a murderer. Brion James and I laughed so hard on that picture. He was the funniest guy. He was always getting cast in these crazy, mean roles. He called his career “jazz” because he would get a role and just throw himself into it like a guy in a circus act. He worked really hard and I think a lot of people never realized how funny he was because he was constantly cast in crazy roles. He made me laugh all the time. He had to beat me up once for a film and I knew I could get Brion laughing by doing something excessive. He punched me in the mouth for this fight scene and I put a ridiculous amount of stage blood in there beforehand. When he punched me, I spit it all out and it looked like he knocked my head clean off, blood just went everywhere. He fell down laughing so bad that the director wound up getting pissed off. I would do strange things around him and he would just go to pieces. He would do the same to me, to the point where I didn’t know what kind of joke he was going to pull on me next. He was a real sweet guy, actually. When you think about the roles he always played you wouldn’t imagine that, but he was a very caring guy. Do you remember his part in Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER? He played one of the androids and he’d pull that one on you sometimes when you worked with him. He’d look at you and say, “Wake up; time to die.” I remember him and I were in one of the worst movies ever made. I call some of my movies “alimony films”. We were in Manila, the city in the Philippines, and we were doing this movie. It starred Brion, Robert Patrick – the actor who portrayed the morphing terminator in TERMINATOR TWO, and myself. The three of us wound up in a scene together so, we did our taglines and it was so stupid. But we wound up laughing our asses off because here were the three androids and it seemed as though we were going to do a chorus line or something (laughing). Some movies you agree to do because you are not working and they ask you if you want to come to the Philippines. So, you say, “Alright. Yeah, why not,” and then you do the best that you can. You’re really just basically spending your time making chicken salad out of chicken shit, you know?

B.L.: I wanted to bring up Walter Hill’s episode of TALES FROM THE CRYPT; CUTTING CARDS was the name of it. It’s my favorite episode out of that series and was actually one of the funnier stories.

L.H.: I love Walter Hill and I also did the film JOHNNY HANDSOME with him. Now, for TALES FROM THE CRYPT I did two of those, but the one I did with Walter was probably my favorite as well. Kevin Tighe and I were playing two gamblers who hated each other’s guts. We start out playing poker, and then we move on to Russian roulette. We wind up playing chop poker, which is where you gamble which finger will be severed from your body if you lose the hand. The resolution is the guys still hating each other, they’ve got no arms or legs and they’re pushing checker pieces across the board with their noses. It was really crazy. Walter is the kind of director that gives you so much room to do whatever you’d like with a character. I went into that shoot and said I wanted to look really skinny. I asked to be dressed in black with red piping on my clothes and put it in such a way that it looks like I have no shoulders. You put the piping in the right place and it will look like you have no shoulders at all. They did that for me and Walter would support the whole idea. When he saw it and it worked, it was like we were on the same wavelength. He’s good no matter what he’s filming. I also worked with Robert Zemeckis on an episode called YELLOW. I was playing this character called Sergeant Ripper and he was pretty similar to Kirk Douglas’ character from PATHS OF GLORY. Douglas was in that episode as well and was now playing the General for this production. I had to tell him that his son was a yellow dog coward. Off-camera I told him how I’d sat and watched him in movies my whole life as a kid, and now here I was in a flick with him. It was really a full circle for me.

B.L.: The production values on the YELLOW episode were just amazing.

L.H.: Oh yeah, but that’s Zemeckis for you. He really knows how to do it. Again, for a street kid from New York with a third grade education – to be surrounded by all of this talent over the years has really been a gift for me. My gratitude for that is always there and it’s the reason I take it serious and do the best work I can no matter what movie I’m in. I don’t care if the budget costs fifty bucks; I’m still going to put the effort into it.

B.L.: Was the film HARD TARGET your first encounter with Sam Raimi?

L.H.: Well, kind of – he produced that film and the director of that movie, John Woo, became sort of a protégée of his. When we were filming down in New Orleans, I bought John Woo a big bag of those crayfish. He came to my trailer and ate half of this giant shopping bag full of crayfish (laughing). He’s a good man, John Woo.

B.L.: You seemed to be having a lot of fun filming Sam Raimi’s THE QUICK AND THE DEAD.

L.H.: Oh, you bet. I loved working on that film. I just love westerns in general and have done about five of them all together. I’ve always had a great time working in the western genre. I ride really well. I had an old stuntman who was my mentor. He was almost eighty years old when I met him. He taught me how to ride horses. I wound up getting the lead role in this western picture and I got him hired on as the stunt coordinator. He was absolutely a great man; Rex Rossi was his name. Rex doubled for Bob Steele during his whole career and he was a trick rider and a trick roper champion. When we did THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, that flip off the horse and shooting under the belly, that was all Rex’s idea and I simply worked it all out. We never told Sam Raimi about it. We worked on it for a month and when the time came around, I said, “Hey Sam, watch this. Let me show you something.” I did it perfectly and Sam said, “Yeah, well, that’s in the movie. That’s in the movie.”

B.L.: I’ve got to ask you about director Richard Rush. He does so few films and I’m a big fan of THE STUNTMAN. How was working with him on the film COLOR OF NIGHT?

L.H.: I’m really happy about one thing; I get parts in movies where it’s good that I’m there. Sometimes, when people meet, they have an automatic response to each other. One of the things that happened during the making of that movie was that Richard Rush was one of those guys that would let you try things right there on the set. He wanted you to try things. There were a few ideas I came up with he allowed in the film. COLOR OF NIGHT was about a therapy group and I played a cop who’s family had been killed and as a result – he’d lost his mind. He winds up in group therapy with all these other loonies. I suggested to Richard that we should have the car that my family was killed in still parked in my driveway, even with a bullet hole in the window. He thought that was just a great idea. In other words, when I created the life of this character for myself, he encompassed the tiniest of details that I came up with. There were other moments where he’d experiment with that film. He would hand people an object and say, “What would your character do with this?” It was one of those little sculptures of an ape sitting on a stump with his hand under his chin like The Thinker, and he was staring at a skull. I told him that my character wouldn’t do anything with that sculpture. He handed it to another actor and the other actor used it in the scene by looking at the statue and then looking over at me, as if to say, that’s who you are – a big, dumb ape (laughing). I mean, it was great stuff and he would always throw these things at you that were actable, you know what I mean? There are some people who direct you in a way that is not actable. The thing itself; the idea is not an actable idea. I’ve been lucky enough to work with people who know what acting is all about. What part of it is about is getting stimulated and have a reaction to it all. Richard Rush respects that and I feel that he is super-talented.

B.L.: That sounds rewarding when a director is willing to allow actors to experiment.

L.H.: Oh yeah, it’s always that way. I try to get that out of anybody I’m working with, especially when you’re working on a budget that’s not very large. I think to myself that I’ve done enough of these movies to know that we are not going to be able to compete with a hundred million dollar movie. So, what are we going to do instead? Let’s use our imaginations and turn this film into something. Even a tiny, simple scene – let’s turn it into something. That’s always my goal.

I’m looking out my window right now and there are about twenty riders on horseback coming up the valley. It really is beautiful.

B.L.: Is that common?

L.H.: Yes, here it is. I picked a spot for my house that’s truly beautiful. I just built a big studio, a new one. I’ve got a million dollar view. The place didn’t cost a million dollars, I can tell you that much. I love it here.

B.L.: Do you miss the Fox Network show MILLENNIUM you starred in for Chris Carter?

L.H.: What I miss is the intensity of that show. In one year we would do what’s equivalent to twelve movies. I mean it was twenty-three shows and fifteen hundred pages a year. You had to really be on your toes. I just love the work that was involved.

B.L.: Do you grow tired of playing the same character week after week as you did for MILLENNIUM?

L.H.: No, not really, when I was in theater I’d do the same character for six months. What you wind up doing is investigating deeper and deeper. You develop more understandings and more perceptions about your character. It’s all a process. Acting really boils down to a process.

B.L.: Are you going to work with Chris Carter again?

L.H.: I really do hope so. There is something going on further down the road that I can’t really talk about at the moment.

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