Continued.... (Back)
Q: Are you easily intimidated?
A: Yeah, I can be intimidated. By anything.
Q: Did you used to watch porn movies with friends when you were younger?
A: Yeah, Ion the side of the icebox. It's a perfect place.
Q: So you still call refrigerators iceboxes?
A: I am coming from the '50s. It was real film, 16 millimeter, which would crack and burn and you'd fix it with Scotch tape. The guys in the film would have their shoes and socks on. But I don't find porn very sexy, it's too much information.
Q: Do you recall saying, "Pornos are like looking through a keyhole, and maybe that's what movie are all about"?
A: I find it hard to believe that I said that. Maybe I did. But I don't think that looking at movies is like looking through a keyhole. When you look at a great painting, you see the world that exists within that frame. It's like Michelangelo said about the David statue­ it was there, he just took the stone away. A movie director or a painter puts something within its frame that is its own world. A good movie changes you a little bit. I'm not sure pornography can do that.
Q: Didn't you once write a script about the porno star John Holmes?
A: Yeah, it was the last night shooting King of New York and Able Ferrara and I were sitting at four a.m. and this guy handed me a Village Voice article about John Holmes. He had died already. He was this simple guy whose father was abusive, and he came to L.A. to work as a handyman, and he never realized he had this great gift [Laughs] and he didn't even know that everybody wasn't like him. It's sort of a funny story, [although] he ended up stealing radios from cars and he died of AIDS. I told his story in my script but I gave it a happy ending, a dream thing where he's very sick and stumbling along and goes back to his apartment and he has this fantasy life with his Donna Reed wife and kinds and dog.
Q: In your script, do you show his dick?
A: No, nothing like that. It's a nice story. Basically it's about the curse of a great gift. It's like Mozart. [Laughs]
Q: Another icon whom you've written about is Elvis Presley. Why is the public so fascinated with him?
A:Because he really was great and he died young. I worked with an actor who told me a funny story about Elvis. He was in this movie, one of those beach things, and he asked Elvis if he wanted to play touch football on their day off. Elvis agreed and said he'd bring some guys with him. A bus came with Elvis and his guys all in professional football outfits, helmets, padding, and they went out and played the guys who had nothing on. And his guys wouldn't let anybody near him. [Laughs]
Q: What did you think of his films?
A: They're all worth watching­ Jailhouse Rock, Blue Hawaii. I always liked it when he played a simple cowhand, like he was just a regular guy working with the other cowhands. And he looked exactly like Elvis. He was the first actor to get $1 million.
Q: What's your favorite Elvis song?
A: "Are You Lonesome Tonight." That's the one.
Q:What inspired you to write and perform in a play about him?
A: When I was doing Batman Returns I had a house and was living very quietly, reading the tabloids from the supermarket. One day there was this picture of Elvis as a middle-aged woman with great big knockers. The story said he had changed himself into a woman. So I just took it from there. I invented this story where he's not dead, he's in limbo with his twin brother. So I stuck him in the play, only his brother is a little younger a better looking and he hates him. And he's trying to get out of limbo. Finally he decides to come back as a woman who works in a diner and is married to an overweight truck driver. That was the last scene­ I came out in drag with great big boobs, and my husband was sitting with his feet up watching TV and drinking a beer. I did it eight times a week, and six times it was funny and twice it wasn't. Doing the Elvis play was the hardest thing I ever did, but I noticed that immediately afterwards so many things were easier. I've had a couple of times like that, where you just get so scared and so defiant of being scared.
Q: Why so scared?
A: Every time I got really scared I'd say to myself, "Who cares? That's the way it goes." I must say that saved me. Because when I thought, "Oh my God, my friends are gonna come, and I'm 50-something years old, and the critics are coming..." then I though, "Who gives a fuck?"
Q: What bothers you about things said of you?
A: Nobody's ever said anything that's hurt me. Being called creepy doesn't hurt me, but it makes me wonder what people are seeing. I read a review of The Prophecy­ I'm a lot of fun in that movie, I enjoyed playing this angel who's furious at human beings and just kicks the shit out of everybody. But anyway, I read this review and the critic said something that had nothing to do with my performance. When I read something like that I wonder what the guy's seeing. How could his impression be so different than mine?
Q: What movies have you seen more than any other?
A: Spartacus and Broadway Danny Rose. That's my double bill.
Q: What's the worst movie ever made?
A: I'm not going to say, but I think I was in it.
Q: What's your favorite dying scene?
A: It's in a very obscure movie called Lucky Luciano. When this gangster gets shot in the end, it takes place on a street where there are 50 feet of garbage cans lined up, and he knocks every one of them over, falling down and getting up. It's the longest death scene I ever saw. It's hilarious.
Q: When was your first sexual experience?
A: Oh, I must have been 19.
Q: If you could have changed one thing about that first sexual experience, what would it be?
A: It would have been successful.
Q: Is there any lie you've told girls you'd like to retract?
A: I promise I won't come.
Q: Why didn't you like high school?
A: I wasn't learning anything. I remember once I was failing in math and my father locked me in his bedroom for a whole weekend. My mother brought food and it was left outside the door. Him and me, we worked all day, we went to sleep, we got up and we did it again for two-and-a-half days. And I passed. And to this day I'm very good at certain things with numbers, with money, figures, estimates.
Q: So you got more than reading out of school.
A: School was boring most of the time. It finally was a social event where you hit on girls.
Q: Were you successful at that?
A: No, not at all.
Q: That's why you hated school. If you'd been successful hitting on girls you'd have loved it.
A: Tell that to the commissioners. I've always been lousy at striking up a conversation, I probably make her nervous. [Laughs] It just doesn't work out. I finally walked up to a girl once and I said to her, "Would you like me to go away?" She just looked at me in a scared way.
Q: Maybe your professional reputation preceded you.
A: The good thing about being an actor is if they know who you are­ you don't have to introduce yourself.
Q: And if they don't know who you are, you get to do what you do best­ act your way into their hearts.
A: It's true, part of it is tenacity­ and I do have that. I've always been that way. My father's like that. My mother's like that. My whole family's like that. Very aggressive people­ but in a good way. My father was a baker, and he was like a terror to the people who worked for him. But he worked hard, and I believe in that. People don't work hard enough.
Q: Did your father discipline you?
A: My father never laid a hand on us. Never. But my mother, I have a feeling he would nod at her and she'd give us a whack. But when I was growing up, there was more of that "spare the rod and spoil the child" growing up. All my friends used to regularly get a whack from their mothers. Now everything has changed. I came from a neighborhood where if you got in a fight with a kid and he beat you up, basically what would happen is that he'd throw you on the ground and get your arm behind your back and he's say "Say Uncle." When you finally said it, he's let you go and you'd shake hands. That's how dopey it was then. Nowadays, they take out a nine millimeter and shoot you and your whole family. (more)