Friday, October 30, 1998
Hard Wood
Vampires quench audiences’ thirst for a bloody good time
By Stephanie Sheh
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Put away your crosses and get rid of your garlic, because this
Halloween, director John Carpenter is bringing out a new brand of
vampires, complete with a less-than-heroic hero.
"John Carpenter’s Vampires," which opens today, stars James
Woods and Daniel Baldwin as slayers off to destroy the vampire
Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith) before he finds the Berziers Cross,
which will allow him to walk in the daylight. Along the way, the
duo is joined by Katrina (Sheryl Lee), a woman bitten by Valek, and
young father Adam Guiteau (Tim Guinee).
But this ain’t your mother’s vampire movie. Carpenter’s film
isn’t full of castles and stuffy accents. Set in New Mexico, the
team of slayers tote heavy artillery and are led by the
cigarette-smoking, priest-beating Jack Crow (Woods). When Woods
enters the suite in the Four Season’s hotel, though, it’s easy to
see how this fast-talking, foul-mouthed, charismatic wonder churned
out a character like Crow.
"He just brings this intensity to your film," Carpenter says.
"What I found interesting is that he usually plays psychotic
heavies, cruel second-leads. And now he gets to play this bizarre
action hero that beats everybody up."
Much of Crow’s perverse humor came from Woods himself. The actor
would keep making up lines after delivering his scripted ones, and
Carpenter kept the cameras rolling
"So, of course, if the film’s running I’m talking," Woods says.
"And I started a riff with Tim. I said, ‘Let me tell you something.
You like a little meaty once in awhile don’t you?’ He’d say, ‘Well
what do you mean?’ ‘You know a big chub there. You got off on that
didn’t you? You got a little wood? A little chubby?’ He said,
‘Chubby? I’m not Chubby.’ I said, ‘No. Did you get a chubby?’ I
said, ‘You know with the alter boys after you had a little couple
extra glasses of wine after Sunday by the 11:30 mass. Take a little
walk, feel Hershey highway.’"
The actor continues, "I’m doing all this shit. The next thing, I
look at the rough cut and go, ‘You are kidding me. You put this in
the movie?’ Originally it was written like, ‘Crosses don’t work.
Garlic doesn’t work.’ And I’m saying, ‘You know these (vampires)
will bend you over and take a stroll up your strata chocolata.’
When I started the movie I said, ‘John, you are going to end my
career. I can’t say this on film. What are you crazy?’"
Co-star Baldwin says he enjoyed working with Woods because of
his ability to perform during the unscripted parts.
"There’s four hands involved in sparing, not two," Baldwin
explains. "A lot of actors only see it as two and they’re throwing
punches and they’re throwing punches, but they don’t know how to
take them they don’t know how to set up, to avoid. Woods is a boxer
as far as in actor terminology. He really knows how to spar."
Baldwin explains that, as an actor, one has to leave space to
react to fellow actors. He also says that an actor leaves a
different amount of space, depending on who they are working
with.
"Woods, obviously, you leave a lot of space open. He’s James
Woods," Baldwin says. "Easily you can make this statement, that
he’s one of the ten most-revered character actors that our country
has right now. He may not be Tom Cruise box-office-wise, but this
is a multiple Academy Award nominated actor. He’s very, very
talented and the body of work he has to display is unprecedented so
you leave a hunk of space open when James Woods says, ‘I wanna
try.’ It’s like, ‘Sure, Jim, let’s go.’"
Although Woods admits that much of the improvising on the set of
"Vampires" was a result of goofing off, he says that it is
important to know the limits.
"I mean we’re kind of screwing around, but we were screwing
around in character, I didn’t screw around like I had a Fudgesicle
stuck in my ass in front of the camera," he says. "I think in a way
there’s probably a process at work that we’re semi-aware of and
semi-issuing as being silly, but this is a tongue in cheek picture
on one level."
On the other level, Woods says that this type of movie can be
harder than some of his heavier movies, such as "Salvador" and
"Ghosts of Mississippi," because he has to make the vampires real
for the audience. The actor points out that there is a delicate
balance between the humor and the drama in the film.
"The story at hand, for the audience to have good time, we
really have to take seriously that these vampires are really
lethal, really scary and really dangerous," Wood says. "We really
got to get them. And if we don’t do that then we’re short changing
the audience. Now along the way with each other we might talk the
way we talk and that’s a character choice. And it’s kind of walking
on the edges of razor blade as it were, but I think it works to
have both as long as one doesn’t impact on the other and destroy
it."
A lot of work. But all in all, to be in a vampire film? "It was
so bitchin’ly cool," Woods says.
FILM: "John Carpenter’s Vampires" opens today.
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