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Val Kilmer Interview
by Marianne Gray
as featured in the August 1995 issue of Film Review Special #12
Posted by raleagh on Mon, 21st January 2008 at 6:15am
This article has been viewed 1233 times |
Will the new Batman save Gotham from Two-Face and The Riddler? Well, Val Kilmer in cowl and cape should. With his hard-baked good looks, he is sexier than Michael Keaton, is prepared to take his shirt off and will be wearing a crime:fighting outfit that has been sculpted with even more attention to masculine ideals.
Says director Joel Schumacher: "Val will make the movie fresher and younger on its third outing. First of all he is a great actor. He's extremely handsome and has a charis- matic bearing which can make you believe in him as billionaire businessman Bruce Wayne. "Once caped up as Batman, night-time crime fighter, Val is heroic and sexy. There's a tremendous amount of depth, sensitivity and mystery to Val... all qualities tailor-made for the role."
To meet Kilmer, in real life, he is shy but sharp, a young 36 with chiselled features and slightly pointy, pixy ears. He talks fast but quietly, looking at you with absorbing grey-green eyes.
"There's obviously something fascinating and of primal interest to audiences as far as Batman is concerned," he says. "The Batman comics deal with the grey areas in between good and evil. He's not always on steady ground with the community. Batman's compulsion is to extract justice at night, but he also has a real sense of irony, in a wonderful comedic style that Bob Kane [creator of the Batman comics] invented."
As Batman, apart from flying and airborne derring-dos, Kilmer becomes encased in a vat of acid, falls out of a helicopter, is buried alive, walks through fire, travels in a coffin and worse. His worst daily stunt was, he reckons, not to sweat his way out of the Batsuit which, including cape, weighs 45 to 50 pounds, and to keep the nipples on his Batsuit in place.
Kilmer, whose grandfather was a quarter Cherokee goldminer in the American South West, was raised in suburban Los Angeles, and belonged to a part-German family rich enough to be listed in America's Forbes magazine's top 100 affluent American families.
His career began at 17, when he was the youngest student ever admitted to the Drama division of the Julliard School. Spotted by the great Joe Papp in a play Kilmer had written, Papp cast him in Henry IV at his Public theatre. Broadway followed, debuting with Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn in Slab Boys, and then in 1984 the films started, with Top Secret!, Real Genius and, because he was on contract to Paramount, as Tom Cruise's alter ego in Top Gun, a film he describes as "a one-dimensional cartoon that sold a lot of Ray Bans".
"While we were still shooting Reagan took away the F1-11s we were using to run air cover in the Indian Ocean and bomb Libya," he comments with a dry smile. "It was his way of proving it was not a cartoon!"
Oliver Stone's The Doors put Kilmer, as Jim Morrison, on the map.
"It took me a year to get rid of the ghost of Jim Morrison and I never got round to taking up the music contracts offered after the film. Let's just say all the good music producers were booked forever and I couldn't sort it out."
Since then there has been a love story with Kim Basinger called Real McCoy, a small spot on Tony Scott's True Romance playing the vision of Elvis Presley, and a Western with Kurt Russell, Tombstone.
"Recently I have become more involved in stage work, writing poetry [he's had a collection published] and screenplays," says Kilmer. "One is about medical research, another on cocaine traffic in the US and the one I'm most involved in is about a Bushman from Africa who ended up in a freakshow in Cuba. I read a book by Laurens van der Post about this man, Frans Taaibosch, and I was just swept away by it. We've been to Africa, to Botswana and Okovango, several times to find out more about these primitive hunter-gatherers."
Kilmer lives with his wife, British actress Joanne Whalley, 32, and their daughter Mercedes, 3, and buffaloes James Brown and Jezebel, on a ranch outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Whalley and Kilmer met in New Zealand on the Sci-Fi Fantasy Willow when she was playing the warrior princess who falls in love with him, the wise-cracking warrior . He'd seen her in a London play while he was shooting Top Secret! in London and they wed secretly in 1988. They subse- quently co-starred in the thriller Kill Me Again.
As Batman, of course, there's no chance Kilmer will be killed again otherwise Warner Brothers wouldn't be able to pack him into his Batsuit and launch the Caped Crusader for a fourth time to carry on what looks like a crusade all the way to the bank - the first two Batman adventures have grossed more than $700 million.
"They haven't talked to me about the Batman 4 story yet," says Kilmer, "but I'm down for the future. I think good will definitely triumph over evil in Batman 4."
So what was the toughest thing for Kilmer about being Batman?
"Trying not to smear Nicole Kidman's . lipstick when we kissed, because she always ended up looking like Bozo the Clown. You just can't not smear lipstick when you kiss.
You have to kiss like Bette Davis if you do". |
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