Are You Right There, Michael?

Now aged 54, Michael Madsen looks more like a former Hell’s Angel than a Hollywood star. A tall, craggy-faced, broad-shouldered man wearing Ray-Bans, blue jeans, snakeskin cowboy boots, a black leather waistcoat and a luridly designed pink and black shirt, he looks like a man with an edge.

And he is. So much so that he was recently charged with — and cleared of — child cruelty, following an altercation with his son that occurred, apparently, after he discovered the younger Madsen smoking pot in the family house. It is a bizarre twist in a life that undoubtedly has its strange and occasionally dark currents. So what is it that makes him tick? Even before this incident happened, I was more than curious to find out.
Madsen’s spiky but receding hair is dyed a dirty blonde, his forearms are colourfully tattooed, and he’s wearing a silver bracelet, earrings and rings. His handshake is firm, his voice low and gravelled from years of chain-smoking, and his eyes are full of mischief. “Hey man, how you doin’?”
He looks slightly puzzled when I place two digital recorders on the table. When I explain that it’s a precautionary measure in case one of them malfunctions, he grins and asks, “Hey, do you wear two fuckin’ condoms as well?”
A moment later he turns his attention to my shades. “Hey man, these are nice fuckin’ glasses,” he says, picking them up off the table. “Do you mind?” He slips off his Ray-Bans.
He snorts with laughter when I explain that they were picked up for about €10 in a Spanish market. “That’s fuckin’ typical, man! Two or three hundred dollars for these, and yours are much cooler.” Reluctantly declining my generous offer of a straight swap, he explains, “I would, but these actually belong to Gareth [Thomas] from the Big Brother house. The rugby champion.”
Just last January, Madsen finished fourth in Celebrity Big Brother 2012. Which offers a clue as to where his acting career is currently at.
Born and raised in Chicago, the son of a fire-fighter father and award-winning writer mother, Madsen’s first onscreen appearance was in the 1982 independent movie Against All Hope. Although he’s appeared in more than 150 movies since, by his own admission the twice-divorced actor has made a lot of bad choices over the years. For every Thelma And Louise, Kill Bill or Free Willy, he’s appeared in a dozen straight-to-DVD flops. It’s been quite some time since his last hit movie.
Although generally typecast as a bad guy or gangster thug, a stereotype which his latest brush with the law confirms, he’s something of a Renaissance man in real life, also dabbling in photography and creative writing as well as movies. Of his several published books of Bukowski-influenced poetry – collected some years ago as The Complete Poetic Works Of Michael Madsen, Vol I: 1995-2005 – his late friend Dennis Hopper wrote: “I like him better than Kerouac: raunchier, more poignant, he’s got street language, images I can relate to, blows my mind with his drifts of gut-wrenching riffs.”
I’ve brought him a gift of a copy of my own interview collection, Selected Recordings: 2000-2010. Politely leafing through it, he spots a photo of English poet John Cooper Clarke. “Is that Ronnie Wood?” he asks. “No? He really looks like him. I went to see the Stones at Wembley and Ronnie Wood came up to me and he asked me did I want to go to his house and I went, ‘Yeah, okay!’ So we got in the car. We were being chased around by paparazzi.”
A few pages on, he spots a more familiar picture. “Hey, that’s Dolly Parton! I played her husband in a movie. Straight Talk. Yeah. Interesting life.”
Before we get started, I ask about the possibility of Hot Press publishing one of his poems to accompany this interview. He’s enthusiastic about the idea, but insists he wants to give me something new. “Instead of you using something that’s already out there, I could give you one that I recently wrote called ‘Looking For Fante’, which is about the writer John Fante, so you’d have one that no-one’s read yet. You want it?”
I’m gradually realising that Madsen was hardly acting when he played Mr. Blonde. He talks like a Tom Waits song, his lengthy sentences peppered with repetitions and unnecessary details.
His PA is despatched to fetch the poem with the following instructions: “Uh… up in my room, in the leather bag, on a coffee table, inside, in the black leather bag on the coffee table, there’s a book, a Vincent Van Gogh picture on the cover, sunflowers in the pot. The book, you’ll know it because it smells like roses, because once upon a time I had it in a bag with some Roses cologne that broke, so the book smells like that, and in it, in the zipped pocket, is the poem, ‘Looking For Fante’. When you get back with the sunflower book with the poem in it, I’ll read it for this guy.”
In the meantime, we get on with the interview. Strangely – or perhaps not – in the light of what happened later, a lot of the interview revolves around the question of family...

OLAF TYARANSEN: What’s your earliest memory?
MICHAEL MADSEN: My earliest memory in my life? Em... (long pause). Well, no-one has ever asked me that before. When I was little with my mom, when my parents were still together. We lived in Chicago... (lights cigarette and inhales deeply).
Your dad was a fire-fighter, wasn’t he?
Yeah. I was only five so he was only just gonna be a fire-fighter at that point. We lived in a little house across the street from a Clark Bar factory, where they made Clark Bars, chocolate bars. And there was a freight yard, freight rails, across from the house and the factory was on the right, about a mile down. When the candy bars came down, off on a conveyor, when they’re wrapped, the irregular bars were kicked off the conveyor and automatically put in a bin, which was later in the day put behind the factory, some wrapped, some not wrapped, some kicked off…
The rejects...
Yeah, yeah. Any little thing, they’d just fuckin’ throw them in there. And me and my pals, we could smell the chocolate in the air. And I guess, if you wanna know, my earliest memory was being with Michael, a friend of mine, he was a Polish kid. He’d come running down and we’d hang out in front of my house. My dad would get very mad because we weren’t supposed to go far from home, but we’d run across the street and we’d go down to the factory. We’d go in the bin and we’d get the candy bars and we’d sit there and eat ‘em, and they were still warm from the thing. That’s as far back as I can remember. There’d be a freight car there, a box car, because a freight train ran through there, and we’d sit in the freight car with the freakin’ candy bars. It was really cool. My dad would get mad though (laughs).
Was it a happy childhood?
My father was a working-class man and he very much wanted to take care of his family. He’s Danish. His parents came from Denmark. In fact, my dad’s parents had tickets for the Titanic, and my father’s sister has the cancelled Titanic tickets because they, in fact, ended up coming on the Lusitania. They missed the boat! Which is a good thing because I wouldn’t be sitting here now!
Your career would have been sunk before it even began!
Yeah (laughs). He had 10 kids, his dad. And I think that he had a working-class ethic. His father was very proud to be in America, and wanted to make it in America, which was instilled in my father, and I think he wanted to be a provider for us but, as fate would have it, those things didn’t happen because him and my mother divorced when I was nine.
Was that traumatic for you?
Obviously, everyone knows that when that happens, and when families get ripped apart, it is a breeding ground for unhappiness, but I was always proud of my father, and I still am. I think he was a great man and a hero to me and he did the best he could. And I did the best I could. No-one gave me nothing, and I didn’t expect it. That’s the difference between now with my kids. They kind of expect it, but I didn’t have that choice. I’m grateful for not having that choice because I was working in a car wash when I was 14. I was selling Christmas trees in a Christmas tree lot. My childhood was... complicated.
Was your family religious?
My father was Catholic, Catholic orientated. I was aware of religion. I do believe in God, I do believe in whatever that is. There has to be something. I know it’s interpreted in many different ways and many different cultures and countries. I’m not really a big fan of organised religion. I remember being in church and singing hymns, or standing with people who were singing. I like to go into churches in different countries because they’re majestic places, but I’m not for going in there and listening to sermons. People tend to have an agenda.
How were you at school?
Ha! (laughs). A disaster! I kinda got the feeling early on that I was being lied to.
How do you mean?
I was pretty sure that they were lying about the Indians, and the fact that they were all massacred and their land was taken from them and yet, you know, the American West is fable-ised by cowboys and the savage Indians, when actually in reality, they were only trying to protect themselves and their families. I didn’t appreciate that. Also I didn’t like the fact that there were subjects that you’re forced to study that don’t have any relevance in your life, and are never going to have. I didn’t like to be forced to learn certain things that I didn’t think were going to be valuable to me.
So I take it that you didn’t bother learning them?
Nah (shakes head). I didn’t like organised studies, and I kind of felt like I was being forced. Now, when I have my sons and they’re going to school, I have the same ambivalence towards it because I don’t feel like they’re being taught things that have any relevance. I don’t think the whole notion of passing and failing is a good thing. I think that it teaches kids early on to feel, ‘You failed, man, you didn’t do this algebra equation so you fuckin’ failed’. Well, that word ‘fail’ is a big word. It’s a big word to lay on a little kid, and I just don’t approve of it, I don’t think it’s a good idea. They should be more focused on individual talents that kids usually come up with early on in life, and become focused on one thing. None of this, ‘Oh well, you want to be a writer but meantime you better take this test about these mathematical equations – and if you don’t do that, you fail!’ Meanwhile they’re forgetting about the fact that he might grow up and be a writer, or a scientist, and he doesn’t need to know that shit. I hated school.
What did you want to be as a kid?
Oh man, I wanted to be a doctor. I thought that would be a good calling.
Plus all those prescription drugs…
Nah, it wasn’t that (laughs). I wanted to help people, cure people. I thought it was a noble thing to do. Of course I realised that was never going to happen because I’d have to go to some university for eight years, and that wasn’t financially available. And my father, of course, wanted me to be a fire-fighter like he was. He took me with him as a boy, he’d take me to the fire house with him.
Was he a fairly macho character?
Yeah, he was a big man. My father was a very intimidating man, very strong. You didn’t want to fuck with my dad.
Was he a strong disciplinarian?
Yeah, yeah. We’d go and I’d sleep in the bunkhouse and in the middle of the night the alarm would go off and I’d run down the stairs and he’d put me in the engine – he drove the engine. I’d go with him to the fires and he’d leave me in the cab of the engine and I’d sit there and I’d watch these buildings burn down and I’d watch my dad on the ladders putting out these things, and then he’d bring me in afterwards and show me the mayhem of fire and the things that had happened in there.
Did you ever see any burnt corpses?
Yeah. It was in a dining-room with sliding doors that went outside, and there had been curtains that fell. The heat, the flame, had not actually reached into the room, but the intensity of the heat outside of the room had come inside and melted the plastic stuff, the curtain rods and the curtain had fallen. It was in the corner. The fire guys had originally thought that it was a table with a drape over it, and kind of ignored it, and in fact, there was a man who in the corner, up against the wall and the ends of his fingers were in the wall and he was just burned to a crisp.
So what happened?
I was standing there and I saw that and my dad put his hand on my eyes – like that (covers eyes with hand) – and turned me around and took me back to the house. That was the end of my career as a fire-fighter. But he wanted me to do that. He wanted me to be a cop. I considered that for a while. He had some good friends who were Chicago cops. They’d hang out with my dad in our house when I was little. I was an orderly in a hospital for a while, which was the closest thing I ever got to being a doctor. I tried to go to junior college to be a paramedic – and I qualified to be an ambulance attendant, which is quite different to being a paramedic. I wanted to do a bunch of stuff.
What other jobs did you do?
I bummed around and I did a lot of different jobs for a long time, but what I wanted to be? I don’t know. I was a big fan of Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin… I thought about film acting, and I thought I knew what they were doing, kinda figured it out. Obviously doing that was an impossibility from where I was in Chicago. But I had thought about it and so over time... I was a pipe fitter; I was an apprentice to a plumber; I cut threads on a pipe; I was in Mt. Sinai hospital; I worked for a landscaper; I drove tow truck for two years; I was an auto mechanic in Joe Jacobs’ Chevrolet for a while. I couldn’t really figure out what I wanted to do. Finally, by the grace of God, I stumbled into acting.
Legend has it that you became involved in Steppenwolf Theatre Company at the behest of John Malkovich.
Yeah. A friend of mine and I saw a production of Of Mice And Men. It was Gary Sinise and John Malkovich – Gary was George, and John was Lenny. They were just a basement theatre company and nobody knew any of them or what they were doing. They were just doing it because they loved it. And I remember watching that and at the end of one of their things, I actually walked, I just walked up and across the stage and went down the steps to the back where the dressing-rooms were, and I walked down this hallway and past this one room and I looked in and there was Johnny Malkovich. He said, ‘What are you doing back here?’ and I said I was just wandering around. And he said ‘Are you an actor?’ and I said, ‘No, no, man’ (laughs) and he said, ‘Oh, did you ever think about that?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, crossed my mind I guess...’
He offered you lessons, didn’t he?
Yeah, he said, ‘Well, we have a scene study class, we do here and I’ll send you a brochure if you want to come here and do scene study’. Of course I didn’t believe him, but I gave him my address and he said he was going to send me the brochure. Then he said to me, ‘Did anybody ever tell you you look like Bruce Springsteen?’ I’ll never forget him saying that to me, it was so funny, and I looked at him and I said, ‘No, never heard that one before’ and he said, ‘Well keep that in your mind, you’ve got a good face’.
Obviously he sent you the brochure...
Yeah. About three weeks later, actually on my birthday, on September 25, in my mailbox was a brochure from Steppenwolf with an invite to go there and do scene study. So I kinda thought, ‘Wow that’s pretty bizarre, that’s kinda interesting’, and so I did. Over time the whole story has been blown up, it was the beginning of this and that, but I only stayed there for like three or four months. I got really impatient and I left out of there.
(The interview is interrupted by the arrival of his PA with the Van Gogh-covered notebook of handwritten poems. Madsen wants to read me ‘Looking For Fante’).
Recently I was with my son, we were driving around up in Point Dume. I had read an article in Malibu magazine that [influential LA novelist] John Fante had lived in Point Dume and I never knew that before, and so I suddenly got obsessed about finding his house. I just wanted to see it and go, ‘That’s where he lived’. I was with my little boy, my six-year-old son, and I realised that this journey, this silly drive that we were doing looking for his house, really, it turned into a father and son thing, because I know John had a lot of trouble with his son, and there I was with my son looking for his house so I wrote this fuckin’ thing called ‘Looking For Fante’. Now where’s my fuckin’ reading glasses?
(The reading glasses can’t be found and, despite having better eyesight, this writer proves unable to decipher Madsen’s scrawled handwriting. The poem is reluctantly abandoned).
Did you ever read Fante’s final novel, The Brotherhood Of The Grape? It was all about father-son relationships.
I didn’t read that one. I don’t know if I want to because I know in the end it was really, really sad. And I did read some of the things his son wrote and I was not enamoured with him, really kinda tragic and horrifying and I felt really bad. You know, I have five sons of my own, and being a movie actor you have to be cognisant of what you’re putting out there. And in the beginning when you’re young and naïve and a rabble-rouser, some of these things seem exciting and then later on as you get wiser, if you get wiser, you start to become more cognisant of the kind of material you’re putting out. With your children, you have to be, you have to answer to them. I just don’t want my sons growing up thinking that the world is fantasy, because it’s not.
Even though you work in a fantasy industry.
Well, there’s a lot of fantasy in it and a lot of people do it for that, and that’s where I think it gets screwed up. The media, American Idol, all that shit, all those gigantically stupid things that make everybody nuts for celebrities, just kinda ruining everybody, man, in a sad way and... [shrugs].
Having said that, you did just appear on Celebrity Big Brother...
I did Big Brother because I saw it as an opportunity to redefine whatever it is that are people’s pre-conceived ideas of Michael Madsen. I knew for a fact that they brought me in there because they thought that I was gonna go berserk, that they thought I was going to have some sort of breakdown or psychological explosion or that I was going to do something insane. And it was just the opposite. I went in there, ‘Okay guys, you’re gonna lock me up in this house for 27 days with these people? Okay. Alright, let’s see what’s gonna happen’. I’m not sorry that I did it. It turned out to be good in the end and I learned a lot about myself. I think the whole thing, let’s face it, is a joke. In the end there is no winner of Big Brother, there are only survivors of Big Brother. It’s a psychological human experiment and it’s a highly-rated show. I had fun with them. In the end I walked away and I felt good about it. It could have been a catastrophe, as it was for some of the others who were in there, but I’m done with it.
There seemed to be some sort of sexual tension between yourself and the actress Denise Welch. What was the story there?
Oh, it was a preposterous attempt at trying to create a storyline, trying to create a theme. All those cameras are behind the windows and behind the mirrors, and when they’re watching everybody all day they have to try and develop a storyline. And so they look for little incidents to blow up to create a storyline. And the thing with Denise and I didn’t exist. It existed in Denise’s mind, but not in my mind, and the more she realised that the more she started to have her issues. I didn’t find out until I was out that it had been developed as a storyline or as a theme. In reality, what actually went on in there was a lot different from the edited versions that was shown to the public. There was really nothing to it at all. I minded my own business while I was in there.
You’re probably most famous for playing Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs. Is it true that you turned down the role of Vince Vega, who was subsequently played by John Travolta, in Pulp Fiction?
I did not turn down Vince Vega. In fact I was contracted to do Wyatt Earp. I had just finished a picture called The Getaway and I got the script of Wyatt Earp and I really wanted to play Doc Holliday. I had three days off from shooting The Getaway, and I went back to Los Angeles with the intent of meeting Larry Kasdan because they had showed an interest in me for that movie. I really wanted to meet Larry, and I wanted to convince Larry that I was gonna play Doc Holliday, and when I saw him and I talked to him, I had this long hair from The Getaway and I was nuts.
You were ‘nuts’?
Yeah. I was young and divorced and I was making this crazy picture, and I think Larry was a little afraid of me, and I said, ‘Listen man, the whole reason I’m here is because I wanna play Doc Holliday’. Kirk Douglas did it in Gunfight At The OK Corral, nobody has ever in history played Doc Holliday as good as Kirk Douglas, no-one ever has and no-one ever will – Dennis Quaid certainly didn’t, for sure (smiles wryly). But I figured I could do that, and I knew I could do that, and I knew I could bring something to that, but he told me at the time he said, ‘Well, you know what, I’ve already cast another actor as Doc Holliday.
You must have been disappointed.
Oh fuck, I was crestfallen. I said, ‘Okay man, the whole fucking meeting was a fucking waste of time and I’m going back to Arizona and shoot the The Getaway and I’m gonna leave now’. And he said, ‘How would you feel about playing one of the Earps?’ and I said, ‘No man, I didn’t meet you for that’. He goes, ‘I want you to play Wyatt’s brother, Virgil’. So I looked at him and I said, ‘Okay…’ I had read the script and I said… Well, we’re all gonna walk down the streets of the OK Corral in October 1881, it really happened, it’s true. It’s a Western. I’ve done Reservoir Dogs, I did that, I wanna do a Western… and I agreed. I told him, ‘I’ll do it, I’ll do Virgil, I will do it, Larry, I promise you’ and I left and went back to Arizona.
So where does Pulp Fiction come into it?
Meanwhile, my agent rang me up and started talking about Pulp Fiction and I said, ‘Well… yeah, of course I’d like to work with Quentin. I’d like to do that’, and they said, ‘They want you to be Vincent Vega’. Well, Vic Vega is Vic Vega in Reservoir Dogs, so how am I gonna be Vincent Vega, that’s Vic’s brother? I don’t wanna play my own brother. And Tarantino said, ‘Well no, you see if you don’t do it then I’ll make The Vega Brothers and whoever plays Vincent will be his twin... Then I’ll be able to make a picture called The Vega Brothers with you and whoever does Vincent, so I’ll be able to do this trilogy thing.’ So I went, ‘Alright…’ Meanwhile I finished The Getaway and then Pulp Fiction came back up again and I said, ‘Yeah I’d love to do this, I want to make Pulp Fiction’ and they said, ‘Well, you already told Larry Kasdan that you would do Wyatt Earp’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I did tell him that’ and they said, ‘Well, you’re contracted for it, it’s all done, you’re contracted’.
This is a long story!
It is! So I went to Larry and I said, ‘Listen man, I want to do this other movie, I want to do Pulp Fiction’ – but they were exactly the same fuckin’ schedule. They were shooting at the same fuckin’ time. There wasn’t a window of two weeks and I said, ‘Well, why can’t I do that?’ And they said because Larry wants you for a rehearsal. A rehearsal? But it’s a Western. And they said, ‘No, no, no, they want you to sit with Kevin [Costner] and it’s a big deal and we’re gonna do these read-throughs and you’ve got to be there’ and I said, ‘No man, I don’t need to do the read-throughs, I can go and do Pulp Fiction and then I can come to Santa Fe and do the read-throughs’, and Larry Kasdan said, ‘No, I gotta have Michael here, he’s gotta be here for that’. And that’s the truth. Over the years it’s turned into this thing that I turned down, and that’s not what happened. That isn’t the way it happened.
You’ve appeared in more than 150 films. However, you’re on record as saying that you don’t like a lot of them.
I don’t. A lot of them are crap (laughs).
Which ones do you rate?
Reservoir Dogs. Hell Ride, which was the last picture I did with Dennis Hopper and David Carradine, it’s a motorcycle film. Vice, Strength & Honour, The Getaway, Donnie Brasco. That’s about it.
Strength & Honour was an Irish film, wasn’t it?
Yeah. Shot down in Cork. Those are it. Those are the best ones. All the other ones are crap. That’s a fact.
You’ve also recorded a spoken-word album with Jerry Fish.
Well, it’s not done yet. When I was doing Strength & Honour, Jerry and I started doing recordings. I was reading stuff from my own book and he went off and he got Iggy Pop and Kris Kristofferson and David Carradine and Keith Richards and Willie Nelson and a lot of musicians that he knows. He got a lot of people to read my stuff and then he made music behind it, so we were going to release a spoken-word album of all these people reading various things that I had written, but because of the distance of Ireland to America, and my travelling as much as I do, we haven’t seen each other in, like, six years. And he’s been working on it and developing it, but as far as I know, it’s not done yet. I think one day it’ll be finished!
Anything new happening on the literary front?
I’ve written a book and I’ve got another one that’s just finished, it hasn’t come out yet. Over time, over the years, the books have become accepted and I have been accepted as a writer. Especially in Amsterdam. I went to Amsterdam and I did some public readings and I really felt like I was accepted as a writer. There was a great feeling. It had nothing to do with films or movies, it felt like a separate entity. I was very pleased with that. I think it’s one of those things where it probably won’t really be appreciated for a lot longer because people think it’s a novelty because I’m a film actor – they think, ‘Oh he’s writing books, he’s a movie actor’, they’re not really looking at it seriously and that’s fine. It’s not gonna stop me from writing. I ain’t no Hemingway, let’s face it. But I have written some things that I think are legitimate. I think it’ll stand the test of time. We’ll see.
You once published an autobiographical short story about losing your virginity to an older woman when you were 13.
Yeah. Jackie. She was screwing all my friends too so... (laughs uproariously). That was the first fuck. The only reason she ended up with them is because when I told them, they didn’t believe me. So I brought them over there and she lined everybody up in the hallway and brought us Coca-Colas. And then... you know (grins).
How have you done financially over the years?
Money? Well, money is a funny thing, it’s the nemesis of everything good and everything bad. You try to do as best as you can to take care of the people you love, and you try to make a living like anybody, and there are good times and bad times, and it’s feast or famine. That’s just the nature of the whole world right now. Everybody is struggling.
Even your old friend John Malkovich got ripped off by Bernie Madoff, apparently.
Oh my god, Bernie Madoff (laughs). Thank god I never met him!
I read an old interview with you where you told a story about your dad sitting in Cher’s house going, ‘What the fuck are we doing here?’
Yeah, I was briefly married to Cher’s sister [Georganne LaPiere]. My dad had come over for the wedding, and Cher had this big mansion in Benedict Canyon, and he was sitting there and he suddenly goes, ‘What the fuck are we doing here?’ (laughs). ‘I don’t know, dad, I don’t know!’ Three years later the marriage is over. Obviously it was a young impulsive thing that made no sense. I didn’t want to get involved in the politics of Cher’s family, it turned out to be much more complicated than I realised at the time. She was an actress. She was on General Hospital. I was just an episodic TV guy, just starting off. I realised early on the politics in that family were very complicated and I got out of that thing. It just wasn’t meant to be. I don’t have any bad feelings about it. We split amicably. That was a long, long time ago.
You’ve been married to your third wife, Deanna Morgan, for 16 years now.
Oh yeah, yeah. Deanna is perhaps the most beautiful girl that I’ve ever seen. And she gave me three beautiful sons. She doesn’t want to be in the entertainment industry, which is good. That’s the reason why we’re still together, to be honest. We have a six-year-old now. Which is the greatest bond of all. She’s a good chicita. I’m very happy with her.
You’ve dabbled in various artistic disciplines – acting, writing, directing and photography. How would you like to be remembered?
If I croaked off dead tomorrow? I’d only like to have been thought of as being a good father. That’s really the only thing that means anything to me at all.
Would you encourage your sons to work in the movie industry?
No. My 21-year-old son Christian wants to be an actor, but I’d really rather him not be. But you know, youth is youth, and I can’t tell him otherwise. I’m not encouraging him, but I’m not discouraging him. He doesn’t know what he’s in for. But then again… (shrugs)
You had just become a father when you did the notorious ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs. Reportedly, you were upset about a line where the cop you’re torturing screams that he’s just become a dad.
I didn’t want to rehearse that scene because we rehearsed the whole freakin’ movie for two weeks before we shot a foot of film, and every time we got to that point I just didn’t want to do it because I didn’t know what I was going to do. Because I’m only good when I’m backed into a corner. I’m good when I’m threatened, I’m good when I have to make a decision about something important without any time to think about it, and I wanted to be able to shoot that scene under duress. I didn’t want to pre-think it. I knew that if I rehearsed it, it would be pre-thought, and I didn’t want to do that – so every time we got to that point in rehearsal I would say, ‘Quentin, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. So let’s not rehearse it’. And he would say, ‘Okay’. But then, on the day when we were shooting that damn thing, Kirk [Baltz] was in the chair and we were ad-libbing with each other. I was saying stuff like, ‘Hey, guess what? I think I’m parked in a red zone’ – I made that up. There was a lot of lines I made up. And so he was spitting stuff back at me, and it got to the point where I was gonna light him up and he’s all, ‘I’m married, I have a little kid’ and I’m going, ‘Whoooah, wait a second. Come on, man, you ain’t gonna say that’, and I turned around to Quentin and I said, ‘He ain’t going to say that’, because if he says it and I’m about to light him up, first of all, I wouldn’t… Michael Madsen or Mr. Blonde, is not going to light this guy up if he’s gonna start talking about kids. I was really angry about that, really against it. And so he claimed that he wouldn’t let him say it, he did blurt it out in one take and it is kind of down, you can barely hear it, but he does say it. I would have preferred that he’d not say it, but it was tossed in there as an ad-lib, and I didn’t like that.
What’s your next big project?
I wrote a screenplay called Thunderbird Park about two brothers whose father is in prison for killing their mother. He killed her, mercy killing, because she was dying, he couldn’t save her and she was suffering, so he shoots her. I play the older brother who is in prison, and I get out and meet my younger brother and together we go get my dad out of jail because we know my father loved my mom and he did it out of mercy. I’m trying to put it together and getting financing to make a movie nowadays is really, really hard. It’s really tough and very complicated, especially if you’re an actor dealing with finance people. I’m doing a picture with Queen Latifah called Text. But I’m gonna start producing and directing stuff, and putting together my own stuff. I’m tired of being a puppet. Maybe someday Quentin will make The Vega Brothers. I just gotta stay busy.
Are you still friendly with Quentin?
Oh yeah. We’re cool. He’s gonna be around a long time. Interesting cat, and we know each other very well. I’m sure he’ll come up with something for me one of these days.
Do you have a motto in life?
Yeah. Never buy anything from someone who’s out of breath (laughs).