I have the immense pleasure today of welcoming a very special guest, actor Perry King, to CINEMATIC REVELATIONS for an interview. Perry has acted in over twenty movies including SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, THE POSSESSION OF JOEL DELANEY, THE LORDS OF FLATBUSH, A DIFFERENT STORY [my review of the film can be found here], MANDINGO, LIPSTICK, CLASS OF 1984, and more recently in THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, DELUSIONAL, and THE DIVIDE. THE DIVIDE marked Perry’s directorial debut, and has been well received, being the recipient of many awards. Perry has also been very prolific on television, acting in scores of programs over the years. In this interview Perry will be discussing his part in A DIFFERENT STORY, acting, cinema and television, Broadway, and his role as director of THE DIVIDE.
Welcome to CINEMATIC REVELATIONS Perry!
Athan: When did you first realize that you wanted to be an actor?
Perry: I was going to, what we in the United States call, a preparatory school. And when I was 12, I was in a play called ‘The Caine Mutiny Court Martial’. And this is an experience pretty much any actor and actress will tell you a version of this story, I think. We did the rehearsal, and I was kind of bored by the whole thing. I was playing this stenographer. I was just trying to get extra credit points. I'm maybe 13 years old or 14.
As the play opens with the court martial, I'm on stage, my character behind a desk. And so I'm sitting there on the desk, the curtain was down, and the lights were off on the stage. I could tell that the lights were on and in the auditorium, there was all kinds of noise, people coming in, and sitting down.
And then suddenly all that noise stopped and the lights in the audience clearly went off, because I could see them go off under the edge of the curtain. And the curtain was raised, and the lights came on the stage. And I just remember thinking, ‘holy cow, this is it. This is what I want to do.’ It was the most exciting moment of my life. Now, I should say, I've come to realize that the impulse to be an actor, be a performer of any kind is a very neurotic impulse.
I've learned, I mean, I'm 75 years old. I've learned a lot. And, the impulse is attention validation. You want people to be looking at you and paying attention to you. But it doesn't mean that you can't do potentially wonderful things with it. I mean, the world would be a much smaller, lesser place without Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Bobby De Niro, and Meryl Street.
There's maybe no feeling in the world as glorious as being moved by a movie. And I love that sense of a movie moving you emotionally. And that's from acting. But it is a neurotic impulse that I didn't realize then. When young actors say to me, I want to be like you, I want to be an actor, be in movies, TV, and on stage, and they don't realize that what I say, great, that's wonderful.
You have all this desire to express yourself. But they don't realize what I'm hearing them saying really deep down inside is, I'm just acting up as you are. That's what it means. But you could do great stuff. Laurence Olivier said, ‘it's a ridiculous way for a grown man to make a living’. And that’s right. It is, but I've done it my whole life and it's been a fun life.
Depending on the part, so often you get positive attention, doing things that in real life you'd be heavily criticized for. Particularly when you're playing a bad character, a bad guy. I love bad guys. I played a lot of bad guys, and they're the most fun of all because, you know, you do anything, that stuff you never, never consider doing in real life. And afterwards, people say, you were great, you were wonderful.
I mean, it's kind of crazy. It's actually very much like I raced cars for twenty-five years at least, it's very much the same thing. What you do on a racetrack is the kind of thing that you'd be just excoriated for doing on the public roads. You know, being aggressive, intimidating, and extremely fast. On the racetrack, though, that's what's called for, it's allowed. I had a friend who was a race car driver, and somebody said they got in his car to take a ride.
I was in his car and they said to him, now, please, please, I know you're a race car driver, but go slowly, will you. He looked at this woman and said, ‘don't worry, ‘I'm a very good social driver’, and he just went very slowly and didn't scare her at all. He knew exactly how to do that, as well as being blindingly fast on the track.
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Athan: Where did you study acting?
Perry: Well, I went to Yale University and got a a BA from there, where they have a drama division, that's why I went there. But it wasn't very good. It really didn't give me much, all through university, those four years. I spent all my time doing plays, which was not what's outside of the classroom. The actual preparation for the Bachelor of Arts and Drama was kind of useless, really.
It didn't lead anywhere. Then I went to Julliard. This was in 1970, and I was up for the draft and we were in the Vietnam War at that time. I was set to go to LAMDA (The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art) in England, which is considered the greatest acting school in the world. I couldn't take it because I wasn't sure I would be able to go.
I thought I might end up in the Army. As it turned out, I didn't. And then I could go to Juilliard where I also had auditioned, and I attended there for about three months. I was under John Houseman, the great John Houseman, an incredible man. And then, through a series of lucky accidents, I auditioned for a movie with Shirley MacLaine. I got the chance to do audition, and went to it thinking, ‘Well, I'll go and see what it's like.’
It'll be interesting. And I assumed they would throw me out on my butt in thirty seconds, because I wasn't at all nervous about it, as I thought I was going to fail completely. Immediately, I got the part and went to John Houseman and said, ‘what do I do?’ All of the other teachers said, ‘Turn it down.’
Now, this is the title lead in a movie with Shirley MacLaine. Plus it was a character in a movie called THE POSSESSION OF JOEL DELANEY, where I played two different characters. I played her brother, who's a very screwed up, mentally troubled guy. And I also essentially play a Puerto Rican killer. He becomes possessed by the spirit of this killer, or he's insane. With Joel, my character, you never know.
It was an incredible part in Joel Delaney. I went to Mr. Houseman and said, ‘what should I do?’ This is the man who had worked with Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater and stuff. I mean, one of the great men of the world in that area, a wonderful leader. He said, ‘Perry, I've always thought an actor should work when he can work and study when he can.’ He said, ‘do the movie’, unlike every other teacher there.
They said, ‘turn it down, study. You're not ready, blah, blah, blah, blah’. He said, ‘go do it, and if you want, when it's finished, come back. Your spot will be over there for you, I promise you.’ And I just started working and never got back. Then I got to work with him over the years, a couple of times as an actor, and several different shows I did had John Houseman. It was so much fun doing that, it was great.
THE POSSESSION OF JOEL DELANEY is a great film. Moments of it, parts of it are really good, and then parts of it don't work - a very flawed film in some ways, like most frankly. But again, there are bits and pieces that are great, but it doesn't really come together.
What I learned over the years is, because I'd go to see things I was in or watch them on television, or wherever I saw them such as in a screening, I was always disappointed. Finally, I thought, nowhere in the contract does it say, I have to watch this stuff, so I do something and enjoy it for all it was worth. And maybe believe it was terrific, and walk away and forget it ever happened. Turns out that's the best way to do it. A lot of actors do that.
A lot of actors, even in the past, for example, Spencer Tracy was famous for never watching his movies. I spent some time with Katharine Hepburn once back in the seventies. I was living in New York, and she had been very good friends with my grandparents.
My grandfather was Max Perkins, who edited Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolf, James Jones, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. He's considered the great literary editor of the 20th century. Katharine Hepburn had been good friends with him. They lived side by side in an area of New York City called Turtle Bay Gardens. They were looking for somebody to play the gentleman caller in a stage production of The Glass Menagerie.
And she, just out of kindness, invited me to her house, where she was trying to get me up to speed, to see if she could help me enough so I could play that part. And I couldn't. I was too young, too callow, and just couldn't rise to the occasion, sadly. But she taught me some wonderful stuff. These are Katharine’s words to me about how you act.
She said this to me, and I memorized it on the spot because I knew I'd never want to forget it. She said, ‘this is what she said you do as an actor on film. You get a blanket idea of the character. You work off the other person, and you throw yourself into the midst of the moment.’ You can kind of hear her saying that, can't you? Parkinson's toward the end of her life made her voice waver. I love that description of how she worked. You could just see her doing that and all those things. Anyway, she talked to me a lot that afternoon. We spent time together talking about Spencer Tracy, the great love of her life. They never lived together, but each always maintained separate residences.
Katharine Hepburn said one time, not to me, but in another interview, she believed that men and women should be next door neighbors, and that's as close they should get. She was a very powerful woman, and clearly, it would be hard to live constantly with that strength, and she knew it. I just love that quote. Throw yourself into the midst of the moment. Such a clear thought, isn't it?
God, I always felt that I was born about maybe thirty years or so too late. I would've loved to have been a young man between the two wars. That was the best time in Hollywood. It's amazing when you look at it. How many incredible movies were made in 1939? Just amazing, almost all the great movies of Hollywood. You look for the data on them, and it turns out to be 1939.
There were dozens of great, great movies made in that year. It was kind of a magic year for some reason. And then, of course, even after World War II, there were so many Hollywood movies, such good stories they really knew how to do well. And I honestly think, old men always say this kind of thing, and I'm an old man now, but I really think if I were twenty today, I don't believe I'd become an actor in this time.
When I was a young man, the way you filmed something was if you wanted it to be on film, you had to go out and do it. That's the only way you could put it on film. It made it incredibly exciting to be in a movie.
I was doing a mini-series, Captains and the Kings, where my character had to follow Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders down to Cuba, where they were fighting the Spanish American War in Cuba. In this scene, I'm looking for my younger brother who has joined the Rough Riders, but it was crucial that I find him. So I'm in this scene, and we're going to shoot it. I go to Universal Studios, which is three minutes from where I'm sitting right now, just down the street and proceed to the back lot, getting ready to shoot. They had taken over the whole back lot of Universal. There was Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, but it turned out a friend of mine was playing Teddy Roosevelt.
He was dressed up as Teddy Roosevelt alongside the soldiers. And there were the Spanish soldiers, with this war going on. There was a scene where I had to run through this pathway, and they were going to set off bombs beside me. I had to dive into this foxhole and got too close to this one thing, with the bomb going, and it actually hurt me. I crashed into the foxhole, and was bleeding a lot on one shoulder and cut up. They all ran over and said, ‘Oh my God, we've got to stop. We've got to stop shooting and we'll send you to the infirmary.’ And I said, ‘What? Are you crazy? Keep shooting. It's my blood. It's real blood. It's all wonderful.” I've never been happier in my whole life, it was so great.
It is like playing the games you played when you were a little boy, but everything around you is designed to support your fantasy. Nowadays, if we shot that scene, I'd be in a sound studio, a soundstage with just a lot of green all around me, and nothing there but me and a bunch of green. They'd lay all that in later with CGI and other stuff. I'd just be doing it all by myself, or with one other actor. It's no fun. All the fun is removed, or so much of the fun is, I just wouldn't like it. People flying around with a cape in the air, who cares? I want to see stories about real people, you know?
These two films, NYAD and ANATOMY OF A FALL, are both films about real living, breathing people, and about the drama of ordinary life. That's what I think a film should be about. And that's what so many of the films in the best years of Hollywood did. Yeah. That's what I watch on television. I just watch Turner Classic movies.
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Athan: Your performance in A DIFFERENT STORY as the poetic, sympathetic young man Albert, was exceptional. What it is that drew you to the part of Albert in A DIFFERENT STORY?
Perry: That's an interesting question. I got the script to play, and loved the sense of quiet humor in the film. I wanted to indulge in that kind of quiet humor and play the part for that. I loved director Paul Aaron from the moment I met him in that production company. He sent me the script as I was set to play in the movie, and then the production fell apart.
They lost the funding. I said to them that if they ever got the funding back together again, I would do it for what they had already paid me. They had to pay me my fee, even though the funding fell apart. I said, ‘Well, if you ever get it together, I'll just do it for what you've already paid me. I won't charge anymore.’ They originally wanted Susan Sarandon, but then that's when they ended up with Meg Foster. Susan started working on something else. I just love the purity, the good heartedness of that script. It's just such a sweet, good hearted movie about ordinary people just trying to make sense of their lives.
I think, by the time I shot that film, I'd learned a valuable lesson, which is, you have to, you must pick parts very carefully, because you have to be willing to live with a character for a long time, and very intimately. It's not like necessarily becoming somebody, although it can sometimes be that way. It was that way for me, doing THE DIVIDE, the character I play in that being the old man. I just quickly got to the place where he and I were the same person. I didn't even think of it as a character.
Usually it's sort of more akin to rooming with someone 24 hours a day, and living with them. And you got to make sure you're willing to live with this character you've chosen. I did a film called THE CHOIRBOYS for example, which was before A DIFFERENT STORY. The character I played in THE CHOIRBOYS ends up killing himself in the film. So that meant all through that film, no matter what I was doing, I had to be thinking about this. I had to live in his mind, in his head with the reasons why he eventually killed himself. And boy, that film took us about three months to shoot, and damn near killed me because of the character’s feelings all day every day.
That guy was going to kill himself, so I had to live with his suicidal thoughts. When the film was over, I kind of ran away and thought, I'm going to choose much more carefully in the future, to make sure I’m willing to live with someone. It doesn't mean they have to be a good guy or anything like that. It just means you're going to be living in their head all day every day. It better be a head you're willing to live in.
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Athan: A DIFFERENT STORY had an excellent cast with yourself and Meg Foster in the lead roles, with Guerin Barry, Valerie Curtin, Doug Higgins, and Peter Donat in supporting parts. The chemistry especially with Meg Foster as Stella was moving, and very real, to witness. What was it like working with these performers?
Perry: Well, there was a wonderful sense of camaraderie and chemistry in A DIFFERENT STORY. And you can feel that when it's happening. That's just good casting. It's very hard to predict when you will have tremendous chemistry and when you won't. It's very strange sometimes with film, and you can feel it happening where two people would be together and they work great on film, even though in real life they wouldn't work well together.
And the opposite, sometimes people who work beautifully in real life have no chemistry on film. The best example to me always is Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. It always seemed to me that Paul Newman didn't start out to be a very good actor by his own admission, but by the time he, by the end of his life, had become arguably one of, or maybe the best film actor in the world, just by sheer attention to detail.
Joanne Woodward was always a supremely good actress, and Paul Newman undoubtedly learned a lot from her. In real life they had a closeness and a bond that was just what we all hoped for with someone. Right? I don't know if other people feel this way about them together, as they were only together in a couple of films. They're dead, they're boring. They don't work together on film at all. Whatever it is that binds them together is invisible.
Whereas I worked a couple of times with actresses, for example, that I didn't really like as a person. That's not true of Meg, by the way. I loved Meg, but I've worked with actresses I didn't really like and wouldn't spend any time with on my own. I could tell, and the actress could tell, probably felt the same way about me. We could tell, though, that for some reason on film, we had great chemistry. It's very hard to predict that. You know, it's very hard when someone casts a film, to tell if what's going to happen or not, takes a really good eye. Like Paul Aaron has, to know what will work.
Chemistry between actors is very unpredictable. When it's missing, it's awful, isn't it? We've all seen features with the actor and the actress, both of them very good, but there's nothing going on between them. It's dead air between them.
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Athan: What did you most love about filming A DIFFERENT STORY?
Perry: Well, there was a lot that I loved about it. Certainly, I enjoyed every day so much on that film, felt so free, and so able to use whatever I could bring. One thing comes to mind is that Paul had a wonderful habit of letting us play a scene. He kept us together in many, many scenes. He would shoot the two of us in a two shot, which was so smart, I thought, unlike most films, so at the end of a scene, he wouldn't say cut very often. We'd come to the next scene, and he let us just do whatever we felt like at the end of the scenes.
So very often we'd say something, or do something, or follow a tangent. He was so smart about that. He knew one of the things that makes film so great is that you can capture forever the momentary accident, the thing that comes out of left field.
He'd let us ad-lib whenever we felt like it, he wouldn't object to that. I mean, you probably know some of the greatest films of all time where the lines were ad-libs. Like ‘We're going to need a bigger boat.’ That line from JAWS which Roy Scheider said, ‘we're going to need a bigger boat.’ I mean, that's one of the great dialogue lines of all time. And that was just ad-lib. He said it one day at the end of a shot. So that's something I remember.
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Athan: Do you keep in contact with any cast members and crew from your movies?
Perry: Well, sometimes you do, but not very often. And sometimes, oh boy, there's one time when I wished to hell I had. I did a television movie called Good King Wenceslas, with Jonathan Brandis, who was on seaQuestDSV. And he was wonderful to work with. A sweet, young guy, and a very good actor. His mother was along with him. He seemed very strong and stable at the time. Jonathan Brandis was on top of the world.
We were in the Czech Republic shooting, this is before the internet. We went down to a news stand, and all the teenage magazines there, all the various teenybopper type magazines had his picture on the cover. They didn't know he was in town at all, they had no idea. It was the way it was.
He was extremely successful and famous, and we had a great time acting together. I was the bad guy, he was the good king. We had sword fights together and so much fun working together. At the end we shook hands and said, stay in touch, here's my number and here's your number, and let's check in with each other. We went back to Los Angeles and I talked to him a few times, but we didn't keep contact because you say that and then you just get busy.
Right? That's it. Go forward about ten years. I'm looking at the news and it turns out he's killed himself. He's dead. And I know exactly what happened to him, it happens to all actors. His career, when I worked with him, was on top of the pile. And then, inevitably, he went down the pile and was back in the bottom auditioning in with the other actors and all that stuff. I'm sure this is what happened. He got very depressed about it. Maybe, maybe if I'd stayed in touch with him, I could've been the one to help him, to show him the truth.
The Bridges brothers, Beau and Jeff, once said a wonderful thing to me. I was with them at an event, and I knew them vaguely from connections and obviously admire both of them tremendously. They're both really good guys, which is not true of everybody in Hollywood by any means. They're the best people.
I was wailing about my career at the time. I don't remember what was going on, but I would say, ‘Oh God, I'll never work again and I can't get work and it's terrible. And Oh God, oh God.’, which actors always do as actors. I think it was Beau Bridges who said to me, ‘Perry, listen, think of it as a roller coaster ride. You go up and you go down and you go up and you go down. And so what that means is when you're up, you better enjoy the hell out of it, because you know where you're going. It's down. And when you're down, just relax, be patient, because you know what you're going to do next.’ Let's back up. You go up and go down. That just solved a whole agony for me, it was so helpful. I wish I told Jonathan Brandis that, I wish so much to God.
I've watched Hollywood and fame, and the whole business of getting successful, or losing it, or whatever it is, kill several friends now. I mean, that literally I've seen it, and it's just so dangerous. It's something you can't understand ‘till you're in it. And I, I mean, I don't understand. I never had enough fame in my career to understand the pressure of it, just enough, frankly, to learn that I kind of didn't like it when it was like that. When I was doing Riptide, I couldn't walk through an airport or something.
It wasn't fun at all. Okay. That was just a little taste of what gets people so crazy. The worst is when they get famous, and then all of a sudden they lose it and they, you know. Anyway, it's a very dangerous place, it hurts a lot of people. It's been part of it pretty much forever.
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Athan: The main characters in A DIFFERENT STORY were Albert Walreavens, who is about to be deported, and real estate agent Stella Cooke, who saves him from this fate. Albert was gay, and Stella was a lesbian, and together they found love. In preparing for the role, did you undertake sociological research on homosexual, and lesbian gender identities?
Perry: An actor does a lot of research, and you try to, we can to live the life of the character as much as you can. I'm not homosexual. Not that there's anything wrong with it at all, but, I'm not, but I did go with the director, Paul Aaron, to a number of gay hangouts and bars and stuff, just so I could experience the life that my character probably lived. I have lots of friends, I always have, that are homosexual, that are gay and great, great people.
As much as I could, I tried to understand Albert's experience and his life, and what his childhood might have been like. You always do that. It's part of the fun of being an actor, really is doing all the research, learning things you might otherwise never learn. I spent a great deal of time learning about Alzheimer's, and going to nursing homes where Alzheimer's patients lived, and asking them if I could just talk to them and observe them so I could tell the truth. I don't ever want to trace something that I haven't actually seen or experienced.
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Athan: You have acted in a multitude of television series and telemovies over the years, with Cannon, Hawaii Five-O, Riptide, Burke’s Law, Melrose Place, The Outer Limits, Will & Grace, and The Mentalist just a tiny sampling of your works. In comparing both mediums, what was the main striking difference for you between film, and television?
Perry: Back in the eighties I did a series for three years. Every series gets canceled eventually, but we did about three years. It was a series called Riptide with Joe Penny, Tom Bray and I. It was a Stephen Cannell production and was very, very enjoyable, but extremely hard work. Most audiences don't realize how hard you work on a TV series like that with twelve to fifteen hour days every day. Imagine.
It was just exhausting. My God, after three years, I felt like I've been hit by maybe two trucks, one right after the other, but it was a lot of fun. The three of us became very good friends and worked very well together. We were very supportive of each other. So important when you do a series. When we first started together, we had a meeting, just the three of us. They had three principal actors, and we agreed that we were always going to stick together. We were never going to let any forces try to get between us and break us apart. And we had that for those three years.
With film, the process of shooting film usually is much slower than TV. In TV, you're always under enormous pressure to get the day's work done, and they load up a lot of work. In film you can might shoot two or three pages of a script a day. In TV you're likely to shoot 12 to 15 pages a day. So, you have to be very prepared, and you move very quickly, and you learn how to to pace yourself accordingly. That's the principle difference. The process of shooting is very similar, at least it always seemed to be. You don't have time to be a perfectionist in a TV series. Do thirty, forty takes in film, maybe it's exactly what everyone wants, but you'd never do that in a TV series. There isn't time in the day.
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Athan: Aside from film television, and Broadway, you have also done radio acting. What is it that you liked most about it?
Perry: Now, onto other kinds of acting. I've done radio dramas. In fact, I'm only the second of three people that has played the part of Han Soul, obviously. And Harrison Ford played in the films, and I played it on National Public Radio. We did all three of the first films for radio. And they worked out very well, extremely well. And that in radio acting is where you're just working with a microphone in a studio room.
Honestly, that's the most enjoyable acting in the entire world. All the things that usually become ancillary and irritating to shooting film or TV, hitting your mark, being lit properly, matching all the requirements of film acting, are all are gone in radio acting. In fact, you don't even have to memorize the dialogue. It's there on a piece of paper in front of you. This is all you have to do in radio acting, and this is the most fun.
Also, the artist is figuring out how they want to play it, that's the joy of acting. The one technical requirement of radio acting is you have to learn to turn pages silently. That's a technique, and it takes a few minutes to learn it, but that's it. That's the only technique. I've done a lot of other radio acting too, and that's really exciting. I've also done stage, which is very different from all of those other mediums. I've been on Broadway and in A Few Good Men. I played Colonel Nathan Jessup, the one who says, ‘you can't handle the truth,’ that one.
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Athan: How did you find acting on Broadway?
Perry: The Broadway stage is brutally tough. I'm so glad I did it once, and I'm also so glad I'm never going to do it again. It's incredibly hard work doing stage work. It's extremely satisfying when at the end of a play an audience bursts into applause and stands up, that's wonderful. And then when the curtain drops, you go back to wherever you're living on, on a cloud, you know. You feel so great, and you don't go to sleep until the curtain comes down at 10 30 or something and maybe 11 o'clock, and you go back. You don't go to sleep until three or four in the morning. Then you get up in the morning and think, ‘oh my God, I have to do it all over again tonight.’ And it's tough. Very tough. So glad again I got to do that. I've had a very lucky career.
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Athan: Motorcycles and sidecars are one of your passions in life. In 2008 you were appointed to the Board of the American Motorcyclist Association, and have also hosted the Motorcycle Hall of Fame Induction Ceremonies many times. When did you commence riding motorcycles, and what is it that you love about them?
Perry: Let’s go to A DIFFERENT STORY. There's that motorcycle and sidecar scene right at the end. Well, that was my motorcycle and sidecar, and it was my suggestion to crash it like that because we were talking; what would you do if you go to Stella and she won't take you back? How would you react? And I said, that was my idea. Albert would crash it into a tree and force her to feel terrible and help him up. So we did that and boy, sure hurt that old bike.
I've hosted the Hall of Fame induction ceremony before, which is a big deal here in the States. I've hosted it now, fourteen times altogether. I love being on the board, and was on the board of the Hall of Fame. Motorcycles are something that, the cliche of motorcyclists is that if you have to explain it, you'll never understand it. You know, there's a lot of truth to that, but I think it's really like meditating.
I get crazy in my life, and if things are unhappy for me, I get on a motorcycle, ride it up to Mulholland Drive, which is sort of along the top of the mountains right through the center of LA. I just ride for an hour, come back, and I'm ready to go again. Meditation for me. Speed, wind, smells. You're in the environment. Control. You feel like you're flying like a bird as close to flying really as you can get. Because even in a real airplane, you're in a metal cylinder, but on a motorcycle, you're not, you're in the air.
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Athan: 2018 marked the release of your first film as director, being western THE DIVIDE. The movie has received sixteen awards, variously for best picture, yourself as director, screenwriting, acting, and cinematography. Has this project been a long-held ambition for you, and how did it feel to see the movie completed and released?
Perry: Well, I'd say that making THE DIVIDE was the most satisfying thing I've ever done in my whole career of about 50 years. I always knew from almost the very first bit of film work I did, that I wanted to make my own movie sometime. When you're an actor, you're really at the mercy of the script first and the director. It's your job to tell the story that the director and the script want to tell.
I wanted so much someday to tell a story that I wanted to tell my way, and that's what THE DIVIDE allowed me to do. It was just absolutely the most enjoyable thing I've ever done. Now the movie has a lot of flaws, and I could talk for hours about the flaws, but there's lots of mistakes I made in THE DIVIDE.
My partner, Jana Brown, who wrote the script, and I both feel strongly that the result is the movie we meant to make, and that's a very rare feeling. It's so strange to usually see something you acted in so often, almost every time. Turns out to be not at all what you just thought you were doing. Not at all what you hoped it would be, but in the case of THE DIVIDE, it really was the movie we meant to make.
It's very satisfying, and very exciting. It's a slow, old fashioned, sweet movie about the drama of ordinary life, and ordinary people. It's meant to remind you of films from the forties and fifties. THE DIVIDE is in black and white because I always knew I wanted to make a film in black and white. I love black and white. To me it's much more powerful and evocative than color films are.
It's a film that's suitable to all. There's no violence at all in it. I hate modern films for all the violence in them. I think it does terrible damage to our whole society. And so I knew I wanted none of that in the film and it is just incredibly satisfying. It’s so much fun to do things I thought were important that I could never get other filmmakers to do, for example, shooting in sequence. Now, almost never do get to shoot the scenes on a film because it doesn't make any financial sense. You shoot everything on one location, everything that happens in front of a building, for example. You shoot all at once. But if you shoot a film in sequence, the actors and the director are able to experience the film the way the audience does. It makes a huge difference to performances.
So in the case of THE DIVIDE, for example, a lot of things happened in front of this old barn, by the way. We shot it at my own cattle ranch in Northern California. I own a five hundred acre cattle ranch up in California. That's where we shot it. We wrote the script to fit this piece of property that we were going to use. And a lot of it happens in front of this particular old barn. I asked the lighting crew to light that barn, I think it was five different times, which is against all the logic of film. I remember the fourth or fifth time we were lighting it, the lighting crew said, ‘Haven't we done this before? Why the hell are we doing this again?’ And I said, ‘It'll make the film better.’
The interesting thing was each time they lit the barn at night, it came out better, and we learned each time how to make it even better, more powerful looking. Another thing I did that film directors never do anymore these days, but they did when I was a young man, is I as a director, would stand right beside the camera. I always loved that when a director stood right with his face, pressed right to the camera so that he was the audience. Nowadays, they all have what's called video village, where they set up a big tent, maybe an eighth of a mile away from the set. And there are monitors in there, and all the people gather in this dark tent and watch everything.
You're away from the tent all alone by yourself, except for a couple of crew members. The actors are lost, and left to their own devices. It's not nearly as good as it used to be as in the seventies where the director, when you shoot film, would be right by the lens. There are lots of things like that that I did the right way. With auditioning, I always heed the way auditions would run. They'll have actors come in through ten minute increments.
Dozens and dozens of actors to read for one part, and I hated that process all my life. So as a director, instead of doing that, I made sure I knew every actor that was going to come and audition for me. Only a few ever did. I'd see all kinds of film on people, but I called in only a few.
I only made a few people go through the frustration of coming all the way to audition for me. And I made the auditions last one or two hours for each person. It was unheard of. My casting director was infuriated by me. He said, ‘My God, you won't be able to see anybody if you give everybody a couple of hours.’ And I said, ‘I only need to see a few people because I'm not calling in everybody to audition. Unless I think there's a very strong possibility they could play the role for me.’ He said, ‘You bring them in in ten minute increments, and then it helps you get a good sense of what you're looking for.’ And I said, “I know exactly what I'm looking for.’
I just have to find the right person to do it, and he said, ‘Well we've got to videotape the auditions.’ That's the current thing that they do in all auditions today. They videotape them, or you even take yourself at home and you send them the tape. And I said, ‘I don't need you to videotape. There's no need at all.’ He said, ‘How will you know or remember?” I said, ‘If I can't remember someone's audition, that means they're not right for the part. I'll remember. Believe me.’ And with my young lead man in the film, he came in, and we spent about three hours reading the script.
He'd read one scene for me, and I'd read the other character. Sometimes we'd switch parts, and we'd read other scenes he hadn't expected to read. At the end of three hours, I broke the biggest rule of all. I said, ‘Okay, do you want to play this part?’ He said, “Yes, I do.’ And I said, ‘You got it.’ Which is not what you're supposed to do, as opposed to the agent, as the agent negotiates really hard. And I said, ‘Nope, we're not doing that. We're not playing that game.’ It was very satisfying all across the board, all the way through it. That's how I did it. Breaking the rules, but with great satisfaction.
It's a good film. Every time I've seen it with an audience at the end of it, an awful lot of the audience are very moved. I'll turn around and look right at the end of it. Often half, or a quarter of the audience wiping tears away from their eyes and stuff. It's a sweet movie, and a good-hearted movie, which so few films these days are.
I’m very out of step with my profession. I can't fit in at all. I've been in the Oscars, the Motion Picture Academy since 1977. The things I think are the best films, and the best performances never even seem to get nominated, let alone win. I'm just completely out of step with stuff. I made a film that was in step with me, with what I care about. I only needed to do it once, but I'm so glad I did it.
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Thank you so much today for your time Perry, and for the insight you have shone onto the art of acting, A DIFFERENT STORY, cinema, television, writing, Katharine Hepburn, Broadway, motorcycling, and film direction. It has been wonderful having you on CINEMATIC REVELATIONS. You are welcome to return whenever you wish.
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Perry King links
+A DIFFERENT STORY movie IMDb page
+THE DIVIDE movie official website
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THE DIVIDE trailer
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