Continued from previous page...
ALL HAIL THE THIRTEENTH
WARRIOR
Vladimir was happy
to share a little more information about his background when asked
and how he managed to get started in the profession that pays his
wages, “My whole family was in the theatre in Czechoslovakia
and when I was 10 years old we moved to Montreal in Canada,"
he tells everyone, “and in that part of Montreal there was no
theatre, it was a blue-collar community, there was no art so I became
a hockey player. I played professional hockey for a year and I hated
it so I just took off on a motorcycle to try and figure out what I
wanted and for some weird reason I started a river rafting company
in British Columbia in Canada, white water, and my first customer
was a producer from a TV show called 21 Jump Street“
At that point most people recognize that this is the show that brought
big Hollywood A-list star Johnny Depp into the public eye.
“Yeah this was before anybody knew him, about 1986 I think,"
Vlad continued "and they had the whole crew of about 60 people
and we [TV producer] got talking and they said you should come down
you know and we'll give you a little part in something and I said
well I used to be an actor when I was a kid so I should be able to
do that. So I came down and that was pretty much it and I started
working right away in television. The thing about if you work in Canada,
your dream is to move to Los Angeles because then you have a shot
there and most Canadians because they are conservative and a little
bit socialist in their scope of life, they don't want to go to America
where you might starve if it doesn't work. So I went down there because
I'm not that way and I got a job right away and got my green card
and I starved for three years. I got nothing and so I fired my agent
and it was Christmas Eve and I got a call the next day, Christmas
Day saying 'I know you fired us but they want to see you for this
silly movie called 'Eaters of the Dead'. So I was desperate and I
went in and I had no idea it had an eighty-five hundred dollar budget
and that was six years ago and that was a big balance for six years
ago. So you know I read and screen-tested and jumped through all the
hoops and I got the job."
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Vladimir Kulich and
Jenny Mollen |
It is the role in 'this silly movie' that most other people recognize
Vladimir from. Renamed The Thirteenth Warrior, Vladimir took
on the role of Buliwyf, The 1st Warrior playing opposite Antonio
Banderas and he relayed some of his memories of his time on that
movie. “The story was written originally by Michael Crichton
and it was originally called 'Eaters of the Dead' which I thought
was really a nice title," he recalls, “they cast the thing
in April, I got the job in May and a year later I was still working
on that project. There were things like the producer and the director
didn't agree on the ending so I came back and I re-shot one ending
for the producer and then I would finish on that scene and then I
would go into a different studio and do a different ending for the
director. It was like 'don't tell them what we're doing over here'
or 'what's he doing over there?' and this was Michael Crichton and
John McTiernan you know powerful people couldn't agree on the ending
so I think it was about a fourteen month process. The funny part was
when I got the job they said 'can you ride?' I said 'yeah I can ride'.
The first day on the job and I almost got killed, as I had never rode
a horse in my life! And John McTiernan has a very deep voice and he
walked up to me, my face is in the dirt and he says 'I thought you
said you could ride?' and I said 'yeah motorcycles'. Anything for
a job you know." Towards the end of the film there is a rather
impressive battle scene, was this as difficult to shoot as it looked?
“It took a long time because you're having 80 things, 80 horses,
80 different fights around you and then you have to do yours and if
yours is off you have to set the other 80 in position and do it again
so that can take two days so it took I think about 2 weeks to do that
fight ø in the rain!
The best part was actually the ending, at the
very end where I die and I'm on the throne and the director says 'OK
this is your big moment. How do you want to die? Do you want to die
with your eyes closed or your eyes open?' Being an egotistical actor
I said open. So we did it and I didn't realize they had rain machines
and rain machines have rain that is big so trying to keep your eyes
open, it was just torture and so I was looking at the camera and I
realize it was a 70mm camera which means the frame is a close up,
and every actor wants his close up, so they finish and they say cut
and I say 'what about the close up?' and the directors goes ' oh don't
worry about that, we got that,' but I go, 'but how do they know I'm
dead? My eyes are open and you're far away,' 'Oh your dog, your dog
is gonna cry.' I said, 'well that's great but we haven't established
a dog, we don't know there's a dog yet.' He says, 'don't worry about
it.' Anyway I went to Paris on a little holiday and I get a call from
the producer's office saying we want you to come back and do a re-shoot
and do this and this and this and this and also yes you're going to
get your close up. And I was kinda cocky and said 'just tell McTiernan
to get his dog to cry a little louder' and then I called back and
said I'm just kidding I'm coming right back!" Finally, what was
it like to work with an actor like Antonio? “Well for a pretty
looking man he's quite good you know. I was surprised “ he laughs,"
he was very grounded and outgoing, he wasn't really you know as pretty
as he looks, he wasn't that way as a person, he was much stronger.
He's very confident, confident in a way of not taking over a scene
because he has confidence so he was great to work with."
GUEST TALK - JENNY MOLLEN, THE BEAUTY INSIDE THE BEAST
Due to conflicting schedules, CityofAngel.com missed a number of the
guest talks that took place on Sunday with one notable and refreshing
exception as Jenny Mollen took to the stage with Vladimir Kulich. As
a self confessed fan of the show before she got her part in Season 5,
Jenny had taken on the role of werewolf and Angel's love interest Nina
Ash. Her stay in the show was short lived considering the cancellation
but how does Jenny think that her character would have evolved had there
been a Season 6? "I think about that a lot because I don't know,
she answers truthfully, “As a fan it was hard for me to see Nina
and Angel be a long lasting, functional relationship but I would have
liked her to have to stay in the picture obviously in some capacity.
I mean I hope I wouldn't have been just a like booty call. I think that
she probably well I don't know whether she could have got a job at Wolfram
& Hart or anything but I would liked to have seen her stay in his
life in some capacity." As the profession." An actor's life
can sometimes be full of peaks and troughs, what does Jenny do in between
acting jobs, “Cry! I sit in a ball on the floor and hate myself,"
she laughs, “that's not actually that far from the truth but I'm
usually auditioning so that's what usually fits in with my day. More
recently I've been working on a script that I have been working on for
probably three years and its been like a huge endeavor and I have a
lot of people involved in it and I'm hoping to go out with it later
this month because it's at that point and I can't tell you how thrilled
I am.
It's so rewarding to hold it and be like I can't believe I did
this especially when I had like my share of cheating at school so its
weird to see something so long and think 'I wrote all of this myself?
I didn't plagiarize anything?' So that's where a majority of my free
time has been spent lately." News of the script intrigues some
and Jenny is asked what her plans are for the script. Does she want
to sell it or does she plan to direct or act in the project herself?
“People ask me that all the time," she admits, “and
I think the reason why it took me to write it is because I had to get
to the point where I said ø OK this isn't you Jenny, this is not you.
I found that with my one-woman show that I wrote and produced in UCLA,
I did myself a disservice because of the fact that they were my words
and I didn't bring anything new to it so it's like I was kind of short
changing both the writer and the actor, and I feel like even though
I'm in love with the work and I love words, that's why I act, it's taken
me a long time for me to get to the point where I can say this is for
someone else because again I wouldn't want to be the first time directing
something that is mine because I don't think I'd have enough distance
to be able to really find out what it needs."
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"Alexis and I took it further than we would of gone." ~ Amy Acker on the death of Fred
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Jenny seems to be an ambitious girl that knows what she wants. When
she began on the road of an acting career did she set herself any targets
to reach and if she did how far is she from reaching them? “Man
I have high standards for myself and I don't know if I've reached them,"
she professes, “I haven't actually ever told anyone about this
but I was in New York screen testing for something I think about five
years ago and at the time I was not able to support myself acting. I
was working at a restaurant and I knew I was the best one there, you
know when you look around the room and you're like 'I'm better than
these people', the actresses I mean and I don't mean that in like a
defensive way but I feel like you know when things are going to happen
sometimes and it was one of those times. So I was in New York screen
testing and I did beat out all the girls and then they said 'well can
you come back again?' So I went back alone and I remember I wrote myself
this letter and I said I'm going to open this letter if I get this role
because I just want to read it you know after the fact. It was basically
you know talking about humility and all why I got into acting in the
first place, the passion and all things like that and it was probably
totally sassy because the point is I never actually got that role, they
never cast that role like the role just went away and I've never opened
that letter, it's still in my suitcase. I've done many movies since
then and I support myself acting now but I still feel in the weirdest
way, it's funny it's like I don't know if I'll ever feel I can open
that letter because its the further I go the more I want sort of thing
but I wanted to be in a Sundance film, I remember always saying that
and that happened so that was exciting."
THE MUTUAL APPRECIATION SOCIETY
As Andy has already
hinted at by revealing his plans for a world takeover via the convention
scene, he has attended a lot of events and so it is inevitable that
a lot of the same stories would come up in conversation as they did
at Quor'toth. Tales about his singing discovery via karaoke with
Patti LaBelle, his 'love' for slash fan-fiction and the demise
of his doorbell have already been covered in CityofAngel.com's features
of previous events. A question did pop up in reference to Fred's death
and how Amy felt about the way her character passed on. “I think
because Joss directed that episode we really got to do the scene amazingly,"
she says, “Alexis and I took it further than we would of gone.
I think because he directed it and it came out so good. It was really
exhausting because we were crying like all day." No one can possibly
question the talents of Dayne Johnson except perhaps the man himself.
He became unusually modest about his creations when asked about how
much say he has in the creation of the demons seen in the show. “I
don't have that much input into the demons that come from Rob Hall
at Almost Human and the way those demons come about is they
do drawings which then get approval and it is sculpted into a mould
to get a feel for it. I never had any hands on." “He is
selling himself short," Andy says stepping in, "because
he brings them to life," “Yeah but I don't actually get
to go to the company and say we'll create this demon." “But
you created Illyria,“ Amy intervenes, “and Lorne,"
Andy adds before continuing, “he does sell himself short. They
can specify the outline, but there is so much detail and if you look
at the close up pictures of Amy's make up and mine you can see it"
All joking aside, it is clear that Andy, Amy and Dayne have a deep
found respect for one another, not just in their personal lives but
also from a professional perspective. Continuing the appreciation
of Dayne's craft, Amy turned to Andy and gave one of his secrets away,
“Like you always got mad when someone else had to do your make
up. If Dayne was busy he would come in and be a diva saying, 'it looks
awful, look at my nose its awful'. Considering what plans may have
originally have been in store for Lorne's appearance, Andy may have
had more to complain about than his nose as Dayne explained. “Joss
had a lot of input into Lorne. He was like, 'this here and that there',
and we had a few versions. We had one of Lorne with stripes with it,
and one with lots of veins in it. We did the make up tests at Paramount
then drove to the Buffy stages to let David Greenwalt
and Joss see it and they thought it was too mean looking. So we went
out to the make up stages at Buffy and Todd McKintosh completely
changed it. We were talking from pinks and all sorts to green."
Lorne? A pink demon? Well that would have been something to see!
GUEST TALKS - HERE CONVENES THE CIRCLE OF THE BLACKTHORN
Dennis Christopher and
Stacey Travis
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There are a couple
of interesting things that came from the Q&A session involving
Dennis Christopher and Stacey Travis on Saturday afternoon. The first
is that the lack of any real questions involving the roles they played
on Angel (especially as Dennis had been responsible for the
death of one of the show's principal characters) and the other is
their very real and intelligent perception of how Hollywood works
in this day and age because of the experiences they have encountered
during their years in the business. Between them, both Dennis and
Stacey have chalked up and impressive resume of work. Being actors
a little more mature in years, have they found it more difficult to
get a more varied type of role as they get older? Dennis is a very
thoughtful and expressive speaker and when he speaks (and he does
like to talk!), his opinion is compelling and he has a lot to say
about age and the acting industry. “In LA you get less opportunities
because oddly enough in New York, they have bigger imaginations. I
mean you can play any range of ages on the stage but in film for some
reason their imagination is so limited that they kind of want the
character to walk through the door. In New York when someone walks
into an audition, they want the person to get the part in LA when
you walk in the room they are looking for all the reasons why they
shouldn't give you the part. My contemporaries, people that are friends
of mine in the business, I'm 46 now so the deal is that all the people
that I know, all the guys my age that I know that are working, they're
all rather round and bald because that 's sort of the American standard
of what a middle-class dad would be like and I'm not putting that
down at all. It's just that I could never get into that even if I
tried so what do you do ø do you bend yourself to try and fit the
norm or do you try to be yourself and be a genuine person that is
really offered something and you're not all pretext so it's weird
how to know how to handle someone's opinion of you the minute you
walk through the door."
When someone mentioned that Rosanna Arquette had made a documentary
called All We Are Saying which tacked this very topic and how
attitudes of the film industry's hierarchy changes once an actor hits
40, the whole ageist topic continued. “It's worse on women I
think," Dennis replies in referral to the documentary, “but
it's for men and women alike and I think Stacey would agree that part
of the reason we became actors was to betray other people and its
almost like you don't feel right in your skin, you feel right playing
someone else that looks another way, that talks another way, that
walks another way, that has another way of thinking than your own,
that's what we really want to do and we're in a business that can
give us that opportunity. The people in charge of that business will
not give us that opportunity. They want the personality to walk in
the door so in Hollywood, they hire personalities, not artists, not
actors. In New York, thank God they still hire actors." Stacey
Travis agrees recalling her own experiences, “I also remember
about four years ago I got a pilot and the pilot was about this young
girl who had psychic powers that kind of came on to her when she was
14 and I got cast and then when we went to do the show they cast this
unbelievably beautiful knock-out model looking girl and she was 19
and she looked 24 and at the time I was thinking I couldn't have had
this kid, I wasn't old enough at the time and TV has gotten that way
a lot. If you watch The OC and stuff, there's parents on there playing
parents of people where they couldn't have had a kid unless they had
a kid at 14 so they want the kid to be hot and they want the mom to
be hot and that leaves out, as Rosanna was talking about in her documentary,
a lot of women in their forties."
“You know if you look back in film history though it's not that
much different because you have Anne Bancroft playing Dustin Hoffman's
paramour when she was just six years older and even earlier in film
history, you were made to think you were washed up at 30 so Garbo
and a lot of people would retire because the lights and the camera
techniques were harsh and horrible on your skin and you stopped looking
good on camera so I don't know if that has changed so much, maybe
its always been a youth obsessed medium." “That's what
nice about shows like this," Dennis adds, “Because when
you go for casting of shows like this, they are using their imaginations.
I mean when I went to audition for this it was a room of really genuinely
old men, all over 65, and I go 'what the hell am I doing here?' and
I ended up with the part. I felt a little guilty because of all these
old geezers that were there and there's not a lot of parts available
for them. One man came with a walker and I thought give him the part,
he's already old. He's got his real breathing apparatus and to be
a guest star on Angel when he's in his sixties, it'll be like gold
for him you know what I mean. There are other opportunities for me
around but they gave it to me and then after four and a half hours
in make up I thought this man would be dead. You know they'd get him
all done in the plastic and try to wake him up out of the chair and
he'd be expired you know what I mean."
