This is an article taken from the UK film magazine Empire (a top film mag!) in the September 1994 edition. Okay, I know it’s an old article but it’s an insightful one and hey, I’ve gotta start somewhere……
Bill Paxton may not yet be a household name, but thanks to his attention-grabbing turns in Near Dark, Aliens and One False Move, his reputation as a cult hero was sewn up long ago. In The Terminator, he got to say “F**k you, asshole” to Arnie. As the cowardly Private Hudson in Aliens he nabbed all the best lines including “Game over, man!”. In Near Dark, he played a vampire who opens a cowboy’s jugular with a spur. In Boxing Helena he slept with Sherilyn Fenn when she had limbs.
It’s a hot Sunday morning in July and Paxton is staying with his in-laws in Twickenham (in the outskirts of London ~ Lauren), just down the road from your correspondent. He drops around, and we take the ferry across the Thames to Ham House for a cup of tea.
“This guy here is interviewing me for a famous movie magazine”, he quips to the char lady who blushes at the charming Texan towering over here, failing to recognise the Hollywood star in her midst. Indeed, it’s a testament to Paxton’s chameleonesque qualities that he’s able to fit effortlessly in this month’s low budget direct-to-video effort Monolith – “that was one for the money” – and James Cameron’s blockbusting True Lies.
In the latter he does another of his wonderful character turns as Simon, the sleazy car salesman who tries to get into Jamie Lee Curtis’ knickers by pretending he’s spy. It’s Paxton’s third big-screen collaboration with Cameron, but the actor and uberdirector go back a long way and have forged a relationship that, while not quite in the same league as Scorsese and De Niro’s, has also spawned the video for Paxton’s former “art band” Martini Ranch which they co-directed.
Paxton started out as a set dresser for Roger Corman in the early ‘70’s before studying acting at New York University. In 1980 he found himself in Hollywood moonlighting as a set dresser on Galaxy of Terror, employed by the film’s art director James Cameron.
“I was looking for a job and a friend of mine said he’d met this fantastic art director who thought was going to be very big in the business. He took me to meet Jim who interviewed me right there and said: Can you start right away?’ Now Jim doesn’t mince his words, and I said ‘You mean right now?’ and he said ‘Yeah, why don’t you pick up that brush and start painting that wall’ ”.
By then Paxton had directed the now legendary music video/short Fisheads, which achieved cult status through regular airings on TV’s Saturday Night Live.
“Jim got a kick out of it”, remembers the genial Paxton, “he took a genuine interest in me, and he kind of let me in. Jim is a very private person, but he started telling me what his dreams were. At the time he was starting to write The Terminator. We’d be on the set at night and he would be giving us the latest instalment.”
So while Cameron moved on to direct Piranha 2: Flying Killers, Paxton landed his first major supporting role in Lords Of Discipline which was filmed on location in England, where he met his wife on the number 37 bus. Once back in Hollywood, Paxton invited Cameron to a screening of the film and introduced him to his co-star Michael Biehn who scooped the lead in The Terminator. “I didn’t get a damn thing”, he grins. But Cameron didn’t forget him, and cast Paxton as the spiky blue-haired leader of a punk gang.
A role as the obnoxious older brother in Weird Science followed, and when Cameron was in London for pre-production on Aliens, Paxton was called in to audition for the role of Hudson. The rest is celluloid history. So is Cameron, as reported, a hard taskmaster?
“He can get a bit overzealous, but he really lives by the adage that if you want something done well do it yourself. I have a fierce loyalty to Jim”.
It was Paxton’s impressive turn as the small-town sheriff in the acclaimed One False Move that finally propelled him from cult status into the realm of the leading man. Roles in Trespass and Tombstone have kept his profile high, while his gig opposite Tom Hanks in Ron Howard’s forthcoming Apollo 13 should set his star blazing. Nabbing the role of Simon in True Lies wasn’t however, a case of calling Cameron and asking for a job.
“Jim is so uncompromising he can’t hire a friend”, he admits. “On True Lies Jim said 'I think you’d be great for this part, but I want you to come in and read for it.’ Getting the role was really flattering”.
Simon, like Hudson before him, has a propensity for classic one-liners that Paxton says owes as much to his father as Cameron’s time at the word-processor.
“Every character I’ve played I’ve found some room for an expression I’ve learned from my dad”, he laughs. “In True Lies I say of Jamie’s breasts that they ‘Make me want to stand up and beg for buttermilk’. My dad used to say that and I have no idea what it means. It’s just a funny expression, like the one in Weird Science where I say ‘How about a nice greasy pork sandwich served in a dirty ashtray?’ That was something he used to say to me if I’d been out drinking, Now I’m always listening out for those kinds of expressions….”
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