CHRISTOPHER WALKEN
Lasting Impression.........
by Jeff Dawson
Speaking in a peculiar way, Christopher Walken insists: "It doesn’t seem to me that I have a peculiar way of speaking ... I hesitate a lot, but that’s because ... I’m thinking about it."
He’s right to a degree. On paper, at least, there’s absolutely nothing unusual about Walken’s arrangement of words. It’s just that when he talks he has a weird habit of adding extra full stops and putting emphasis in all the wrong places. But what should he care? Throw in the calculated nonchalant delivery, the emotionless eyes and the mobster-style New York accent and Walken has carved out a niche for himself as one of the most distinctive, and oft-imitated, modern screen personas.
"It’s great," continues Walken, harking back to this year’s Oscars when presenter Kevin Spacey got to do his Christopher Walken. "I never thought when I was starting out that actors would be doing me. There’s a guy named Jay Mohr who does me doing a commercial, and he keeps changing his mind. Kevin Spacey did me on Saturday Night Live auditioning for Star Wars. It’s very funny."
Fortunately, the real Christopher Walken is nothing like the ghoul of popular legend. Not the antichrist of True Romance who achieved the unique distinction of making Dennis Hopper seem well balanced. Not the monster of Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead, surely the most threatening paraplegic ever committed to celluloid. Although the voice and twitchy mannerisms remain, they only go to enhance Walken’s wickedly droll sense of humour.
"It’s very strange, it’s nothing that I do consciously," he muses. "I don’t think of myself as dangerous or anything like that. It’s funny, even the independents usually cast me as villains and strange things."
There’s been the mainstream - Batman Returns, Wayne’s World 2; the quirky - Pulp Fiction and the three films he’s made with Abel Ferrara among countless others. And, as Walken points out, if there is anything that has characterised his career, it’s quantity.
"I make a lot of movies," he says. "I make four, um, five, six movies a year. I do it because I really like to work. I really don’t have anything else to do. Some of them go straight to video. They’re so obscure. I make movies that nobody will see," he says proudly. "I’ve made a number of movies that I have never seen."
Quite what the public will make of this month’s Alicia Silverstone-produced Excess Baggage is yet unknown, but there’s Walken again, as malicious Uncle Ray, weird as ever and with a strange red tint in his hair (like the dye job in Last Man Standing, and a variant on the weird yellow hair he had as the Bond villain in A View To A Kill).
"This is a very big movie," he insists, lest we get it confused with some of his smaller efforts.
Actually, Christopher Walken isn’t Christopher Walken at all - he’s Ronnie Walken, a kid who grew up in Queen’s, went to stage school and, with his two brothers, spent the 1950s as a child actor during the golden age of live TV. He appeared with the greats - Milton Berle, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis - and forged a successful career in Broadway musicals until, at 25, he decided to change his moniker.
At 26, he got his first film part in Me And My Brother (1969), then The Anderson Tapes (1971). He didn’t do another movie for four years (Next Stop Greenwich Village) and though he won plaudits for things like Roseland in 1977, it was his other movie that year, Annie Hall, with a cameo as Diane Keaton’s auto-destructive brother that probably set the pattern for everything else since.
If his astounding performance in 1978’s The Deer Hunter marked him as an actor of distinction and bagged him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, his new-found celebrity status (partying with Belushi, hanging out with Andy Warhol) was not cemented onscreen. Top billing in The Dogs of War was undone by his turn in Michael Cimino’s disastrous Deer Hunter follow-up, Heaven’s Gate, and then came Brainstorm, during which co-star Natalie Wood drowned. Since then, apart from the odd diversion, like the hoofing pimp in the big screen take on Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven, his films have seen him slip into the familiar haunted characters.
"I’ve had some very good parts, you know, some things that I think are always very interesting to watch, like my dancing in Pennies From Heaven, At Close Range which I did with Sean Penn and things like Pulp Fiction. I also like my angel movie, The Prophecy.
"And I still have a lot of hair," he adds, giving it a tug. "Most actors, when they watch themselves over the years, they see their hairline go back, but I’ve been very consistent about that. This is the real thing."
This with the flicker of a smile - you’re never quite sure whether he’s just having a joke (as with his beauty tip, that his skin has never seen the sun). But when it comes down to choosing his favourite film of all, Walken’s deadly serious.
"Puss In Boots," he insists, harking back to an Israeli version of the old fairy tale. "It’s really one of my best movies. Nobody has ever seen this."
Empire ventures the hope that there is positively nothing that would keep Walken off the screen.
"It would have to be something that was either weird or so mediocre that there was no point," he replies. "For me it’s got to be almost hopeless before I will say no ..."