Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on August 18, 2009, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Bill Pullman may not be the first person who comes to mind when you think “genre veteran.” But the actor who is perhaps best known for such populist entertainments as Independence Day and While You Were Sleeping has taken a number of cinematic trips to the dark side, most notably under the guidance of the Lynch family. Having starred in David’s 1997 mind-teaser Lost Highway, he now can be seen as the lead in daughter Jennifer’s Surveillance (reviewed here).
Pullman stars in the film with Julia Ormond as FBI agents Hallaway and Anderson, who arrive at a rural police station to investigate a grisly roadside massacre. A trio of badly shaken witnesses survived the bloody incident, and the particulars of what happened gradually come together through their dramatized recollections as they are separately interviewed. One, a little girl named Stephanie (Ryan Simpkins), is queried by Anderson, while Hallaway oversees all three interrogations via video monitors. As the truth about the violence is revealed, we also discover that Hallaway and Anderson’s relationship is closer than it first appears.
Originally tapped by Jennifer Lynch to star in her debut feature Boxing Helena opposite Madonna during the project’s initial stages (scheduling issues ultimately led Julian Sands and Sherilyn Fenn to take the roles), Pullman was initially doubtful when Lynch sent him the Surveillance screenplay. “I’d known her for a long time,” he says, “but I was thinking, ‘I don’t know if I can get into this story.’ Then she called and said, ‘Pullman, you’ve got to look harder at it, I really see you in this role.’ So I signed up.”
Having previously been cast by David (on Jennifer’s recommendation) in Lost Highway, Pullman found interesting parallels between the father and daughter’s creative working methods. “They have similar, terrifically interesting personalities and sensibilities,” he notes. “Their senses of humor are very similar, and I’ve always felt very close to what they’re doing. But David comes from an art-school perspective, and he’s very much entranced by the psychological underpinnings of a character, while Jennifer is much more engaged and can really get ignited by a character’s emotions. So you couldn’t get wider apart on that level, even though they both have similar touchstones. I’m always amazed by certain rituals of life they both enjoy, like drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, which enter into their stories.”
Ormond, another performer not typically known for genre roles (a stint in I Know Who Killed Me notwithstanding), also made a strong impression on the actor. “She’s a very directed person, focused and everything,” Pullman says. “She brought an incredible amount of will and dedication to her part, and a fascination. There was a wicked joy that made her fun to work with.”
This was particularly true (SPOILER ALERT: skip this paragraph if you want to preserve some of Surveillance’s surprises) in the later scenes between Hallaway and Anderson, during which they prove to be more than what they seem. As a result, Pullman felt no need to research the FBI side of his role. “I really didn’t have to; I was more intrigued by psychopathic behavior, so there were things I looked at to try to find those resonances in myself. There’s quite a bit of literature about that, books like The Mask of Sanity by Hervey Cleckley, which is the real cornerstone—the guy wrote it in 1941. And then there’s a more recent book by Robert Hare called Without Conscience, so that really was my direction.”
Real-life crime also resonated through Lost Highway, in which Pullman plays Fred Madison, a jazz saxophone player who is framed and convicted for his wife’s murder. In one of the movie’s many enigmatic twists, Fred is suddenly transformed into a young mechanic named Pete (played by Balthazar Getty) halfway through the story. How much of the movie’s strange circumstances did David Lynch explain to the actor beforehand? “Not too much,” Pullman reveals. “It was fun to do the press with him, because that wasn’t why he did the movie—so he could explain it to everybody. He has since come forward with some tantalizing things about it in his book Catching the Big Fish, where he talked about Lost Highway for the first time in regards to the O.J. Simpson case. I had always thought, but never pressed him about it, about the kind of man who gets accused of killing his wife and is convicted of it. They say, ‘You are this person,’ and [in the movie] I’ve got to make a physical adaptation to become the exact opposite. Rather than a jazz musician, I become a garage worker in the Valley. I believe he was kind of working with that, in a paranormal sense.”
The theme of spousal homicide only became tied in tighter with Lost Highway when Robert Blake, who plays a mystery man who confronts Fred at a party in the film’s most chilling scene, was accused of killing his wife in 2002 (leading to acquittal on criminal charges but a guilty verdict in a civil trial). At the time, however, Pullman recalls finding Blake to be “an incredibly interesting guy. We worked a lot of nights, and I remember being in Death Valley at some bungalow hotel where they had him staying. I came back at like 3 or 4 in the morning, and Robert was in a folding chair underneath a tree smoking a cigar, and I spoke to him for a couple of hours. He was very philosophical, a very astute observer about life, including his own life, and some things he had done that maybe he wished he hadn’t. Very charming.
“That was kind of a wild time,” Pullman says of the overall Lost Highway experience. “The Madison house was very evocative, and I had never shot anything located in such a specific place. It wasn’t a set, it was really a house that David bought and then converted into what he used for filming. It was strange to feel that this was a place dedicated to spooky stuff going on, and a lot of shifts between what is real and what isn’t.”
An equally memorable locale was the setting of 1988’s The Serpent and the Rainbow, the actor’s first venture into the horror field. Directed by Wes Craven, it’s based on Wade Davis’ non-fiction book on voodoo practices in Haiti, with Pullman standing in for the author as anthropologist Dennis Alan. “That was my third movie,” he recalls, “and I thought, ‘If moviemaking is like this, this is unbelievable.’ We went to Haiti and the Dominican Republic to shoot, and we had a riot with the extras—2,000 of them were chanting, and production stopped and producers with bullhorns were standing on cars trying to talk them down. It was crazy. And then the movie itself was about investigating something in a country that’s very complicated. Haiti can seem so troubled, yet the people seem so happy—just the strangest contradiction.”
In terms of capturing the voodoo practices on film, it helped to have Davis present on the set. “He had an incredible facility to move among and get the trust of people,” Pullman recalls. “That’s the premise of the book; people would share things with him that they don’t normally share with anybody. It was amazing to travel with him to the ceremonies.” A specific ritual to bring good fortune to the Serpent crew was performed prior to its production, “which I wasn’t there for, but they presented me with evidence of it. Some of these scary movies have ceremonies just to get protection for the cast and crew, so you don’t irritate spirits that are gonna bite you. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and occasionally things have happened, but it could’ve been a lot worse. We did the same thing on The Grudge.”
That Takashi Shimizu-directed, English-language remake of his own Japanese hit Ju-on gave Pullman (playing a teacher with a memorable introductory scene) a taste of yet another foreign culture. “I had been to Japan before on promotional tours and such, but it was great to take part in something within their film structure,” he says. “[Producer] Sam Raimi wanted to give Takashi the best conditions for him to do the American version, but keeping the integrity and the strangeness of vision that the first one had. The way the Japanese crew works is very different; the first AD is not on the set, and your shoes aren’t part of costume’s responsibility, but props—things like that. You come to appreciate how they operate as a team; they have a group that sticks together from film to film, with an incredible process of collective endeavor. It was a real eye-opener, and a great experience.”
Pullman’s other genre credits include the David E. Kelley-scripted giant-alligator adventure Lake Placid as well as Scary Movie 4, in which he amusingly spoofs William Hurt’s role as the elder from M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (“Do not speak of that about which we talk of not speaking…about”). But one of his most interesting turns was in the lower-profile Brain Dead, a 1990 Roger Corman production directed and co-written by Adam Simon, in which Pullman plays Dr. Rex Martin, a neurosurgeon whose attempts to crack the mind of an asylum-bound mathematician turn his life into a hallucinatory nightmare.
“That was based on a script by Charles Beaumont, one of the original Twilight Zone writers, that Corman had on his shelf—the onion-skin copy,” laughs Pullman, who didn’t hesitate to take a break from the majors to do the film. “I’ll take some wild pitches. I’ve always, for better for worse, done things that are intriguing to me or somehow tap into my interests. I recently did a movie called Your Name Here, which we had at the Fantastic Fest in Austin and Cinefest in Vegas, but has been a little bit hung up in terms of its release. It’s kind of a fantasia based on the last days of Phillip K. Dick; I love those down-the-rabbit-hole stories, and Brain Dead was one of those too. That movie also had quite a few people I knew from a theater company called The Actors’ Gang in it; Adam was part of that, and had written some of the parts for them.”
Playing an old friend of Dr. Martin who embroils him in the strange situation is Bill Paxton, also taking a break from the studio-spawned likes of Aliens and Predator 2. “He’s a very outgoing guy,” Pullman says. “He has always had a great energy for the work and enjoys a keen spirit. He does more than just act in things—he’s also a good booster for what’s being done.”
The same can be said for Pullman, who tackles movies big and small with the same enthusiasm. With roles in a pair of upcoming independently produced thrillers—The Killer Inside Me, based on Jim Thompson’s novel and co-starring Jessica Alba, Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson and Simon Baker, and the independently produced Peacock with Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, Susan Sarandon and Josh Lucas—he continues to let the material be his guide. “My decisions are driven by personal perspective,” he says, “and whether I feel a project is somehow twisting the genre or taking it to a place I haven’t seen. I love to watch or act in a great B-picture—something that’s just strange and totally unique, but doesn’t necessarily have to be backed up by a lot of money.”
