Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on November 16, 2007, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Even one of the oldest monsters in the history of narrative storytelling can bear a little revisionism when the occasion calls for it. Beowulf, the epic poem dating back to around (and perhaps well before) the 10th century, has now been completely reimagined by Robert Zemeckis, scriptwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary and an army of digital technicians as a CGI/performance-capture epic that adds new psychological levels to its creature-slaying titular hero. Accordingly, his first foe has been reconceptualized as well: Grendel, the scourge of the realm of King Hrothgar who has previously been dramatized as either human and utterly inhuman, now combines elements of both. While enormous in size and deformed of features, he is also a tormented, at times pitiable being—a confused, disruptive child in a violent monster’s body.
Providing both the voice and movements of this new Grendel is Crispin Glover, who reveals that a certain compassion for the marauding beast was on the page from the beginning. “It was very apparent that there was a sympathetic side to the character,” the actor says, “and there was always the element of his ear being pained by the noise that these creatures—the humans—down below are making. And I have to go down and do something to them and stop it. Robert Zemeckis had the good suggestion that all the actions I take are an immediate reaction to pain, because there’s a certain amount of physical trouble to this character. Then I meet up with the king, who’s played by Anthony Hopkins, and I have a fair amount of confusion about that relationship. And then I return to my mother, played by Angelina Jolie, who brings Grendel a fair amount of solace. Those were all very good things to get to play.”
One of Glover’s inspirations was to speak Grendel’s dialogue in Old English, adding to the character’s otherworldliness. “The script was written in [traditional] English,” he says, “and through discussions we had, it made sense that I would speak in Old English, and I am very glad we did that. When I was in junior high school, I had seen portions of the poem written in Old English next to modern English, and I had an interest in etymology, so it was intriguing to see the comparison. Some of the Old English is absolutely unrecognizable, but there are certain words you can pick out. So I’d had an interest in that for a long time, and I had coincidentally listened to a college course on the history of the English language just a year before I was approached about being in this film.”
Once Glover was cast, he underwent the unique experience of acting for performance-capture cameras, his every movement recorded for Beowulf’s digital animators to transform into CGI. That included a great deal of physical action, for scenes where Grendel smashes his way through a tavern and engages in a lengthy fight with the titular hero. “Everything that you see my character do, I did,” he reveals. “I was on wires for the leaps, there were balsa-wood or foam tables that I crushed, that kind of thing. When I was acting with somebody, say Ray Winstone [as Beowulf] or Anthony Hopkins, we were physically in the same place together, but I would be up on a platform. Or, in the scene when I come in very close to Hopkins, I was on a crane and lowered down to him, and then lifted up again as I was screaming away as Grendel.” For the creature’s battle with the much smaller Beowulf, Winstone “was physically on a larger construction, particularly when he’s punching me in the ear, and I conversely was dealing with a smaller-sized [dummy]. If I was tearing someone apart or throwing them, I was using a doll.”
The actor’s experience on Charlie’s Angels, in which his villainous Thin Man has a showstopping, high-flying martial-arts brawl with the titular heroines, served him well when it came to Beowulf’s stunt-oriented aspects. “On that film I worked with Yuen Cheung-Yan, younger brother of [the Matrix films’] Yuen Wo-ping; the Yuen family does all of that tremendous wirework, and that was a much longer experience because it was a traditional film, and the training period was very intense. My double on that film choreographed the fight scenes for Beowulf, so he knew what I was able to do on the wires and was helpful to me. That’s a very particular kind of work that you have to have a certain kind of concentration for.”
As opposed to the Angels experience, however, Glover reveals that he spent only a matter of days performing before Beowulf’s performance-capture cameras, after which his features were transformed into Grendel’s hideous visage. The actor describes his digital augmentation as “the most nuanced makeup job I’ve ever had. Normally, they would attempt to do this with the kind of prosthetics we’ve come to be used to now, and there would be a limitation to the amount of movement that could happen in the face, and that’s not good for an actor. Whereas with this, there are elements of my face that are missing, which couldn’t be done in any other way, and yet there are parts that are virtually unchanged. It’s very strange.
“What was important,” he continues, “was that my essence came through and there was enough of me in there. Until about a month ago, when I saw the final rendition of one of Grendel’s integral scenes, I didn’t know if it would genuinely have the inner life or the nuances that you know will happen with standard cinematography. But when I watched that, I was very happy to see that yes, they were in there. And not only that, I’m very pleased with the performance itself.”
Beowulf isn’t Glover’s only film to be hitting screens this month—but the other finds him behind the camera. It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine., the second in a surreal Glover-directed trilogy that began with What Is It?, will play New York City’s IFC Center for a week starting next Wednesday and then hit LA’s American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre in December. The movie is just part of the show, as Glover explains: “I also do a live narration of eight different books. They’re heavily illustrated, and that section lasts for an hour, because of the number of illustrations; it’s important to have a visual representation so people can follow along with the story. It wouldn’t make sense if I just did a reading. Then I show the film, and I have a question-and-answer and a book signing after that. So it’s a long evening.”
The cast of What Is It? is comprised largely of performers with Down’s Syndrome, and It Is Fine! was scripted by and stars Steven C. Stewart, who had cerebral palsy; he died a month after filming wrapped. “On some levels it has to do with his real life,” Glover explains, “but it’s written more like a murder mystery—a TV movie from the ’70s—where he’s the bad guy. There are a lot of psychosexual elements dealing with women who all have long hair; he has a particular interest in that, so they’re all in love with him and want to have sex with him. The film plays as kind of a naive fantasy, and as a documentation of him living out his fantasies.”
Movies don’t get more off-Hollywood than these, which is exactly the point to Glover, who says he makes his films to challenge and shatter the taboos that mainstream cinema ignores. His aim is to create “those moments when the audience sits back in their chairs, looks up at the screen and thinks to themselves, ‘Is this right what I’m watching? Is this wrong? Should the filmmaker have done this? Should I be here? What is it?’ And that’s the name of the first film. What is it that is taboo in a culture, and what does it mean that it has been vigorously cut out? I believe that’s a negative thing, because it’s that moment when a viewer sits back and asks those questions that they’re actually having an educational experience. And to have these elements eliminated in the most important medium of communication in the culture only helps to stupefy that culture.”
Glover finances these projects with the salaries from his acting jobs, which have encompassed a wide range of genres since his debut in the 1983 sex comedy My Tutor. The son of veteran actor Bruce Glover (Diamonds Are Forever, he first entered genre waters by taking an ill-fated trip to Crystal Lake in 1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter and memorably enacted the title role in 2003’s Willard remake. Recent years have seen him return to the low-budget horror field: He plays twins in Simon Says, a slasher opus written and directed by William Dear that was lensed in 2005 but has yet to find distribution, and has the title role in The Wizard of Gore, Jeremy Kasten’s remake of the Herschell Gordon Lewis cult flick that Dimension Extreme releases next year.
“I had a lot of fun playing that role,” Glover says of Wizard’s Montag the Magnificent, whose bloody stage tricks later become lethally real for the volunteers he plucks from his audiences. “When I first read the screenplay [by Zach Chassler], I knew it was based on the Lewis film from the ’70s, which I had not seen, so I watched that to see if there was anything I could pick up from it. And I didn’t really see anything in the performances, but there were conceptual elements that were of interest, and I could see why somebody would want to play with those. And there were certain aspects of playing an illusionist, within the writing of the screenplay, that made sense to me. So it was a matter of finding those elements and then playing them to the fullest extent.”
Another murderous, eponymous role, that of The I Scream Man, was to have showcased Glover’s talents this year, but he says, “I don’t know the status of that film right now. It was supposed to be shot this past summer, and I’m being told that the money will come through for it to be done in 2008.” The actor has been in the business long enough to know that such financial wranglings are par for the course (Red Light Runners, in which he co-starred with Harvey Keitel and Roy Scheider, stopped filming midway when the money ran out, never to resume), and has adopted a philosophical attitude about independent film work.
“For the most part, unless it’s something like Beowulf that gets a large release, and I’ve seen the film and I’m excited about it, they kind of exist in my memory as something that I did,” he says. “I’ve learned to kind of divorce myself from them emotionally. I’m glad to do them, and I have a good time working on them and go in with a positive attitude, but I sort of purposely leave them in my peripheral vision a little bit, so I don’t get made crazy by, ‘Is the money here? When am I gonna do this film?’ It’s like, when it happens, it happens.”
Increasingly devoted to making things happen himself, Glover reports that he has bought property in the Czech Republic that he’s transforming into a soundstage, where he can continue creating his own films in between acting assignments for others. And despite the great disparity in budgets, he finds common ground between Beowulf and his personal productions. “Beowulf is a movie that audiences can have questions about,” he says. “It’s not necessarily dealing with the kind of taboos that my own films are, but it is something that can be interpreted and thought about, and that’s a sign of good filmmaking and good writing. It’s a film I’m glad to be a part of.”
