Très Biehn

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This article was published 12/01/2012 (5362 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — Let’s face it: if Hollywood made sense, Michael Biehn would have been the big star to emerge from The Terminator in 1984 and Arnold Schwarzenegger would have been left a Hollywood footnote.

In the role of Kyle Reese, Biehn was good-looking, intense, he had presence and acting chops to spare. Of course, Schwarzenegger emerged as the star. But Biehn never stopped working in starring and supporting roles.

That particular destiny made the Alabama-born, Nebraska-raised actor available last year for a role in the low-budget, high-impact apocalyptic thriller The Divide when it shot in Winnipeg in early 2011, mostly on a soundstage at the Manitoba Production Centre. The film will have its official première on Thursday, Jan. 19, in anticipation of a theatrical run beginning Jan. 20 (although Anchor Bay, the film’s distributor is, at press time, hedging on that particular release date).

Biehn, 55, was promoting the film in Toronto when I caught up with him at a Queen Street Starbucks to talk about the movie and its place in a colourful career.

It must be said that Biehn is not delicate about the fact his film work has featured its share of, um, disappointments.

“I’ve polished a lot of turds in my life,” Biehn says in a gruff, honest fashion befitting the guy who played the gruff, honest grunt Cpl. Hicks in Aliens.

Recently, for example, Biehn was up for the role of the tyrannical colonel intent on destroying paradise in James Cameron’s humongous hit Avatar.

“I met Jim and I thought he was going to give me that role and I waited 10 months to find out Stephen Lang was going to play it, which is cool, because I like Stephen,” he says. (He and Lang were in Tombstone together.) “He deserves his due, but that was a disappointing deal, so when you’re not in movies that are big hits, people aren’t pounding down your doors to get you to work.”

The Divide came up at an opportune time for all concerned. Biehn plays Micky, a caretaker in a New York building who finds himself playing unwilling host to a collection of survivors who gain entrance to his makeshift bomb shelter. He says the movie’s French filmmaker, Xavier Gens, falls into the category of admirable directors in his willingness to collaborate with actors in order to make the best possible film.

“Xavier gave us an outline story and he had a writer on the set. And then he gave us the freedom to take our characters wherever we wanted them to go,” Biehn says, adding many of the directors with whom he has worked won’t listen to actors’ suggestions and the films are the worse for it.

“But guys like (James) Cameron or (Robert) Rodriguez or whatever, they’re always the same way: If you’ve got a good idea, they’ll incorporate it into the (movie).

“And Xavier takes it to a much further level,” he says, recounting how Gens led him to believe he was going to shoot him doing a monologue, only to have actor Michael Eklund interject lines into the scene to create additional tension.

“Most actors can look at a scene and go: ‘OK, I’ve got a couple of good lines here,’ or ‘This is my scene,’ and they know the way a scene is going to play.

“But if you take that scene and throw it out in the middle and say: ‘Everybody, it’s up for grabs,’ people who thought the scene was their scene, all of a sudden people started improv-ing off of each other.

“But it was a positive,” he asserts. “It wasn’t like people were trying to steal dialogue or f up people’s performances or anything like that. It was a positive competition for screen time and any time Xavier got something he thought was interesting, he put it in the movie.

“That was fun. We had a good time,” he says. “From an acting standpoint, I had more fun on that movie.”

The film arrives at a time when Biehn is enjoying a renewal of interest in his work, especially his genre films — Aliens, The Terminator. At conventions, Biehn confesses he is amazed to discover some of his biggest fans weren’t alive when those films were made.

“I’ll invariably have 20-year-olds come up and say, ‘Kyle Reese is the best character of all time’; ‘I love you’; ‘You’re my favourite actor.'”

 

Michael Biehn, Michael Eklund and Xavier Gens will attend the invitation-only première of The Divide at Silver City Polo Park on the evening of Thursday, Jan. 19.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca