Hard Wood

Published: Friday, October 30, 1998

Friday, October 30, 1998

Hard Wood

Vampires quench audiences' thirst for a bloody good time

By Stephanie Sheh

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Put away your crosses and get rid of your garlic, because this Halloween, director John Carpenter is bringing out a new brand of vampires, complete with a less-than-heroic hero.

"John Carpenter's Vampires," which opens today, stars James Woods and Daniel Baldwin as slayers off to destroy the vampire Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith) before he finds the Berziers Cross, which will allow him to walk in the daylight. Along the way, the duo is joined by Katrina (Sheryl Lee), a woman bitten by Valek, and young father Adam Guiteau (Tim Guinee).

But this ain't your mother's vampire movie. Carpenter's film isn't full of castles and stuffy accents. Set in New Mexico, the team of slayers tote heavy artillery and are led by the cigarette-smoking, priest-beating Jack Crow (Woods). When Woods enters the suite in the Four Season's hotel, though, it's easy to see how this fast-talking, foul-mouthed, charismatic wonder churned out a character like Crow.

"He just brings this intensity to your film," Carpenter says. "What I found interesting is that he usually plays psychotic heavies, cruel second-leads. And now he gets to play this bizarre action hero that beats everybody up."

Much of Crow's perverse humor came from Woods himself. The actor would keep making up lines after delivering his scripted ones, and Carpenter kept the cameras rolling

"So, of course, if the film's running I'm talking," Woods says. "And I started a riff with Tim. I said, 'Let me tell you something. You like a little meaty once in awhile don't you?' He'd say, 'Well what do you mean?' 'You know a big chub there. You got off on that didn't you? You got a little wood? A little chubby?' He said, 'Chubby? I'm not Chubby.' I said, 'No. Did you get a chubby?' I said, 'You know with the alter boys after you had a little couple extra glasses of wine after Sunday by the 11:30 mass. Take a little walk, feel Hershey highway.'"

The actor continues, "I'm doing all this shit. The next thing, I look at the rough cut and go, 'You are kidding me. You put this in the movie?' Originally it was written like, 'Crosses don't work. Garlic doesn't work.' And I'm saying, 'You know these (vampires) will bend you over and take a stroll up your strata chocolata.' When I started the movie I said, 'John, you are going to end my career. I can't say this on film. What are you crazy?'"

Co-star Baldwin says he enjoyed working with Woods because of his ability to perform during the unscripted parts.

"There's four hands involved in sparing, not two," Baldwin explains. "A lot of actors only see it as two and they're throwing punches and they're throwing punches, but they don't know how to take them they don't know how to set up, to avoid. Woods is a boxer as far as in actor terminology. He really knows how to spar."

Baldwin explains that, as an actor, one has to leave space to react to fellow actors. He also says that an actor leaves a different amount of space, depending on who they are working with.

"Woods, obviously, you leave a lot of space open. He's James Woods," Baldwin says. "Easily you can make this statement, that he's one of the ten most-revered character actors that our country has right now. He may not be Tom Cruise box-office-wise, but this is a multiple Academy Award nominated actor. He's very, very talented and the body of work he has to display is unprecedented so you leave a hunk of space open when James Woods says, 'I wanna try.' It's like, 'Sure, Jim, let's go.'"

Although Woods admits that much of the improvising on the set of "Vampires" was a result of goofing off, he says that it is important to know the limits.

"I mean we're kind of screwing around, but we were screwing around in character, I didn't screw around like I had a Fudgesicle stuck in my ass in front of the camera," he says. "I think in a way there's probably a process at work that we're semi-aware of and semi-issuing as being silly, but this is a tongue in cheek picture on one level."

On the other level, Woods says that this type of movie can be harder than some of his heavier movies, such as "Salvador" and "Ghosts of Mississippi," because he has to make the vampires real for the audience. The actor points out that there is a delicate balance between the humor and the drama in the film.

"The story at hand, for the audience to have good time, we really have to take seriously that these vampires are really lethal, really scary and really dangerous," Wood says. "We really got to get them. And if we don't do that then we're short changing the audience. Now along the way with each other we might talk the way we talk and that's a character choice. And it's kind of walking on the edges of razor blade as it were, but I think it works to have both as long as one doesn't impact on the other and destroy it."

A lot of work. But all in all, to be in a vampire film? "It was so bitchin'ly cool," Woods says.

FILM: "John Carpenter's Vampires" opens today.

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