Feb. 08, 2012 - Issue #851: Jon Mick

The cult of Biehn

Michael Biehn brings two films to town

'I told my agent when I was young I didn't want to be a movie star, I wanted to be an actor," Michael Biehn says. "And that's come to pass, for good and bad."

That Biehn's legacy is one of a cult actor was, at least in part, engineered by the man himsef. He's known best for the sort of roles more likely to get you panel slots at comic conventions than Oscar nods and tabloid flashes, though he's had a few brushes with more major limelight: Corporal Hicks in Aliens proved a classic role (an early draft of Alien 3 had him, rather than Ripley, as the protagonist), as did Kyle Reese in The Terminator, and The Abyss's Lieutenant Coffey was a role that the studio lobbied heavily to get Biehn an Oscar nomination for (it was ultimately unsuccessful).
But Biehn works more as he originally intended, popping up with comfortable regularity as (usually) a tough face in films—say, beside Sean Connery in The Rock, or as a small town Sheriff in Death Proof—or now, for the first time, in the director's chair: brought into town by Dedfest, Biehn's coming with a pair of movies, one of which is his own. The Divide features Biehn as part of the ensemble—an apocalypic, survivors-trapped-in-a-bunker dark horror—while The Victim marks his first foray into directing.

"[James] Cameron always told me I should direct," Biehn says, taking the call from LA. "I was always a little bit hesitant about it, because I was working a lot as an actor. I worked on Grindhouse with Robert Rodriguez and Tarantino, and it was just a blast. Robert's inspirational in the way that he just does it."

Biehn's partner, actress Jennifer Blanc—also in on the phonecall—agreed to star, and took on the role of producer. She notes they had about a tenth of the original Terminator's funding to make their film and limited resources: one camera led to as much as  45 setups a day during a tight, five week shoot.

The Victim stars both of them: Biehn plays Kyle, a recluse living out in the woods who finds his seemingly quiet existence interrupted by the arrival of Annie (Blanc) fleeing from her friend's killers, though her own innocence quickly becomes uncertain. In other words, it's a grindhouse flick, heart and soul.

"You watch it, you have fun while you're eating it and then it disappears," Biehn says. "It's a lot of fun when you're watching ... All the exploitable items I could think of that didn't cost any money are in here.

"I felt if I could take people's minds off the serious business that's going on in the world for 88 minutes, I've done my job."

Biehn and Blanc note that they pulled inspiration from Kevin Smith's DIY distributor route, taken to release his 2011 film Red State—"I really think it is the new model for theatrical releases. For small ones," says Blanc. "Not for 20th Century Fox, for Paramount, but for independent movies."—and have been pushing to get the film out to film fests and college campuses, the sort of places that Biehn's name and face would likely pull in some fandom. Though that status of "cult" recognition isn't something Biehn seems quite used to, even now.

"It's only really been recently, to tell you the truth," he says. "The word 'icon' has been creeping into the conversation for the last two years. I've started hearing it more and more. I've done three [major] movies: one was  Terminator, one was Aliens and one was the Abyss, and I have children—who I consider children, who are 20, 22, 28, 25, and even young kids, 10, 12 years old—who will approach me and say, 'Aliens is my favourite movie of all time.'  I've finally come to realize, well, these movies were made before these children were born, I've come to realize, I don't know if you want to call them classics, but they've become movies that have crossed generations. When kids come up to me and say Kyle Reese is their favourite character, they mean it." vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus