THN was understandably thrilled to be given the opportunity to talk to James Cameron’s earliest muse, Michel Biehn. The star of TERMINATOR, ALIENS, and more recently, PLANET TERROR, came across as nothing but affable, humble and enthusiastic. He’s undoubtedly found a new lease of life perched in the director’s chair, but is determined to do things his way. He’s certainly has no problems getting his hands dirty having written, produced, directed, and starred in his low budget grindhouse feature, THE VICTIM.
Tell us about your new film, THE VICTIM?
Basically it’s a very low budget grindhouse movie. We shot it in eight days and I wrote it in three weeks – it’s basically the story of a young woman who’s out partying with a friend and some cops. The cops happen to be not, er, on the ‘up and up’, one of the girls is accidentally hurt and Annie, who is the character that Jennifer plays [Biehn’s wife, Jennifer Blanc] sees this and is afraid that the police are going to hurt her next. She goes running off into the woods and shows up at the doorstep of a reclusive guy who’s trying to put his life back together. She’s like, “Help! These cops are trying to kill me!” The cops are at the door, then I have to make a decision and I [Biehn’s character, Kyle] have no love lost for cops anyway, so I decide to protect her. The rest of the movie is kind of a cat and mouse game; the cops getting the upper hand, me getting the upper hand, it’s a thriller more than anything. It’s not a zombie movie, it’s not a scary movie, it’s not like SAW, it’s a true little thriller but it’s got a sense of humour to it. We’re not taking ourselves too seriously here, and then we go and do David Fincher’s opening credits! There’s a story between David Fincher and me – he cut me out of airline security so I thought I’d use a bit of his opening credits from SEVEN. There’s also an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING. I’ve got some references in there for Quentin Tarantino and for Clint Eastwood, my favourite director. So it’s meant to be a fun film. I think it keeps you on the edge of your seat but it’s not to be taken too seriously. I always describe it as ‘candy floss’; you’re eating it and its good when you’re eating it, then you’re done and that’s it, not too much to really think about. If I can take people’s problems off their minds for 90 minutes, which I have a lot of you know, then I will have achieved my goal.
Presumably a lot of the inspiration of making a grindhouse movie came from working on PLANET TERROR with Robert Rodriguez, has he seen THE VICTIM yet?
Oh yeah, Robert’s seen it, and it did come from that. I wasn’t that aware of grindhouse and low budget movies, I didn’t run out to watch Roger Corman movies when I was a kid, although I did see some when I was growing up in one or two drive-in theatres, but yeah, he [Rodriguez] had inspired me to make the movie.
What did Robert Rodriguez make of THE VICTIM?
He was one of the very first people who saw it, he said he thought it was fun and well written, or that’s what he told me… I showed it to Jim Cameron too, he looked at it and said, “I’d take that shot out and I’d take that shot out, but otherwise it looks pretty good to me, Michael.” So he seemed to enjoy it too, but this is something that he would have been directing 30 years ago. This is two out of two stuff, you know. This is EL MARIACHI stuff; we were doing 45 set-ups a day, no rehearsals!
You’ve obviously gone in completely the opposite direction to James Cameron; he’s off filming the AVATAR sequels, some of the highest budget movies of all time, while you’re keeping it very low budget making grindhouse films. Do you have any aspirations to work with James again or are you committed to directing for the foreseeable future?
Just being on a set with James, forget about like, “Oh, I’m in a movie, what’s this going do for my career?” just being on a set with him is pretty magical, and watching him work is pretty magical- I would love to work with him again. The thing about Jim Cameron is he did TITANIC, and then he waited ten years to do AVATAR, the next AVATAR I don’t think will be out for another two or three years or something like that! I don’t know how many films he has left in him because I think, I don’t know for sure, but I get the feeling with Jim he sees himself as more of an explorer, underwater, in the vein of Jacques Cousteau, and he loves taking submersibles to depths that other people have never been before. He’ll go down there and document different types of fish and different types of algae and all that sort of stuff. I really think that that’s where his interests lie. I think filmmaking is kinda secondary for him. I could be wrong but I’ve quoted that a lot and he hasn’t called me up to tell me to quit saying it so…
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m going up to Canada in about four days to shoot a movie about these guys who get in the ring and beat the shit out of each other. This is the story of an underdog and I play the Mr. Miyagi character-I’m this young guy’s coach. There’s also a bunch of stuff up in the air, something came down last night as a matter of fact! We’ve got one in the can that we shot and that’s in post-production right now. Instead of just sitting around waiting for agents to call and waiting to audition, it’s like, why not just go out and make a lot of movies? I’d rather be in charge of a little movie like this than come in and you know, play the bad guy in something like Die Hard 6, fly to Germany or whatever, set up and be over there for six weeks.
Would you like to make different kinds of movies away from the grindhouse genre?
Yeah, I think so. I made a grindhouse movie because it’s a low budget exploitation movie, I originally set out to prove to the mini-majors that I can make a movie that makes money, and not that many do. I didn’t have enough money for digital effects or make-up effects, I couldn’t crash cars, and I didn’t have enough money for a lot of people. I just used sex, dirty cops, drugs, a little bit of torture, a bit of action, and I threw in a serial killer. I mixed all those things up and wrote it in 3 weeks. I’m hoping that my next movie will be a $5 million movie if this one is successful. In the meantime Anchor Bay bought THE VICTIM from us, which was great. They decided they weren’t going to release it until now, but they bought it back in January. We didn’t have anything to do, so we went ahead and shot another movie called TREACHERY, which is basically about a guy who’s fucking his friend’s daughter!
The Victim is available to buy on DVD & Blu-Ray now
