Episode 813: Kill Me Again (1989)

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Choose from over one hundred and fifty five thousand films and get Blu rays, four k's and DVDs all delivered directly to your door. Visit Scarecrow Video dot Org. Today, Old You is both its showtime. People pay good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater.

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Well, there's a man involved in a relationship. I made a real mess out of things. He's trying to kill me. You have to help me. Now, what do you want me to do?

I want you to kill me. I always wondered what it would be like today, really violent death. Well I know. Welcome to the Projection Booth. I'm your host.

Mike White joined me once again as mister Rob Spencer. I'm going to need a point of a negative blood. Also joining us for this month. Is my co host, Jedediah Airs so happy to be here. We are kicking off a month that we're calling Valhalla.

It's a month looking at the films of Vell Kilmer. Sure his body of work could fill an entire podcast on his own, but I've picked out four films that I've been wanting to discuss for a while, starting with nineteen eighty nine's Kill Me Again, directed by John Dahl and based on a screenplay by Doll and David Warfield. The film stars Val Kilmer as Jack Andrews, a PI in reno who gets entangled with a couple of bad characters, Fee Forrester played by Kilmer's then wife joe Anne Wally, and Vince Miller played by Michael Madsen. We will be ruining all of the twists and turns of this crime thriller as we go along, So if you don't want anything ruined, turn off the podcast and come back after you've seen the film.

We will still be here. So, Rob, when was the first time you saw Kill Me Again? And what did you think? The first time I saw Kill Me Again was a few weeks ago for in preparation for this podcast and in fact, I had never heard of this was one of your films that you were looking at, which surprises me because I love Valkilma and I love neo noir, and this is quite pivotal na'ho noa as it turns out, as I've learned. But yeah, I really enjoyed it.

It's exactly the kind of thing I like. This is the kind of movie I really miss. I loved it in the This is early because it's late eighties, but I loved through the nineties when we were getting a lot of these sorts of films. It feels like wayward souls trapped in the American desert somewhere up to all sorts of naughty Shenanigans getting themselves in trouble. It's good stuff.

So yeah, no, I really enjoyed it and looking forward to talking about it and. You had today, how about yourself. I would have seen it sometime in the nineties. I think I was definitely a Val Kilmer guy. He's what brought me to it.

But I didn't watch it immediately because and this is just how shallow I am. But the box are I kind of love the box art now, but the original box art just I don't know, it didn't make him look too sexy. I was like, that's supposed to be val Kilmer, and that's weird looking drawing of him. And I put it off for a little while, but once I saw it, and I think I saw it after seeing Red Rock West. I was also a big nick cage guy, so when I saw Red Rock West, I saw that he'd also done a movie called Kill Me Again.

I was like, Oh, that's that valk Kilmer. One. I had to watch that, So I think I did Red Rock West first and then came to Kill Me Again. I gotta say John Dolls opening trio of Neon War, those early films he directed really kind of imprinted on me and helped me identify exactly what I was interested in. I loved movies, but I did have a particular idea of what my taste in movies was.

But those first three John Doall directed features really helped me say, yeah, this is what I'm into. I'm really into this crime stuff and specifically noir and neo noir, though I would not have really recognized those terms probably when I first saw this. I'm really glad that you said that you were so shallow that the video box kept you away for all that time. Because the video box kept me away from this movie for thirty seven years. Well, whenever it came out, it was definitely at the I would have started working at video stores around ninety two, and god, it was just awful.

And you can go out online and do a search on kill Me Again a box cover art or video art, and this movie's been plagued with really bad video art. We were talking recently and I was talking about doing this episode, and it was me and a few other folks that were looking up different pieces of the art and there's one where it's this giant explosion and joe Ane Wiley on one side and Val Kilmer on the other side, and just this like hit Me Again type of cover art, like the big block letters and stuff. The original of this one where was Yeah, that awful drawing of Val Kilmer. It just kept me away for this forever. And yeah, it was a big Red Rock West fan really liked the Last Seduction, but I just stayed away from this.

And it was finally when we were talking last year Jedediah about doing a Valkilmer month that I said, Okay, time for me to finally buckle down and get past myself and finally watch this. But yeah, that video box was just an abomination. They've done quite a lot of covers of this, and they're all terrible. I think they've come up with a good one, yet. There's one where it's her with just a very simple kill me again across the middle of it.

That one's probably the most inoffensive, but it still could be better. It really just needs more of a neo noir type of box cover. The poster needs a real redesign for this, and I think that's where some of the other neo noirs of the period like this came out before The Grifters. But the Grifters and Romeo is Bleeding. I love the poster for Romeo is Bleeding.

There were so many good pieces of art that came out of this. Of course, the classic pulp fiction poster is one of the best posters around. But what did this movie do to deserve that horrible box cover? In Siri, I'm a big fan of the drawing the box cover drawing style, but yeah, I just I wouldn't say I was repulsed by it the same way my gus, But I was not drawn to it didn't seem sexy to me, even though clearly it's trying to be sexy, and it's got the Venetian blinds and it's got the shadows across Joan Whaley, and yeah, she looks good in the box, but I'm looking at I got my VHS copy right in front of me. I'm looking at it.

She looks pretty good, but yeah, Val Kilmer did not particularly look I was a big mad Martian guy. I loved Willow, and so of course I loved Joan Whaley from Willow too, But Willow was kind of came out at the perfect time for me. I was like twelve, I think when I came out and I could. I was just making enough money bowing lawns and babysitting to start going to movies on my own. And I had a bicycle I could ride, and so I would ride, and I think I saw Willow eight times at the theater.

It definitely made an IMPRESSI on me, and so to me, Vaal Kilmer was super cool. He was the next Ton Solo as far as I was concerned, and I was interested in this stuff. But yeah, the box art did not entice me. I don't think I saw Willow. Gosh, that was a long time too, and that had nothing to do with the box cover.

I don't know what it was about Willow that. I guess I was just the wrong age kind of thing for that one. I think I might be a little bit older than you, Jedediah, So just really wasn't in my wheelhouse. Once I foundly did see it, I liked it. But I have to say that I like Joe Anne's looking that a lot.

Thought she looked. Amazing on that movie. And yeah, she's just a gorgeous woman in a perfect fomp fatale. She's really good in this. But it's really interesting watching this in because I caught up and I'd never seen Last Seductions, so I caught up on that in the last few weeks as well, And I do wonder whether this character is a kind of first attempt at something like that.

I know Dhal didn't write the Last Seduction, he didn't make the film. She is so obviously a fem futile. There's no mystery involved in it, although it does lead you to believe maybe she changes along the way depending on your orientation towards the film, even down to the name that those f F initials aren't a mistake, I'm sure. So the film is telling you this is the fem futile, and in the last seduction, he just goes the whole hole that makes the fem futile the protagonist, which is the interesting twist there. She almost is here.

It's a bit hard for me to say because I'm not American, but I'm quite impressed with her accent. Feels seems natural to me. I don't know if it does to you, guys, No, not at all. It wasn't distracting to me. No.

I thought she did a great job with her What was distracting to me was her hair. It seems like it kept changing, Like every couple scenes, it'd be like, is now where is that a wig? Or and sometimes it seemed more red and sometimes it seemed darker. And I don't know if it's a continent r but there is some very weird stuff going on with her hair in the second half of the film where she's a redhead because she's dyed her hair or wearing a wig, We're not sure. And then there is a sex scene where she still seems to have red hair.

So I was thinking, Okay, I guess it's not a weig then, because she's still got that on. And then there's a weird scene where she's cooking breakfast really badly. I think that scene's just in there to show us that she is not the domesticated type. She's obviously told to make a bacon and eg sandwich really badly, and she's holding a piece of bread by the corner and trying to butter it while she's lifting it up and then doesn't know what to do. It's quite funny, really, but then in the next scene she's and in that scene she's back to being a brunette, and then in the next scene she's a redhead again, so it's very confusing around that time.

I'm very surprised that our main character here isn't named a variation of Mike or Michael, because I just for this. I also went a little bit past Last Seduction and watched Rounders and joy Ride, and I noticed that Matt Damon's character's name is Michael. I think it was Michael in Red Rock West, and then it's Mike I think in Last Seduction. I think that's the Peter Berg character name, so very surprised that he's Jack here. But Jack is very much that pulp private eye type name, and just he's trying to fit into that as much as he possibly can.

He hits this role I would say a little bit more like a Dick Powell than a Humphrey Bogart when it comes to his approach to things. But I think he's doing a hell of a job. But yeah, it takes a while for us to even get to him because really the first face that we see on screen is Michael Manson and this was just the top of the line. Michael Manson, this is He is so good in this and this was I want to say, just a couple of years before Reservoir Dogs and he would start showing up everywhere. I was just watching Wide ear for our Tombstone episode and he shows up as one of the Earp brothers in there, and I'm just like, my god, I can't get away from Michael Manson lately.

But he is just so wonderful, especially just playing this kind of absolute off the chain, you never know what he's going to do type of character, and he's so great that he's the jilted guy that he really has a good reason for not liking her at all and really wanted to get some revenge because she's the one that just fucks him over. And I like when a noir, I guess he's kind of a protagonist. When a noir protagonist is not going to put up with anybody's shit. He's both for me protagonist and antagonists. He's really the villain of the piece.

But I think she's worse. Like you said, he's got good reason to be angry at her, and he does seem to really aside from her screwing him over on a business deal, he seems to he says it, and throughout the film, I believe it that he'd as soon burn the money up if he thought it was going to come between them. He loves her. Robbie compared her a little to the Bridget character in the Last Deduction, and they're very clearly the fem fetals and built on kind of some classic tropes. But man, the more I watched Kill Me Again, the more I just love how dumb she is.

And I say dumb in that she does not think five minutes into the future. She's just like all impulse, which is a really fun character to follow, but just terrible decisions, including Michael Manson. When they find out at the beginning of the film that they've stolen a lot more money than they thought they were going to she's so giddy and excited, and he's like, oh shit, oh shit, we really stepped on it now, and his plan is, okay, we got to go I low. She's like, screw that, I'm head into Las Vegas, and that sets the whole thing in motion. And she she doesn't hide well, everybody tracks her down.

Her whole thing is kill me, erase my identity. And then she goes out and she can be found doing exactly what anybody would expect the dumbest person to do, and I really enjoy that about her this time. Is how the femme fatale is. Usually we think of them as being a crafty and really manipulative with a grand plan. But she has no plan.

And she's a beautiful woman who I think is without the moral code that allows her to operate do some things that other people wouldn't do. But he's clearly been coasting on that sis. Not verriefs. These three characters we're talking about. I've been thinking about this a lot because reading some of the critical reception at the time and some of the more critical reviews that had issues with I think this is where people stumbled, and I think it was assumed that it was bad writing, because, let's face it, this plan is terrible all the way down for her and for Jack Wells.

For Jack even to the point where you wonder why he agrees to do it for ten thousand dollars, because owing it to Loan Sharks, I'm not sure really makes it worthwhile. I always like to give the filmmakers some sort of benefit of the doubt, at least see if I can find some way for that to make sense. It does become quite interesting because, as you say, Vince, the Michael Madison character, he is in a way until a certain scene later on, he is more sympathetic than her. He's more sensible. He's the one who gets shafted by her.

She just wants to go blow all the money in Vegas, and he's the one who says, maybe we should lie low for a bit, and then she does the dirty on him and takes the money. So you can see where he's coming from. Meanwhile, you've got her, as you say, she is not real smart, to the point that when they carry out this faking of her death. We know that Vince is in Vegas because that's where he reads the newspaper report of her supposed suspected death, and so she goes her brilliant idea then, because she knows he'll be in Vegas, is to go to Reno Campbell, because he wouldn't think maybe she'll go to Reno instead. It's the most minor adjustment to the plans that he already knows that she's going to do possible.

But I think the really interesting one is Jack and who was the Time Out reviewer that was complaining about the sort of pudgy baby face. And he doesn't seem like he can. He doesn't convince as this hard bitten detective. My view on him is, I think I would like to think that's intentional. I don't think he does belong in that world.

He kind of knows his way around it because he's been doing it, but he's not very good at it. And on my second watch of this thing the other day, I thought, I think there's a streak of nihilism to this character. I don't think he cares that much. In fact, he may want to die. We don't get a lot of dwelling on.

We know all about the death of his wife and that he probably blames himself in the accident, but we don't get a little dialogue about it. He doesn't really talk about it. He's goaded by a cop at one point and reacts angrily to that, but that's it's very there's not much told to us. But I got the real sense that just in the way he reacts to the people, the way he reacts to the loan sharks who are beating him up, the way he reacts to the cops when he gets caught him even agreeing to do this plan, which has got to cast suspicion on him. And I know they can say if they don't find the body, he can't be convicted, but still doesn't seem that smart.

I just wonder if he doesn't care. And then obviously there's the bit. The thing that cemented it to me is where Vince puts the gun to his head and he says, shoot me. And I know you could say it was because he knows where the money is, but still I think there's the way Kilma performs that there's something in his eyes where it's kind of like he's actually he wouldn't mind if he got shot in the head at this point, And there's a sort of puppy dog almost innocence to him in the way that he deals with Faye that I think is very deliberate. And this is one of the things I didn't say up front.

I'm a massive val Kilma fan. I haven't seen all his films, obviously, I haven't seen this one. There's a few I haven't seen, but I think it was I think for a lot of people his performance is doc Holiday and Tombstone that first made me sit up and take notice and think, oh no, this guy is actually a really good actor. He was good in the Doors too, but it was an impersonation as well, so I always take those with a grain of salt. But then as time has gone on and I would watch him and I've noticed in films like this and the early films like Thunderheart, for instance, these are not roles that require amazing acting, but he has this ability to inhabit characters and just do the little things.

And I always really watch him closely now when he's not speaking, when he's in the scene but not the focus of a scene. And if you think about it, he really becomes the characters in every film he ever is, and he makes it look quite easy. I think it's quite instinctive for him. He's pretty method, isn't he, which is one of the reasons that probably his marriage to Joan Wally split up in the first place. I know when he got the Jim Morrison role, he was apparently walked around the house as Jim Morrison for a year, and that would have been pretty hard to take.

Would you quit singing I'm tired of it? Yes, you're mister Mojo Rizen. I get it. You are not the Lizard King. Okay, just forget it.

But you watch the way he walks with her, the way he doesn't look her in the eye. He's kind of self effacing manner with her. He's a very odd character that I think maybe the filmmakers would have been better off making that more obvious what they were trying to do. I think it went over people's heads and they just thought this guy's not very convincing. But I think he's terrific, and I think he's a really interesting character.

I think reading his memoir I'm Your Huckleberry, he was speaking about an early opportunity that he had on Broadway where he was going to be the lead in a play, and then it turned out Kevin Bacon was available, and they wanted Kevin Bacon for the leads, so he went to the number two spot. And then it turned out Sean Penn was available, and they wanted Sean Penn, so he went to the third spot, which was not a role he wanted. It was the straight role. The two leads were a lot more attractive to him. But he said that through that, I found that I could play the kind of the I think he had it and quotes the good guy, the naive guy, maybe the and there's a quality to this role that I think, yeah, he holds.

I don't know that a lot of actors could hold that be interesting or at least make us want to watch him in a sort of a role. That naive is one way to say it, and maybe that's what he's bringing to it. But it's not a detective who does a whole lot of brilliant detecting, and he's definitely not a tough guy. He gets shit kicked out of him a couple of times, which is something I always like, actually, but I like my detectives to get knocked around. But.

There is a quality about him that he brings to it, and it's not I think he is more known for his showier stuff like like the Doors. But yeah, he could do this, He could do this role and brings something to it even though it was on the page. Maybe I like what. You're saying, Rob as far as the nihilism, especially the first time he gets beat up and he gets his fingers broken, which will be an injury that marks him through the rest of the film. We talked about The Big Fix a few months ago, that whole thing with our main character, Richard Dreyfus, having his arm and a cast through the whole thing.

Now you've got him with his fingers bandaged up through pretty much the entire movie. Or Elliott Gould in California Split. Jack Nicholson and Chatatown Toe. It's this whole idea of marking your main character, especially Yeah, he's too nosy, right, but here it's one of the loan sharks is going through his drawers and he finds a picture of Kilmer's now dead wife, Jack's dead wife and he starts talking about her, and that's when Kilmer goes on the offensive and gets the shit kicked out of him. And then it's interesting it's a different picture that he lands next to that is broken on the floor.

And when I saw those two pictures of this woman the first time I watched this movie, I was thinking, Oh, that's Joanna killmer Ray here, but no it's not. It's a different actress entirely. But you talked about the red hair. She's got the red hair in here, and it's almost I'm wondering if the little vertigo thing of remaking her in his dead wife's image, because he's going to kill her in a way that is similar to how his ex wife or his dead wife died. I also found it was interesting that second picture.

He's there and I want to say, he's like holding up some fish or something. He looks like he's dressed as a fisherman. And the hotel or motel behind them is Echo Bay Motels. I'm like, oh, Echo Bay, all right, this is nice. It's like your second chance here, And it is that is.

The hotel they go to later, isn't it. It's the Echo Bay as well, because I didn't, Yeah, I didn't notice it in the picture the first time around. I noticed it when they turn up there, and I thought the same thing, echo bay, Okay, it's going to be an echo of water. This is symbolic of you know, what he's lost, and kind of maybe that symbol of a transition between life and death. And it was, Yeah, it's only on the second watch that I noticed that this is actually where he was with his wife.

I think it is the lake or the bay or whatever it is where his wife died, isn't it. It seems to be suggested. Yeah, And his secretary says something about like, you know, a cabin or something, and I'm just like, oh, I'm sure that's not going to come back in the third act of this movie. The other thing that I noticed too, we were talking about the robbery that starts this movie and that they have a lot more money than they expected in that briefcase. So I don't know if Madsen ever says this is mob money, it's obviously it feels very much to me like the beginning of Charlie Verrick when they rob that bank and end up coming away with a lot more money than they were supposed to.

And of course Verick Mathout is so smart. In that movie. He's just oh, we fucked up, we are robbing from the mafia and this is really bad, and it kind of sets up that whole tension between him and Andy Robinson where Robinson's like, hey man, you got all this money, I want to go spend this money. It's like no, And the first thing you would think you would do was very distinctive green bands off of this money, because then, like you were saying, she's not very smart and ends up keeping those bands around the money, and that's how she gets spotted in Reno. Yeah, there's a number of things in this film where I was thinking, is that funny and laughable or is that actually totally true to life?

The fact that they find them through rubber bands, I thought, Wow, what a weird plot device, because would you really think, hang on, that guy said green rubber bands the money that still had green and rubber bands, and I would have I just would have assumed it's a detail that no one would really notice or think about that much. But hey, why not. There's a real tendency in at least there was a lot of these kind of low budget crime films me mad and released in the nineties on the wake of Tarantino's success, which I'm grateful for because I enjoyed a lot of those a lot of those films, but there was an increasing reliance on characters being too smart, having to be ahead of the game. It's not what I like about crime at Noir.

And there's something about characters doing dumb things believably that just brings a lot truer and makes the emotions really come through when you're like, yeah, I believe that they would behave that way, even when it's clearly not a good plan. Dahal and is it Woolfield these rotting patna, I believe that's a conscious decision on Netpark is one of the things I love in this film is it's a recurring incident of misidentification. You've got that scene where Kilma and you're thinking when he does it, he where they're faking a death and he is making a big show of carrying her out to the car and being seen, and at the time, I was thinking, Okay, that makes sense for the plan. It doesn't seem to make sense for him.

Why would he want to do that? And then he's in the police station and they bring the guy in and is this the guy? And he looks at him and says not, because actually, eyewitness testimony sucks. People do not remember what people look like, and people do not remember. What they see.

And it happens. I think it happens again, happens a couple of times in the film. It's like a check off some identification. It's a nice twist later on. Yeah, it happens when the mob guys who got ripped off at the beginning, the survivor comes into the hotel room and identifies Kilmer as Michael mads and.

He's like, that's the guy. That's the guy who shot us. So yeah, yeah, So it's like swing swings and her oundabouts. He gets the benefit of the doubt one and then he gets a real deal with the second time. Yeah.

Yeah. I kept wondering. I was like, were these two actors supposed to look a lot more like each other? Because for me, Belkilm or Michael Manson couldn't be more different. But I'm like, all right, and like I felt like we were watching that movie Suture, where was the black guy and white guy and their twin brothers.

That was a fun one in the ninety so made an impression on me too. It was all style and you know what Kill Me Again is a lot more stylish, and I gave it credit for I think when I first saw it it was on VHS. It was probably a pretty beat up rented a lot copy. The last few times I've watched it, I'm like, this is a really gorgeous film. I forget the cinematographer's name Stein, I think.

But and this is apparently the last film he did, maybe working into TV or music videos still, but yeah, it did. I think this is the last credited film of his. But man, it's a good looking film. It reminds me of some of those Vendors films shot in the US where he's just very fascinated with the wide open spaces. Between this and Red Rock West and maybe Steve Clove's Flesh and Bone.

There was just in the early nineties, late eighties, early nineties, some really great noir neo noir set in the American West, in these wide open spaces that I don't know. It felt pretty fresh. It felt like it was different than stuff set in the big cities and the urban noirs, and different than the southern ones too. And there's a real romantic feeling about these people out in the middle of nowhere. Who still are looking to escape and start over.

I was like, man, where do you go from here? This is where you run to when you need to start over. You need to get away from everybody. Where is left to go from here? So that great shot of Kilmer at the end of the film in the back of the truck with the blanket wrapped around him and you know, the money in his pocket, which is very similar to Red Rock West Nick Cage in the train with just a little bit of money in his pocket, just kind of head now into the middle of nowhere.

It's a romantic idea that I'm not sure how easy it was then, but certainly easier then than now to kind of disappear and start over with a little bit of cash in your pocket. Yeah. I think there's a very strong kinship visually between this and Red Rock West. They seem like two peas in a pod visually, I think. And I think there's also an interesting relationship between this film and classic film noir, because neo noir has come to be a term.

I know, I do, I use it for all sorts of films. I don't really know what is actually technically a neo noir and what isn't, but it gets banned about so much for any sort of maybe slightly melodramatic crime thriller, whether or not you've got some of the tropes like femfatiles, it's often sort of used, and I think it's almost been retroactively used for a lot of those great seventies conspiracy thrillers now tend to be called noirs as well. Maybe they're not really, but whereas this one, the script feels like it could be out of a forties or fifties noir. It's very very classic noir. A few wrinkles in the way that the fem futile is set up a bit differently, but you got that, you know, riffing on very familiar ground from a script point of view, and visually it's sort of it's got some callbacks.

Again. Another thing I read in a lot of the critical reception was how it really exercises that noir palette, well not so much the color palette, but the use of shadows and blinds and that kind of thing. And I had to go look back at it today because I did not really remember that much striking use of the sort of the light coming through the blinds and I can only really see one scene where that's done very strongly, which is in the hotel room scene where they're setting up the fake death. We get plenty of low lit rooms with a single light source somewhere, usually from down below or something like that. You can see a lot of Venetian blinds, but the light is not shining.

They are not lighting up the scene. You're often just a background element. It's like there's a bit of an homage there. But then yeah, overall, this is a very brightly colored nah You've got, whether it's the neon of Reno or the beautiful gold umbar turquoise color of the Beautiful Lake, which is more of a turquoise of blue and very sunny. It's a very sunny noir as well, and you've got those desert sort of hues, and it is.

Yeah, I think it's really beautifully shot. I think the first time that she comes into his office that's also very noir, with the way that the light is across her and she's in darkness when he kind of comes in. And I love how every private detective's office is almost exactly the same in the movies, where you've got the outer office, the vestibule where the secretary works at and then you've got the inner office with the Venetian blinds behind them, two windows over here, one window over there, maybe a bathroom on this side. It's just like the floor plan. And I like how in this one too, when you're introduced to him, you start with the name on the door, and then the camera kind of tracks down and then you see the broken glass that somebody has busted this glass to get in, and then him just sitting there while those guys are rifling through everything is pretty great.

And yeah, when she comes in and he's been picking the glass off of that picture still we don't know how many days of passed at this white but he's still picking the glass off. And you cut from that picture of his wife of Kate to her coming through. You see the face coming through that break in the glass that I was talking about. That's such a nice way of framing her. And yeah, all of the framian here, Jennidig, you're talking about the beautiful cinematography, the stuff, especially when he goes to Kate's grave and is putting the flower on her side of the grave, and then you go over and it's his side with the death date missing, and that plays into that nihilism you're talking about Rob, where it's just like he's just kind of waiting to die.

He sees that date is missing off of that grave and it's just yeah, it'll be nineteen eighty nine here pretty soon. Is that common practice to actually put your headstone? I know people will often get a double plot and the plan is to be buried next to your partner, But do people normally put their headstone in before they've passed away. I wasn't aware of it. I think that is a thing, yeah, because I've seen that plenty of times.

I'm not sure how much it is a thing now, but in the past I've seen that before, and yeah, it's just more to suggest. There's a living person down there is Oh my god, he's not dead yet they've already buried him. It's where you wait for the bell to ring, the grave bell. Jeneddigh, you're talking about beautiful Western noirs, and I just, of course I love the White Sands, which we talked about in the past, or After Darkness Suite, which I think came out the next year. So it was like nineteen ninety was a real boom year.

For this. So this coming out in eighty nine was terrific. And yeah, there's a lot of movies that I was like, Okay, what are some of these neon WIRs from the late eighties, and some of them, I'm like, yeah, I don't consider Midnight Run to being neon noir, thank you, or con and Tate and maybe, but it's come on, guys, once you start to get into more, yeah, the Grifters or After Dark My Sweet and some of these, it's like, all right, these are definitely much more neo noir. And I can't remember there was the film Palmetto with Elizabeth schu and Woody Hailson. I can't remember if that was a out West or if that was a Florida.

Noir Florida or Louisiana. I think it was Florida. But when you talk about Palmetto and you talk about After Dark, My Sweeter, the Grifters, I think you're talking about stuff based on books, classic mid century noirs and really dark hearted stuff. I think there's a reason that those stand out. And I think that these first three John Doll movies really fit in there too.

There is both Kill Me Again and Red Rock West have a character you could call the hero pret dark stories and driven as you suggest rob By dark impulses, even the good the good guy the hero character. I do think you're on a sum there that he's waiting to die. And I do think even we talked about Faith not being terribly smart, just being an impulsive character, there's a resigned fatalism or nihilism if you want to Kilmer's character where he's he does seem to recognize, Oh, it's going to be that kind of story, and here's the role that I'm supposed to play, and he's I'll play it. He's willing to play it. Reservoir Dogs made a huge impression on me.

I am so happy that we got to live through a lot of these films that came in its wake being released and available people wanting to make them. But there's something so special about those first few John Doall movies and somebody like Nick Gomez who was also making crime movies, low budget crime movies at the time that aren't really touched by that Tarantino thing. They perhaps were made because of that, perhaps were funded and things like that, but there's none they're very sincere tales. None of the stuff that Tarantino would be credited or blamed for cropping up in movies too much, the kind of wise ass attitudes of the criminals and things like that. Those guys John Nick Gomez probably.

A couple O. There's really making some very sincere pre dark stuff that really stands out in retrospect how special it was compared to the other things coming out. And I just wondered it was just the thing filmmakers of that time just wanting to harken back to those sorts of stories and those sorts of settings, because they do. I was thinking, these some of these neo noirs do of the type that we're talking about. Do you remind me a little bit of the what did they call them?

The Warner Brothers would make them the sort of you know, the short, sharp genre pictures, stuff like heat Lightning, which were even before the onset of film noir is a big thing. But they were like crime stories. They churned them out. The main thing that they tried to get across is mood and setting and vibe and then and they were quite formulaic as well as these are formulaic. I mean, I did find it quite funny.

One of the reviews of this film said it's oh, it's just a carbon copy of Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings twice, and I was like, well, hang on, did you not know what film noir is. They're all carbon copies of each other to a certain extent. That's the whole point. And there is a comfort to formula. There is a comfort to genre and formula and a reason why we like to go back because the train tracks are laid down.

The fun is in the wrinkles around them. That's where the originality is. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a surface resemblance to these sorts of things. But as well as Tarantino, at that time, you also had David Lynch obviously Red Rock West. When I saw it, I remember I rented that from the video store because I was hoping for another Wild at Heart, which it wasn't exactly.

I was a bit disappointed at the time, but I've come to really love Red Rock West because that's just not what it is. It's something different. But Lynch has clearly been riffing on noir all through his career as well, so I just wonder if there was something in the air, and it feels like Darl and Warfield just wanted to make this sort of story and this is yeah, this is obviously this is before Tarantino. They can't be accused of viping him. Well, I'm curious if it was the whole directio market.

I know that this did get a theatrical presentation. I know that there was the whole thing about Red Rock West and how it played on HBO, And there were some really good made for cable movies around this time as well. Obviously, we were going to the video store in nineteen eighty nine, and I was working at the video store in ninety two and seeing this box cover art that was, as I said earlier, repulsing me. I didn't realize I used that strong of a word, but yeah, that was just really turning me off. But I don't remember this street the video market really hitting until more like ninety three, ninety four kind of thing.

But even then, there were some great thrillers that were coming out. I remember was the one called Knight of the Running Man. I think it was with Scott Glenn and Glenn Oh. It was amazing. Scott Glenn is channeling Lee Marvin in that movie, and just some of the torture scenes that they were doing the whole thing of the boiling water on the feet thing reminded me of the Big Combo with the use of the hearing aid as a torture device.

It just was very smart the way that they were doing this and mining these crime films because again, not big budget, you don't have to spend a lot of money on special effects with movies like these, and just the more taut and well written and well acted they are the better. And yeah, there were some just amazing films coming out around this time, and yeah, I agree with you Jedediah that these first three Doll films were just man oh man. I could not get enough of Red Rock West or the Last Deduction when those things came out. And I remember I think I saw Red Rock when it was on HBO and then actually saw it at the theater later on because I liked it so much. And I agree with you too, Rob as far as with Dennis Hopper, Nick Cage, and Lara Flynn Boyle all being in Red Rock, I really was hoping for more of a Lynch feel to it, but what I got was just fantastic.

JT. Walsh was he ever in a I don't think he was ever in a David Lynch film. Was he? But he should have been, because he would have been amazing. But yeah, that's one of the great things.

One of the things I love about Red Probably my favorite thing about Red Rock West is just how much AirTM J. T. Walsh has got in that. Because he was special, his Shriff character. He could have walked right out of a Jim Thompson novel if he wanted to.

And Yeah, these types of movies where the writing is so strong and you feel like this could be based on a book. If if they had a book about a book called Kill Me Again, that was the story, I would believe it because it just feels very classic, and these twists and turns are not something that I was necessarily expecting. Just even having the title of kill Me Again. I love that. The story that they tell is we got the title and then we had to write to it and yeah, which is very much the opposite of Red Rock West, where they just started writing.

Him and his brother dol and his brother started writing and had no idea which way they were going until they got to a point where they're like, Okay, how the hell, how the hell is this story going? To end. That's funny too, because Red Rock West could be the J. T. Walsh and Lara Flynn Boyle characters could be Fay Forrester and and Vince Millard from Kill Me Again if their plan had worked out.

Or Bill Pullman and Linda Fiorantino, right, doesn't she screw him over? They are those people who ran off into the West and started with a robbery and started a new life out there. They got too successful at it, but they they started over, and yeah, it's a great little riff that. Yeah, I don't hold it against him, as you were saying, rob for being very similar the it's not a it's maybe a feature, not a bug. I tried getting John Gryse for this episode because he's been on the show before and I know he's a fan of this movie.

And I don't know. He wrote to me and said that he's laying low right now. I don't know what that necessarily means, but I was like, all right, I really thought he would because when we talked the last time, when we spoke about Real Genius, he was talking to me and I hope it made it to air that a lot of the stuff in the vow documentary was actually shot by him. A lot of those early the tapes of Kilmer, especially when it came to his audition tapes, because he would tape his auditions a lot kind of work on his characters that way, those were all shot by Gray's. They were friends when they were younger because of real genius and so having Grays show up in this I was just really happy.

And he just plays such a great character. Its kind of helping him out, trying to be the good friend and everything, and then just gets fucking murdered for his troubles. And that scene is brutal. We have talked a bit about Madsen. Madsen and Gray's in that scene are both fantastic.

It's eerily similar to the scene in Reservoir Dogs, even down to Grais's performance too. Is very similar to the way that the actor who plays the cop in Reservoir Dogs is playing it as well. Super physical, disturbing, a focus on trying to disturb you. Something struck me while I was watching this scene again with Madsen, and this is one of the things I've realized I love about Madsen is he does violence with a streak of He's like a he's like a kid being cruel to an animal. He's there's a curiosity and playfulness to what he's doing, which he does here.

Even when he eventually slips his throat, he kind of stands back and you see just the way he sort of stands back and watches how he falls. He's interested to see how he falls. It's a little thing that he does, which just makes it so disturbing and so fucking evil. It's like Michael. Very amused by the very prospect of doing horror violence upon someone, and Madison selves out.

I think he's just fantastic in this film. He's great. Whenever he's on screen. He's just a kinetic violence to him. Anytime he might explode.

You know that scene where he walks into Jack's office before he thrashes him by he just to he's a heavy, he's bad news. But there's no fitting violence against another person in it. But that scene where he destroys the diner, he's just like just brushes all the plates off the counter and smashes things. And that's that's scary too. It's just scary shit.

And already's cuffed to the toad, to the disk he holds that thing up like it's Bulsa would yeah, And he's like, yeah, you like fucking get away quick because this guy's company's like a fantastic from Hell's hard. I stab at the going back to what a not that great private detective Jack is at times the whole nihilism angle of it. Maybe he wants to be caught, maybe he wants to be killed. He doesn't do a very good job when it comes to hiding that car. It it turns into kind of a Norman Bates and Psycho thing where the car is just kind of hanging out there and it never does the rest of it.

Like there's that moment where Baits puts the car in the lake and it pauses and you're like, oh, no, he's going to get caught. And you're like, what am I doing caring about this guy who just murdered this woman? And here it is, the car stops, it never goes back in, it never finishes going down. And meanwhile, yeah, they had that nice shot of the matchbook with his name on it in the motel that he left her in with all of that blood. He is a bad private eye from that point of view, but he's so bad you got to think it's he just doesn't care what he sends that car in to seek.

Right from the start, you're looking at it thinking that car is not going to sink into that water is not deep enough for it. To think. It's not marsh like you've got in Psycho. It's like a rocky pond somewhere, is what it looks like. And again after that, he's like, whatever, it doesn't matter, they're gonna find it anyway.

He's just he's just so whatever, thank you. And it's just luck that they bring in the kid from the hotel and he goes, no, that's not him, and it's like stupid moron. Yeah, disposing of the car and things like that. It's half assed, but is also he knows there's nobody, he knows they so it's a little bit low stakes. The whole point for him is that someone thinks she's dead, and so finding this car is maybe not a bad thing.

But the scene that he commits to the character is so invested in that both he and Wally are invested in, and is the fake murder. And what a hot scene that is? That is there's a literal sex scene in the movie. This is the hot sex scene as they're just backing off of each other, going up to the moment of violence and backing off and spilling blood everywhere and getting so excited by the sort of pay wrestle with me. They're just talking about what the killer would do, and man, that's a that's a really sexy scene.

I bet that is the scene that grabbed Kilmer's attention or whoever's attention when they were first I'm going to do this movie, I think. I bet that really leapt off the page. It's almost like a blood money shot too, when all of that blood just comes gushing out of that bag and it's like. Whoops, it looks only do that too. Sad it happens to all the guys excited.

That's it. It's just everywhere, a hell of a wet spot. Yeah, but he doesn't follow through on the promise of the sex, and that she loses interest. She's so flighty, she'll go with the flow with whatever she wants to do. I don't believe for a moment that this plan, even if it had come off perfectly, would have kept her hid him from Vince.

By the way, when she immediately goes to Reno, the only reason like what are the chances that he would even read this little story about her possibly being dead in the newspaper. You could easily have never seen that. It's not a massive news item. But she just assumes that he knows that he's been led astray, that she's probably dead, and that's all fine. But yeah, when after this scene and when he gets rid of he says, she's very hot to trot and it's like, here's my new hotel.

Let's go for it. Come in and he's like, no, I'm going to go get rid of the clothes and all the evidence in the car. It's going to take me a couple of hours. And I was thinking at the time, first time I watched this, I was like, she's not going to be there when you go back. She has you five thousand bucks.

You might have got it if you'd stuck around and gave her what she was asking for. Yeah, that's going to be gone. Obviously. The fake name, because we've got the what fee fee Forrester is her original name. I won't say it's a real name, but Fay Forrester is there.

And then she changes it to what vera Billings Lee or vera Billings But then he's calling around all of the different hotels and they find a vera Billings Lee. I guess it is. So it's okay. She's not even that good when it comes to picking another fake name. She could have had any name in the world.

She could have been Idle Lowenstein, but instead just one on gay Garist. What is your name? Luddy is? Laddy is? What luddis?

What's herum? So your name is like the sign ladies washroom? Oh that is a made up name. What is your name in place? Employce?

What in place? Muswissens? That is a made up name. M hmmm. What is your real name?

Max? Max? What occupant? See one? There is a number in the name?

Who are my name? Uh uh uh p uh ah. Tea ah Grifferen, Yeah yeah, Peter Griffin. Crap, that's like Wendy Croy and the last seduction when Billings is like ship they're near Montana, They're god all these ties. But I do think that she thinks Madsen will we'll find out about it in the papers, because that's where she gets her whole plan is from the paper, which is telling that she thinks, oh, here's a plan that didn't work.

I'll do that. It didn't work. They found out about it. There's a story in the paper. But well, it didn't work for them.

I bet it would work for me. Reality doesn't touch her. At least. She thinks she can walk through the raindrops, and she thinks she can go to Vegas and be the loudest person at this craps table, just surrounded by all of these men, throwing out sevens as much as she wants, and nobody's going to notice me. Nobody's going to put the finger on me.

Here. She dresses exactly the way he told her to when he told her to be make sure she's noticed. She wears that that low cut dress and that Yeah, she's very sexy and flirty with everybody in loud so yeah with the dress in the wig, she looks like golden hawn from death. Becomes her compulsiveness. You mentioned this, I think in your Night'smark it's a really good point.

This is her right, the compulsion, And I always find this. This is one of the things that does fascinate me about crime films, because personally, I'm too sensible to be a criminal like this, but I'm also too cowardly. I just can't believe the risks that people take and it's a compulsion. And my favorite bit of performance from her actually is when Jack drives her up to is it a police station or just a bunch of cops somewhere and says he's going to turn her in, and she just lose it. All just crumbles away, all the fear, all the neurosis, all the sort of you think yet she's always feared this thing happens.

She is aware of the consequences, potential consequences of what she does, but she just chooses not to think about them, and when you confront her with them, she just loses it. And I think Joanne Wally does a great bit of performance there because it's you feel for her. You're like, yeah, she is, she's upset. It works. I want to ask, though, if is she genuinely upset or is she just saying anything that she thinks he wants to hear to make him go away.

I think it's both. I think she is genuinely upset, but she's still calculating and showing her upset doesn't hurt, but it just it feels. It's one of the few moments in the film because personally going through this. I never believed her for a moment, and I didn't believe that Jack really ever believed her. But he I think he was doing a bit of expect the worst, hope for the best because may and it's just because of his hang ups with his wife.

And also, like we say, for him, everything's kind of low stakes. I don't think he cares if he dies. But on the off chance that he can start a new life and get his wife back in some way, then it will give us worth a try. But that is the one scene where I believe her. And but what's She's still lying to him in terms of what she's trying to get him to do.

She continues to lie to him all the way through. We know this because we I know what the truth is, which but that makes sense. But it's the emotionality that I think is real there, if not the content of what she's saying to him. I agree that it is both. It is a genuine reaction, and it's her telling him what he wants to hear, because that's really the only tool in her box.

She doesn't have a grand plan, but she's very good at knowing what usually men want to hear. In a certain situation to get what, you know, her whatever her shirt term goal is. But yeah, that bit is where oh, this is the real her. That other than that great fight she has with Michael Manson at the beginning of the at the beginning where he stops the car as they're speeding away and comes around in a threatening way and she's screaming at him from behind the glass. That's a great scene.

And I love how he's waving the case out of it because she's, Yeah, you can let yourself in the car and scream at you all your life, but I've got the case, So can we just move on this point? Yeah, him smashing that window and they're, oh, it's great. Yeah, I was just double checking the whole thing with the hair, and it is very weird because I really did think that it was a wig when she's in Vegas, but also a wig when they're having sex. And then yeah, you cut to that domestication scene. She's got the brunette here, and then you cut back to them in bed, and it's almost like that that domestication scene had to be either a pickup or at another point in this movie, because just them it almost feels like a continuation of the scene when they cut back to them in bed, it's the next morning kind of thing, or even maybe because I can't, I guess it is bread outside in Echo Bay, which yeah, like again with this whole of her wearing a wig, I was just like, okay, yeah, very kim Novak and this whole idea of oh, yeah, I'm going to have you have a chance to save your wife this time, this day, I want you to kill me again, and this time do it like your wife and save your wife's life.

That's the unwritten thing of this movie, which is wonderful. What a smart way of approaching this. I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards. And the echo of kill me again if he believes he's killed his wife as well, So it just gives a sense of the jeopardy at that point, because if this doesn't come off, you're putting yourself through it again and you're killing her again. That's completely different.

Many It's pretty neat just in terms of that kind of creates creative exercise that the writers went through to start with that line and to come up with something that that justifies the line being said. I think they did that pretty well. Creativity loves constraints and it works for them here really well. And I love the what's the story you had about the Red Rock West link? Here about the genesis of that idea that had something to do with this film, Mike.

Well, that one was just the they just kind of started and went just ad libbing kind of. Then this scene, they didn't have a title, they didn't have a purpose until they got two thirds of the way through and they're like, how the hell are we going to end this? They didn't come at it with a pre planned notion at all. So just again this way of you know, Okay, now we have a title, how do we write to the title, or now we just have an idea of here's this guy who comes to town. Doll, we'll talk about that.

And I'm definitely we are covering Red Rock West later on this year, So I'm going to cut this interview with Doll in two and have the second half of it later on in the year when we talk about that. But this whole idea of just coming up with the idea of Red Rock West by going through these kind of backwater bergs and seeing a bar and being like, oh, nothing good is going to happen in there, and you always get those kind of bar scenes. There's even one in this one. There's definitely one in After Dark my Suite, there's even one in The Brave, And it's like, okay, this is like nothing good is going to happen in these wide open spaces where you have this little shit bar. It's almost like the for this one.

It's also a little bit like the gas station that he pulls at by Last Chance, where you've got the cops on one side and the cops on the other side, and they exchange at certain points of the day. Oh, when these cops show up, these cops get to go to lunch, and then when they come back, they these other cops leave, and I like there's that little window of time that he sees where he's just like, oh, I can use this to my advantage. And that's where you get our detective actually being fairly smart. Yeah, we get later on that he was an insurance investigator, so surely he picked up picked up some tips. There, Oh, very Walter Neff.

Yeah, And then you get a kind of a prequel to Thunderheart by him going out on this reservation and Graham Green is not there. To give him a hard. Time this time, or the. Yeah, there's no Indian to guide him through the Yeah, this whole thing of him searching for redemption, trying to find it my favorite definition of noir, right, and he starts off pretty fucked. In the ends this movie even more fucked, though, I would say this is a relatively happy ending for a film noir.

This is a wild that you mentioned the end and sorry spoilers for Red Rock West, but also a happy ending, which is very unusual for a film like this. It goes pretty elegantly with what we've been saying about his attitude through the whole thing, because one thing that many classic film noir protagonists have in common is desperation, and they're always desperate. There's a lot of desperation that constantly to try to get ahead. They're up against it, they make bad decisions, they realize they make bad decisions, they dig themselves deeper. There's always this feverish sense of desperation, or at least it's very common in film noir.

In this one, it was the thing that really struck me about the film that it was almost a jarring note at first before I decided to actually this is quite good, and I quite like this sort of sense of it is almost low stakes with him. He's such an internalized character Jack that you don't you're thinking, is he just hiding how he's feeling or does he really not care? And if it is, what we were saying that maybe he does welcome oblivion and that he doesn't really he's going to try to get ahead, but he'll accept that unhappy ending, so of course he gets the happy ending. It works out, all right. We're going to take a break and we'll be back with a pair of interviews.

First we'll hear from John dol and after that we're here from David Warfield, and we'll be back with both of those right after these brief messages. Matt from Viva again and Emily. Looking for something superior to streaming a place with more than ten times the selection available on literally all of the streaming services combined. Check out Character Videos rent by mail service, select from an unparalleled collection of over one hundred and fifty five thousand films, and get blu rays, four ks, and DVDs delivered directly to your door. Get in on it now at scarecrowvideo dot org and rediscover the Wonders of physical Media.

Where were you at when you started working with David Warfield. Yeah, we went to film school and Bozman together. We started a collaboration way back then. I think we made our junior project together. There's only nine people in our entire film class.

Five of us were in one group together and then the other four were in another group. But we did our junior film together, and then we did our senior film together, and then we My girlfriend at the time now my wife, Beth Friedberg, was also in film school with us, and she and he lived in Baltimore, she lived in Boston, and then after college. This is not to be labeled this for too long, but then we went to Dave got a job working on John Waters film Polyester, oddly enough in Baltimore, got a job on that, and then that led to getting a job being a production manager on a children's television show called Powerhouse, and Beth and I both moved to why Wash in DC where he was working on the show Powerhouse, and it was an amazing collection of people.

Rosemary Brandenburg was the assistant art director on that project and Tom Richmond was the cinematire for Tom went on to do a bunch of stuff. Rosemary is a set decorator in Hollywood with enormous credits, Like she did the last couple of Star Wars she's done. She worked for every big director Hollywood. Check out our credits. Tom Richmond unfortunately has passed away, but he did a lot several movies.

And we all moved to Los Angeles to attend the American Film Institute, and the three of us overall accepted to the American Film Institute. Dave and I started writing scripts all the way back then, and we had Kill Me Again. We had written a horror film that we thought was quite clever, and we had named it Silent Night around the time that we're trying to give this out to people, but somebody else came out with a title called Silent Night Deadly Knight and stole our thunder. So we're sitting there in our apartment in Hollywood trying to come up with any kind of names that we can name our horror film something else, and we're throwing out like kill die all these kind of Out of that sort of spitball session came the name kill Me Again.

That well, that's pretty funny. How do you get somebody to say that in a movie. And then before I went to film school, I was an art student at the University of Montana in Missoula, and I remember walking by and I like, really like graphic arts, commercial art, and I was walking by this he was book sale by the student union and they had all these old pulp fiction books. When I was looking at him, mostly because I love the graphics, and they had these crazy names like I Wake up screaming Dead on arrival, They'd have a woman with a telephone cord wrapped around her there, and they were all like, if you think about those, all those great like sort of pulp fiction books. And that's why I thought that was one of those titles is kill Me Again.

It's so we started, and I had a couple of ideas when I first a good friend of mine, a childhood friend of mine that moved to San Francisco, and then I was went to visit him once on a school book when they had a spring break bus in Bozeman and I just jumped on that bus and it stopped in the middle of the night in Los in Reno. I thought, wow, this is I'd only read about or seen pictures of reen and I thought, this is just decadence and twenty four hours a day drinking and gambling. What kind of stuff goes on here? I was twenty years old maybe, and that stuck in my mind and then just kind of working on scripts even when I was in film school. But the idea of a private detective in Reno, Nevada kind of start to percolate with how you know this guy?

So this woman walks into this private detective of office and says, could you I need you to kill me so I can anyway, That's how we started. So Dave and I started working on that script at that point, and when we were at the AFI. Why did we watch. Double Indemnity in Sunset Boulevard almost at the same time on screen at the AFI? It must have had a guess that was coming through on that.

I don't remember why. But the thing that was also crazy about that was that there are great movies if you've never seen them. Most people have, but some people haven't. They're just amazing, amazing movies. And also, as in The Hole, which is another great movie, same director, the great Billy Wilder, what was amazing about that is that we were living in the same neighborhood that Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity were filmed in, and Old Hollywood was like, I love Old Hollywood history.

But. We were near it Franklin and Venice Boulevard, you know that, Franklin and Vermont over the hills by So now it also gelled as Okay, this is the neighborhood where all these stories took place. How could a story like that take place in It could take place in Nevada like I or then again that led into a red Rock West. It's how do I do a film noir in Montana or even a place where all the criminals live, which is like Wyoming. I don't know why we picked Wyoming, but that's it seemed more desolate and obscure than Montana.

But Wyoming's a great state, it really is. But anyway, Killing Me Again came together pretty quickly. We were working with two guys that we met doing music videos together, Steve Bullen and Yanni sieg Watson. Dave had found this real estate agent from Las Vegas that wanted to make a music video in la and this was like it was that was the new thing to do, and so he he paid us money to make these music videos. And Steve was the at on my music video on Yanni was the production manager.

There was a bunch of us that we're getting out of the AFI around the same time, and we started kind of making films that way, and Steve and Yanni had really gotten into music videos and then they had kind of ended up starting their own company, which became Propaganda Films, and Dave was producing music videos. I was directing him, and that led to one day we went in and pitched Steve our story for Kilney again and he loved it, and so I'll buy it. And we said, okay, slow down, and we decided to go out and we wrote it. We wrote it instead and then shopped it around a little bit. Then Steve and Yanni liked it, and Propaganda made it, and that's how it came out.

Well, I know, it's not just that easy to be like, Okay, we're making a film. It's not it's not no. And I think I worked on it for two and a half years almost trying to get it made, made a living drawing storyboards and directing music videos, and then we actually I think we people responded to this. We mean, I think we had I think it was HBO that wanted to buy the script, and so we kind of went to Steven Yai. They want to buy it, but we'd rather make it here, and they said, okay, we'll do it.

So that with Pologram Films we had written a script for It's kind of Stephen Gianni's one of the early projects. It was called with the Nigel Dick was the director. PI Private Investigation was the name we David I wrote. Steve Yanie picked it up and we got Pologram was kind of backing it, and then eventually we got MGM to kind of pick it up. And it wasn't an expensive movie, but it was maybe it's like four and a half million dollars, which I think about it now, it was we got to shoot for about seven weeks, we got in La Reno and Las Vegas.

I don't know what those dollars translate now, but it was when I did Last Seduction. I think that was like a two and a half million dollar film, and that was like maybe four or five weeks of shooting. I think I can't remember. But so once we had MGM on board, then we started casting and then we kind of got into that whole process, and we creating all the way that we could put together the film and we could save some money by shooting in Los Angeles for three weeks I think, and then we shot in Reno for a couple of weeks, and I think then we shot in Las Vegas for it was two or three weeks. All that like basically the Vegas Strip and some of the hotels and Valley of Fire, which was pretty great.

How did that cast come together? When you're casting a movie, you're trying to get the biggest start possible that the studio is and Val Kilmer was interested, so that kind of came together. We'd actually been talking to maybe even actually heard about it through his wife, Joanne Wally, because we had been I think we had met with her before we even met with Val. And Michael Mattson came in and auditioned, and who wouldn't cast my Madson. He was fantastic.

Then we kind of picked up some local people. I think he picked a few people. Out of Nevada. Yeah, it's been a long time, but it kind of came together that way. And once you get an actor like Val who was you know, everybody wanted to work with him.

Some things kind of came together. He imagine that he's one that brought John Grice. To the party. I think they knew each other, but John was like, we met him, he's one of those people. Why would you cast John Gryce?

He was terrific. I think John had known him, But I don't know that they how friendly they were. I don't recall it. I do know that they knew each other once they we started rehearsing. I think there's a danger at times that Michael Madson might steal the film.

Yeah, he's pretty unconventional. He's a pretty great guy. I remember when we were filming that scene where he's got valid in the closet and at the hotel out in the Valley of Fire, and he's got this gun to his head and he just kind of ad libs that. He takes a lot of time, and we're running film and I think our budget for film was five thousand feet a day, which is not very much, and I think we shot eight thousand or nine thousand feet on that day because Michael just kept We just magazine runs for ten minutes, but he just blow through ten minutes. So at the end of the at the end of the day, Janni was really pissed off at Meat.

Oh, we can't shoot this much film. What do you out of your mind? That's what he's doing. I'm sorry, but I think one of the first times they gave him a note. I'm a young direct rival and this is my first film ends.

There's a scene where. I think it was one of those. It was some one of those scenes in VAL's office, which was a stage that we built in Los Angeles, some of the first stuff that we've and Michael comes in and he's got some He was one of those scenes with must have been a scene of Val, obviously, but I was like when he was came in and busted up the place and I gave him a note and he goes, yeah, Johnny, I think I got it. Yeah, okay, And he. Did it exactly the same way.

And I said, and what did you think? And I said, that was great, Michael. He's an actor. He was directable, buddy, he was doing his thing. There's some actors that are amazing personalities and that's what you get.

And there's lots of really good ones that are like that. They're always the same guy in this in every movie that they do, and that's what people like about him. I love Clean Eastwood and he's a great actor. But you know what you get and when you go to a Clean Eastwood movie, and that's why you bought the ticket. He's great at what he does.

When there's many people like that, but that's Michael Madson was more like Michael Madson was always Mike Madison in a movie, and that's why people liked him, and he was great at that. Yeah, I was curious what it was like for you, because I know you had done the music videos. I imagine when you did your project at AFI, going from music videos to directing these kind of A list stars at the time must have been a little bit intimidating for you. Fortunately, I had done about, I don't know, maybe twenty five thirty music videos by that time, so I'd had some experience of being on a set with the clock running and the money's going out the window, and the crew people and the artists and hair and makeup and props and all that stuff.

But act dealing with actors was a whole new thing in a way, and it's kind of like controlling chaos in a way. When you have to be you have to kind of learn how to work with everybody individually, and everybody's different. Okay, so how's Michael Madson going to do this scene? Let's find out. I adopted this Colombo tactic in a way.

It's like I never tell anybody what to do. I try not to. I always ask them questions because I think creative people would rather ask answer questions or like explain than be told what to do. Here do it like this. I've just I'm just never I don't like being told what to do.

I don't think a lot of creative people do, but they so. And so if you start a conversation and that's started working that way, so probably gonna kill me again and again totally on Red Rock West. And I've just been doing that for years, like just talking to actors, and you know, I think the other thing about an actor is that they're the one person on the phone. There's really there's a lot of people on film sets that they're there, they want to do a good job, but there's very few people that have as much skin in the game as the writer, the director and the actors. What's your name?

And you can work on a movie and if even if you're if you're the lead in the movie, you've got a lot on the line, and or even if you're a young actor, they all have a lot on the line. So it's like you have to be conscientious to the fact that and they also have they bring a lot of talent to the floor, and you have to having done lots of televisions, sometimes you'll get writers that want to give them a bunch of notes before they've even done the scene. The thing about most actors is they've read the script, they've studied it, they've thinking about it, they've been thinking about it for hours and days, and when they finally get to the set, just let them do what they do. Let them be who they are.

Another analogy would be being a coach for an NBA team. I don't know how many people are on an NBA team, maybe fifteen players total, eleven something like that. It's not a big locker room. It's not like a football team or a baseball team. There's a handful of guys and you've got probably some of the best players in the world sitting on.

James Harden used to be on the bench. He was the sixth guy on the Oklahoma Fund. Is that there the Olaham of Thunders I think is their name. Anyway, that was the bench on that team, and back in the nineties was amazing. But anyway, you've got amazing players and you've got amazing talent, and you're sitting there and all you're trying to do is figure out how to coach them.

And you don't have to tell them how to act because they already know how to do that. They've they've made it through through wherever they came from, and they've made it to Los Angeles and they've gotten themselves into a casting office and they've been in a couple of movies. You certainly don't need to tell them how to act. They know how to do that. It's just like, really, what can you They just want to know that you've got a game plan, which is a script, and they want to know how, am how are you going to do this?

And so that I can take what I have and contribute. I love actors and they're like so vulnerable when they walk onto the set and you want to make them feel like they're safe. Try this that's working on it, and. Then be encouraging. And you're not always going to get what you want sometimes, but also be careful what you wish for.

There's this one of my I still have never found a copy of it, but there's this When I was a kid, I used to read mad magazines and there was this one one couple pages of cartoons where it was little kids were drawing a picture and sending it to Santa for the toy that they wanted for Christmas, and then the kid had opened it, and in the next frame was him opening the present on Christmas morning. It looked just like they're drawing it like a bicycle that you couldn't possibly ride because the spokes. And I just thought that was hilarious. And that's what having been an artist and worked as a graphic artist and I designed bill boards for a while, which was great fun. And you've got this canvas the paint on, and careful what you wish for?

Do you really want to get everything that you wanted because you're just by yourself. And that's the great thing about the great thing about the filmmaking process, and one of the reasons that I loved it so much is I also played music, and I played in band and orchestra, and from the age of I don't know, eleven or ten or eleven. I played in bands all the way through high school and into college, and I had my own bands. And I love the process of being working with a group of people. And when you get on a film set, there is tons of talent.

These all these people that are on anybody. You know, if you start talking to the wardrobe mistress or the prop the second prop person, or this the on set dresser. That's a guy that stands there and when you move the couch back, he moves it into and then they've always fixing the set. These are but you start talking to these people. One guy that was a set dress that I worked with for years on here in Los Angeles, he was the I've just gotten to talking to him one day and he grew up in Compton and he said that he told this, He said, I was the fourth fastest sprinter in the United States.

I almost made it to the Olympic team. It's like, are you kidding me? So it's an incredibly competitive business. And if you actually make it onto a film set and you're doing something on the film set, there is something about you that's I love talking to people on film sets. I learned something from them every day because they are these just incredible people, and so as you as a director that has the awesome responsibility of trying to make all this stuff work.

Every film set's kind of the same. They're all really kind of the same. But a guy like Steven Spielberg can walk onto a film set and wham, it's amazing. They're all the same. And everybody's trying to make a great movie.

I remember my father in law said, well, why do they make bad movies? I said, nobody's trying to make a bad movie. Everybody's trying to make a great movie. Why everybody's out there doing their best, But our mistakes are really obvious. And around that time, remember Coca Cola had made new Coca Cola and it was a big bomb.

While it was like why, said them, why did they make new Coca Cola? Everybody likes the Coca Cola that they were drinking. Why would you want to make spend millions of dollars making a new one? But a lot of businesses spend a lot of money on research and development pharmaceuticals. How much do they have to spend to make a drug?

So it's a lot of money. But our mistakes are in the film industry. They're evident, we don't have to pick out a movie and discourage this disparage it. But you can probably think of a couple of movies where you're thinking to yourself, while they had all that talent, and that's what they came up with, and what happens. Nobody sets out to make a bad movie.

Once kill me a Gun comes out, what happens with it? So we make the movie. MGM has a kind of agreed I think with Paulo Graham. Paul Graham probably put up half or more of the money MGM's going to distributed, and they were going to just distribute it in two markets. I don't think they had a lot of confidence in it.

The two big markets. And then the two big cities they were going to distribute it in were I think it was Phoenix maybe and San Francisco. Those are the two and they said, so they put it on two hundred screens and those are the two big markets. So it was a theatrical lease. And my childhood friend that had gone to the San Francisco Our Institute and was living in San Francisco and issa, they're going to release the movie in San Francisco, and the day that they released it was the day that before whenever year that was.

It was the year that the Atlanta the Oakland was playing the San Francisco Giants in the World Series, and I think it was game five or six, and it was a very decisive game. Earlier in the there was an earthquake. It was a tract earthquake that took down that freeway and on the Bay side people died. It was when the Big ball game was on. Anyway, that had happened.

And then the weekend that they're going to release Kill Me Again is the weekend they started up the series again. So it was not very well attended what he was going to the movies because they were all going to the ballpark. It did okay, It just did okay, but at least what But then a couple of things happened to it, and a couple of reporters and a couple of critics of Los Angeles watched it, I remember, and there was somebody on like one of the local news stations ook there's a lot of movies that you go should go see this one and got some good reviews. When it got a good review from the San Francisco paper. The guy that used to the critic that had people.

His thing was that he'd have some either somebody sitting in a chair or standing up or clapping. I can't remember his name, and that was kind of that. I would like to know a little bit more about you and how you decided to get into writing and producing. I went to college and I got into filmmaking that way, and I went to a few different colleges, universities, and at Montana State we had made some films together with a small group of people, and I think you already talked to John. When we got out of college, nobody had a job or anything, but I was back here.

I came back east where I'm from. I'm from Maryland. I was working on a John Watters film and I met all the people and working in the DC Baltimore sort of mid Atlantic film market by working on that film, and then I got a job as a production manager on a TV series for public television that was like a kid's mission impossible. I called all my friends from college and said, I'm the production manager on a show. I can hire you.

All. All my friends moved here and hired them all and others too. They flew in a new DP out of AFI named Tom Richmond, who went on to shoot a lot of interesting films. But anyway, after we worked on that job called Powerhouse, we all moved out. Three of us applied to the American Film Institute and got in there, and we say, we're writing scripts all the time and trying to get movies made and all that kind of thing.

You had to write scripts because you couldn't afford to buy them. What kind of stories interested you at that time? I genuinely gravitated towards crime thrillers. Do you have any favorites growing up that you enjoyed a lot? Good?

Back in those days, people didn't think of film noir as the sort of hipster thing it is now. But I certainly ought all the films Noir and some of the French films as well were certainly a big influence out of the past, and there was some of the Bogart films and so on, And when I was growing up, certainly even things like Taxi Driver were super influential. I saw that in college there's not a crime thriller per se, but probably all the usual suspects you would think of. Right about the time have killed me again. The Coen Brothers their movie came out, and that was also like, oh my god, we didn't end up to be the Coen Brothers.

They did Blood Simple, and that was right. At the same time, there were a few other some people called them neo noirs, or later it was called cable noir, the same thing and as it is today, so horror, because the perception was that you could make a low budget horror movie. You could get him such a movie made as a genre didn't demand movie stars necessarily or whatever. I was mostly just trying to survive, and I was working on all kinds of films. Started producing a lot of music videos because that was a big thing because when I was at AFI, MTV got invented.

My friends and I were all working at night and then going to AFI in the daytime working on film shoots and stuff. Can you tell me a little bit more about KEI private investigations. Michael Kuhn, who was a boss at the British company called Philip Blank, I can't remember the name right now. He was over here. Some of our friends from AFI started.

We were all hustling in various ways. Yanni and Steve Golan who since passed away, and Yanni I'm not sure where he is right now. They were gearing up to on propaganda films and we were all producing music videos. We were putting movies together one way or the other, and Nigel Dick was another director of music videos, and somehow that all came together. I think John and I wrote the script for that movie and Nigel directed it, and it was a low budget action but it was fun.

There was like a thumbnail of a story idea, and John and I just ran with that and wrote the script for it. And I'm trying to think if I worked on the film. I think I did. I think I might have been an ad or associate producer or something. I had some really interesting actors in it.

Talia Bossom was in there, and a few other actors who we could get for the limited budget that we had. It was all shot around one of the old western town they're up in Seeney Valley or someplace, and downtown LA. And that little story was about that sort of rapid succession of gags as the miscommunication and the mistaken identity and the problems with the main character who I even forget that actor's name at the moment Clayton Roner Clayton was good, and it was just kind of designed to be a quick succession of incidents that cause and effect tumbling the character, main character tumbling through the story and coming out at the end of one piece. I really liked that, and I especially liked just that small role from Anthony Geary Tony Gary.

The torture of him with that oil pump was fantastic. I know we came up we really wanted to use the oil pump, and I keep noticing how it's used in other movie. Not that it made any difference that it was this one. I'm sure other boobies before that one did it too, But where did I just see an oil pump scene last night? Lucky the thing with Anya Taylor Joy they did?

And what I'm seeing? So yeah, and yeah, that cast was amazing, seeing Robert Edos show up in such a small role, and then like Brendon Wells, Well. It's who I was thinking of because Paul had done a few really interesting sort of indie films. We got him in there somehow. Nigel, by the way, who's a very steady character who just kept directing music videos for all these decades.

I noticed on the Facebook he just wrote a book about his work, which might be an interesting read, just because he's one of those people that hung in there and just kept doing music videos forever. He did a few movies too, but his bread and butter and nobody has a more long range of view. I think of the music video thing. Then Nigel did PI private investigations helped pave the way for Kill Me Again. John and I, back in those days, had written a number of scripts together, most of which did nothing happened with it at all, but we worked on that one, and as I recall, Steve and Yanni were hot to produce any kind of movie.

They had a money person. I can't remember the order, whether Propaganda Films had actually formed yet or not. I think it had, and I ran Propaganda Films there for a little while as a had a production, but that was when that was a few years later. That was when I was producing for Fincher and dom Senna and all those guys who came out of the propaganda thing. I don't know if we wrote the script it pitched it to those guys or what we did the exact order, but it really as it is now for the most part.

But in those days it was all about you can get the money for the film, especially if it's fairly low budget, but only if you get a cast attached. So Val at the time was a nobody, but he was big enough for this budget if he could get Val attached. He had come off Willow and it's something else I forget, so he wasn't like but he was enough. Yeah, by this point he had already done Top Gun. Oh, he had already done Top Gun.

Okay, really that seems backwards in order to me, but I'm sure you're right. Steve and Yanni were. They were negotiating with David Lynch to do a show. And or a movie, and. Val was very suspicious person, didn't want to work with anybody too much unless he thought they were super cool or whatever, competent or whatever.

But we got David Lynch to talk to Val. Hey man, these guys are cool. The producers will have your back, and we did. That's just a little back room thing that I'm aware of that I wasn't directly involved in. But I did work on David Lynch's short film, which was called The Cowboy and the Frenchman.

They assigned me to it because I was the propaganda had a production guy, just so that things went okay with David Lynch and everything. I'm a little confused about the order of all those events, but we shot that in a few days. Up there in Santa Clarita or someplace. There was Propaganda Films, which is making commercials and music videos and developing feature films. So Kill Me Again came out of that while we were doing a million other things.

And this is another one with just this killer cast. Michael Madson and Joanne Waley were just amazing in this too. It's funny because Val was like, you have to cast my wife, and we're like, we don't even know where a man and then we met with her and she's great, and it's like, why not cast his wife. That's not a terrible idea because we couldn't cast some a big famous person anyway. And she had done some great work in her British film about this.

I think it was called Scandal, and she was cool. Just a couple of years ago, there was a little screening over at the American Cinematech that the arrow in Santa Monica, and they screen Killed Me Again. A couple other things and John and me a few other people that worked on those films went there. It was fun to hang out. And then Michael Madson, that was an interesting story.

I'm trying to think how we got on to him. The first time. They were trying to cast his sister and something else. Our casting director Carol Lewis, who since has changed careers and retired, but I'm sure she came up with Madison, but I can't remember exactly how we got on to him. He was rejected by the executive from England, but I pushed for him because he seemed so bizarre and menacing and he was cool, a very cool on stay on camera presence.

The scene with him and John Grys is one of my favorites. It is. And the thing is, you know who copied that scene verbatim a few years later? Are you talking about the guy who copies everything. That he does.

Yeah, he copied our torture scene, but that's okay, whatever, And he hired the same actor and then unlesser known. All these things are connections. I'm not trying to take credit for any of it. But I also put Michael in front of Gridley Scott for Thilma and Louise, and that's how he moved from Kill Me Again to Thilma and Louise. My then girlfriend and later wife wrote Filma and Louise, and so we were again.

Everybody talks to everybody. We're all connected, and said, you should check out Michael madsen Man. But yeah, he's an interesting character. I rest his soul. I believe these guys are dying vow as well.

What do you remember about the making of Kill Me Again? We took it release seriously and we didn't have that much money, but we scouted the entire state of Nevada endlessly for the exteriors, and then there was a bunch of stuff we shot and Reno. There's a few interior sets were built. One of them, notably, the Private Eyes office, was built in the old Triangle stage over there in Silver Lake, which I think was the stage where some of the silent film stars had done a lot of work. I can't remember the history right now, but it had that fun little feature of ancient soundstage that was actually pretty small.

I know that we scouted for a long time. We kept rewriting the script. We were pretty young. Val was a kind of intimidating person. And we just tried to keep him happy.

It's The director of photography was the guy whose name I forget, who we had never worked with, but he got in there somehow and he was fine. How much did the movie change during production or was that all pre and then everything was shot for the script once you got there, or how. Was that pretty much followed the script? It was not much. Will change happened at all.

We had another set of exteriors out by Lake Mead. We had to. Arrange a few interesting things like how to do a car swerve to avoid a deer and goes over a cliff and into a lake with no money. But these are all fairly routine filmmaker things that you overcome. Even though it probably had a minute school budget, it doesn't look like it.

It really comes together and holds together. It's not as immaculately polished as some larger budgeted films with more detailed or experienced crew and that kind of thing. But yeah, it's fine. It's a little strange, which is great, and it held up okay. Last time I saw it a few years ago over there at the era, it seemed like it was fine.

Beth Johnna Friedberg, who later married. John Dahl was second unit DP on that one, and we also had a second unit director who helped with a lot of the opening titles and the atmospheric things. Bob Tonnell, who I still talk with. He did a movie a couple of years ago called The Feast of the Seven Fishes. He's done some other stuff in recent years too, So yeah, Bob, I'm trying to think who else was involved.

He gave you the casting director, Steve and Yanni John of course, and me and Beth, and we had a whole contingent from Iceland. Yanni Sigovatsen is Icelandic and his friends and relatives like Heba. Thora's daughter is of course a famous makeup person now, and she was working with us on a lot of these shows, although not I don't think she worked on Kill Me Again, because she does all of the Tarantino movies now, And she did a series Lady in the Lake with Natalie Portman last year or two years ago in Baltimore here, and I hung out with her because again people that was known for all these decades. But yeah, I vaguely remember Frida, but then I think Lizbeth did makeup Lizbeth Williamson. Yeah, and Lizbeth definitely on the case.

Definitely a great pro and still working. But yeah, it sounds like you were juggling a lot. We did a ton of location scouting. We had all the usual stuff to deal with transportation and one thing and another. But this shoot went off without any major issue or problem, and I believe it was on budget and on schedule.

As I recall. The real sad part of this whole thing is just the way that it didn't really do much one that came out unfortunely. What are you going to say, marketing people? It was weird. I just remember one thing about the marketing people.

I remember like complaining about their this is it an MGM? Their marketing scheme such as it was, which really was no scheme at all. I think they just buried the movie like their poster. Their beta posters were horrible. And I'm like, guys, why don't you put the main actor's name on the poster?

And they said, because nobody knows who he is anyway, And I said, yeah, but if you put his name in big letters, they think it's a movie star. What the fuck are you thinking? But I remember having those kind of common coversations with them. It had a theatrical release, but it was limited. I think I saw it in Nashville when it was released theatrically, because I happened to be in Nashville at the time.

What was it like for you when you directed your own film by doing Rose? I was never a director, but here in my old age, I did make a few micro budget films. Yeah, I forgot about Ocean Park as well, and. That was a disaster. But fun Rose was really fun.

I know that I never expected anybody would see it, but that was the most fun I ever had working on a movie. We just had a group of people come out and stay on a farm for a month or two and I'll be trapped. Here was shot on a canyon five D and I have to give Scott Chess not a huge amount of credit for that. He probably is the person that should have edited to Kill Me Again, but for whatever reason, he wasn't available. It was in the same sort of group of people, but he was the DP on rows and post production sort of consultant.

The what he got out of that Canon DSLR is incredible. The movie's kind of stupid, but it's an incredible looking movie for zero budget. But that was a lot of years later. I dropped out of the whole thing for a long time. I did a lot of screenwriting and made my living screenwriting most of the time stuff that never even got produced.

That's Hollywood for you, but all good. I've had a worked on a ton of stuff and made stuff and met incredible people and all that kind of thing. Valid an interesting career, for sure. It was niche on the one hand. He never got to be a huge movie star.

But like one of the weirdest things I ever saw, very few people saw this. You may be aware that there was a major musical, a stage musical based on the idea of the Ten Commandments, like the old movie with Charlton Heston and Val starred in it, that had a short run, as far as I'm aware, at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood where they do the oscars and everything, and that's where I saw it, and I saw Val be Moses in the Ten Commandment. And if that's just so fucking weird. It was a big flop, that show, but it was interesting that he did it. And then of course when he did Tombstone, that seemed to click with a lot of audiences and gave him a lot of riz And I think his bang was helpful to him too.

I don't want to speak ill to dead, but he could be what's the right word, difficult. I've heard that, and it felt like he was his own worst enemy in some ways. I think, Yeah, how long have you been teaching now? After I quit? It's just funny, I say quick, because I'm still making films all the time.

I've been dat about ten or fifteen years here. Like I say in my old age, I'm in my seventies. Since we built up a film program here at Morgan State University from nothing. When I say we are Keith Mellinger, who's another film professional also from Los Angeles. But long story, but we started out with five majors, and that was one hundred and sixty majors and we are just this year moving into a huge sound stage complex that we is our program now.

It's a sound stage that was quite active in the Baltimore Where are you located? Just outside of Detroit, but I've been to Baltimore many times. Yeah, So Flight three was an active soundstage studio facility for many years. But then it was I don't know, went bankrupt or something. The university bought the property a long time twenty some years ago and didn't even know what it was.

So we've been building this program up, this film program, and now we've got the building as two huge downstages, one with the hard psych three floors of computer labs, classrooms and offices, and it's awesome but needs some rehabilitation work infrastructure wise, but it will soon become a private public partnership where people come to rent the stage and the students are the stage managers, and the you know, and all that kind of thing is going to be part of it. We've already been shooting in there a bunch of stuff, even without the fully tricked out grid and all that. We have Area Alexas and red cameras and the high end Sony can. We have everything now because this program really took off and it's a filmmaking and screenwriting and animation program.

I have another modestly budgeted feature I'm doing, but this fall we're going to do a short film version of it to help push that to the next left because it needs a little bit of money. It can just be a micro budget. But I'm still doing this stuff all the time. Mister Warfield, thank you so much for your time. I'm so glad we're able to connect.

Thanks for taking the time to look back into the somewhat more recent film history. All right, we are back and we were talking about Kill Me Again, and I was curious, did you guys get a chance to see the movie that they made Worfield and Dall before this called PI Private Investigations. It's on TV at the moment. Actually, when I watched it, said it's leaving TV tomorrow. But I went back and because I wanted to check something in the credits the other day and it was still there, So hopefully they're still showing it, because it seems pretty hard to find otherwise.

I liked it. There is a twist. There's a fake out twist in that film towards the end, involving a female character shafting our protagonist, which turns out to be a dream. And I thought, in my head canon because I noticed it's a script by darl And Warfield, but the story credit is Nigel Dick, the director, and I've got a feeling they wanted that twist. I bet you they improved his story and said do this instead, and he said, I like it, but I like my story better.

But I'll tell you what. We'll put it in as a dream sequence and have a fake out because it's a very dull moment. A lot of his films and warfields have this moment of female characters shafting the protagonist in some way. He kind of fixates on it. So I thought, oh, that's the one bit of Dahl I can like.

It was not the one bit of Dhal, but that's the very obvious bit of Darl I could see in this. But yeah, it's a fun movie. It looks quite quite well directed by Dick. I think it's fun. It's very eighties.

It's got the the trope of Clayton Rona, who I quite like, but he is that. I feel like there was a lot of films in the eighties where we got the sort of hunky, sort of heart throb type lead who's this guy's very sulky. But everyone seems to think it's cool. It seems to come off as cool, But I think this guy's really a bit of a sulk. It's a bit of a silk.

But it's fun. Yeah, it's got a lot of It does have a dull vibe to it in general as well. Yeah, Yeah, I liked it. It's good fun. I do think it's something that I'll probably watch again and maybe it'll be more memorable.

I've seen it a couple of times. I watched it a few months ago thinking about this, but I watched it a couple of years ago too, for the first time. But there's elements in it that I'm like, Okay, this is my kind of movie. I like these elements. I like this this kind of story.

But honestly, I don't remember the story very well. So it's probably one that I will revisit for John Dall for quite a while, as long as it's available, But it's not one that's totally sunk into my consciousness yet. But I do like that. Speaking of these these noirs, you know, these neo noirs of the eighties, like what you could call a neo noir, you know, I do think this one qualifies. I think that it, you know, not just stylistically, but the psychology of it feels that way to me.

Yeah, and it's a bit Hitchcockian as well, isn't it a bit of a wrong man taught situation, which I quite locked. I also enjoyed seeing he's best friend with the sports car that he keeps borrowing is Chuckie Charles from Sonfels. Oh yeah, yeah, that was nice. Yeah. The cast in this movie is fantastic, like Ray Sharky, Paul La Matt Martin Balsam, Anthony Zerbe, having Robert Edo show up for just a few seconds, Vernon Wells.

I really thought that Anthony Geary when he showed up. I was just over the moon to see him. He was so good. In any other movie he would be the protagonist, but instead it's Clayton Rohner here as this Joey Bradley guy, very not a noir protagonist, but he's an architect. Everybody was an architect back in.

The eighties, and well photographer one of the other. Or a photographer this whole thing. It's really his dad who's been trouble, but then he gets sucked into the mystery and all these things. I like that, And I also really liked the relationship he has with this woman that he meets and that he needs new clothes and ends up having to borrow her clothes, including it looks like her shoes or somebody's shoes that these shoes are wild, these bright red shoes that he's wearing. It's her boyfriend, her ex boyfriend.

This is another eighties Trait was like, ah, these are all my ex boyfriend's clothes. It's like, well, these women have ex boyfriend's clothes in their clothes. But they look like women's clothes to be this kind of like sea foam blue shirt that he's wearing. Seven. Yeah, that's true.

Again, very sunbaked. I almost mentioned the film Nightfall earlier, which is a super sunny noir, and one of the things I like about that one so much is the oil derek that you see like in things like Beverly Hills Cop two, and you see it in this one as well, and especially to use that oil pump as a torture device for Geary. Oh man, oh man. That was wonderful. Yeah, that's the best saying in the film.

I think that's really good. Yeah, there's some good stuff. It's got some nice touches, it's got some real style, it's got a good vibe. The story is not great and it is somewhat forgettable, but it's just got a nice vibe. And if you like that kind of thing, it is very under scene.

It's it definitely should be seen by more people. As of this recording, it is on Amazon Rime and then yeah still be on toob you never know. So yeah, it's definitely out there. I don't think the rights are as secure as they might have been at some point. It is a Samuel Goldwyn film, so legit production company and everything.

It wasn't some sort of fly by Night type of thing. Saddled with a poor title Private Investigations, and I love how that at some point and they've come up with a with a new title for it, and the best they could come up with was PI Private Investigations. It's much better. I was so shocked by the score or the soundtrack for this to have fucking bon Jovi. I was like, wait a second, because Dead or Alive that was a Young Gun, right.

Yes, yeah, or Young Guns too, one of them. Just the opening sort of sting from one of Dead or Alive. Yeah, crazy, I. Think so, because I used to clean the theater after that one. But then wasn't there what there was a bon Jovi song that was also in Harvard.

Lee Davidson and the Marlboro Man wanted Dead or Live? Okay, yeah, no, that was They're Alive. Yeah, oh I can. I'm totally conflatet song with Blaze of Glory. That was the song that was the song for Young Guns.

Too, Okay call me Young Gun okay, but yeah, this one. So this song was used in Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, which must have come out right before this, right had to have been written at the same time. It was like nineteen ninety Marble Man Harley. DIDs Really so this was eighty seven? Wow, okay, all right, interesting.

Yeah, it was so surprising when I started to hear those strings and I was just like, wait a second, that guitar. I was like, there's no way that this is bon Jovi. This has to go into another one. Or it was one of those knockoff songs, like when you listen to something you're like, oh, it's in the style of Pearl Jam, but it's not really pearl Jam. We used to have CDs like that at the cable company I worked at, and it'd be like, oh, use a song that sounds like Nirvana for this commercial.

Okay, I'll break out the library CD and throw in this song that is close to grunge but not quite. Yeah. I really enjoyed this one more than I thought I would. Yeah, and I would like to think that this helped lead to you know, Kill Me Again. I thought it was a very solid opening for these guys, and it just sounds like from these interviews that it was a struggle man.

It does not sound like it was easy at all. There was that really nice book I can't remember the title off the top of my head where it was. The author was writing specifically about these three noirs, but of Kill Me Again, Red Rock Quest, and The Last Seduction and talking about just how poorly Kill Me Again did at the box office. And when I was reading it, I was like, there's no way that was the number. It looked like, oh yeah, and they raked in eighty thousand dollars this weekend.

I was like, wait, eighty thousand dollars in today's box office terms, that is death. But then that hung around. This is still the point where movies can hang around in theaters for a little bit more and word of mouth can happen and reviews can actually help out. But it still ended up just not making very much money at all. It was a blessing that it ended up in video stores for us to see or avoid later on.

Yeah, that was a whole different market that ended up being probably just marketing for the home video. Really, these a lot of these smaller films, that's where they could really make their money. You gotta admire that gots because they wrote this script for Kill Me Again and made a pact, if we don't get three hundred thousand for it, we make it ourselves. And they were often two hundred and fifty, and they stuck to their guns made it themselves. But I do wonder whether that ended up with them getting not the sort of release and marketing support that the film needed.

Because I'm still convinced. But when you see films like this that bomb and their decent films, I always just think that's just not marketed. Well, bad luck, bad marketing. That's it. You get the right sort of marketing, you get that in front of people, more people see it, it'd be a success.

But they just didn't get that. And it feels must be so demoralizing working in that industry and just being totally susceptible to whatever happens there, which is somewhat out of your control as a creative. It's odd for something that's such a throwback to classic film noir and is so indebted to classic film. It kind of was ahead of its time, and it must have influenced because it's hard to believe Tarantino didn't see it, and or someone whoever was casting for Tarantino for Reservoir Dogs didn't see that and think, oh, I've got the right guy. You far be it from me, Mike to say that Tarantino would ever imitate anyone else.

But and I know you would never say that either, But why would you even think that that scene with mister Blonde, It's just very similar. There's no way he wasn't taking notes from this film. What's kind of amazing to me that Vill Kilmer wasn't bigger by this time. You know, he he did Real Genius and Top Gun back to back, and you would think, okay, after Top Gun, you know, look out Like he did two TV movies in eighty six and eighty seven, Murders in the Room, Morgan, the Man who Broke a Thousand Chains. Then he did Willow, where even though he's on the poster and has a great role as Jennidiah will tell you he's not the main character.

You know, it's not named Mad Murdigan. It's named after Willow. Great role in it, you know, very good supporting role, like you said, very han solo. And then after that he does another TV movie where he's Billy the Kid, and then this one and killed me again, and then after that is The Doors and that's where like he really starts. I won't say he's firing around al cylinders because he makes some real clunkers after that, of course.

I mean I liked Thunderhart. Was not a big fan of the Real McCoy, even once back and rewatched it last week. I've been doing a lot of Kilmer this month. Not a big McCoy fan. He had a very very variable career.

Let's say he was so mercurial in so many ways, and I think also in his choices he went with his heart and obviously it was probably brought on a bit of a prolonged career suicide. Didn't putting his health problems to one side when he gave up the Batman gig. But he did it because he wanted to be an actor. And as he says in Valve in the documentary, you know acting you're a suit, you're standing in a suit. You can't do anything, and he goes off and makes the Saint where he gets to play eight or ten different roles because I think he's he had the soul of a character actor.

That's what he just wanted to play characters. And it's interesting when I think back to my time, despite being a huge fan of Top Secret Willow and what's the other one? There's another one too before he does the Doors, And it was only when he did the Doors that I realized, Sorry, Top Gun, which I was a reasonable fan of and certainly made an impact in the iceman I knew, but it never occurred to me that they were the same guy. I was a kid, but still it never occurred to me the same guy. And it was when the Doors came out, I was like, who's this val Kilma guy?

And if I'm any indication of the general population, which is always a mistake to project, but he just played different characters so convincingly. That is kind of anathema to the Hollywood star system. The Hollywood star system is that you find someone who promote them as themselves, or at least a persona of themselves, and the George Clooney model he plays George Clooney in every fucking movie he ever does, and that works. That's bank. But Kilmer he wants to be an actor, so having said that, he did make some strength decisions throughout his creator as well.

Also didn't take him any time at all to be have a reputation or being difficult to work with. That probably didn't help him get some roles he wanted. I was shocked when I heard the budget for Kill Me Again. And I think it was doll saying that they had got Kilmer because they paid him twice as much for that as he made for for Willow. That's insane.

Willow is cited by Oliver Stone, is why he wanted to see him for the doors, and Willow clearly opened a lot of doors for his career. But it's wild to me that a small movie like this would have paid him twice as much as he made on Willow. George Lucas was holding out only those George Lucas wasn't it? It was a pot of Ron Howard directed, George Lucas produced. Yeah, yeah, you didn't need to be an accountant to know that that's that's not.

Good looking at Wikipedia says that Kill Me Again had a budget of four million and a box office of two hundred and eighty three thousand dollars. Yeah, and unfortunately again this was released on DVD by MGM Home Video and then Alive Films put it out back in twenty sixteen on Blu ray. I think that's the one with the fairly decent cover, the one with Joanna on the cover where it just has killed. Me again on there. And because it's Olive, they didn't have any extras on here, and so there's no audio commentary.

There's no you know, making of or anything. I don't think they were shooting a making of when they made this, but man, oh man, would I have loved to have had an audio commentary for this. I'm surprised that it hasn't had a larger especially with Red Rock West and a Seduction being so well regarded. I'm surprised that he hasn't had a larger sort of cult come up around it. I showed this film, In fact, I think it was maybe the first film I showed.

I had a film series that I at a library in Saint Louis maybe ten years ago, and if not the first, this was one of the first two or three films I showed in that that film series, and back then I would have guessed that by now there'd be a much larger community supporting it than I'm aware of. In terms of making of I read somewhere that Duhl I think he said somewhere that he found Kilmer difficult to work with making the film. I think he was just difficult to work with for everyone, And speaking of him being difficult to work with, I don't know if this story is true, because I can't remember where I heard it or read it, and maybe my in the course of Valhalla you can set me straight on this. But the Island of Doctor Moreau, Is it true that Kilmer was he was actually cast to play.

The protagonist, the David Thulis character. Yeah, yeah, And he turned up on the first day of shooting and said, actually I want to play the grounds keeper and h and whoever the director was he was the director first Stanley. Oh yeah, Richard Stanley, and then Frankenheimer. Yeah, Richard Stanley's order, he's going to play the protagonist. He said, We'll get Thielists to do it.

He's right, he's a good actor. Get him to do it. Is that true? I mean that I don't remember. There's that great making up documentary, which if you haven't seen that one, you have to see it.

It's fucking fantastic. Yeah, and it's been a while since I've seen it, but I would not be surprised because it seems like if you said black, you would say white, and that whole time, it just whatever it would take to be disruptive, which is just a a weird way to live your life. I remember watching the commentary track for Kiss, Kiss, Bang Bang, which I you know, I love, I love Shane Black, I love the whole cast is great, But watching that commentary track and just hearing Kilmer, yeah, just disruptive the whole time, which is charming to a degree. There's a whole series of video interviews of he and Robert Dunny Junior interviewing each other. It comes off a lot more charming and affable and like they're both just kind of riffing on each other there.

But the commentary track gets maddening. I can see exactly why this would serve you in some small ways but absolutely make you a pain in the ass to work with. And others. I would like to point out real quick that I've credited John Dall in his first three features that he directed as being real influential on me. There's a book parallel to that, and it's John Ridley and his first three novels Stray Dogs, Love is a Racket, and Everybody Smokes in Hell that I read in the late nineties that really helped secure my identity as being I'm into crime, I'm into noir.

This is exactly what I want to do. But looking at the similarities between stuff like Kill Me Again and Red Rock West and John Ridley's first couple of books, Straight Dogs and Love is a Racket, I wonder how influenced John Ridley might have been by John Stall. If you've seen the Oliver Stones movie U Turn and compared it to Red Rock West, with you know the similarities in plot He turns based on John Ridley's novel Straight Dogs. I think it had that name for a little bit and then it got changed, if memory serves, because as soon as you said straight Dogs, well first I thought of Krosawa, but then my mind went to that Oliver Stone film because in my mind it's still Straight Dogs. It's never been your U Turn.

Yeah again, we've talked about how noare is points for originality aren't really a thing. He just there's a handful of plots and you make them your own. You know. I'm not holding it against John Ridley or Oliver Stone for that, but I mean the first time I saw you know, I saw You Turn in Theaters and I was like, oh my god, this is it is Red Rock West. The plot and then his second novel, Love Is a Racket, starts in the very first chapter.

The main character gets his fingers broken, just like Jack Andrews in Kill Me Again. And I remember reading that book and this, like the opening chapter is so potent, the idea of this guy getting his fingers broken. And I don't remember if i'd which I if I read that book or saw Kill Me Again first, but both of those scenes of the fingers getting broken were so And of course in You Turn or in Straight Doggs he's got the fingers cut off at the beginning of the story too, so definitely a recurring motif. But yeah, it stands out to me that I identify with John Stall and John Ridley and both of them with their first three works so strongly. And it had not occurred to me before doing this episode that how much John Ridley might have been influenced by John Dall.

Speaking of crime fiction, there's one thing that I think would improve Kill Me again if the script had have been got a bit of a passover by an actual bona fide crime writer. I'm thinking of older writers. Have you got someone like a Raymond Chandler or a Jim Thompson or a Donald Westlake or something like that, just to give the dialogue a bit more kind of sting. That would be perfect. It's not really a problem with the film, but just thinking about it now, it doesn't quite have the snappy dialogue that I just really love.

Jim Thompson, he might have written the scene between Grys and Madison. It's the kind of thing that you would contribute. It's definitely got a bit of Thompson to it, that scene. But yeah, just the dialogue could be a bit busier. I imagine that's where somebody like having your Donald Westlake come in and do a polish of the Grifters.

I mean, you've got two amazing writers both taking a shot at the same thing. Yeah, and all those old film noires from the fifties, forties and fifties, you got Raymond Chandler rewriting James M. Kin Or. Or William Falter rewriting Chandler on The Big Sleep. Chandler did.

Patricia Heigtsmith too, didn't he was Strangers on a train. He did a polish of double indemnity, didn't he because it wasn't based on his book? But he wrote the script, didn't he? For that one? Yeah?

He did? Yeah, so that was yeah, James kin and yeah, so you got all these fantastic people, yeah, going over each other's stuff, and it's yeah, hard not to. Love those love those scripts. This one, it's just a little detail that I loved. But right at the end where Madsen and Wally opened the suitcase that's supposed to have the money in it and the inside they found some phone books that a can of thinking, well, talk about adding insult to injury.

That's really disappointing. When Joanne Wheley when Faye is looking for a private investigator and she finds Jack and andrews I that his address is on Doll Avenue. That was nice, Dahl. So I was looking for other things in there and didn't see any more nights to their friends. But yeah, hard not to enjoy something like that any other thing.

I was going to mention just a small thing, but did you recognize the actor who plays the cop that goads him about his dead wife? And he Kilman does a great bit of performance there where he's faced, eyes just got red. Michael Green blades at him. Yeah, he's in to live in Dinala. Isn't he Bill Peterson's partner, the guy that gets murdered right at the beginning?

Oh yeah, yeah, that guy must have made a career of playing cops. Detective watch these Doll films over the last few days. It has been interesting seeing his relationship with cops and just what role do police officers play in his films. I mean this one You've got, yeah, the one cop who's very you know, oh you killed your ex wife or killed your wife kind of thing, which is such a typical cop thing to do. And then you know, we'll talk about this more on the Red Rock West episode, but just the relationship, you know, with JT.

Walsh being the crooked sheriff but then kind of really being usurped by his two deputies, and then like in I don't remember necessarily that many police. It's been a while since I've seen last Seduction, but even watching like Rounders, and there's the scene where Damon and ed Norton go into a bar and it's almost all cops in this bar and they're playing them in poker and starting to scam them, and that's fucking ed Nor And I kind of wish that his character had died by the end of the film because he's such a piece of shit, but that he's dealing off the bottom of the deck and the cops catch them and just they all pile on these guys and beat the shit out of them, and it's like, you know, it's very interesting to see that even with it was oh joy ride, you know, like do you trust the cops?

Do not trust the cops? The cops think that these guys are doing this stuff. No, like, look that this fucking truck is about to you know, crash into this kind of thing. You know, like what is that relationship with the police. So yeah, it's always interesting to see how he portrays that because they you know, it's always that thing in films noir where it's you know, do we have to go to police?

You know, what role of the cops playing in that almost uneasy relationship, especially between the private detective. Here you have a legit private detective versus you know things like you know, Peter Berg and Last Deduction, or or Nick Cage and Rhetoric West where it's these characters that are thrust into these mysteries and they have to kind of figure their way out while they're facing off against all the problems that are coming at them. How do you figure out when Lyle from Texas shows up, how to avoid being killed by Dennis Harper. Yeah. Actually, two nights ago I watched the ironically titled Unforgettable.

She has been largely forgotten, and I. Kind of skipped over that one. Yeah, the same thing I watched the two nights ago, so I can still remember. You got Christopher McDonald as a particularly obnoxious cop. He does the similar because Ralliota there is a guy whose wife has been killed and he is suspected to have done the murder, and you've got Christopher McDonald all the way through the film just getting in his face about it and been a real piece of shit.

Yeah, there is definitely something there. I actually found Unforgettable quite a fun film. It's quite ridiculous. I really love Rayleiota and Linda Fiorentino is like as a sort of lead pair because they're such not their character actors, but they're not really leads. They didn't keep that up.

But they're a lot of fun and the sci fi conceide of it of I think it's basically, if I understood it correctly, if you inject someone's spiral fluid, you get their memories, which is weirder than something you'd get in a Dario Agento film, talk about pseudoscience. But the thing I love about it is whenever he gets injected with his stuff, he gets a professionally edited clip highlights reel of the things that are only relevant to his wife's murder. It's quite amazing. I do love a high concept sci fi crime movie like that. Or you know, Criminal with Kevin Costner is a good one in that way, and Blink with Madeline Stowe and Aiden Quinn, you know those are fun.

I haven't breathed. I've done a lot of kilmer for this month, but I haven't breathed at first Sight yet. So speaking of eyeballs, I just haven't gone there. It took a lot for me to rewatch the Saint, I'll tell you that much. So he definitely like he's having a fun time in it at least.

Yeah, it's he's having fun in the site. That's it's almost worth watching for just I've watched that, I think for the first time, just after he passed away, and it's good therapy because I was sad about that, so you know, he was having a great time in that one. I think that movie could have been a lot better with different maybe different sound design or there's just something about the score that's I don't know. The whole thing is just so textureless, just kind of slides right off of you. And yeah, I can totally see why Kilmer would want to do it because he does get to do a million different accents and put on silly makeup and things like that and just have fun.

But yeah, it could have I can see that movie being something more memorable and fun gone just slightly different directions now post production stuff. So uh no, I don't like it, but I don't, you know, I'm not interested in watching it again really, but it's I can kind of see what why he'd want to do it. My favorite bit was and still remains Elizabeth Shoe as the nuclear or she discovers ColdFusion and keeps the formula for it in her bra That was kind of my favorite thing. That is the first place i'd look. All right, guys, we're going to take another break and play a preview for next week's show right after these brief messages.

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It was a place where a man could start over. That's wider got a name for himself as a peace officer. Hired of you. I'm retired. You must be doc holiday you retired too, I'm me.

I'm in my prom. They say every town has a stone. Tombstone has a legend. Tombstone not ready to start Saturday, December twenty fifth at a theater near you. That's right, we'll be back next week.

But they look at Tombstone until then, I want to thank my co host Rob and Jedediah. So, Jedediah, what is the latest with you, sir? Doing a handful of Blu Ray release stuff. The only one I did, No Escape Martin Campbell's No Escape with Raylioda. Oh wow, speaking of Raliota, what a movie that is.

I just rewatched that recently. Now I'm gonna have to upgrade to your Blue rid. That's a fun one. Yeah, that came out, came out a couple months ago, and then oh shit, I didn't even know that got it on the upcoming ERO release of John Flynn's The Outfit. So but I can't talk about the others yet there announced.

But yeah, I'm enjoying working on. And Rob What's new in your world? So we will have just released our episode on Sunshine and the Quiet Earth. So we do a double feature each week, a bit of a sci fi week, and then coming up we're going to be doing an Italian couple of Italian crime films named Rabid Dogs and another film called Like Rabbid Dogs, which I think is no relation. I don't think it's a sequel, but we released that every week.

I did that with my co host Joe, and we often get Mike on and a few others of this parish will join us from time to time. I just finished recording an episode with Heather Drain the other day which was which was a riot as it always so. Yeah, check it out Calibinin from out of Space. That's a great title. It's maybe not the best for mass appeal, but it's certainly anyone who recognizes that these a kind of people.

Well, thank you so much guys for being on the show. Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other shows that I work on. They are all available at Wirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community.

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