Crispin Glover

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

His acting modus operandi couldn't be more distinctive: pale-skinned, with short brown-hair parted at the sides. The description of his type of roles is often summed up by the entertainment press in one simple word: eccentric.

Since the mid-1980's, actor Crispin Glover has lived by this distinctive trait and has made his presence known as one of the acting world's most incredibly unique and unusual performers. After making a splash in the late 1980's, Glover had seemingly vanished, until the turn of the millennium, when he unexpectedly reemerged in an incredibly diverse range of small roles on Hollywood films from Charlie's Angels to the remake of Willard to Like Mike to Epic Movie.

He's reunited with famed Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis, who gave the now 43 year old actor his breakthrough role in a certain famous time-travel comedy adventure. He now discusses his upcoming role as Grendel in Zemeckis's new film Beowulf, which he says, in his string of many Hollywood roles, was one he was quite proud of doing.

'I do like Beowulf,' Glover says, 'I do think that this is a film that's intelligent, even though it's not getting into the taboo subject matter that my own films have been getting into. I think that it leaves an audience with a way to be questioning things, which is rare, especially for a film that works on being an audience-pleasing blockbuster sort of commercial entity.'

Crispin also says he was very impressed not only with the film's script, but by how the character of Grendel was interpreted in this new version.

'I play somebody that is difficult to understand from the people that are down below that I'm going in to get rid of my problem, which is they're making a lot of noise,' he explains, 'From their point of view, of course, I'm this horrible monster. I like the character very much because it was written with a great deal of sympathy. I think are the characters are represented well in this rendition of the Beowulf story, when they're exploring the good or the sympathetic side of the traditional antagonistic elements for being Beowulf, Beowulf's mother, and the dragon.'

'But on top of that, even more than that, particularly when the mother character is introduced, played by Angelina Jolie, it becomes apparent that there's a reflection of what is internally antagonistic with the traditional hero of Beowulf,' he continues, 'So these are part of the things that are genuinely contemplative in the film. I do think it's well-rendered in such a way that audiences will get more than one thought out of it.'

An amazing aspect about Beowulf is the incredible CGI animation. It can only be described as so realistic that it really blurs the lines between animation and live-action. Glover claims when he first saw the film, he was incredibly impressed by how it captured a clearly distinct performer such as himself.

'When I saw it, about a month before the release, a portion that contained an integral part of the performance of my character, so it does indeed capture life in an interesting and particular way,' Crispin recalls, 'I could almost describe it, looking at myself, as like the most detailed makeup I ever had. To me, I am quite altered in the way I look, but I recognize my performance in this strange way, but I think that the most important thing is that this essence is coming through. This comes through, not just my character, but all of the characters and the excellent actors that I got to work with, that I admired in other films before.'

'The weird thing about it is if somebody really wasn't familiar with my work before seeing it or with me personally, you wouldn't recognize me from the character, but if people were familiar with me from before, then they very clearly could see that it's me,' Glover adds, 'I think that it's the same with Ray Winstone. I was there with him working and so, when I'm watching, not through all the scenes because I was there working with them, I could recognize that this is an excellent performance that I gave. But if I introduce somebody to him that hasn't seen him before, they can't correlate that this is the same person that played Beowulf. It's strange in that way, it's interesting the technology though.'

However, he stresses that incredible CGI is not the only thing that excited him about the film's end result.

'It isn't just the technology, it was extremely well-written and then it was extremely well-cast and then this technology and everything about it was well-realized by Robert Zemeckis,' Glover believes, 'And it's based on these fascinating Old English long poems. So there are a lot of elements at hand that allow it to make it a truly interesting film.'

As mentioned earlier, this is Crispin's second film with Robert Zemeckis, after previously working with him in his breakthrough role as Marty McFly's father George in the 1985 comedy/science-fiction megahit Back To The Future. When asked about how he felt reuniting with the director, he took the opportunity to tell us his side of the story of what led him to file a lawsuit against Zemeckis in the early 1990's that brought him much controversy.

'When I was approached by him to work on this film, I did have questions because there had been a lawsuit about the sequels of Back To The Future,' he explains, 'I wasn't in it. They had hired another actor and put prosthetically a false nose, chin, and cheekbones on him in order to look like me. Because of my lawsuit, there are laws now in the Screen Actors Guild make it so now that actors, directors, and producers can't do something like that again, so I'm proud of the result of the lawsuit.'

'But when something like that happens, you figure, well, I'm not going to work with these people involved in that particular project again,' Glover adds, 'I was fine about this. I was in a wrong situation and needed to stand up for that particular element and it did set precedents. When I heard about it, the way that I choose movies is very different from how it was a number of years ago.'

He goes onto explain what ultimately made him decide to take on this film and reunite with Zemeckis, despite the seemingly bitter fallout.

'I looked at the story,' Crispin says, 'I knew that this was based on the longest piece of long form English language poetry, a classical piece of English literature, for the famous character of Grendel. It was an excellent cast of people and of course, it made sense. I would be able to utilize the money as well for these films that I'd be making that I was extremely passionate about.'

'And then, it was not brought up about, I read the book How To Be A Gentleman, which says don't bring up source objects, so I never brought anything up, Robert Zemeckis never brought anything up, and it was a great working relationship,' he continues, 'I had a great working relationship with all the actors and I'm really glad to be in the film and proud to be a part of it and it's all working out well.'

The actor also took the opportunity to explain with us some of the methodology for why he has reemerged in this decade, after his profile had considerably lowered by the end of the 1980's.

'At the point that I did Back To The Future, I was a working actor needing to work as much as I could, anything that I could get,' he recounts, 'I was very glad to get work. I'd been working since I was 13 and at a certain point, I didn't want to do commercials and at a certain point, I didn't really want to do television. Then, I became more particular about films only after Back To The Future came out. When that happened, the first film that I chose to act in was River's Edge and that's a film I'm still very proud of.'

'I tried to find films subsequent to that which would somehow reflect my psychological interests in things,' Glover continues, 'But, really, what I found was that wasn't happening. The films, maybe there would be something about it that would reflect something that I was interested, but for the most part, they didn't and they wouldn't necessarily do that well commercially and that was not necessarily that good for me as an actor.'

However, there turns out to be a grand reason for his reemergence in Hollywood. The actor told us of his long-gestating and highly ambitious film project. It's a trilogy of sorts, which begins with his directorial debut What Is It'. Glover soon explained for us what he has described as his passion project.

'My first film is reacting to what's happening in the last 30 years, where anything that can possibly make an audience uncomfortable in corporately funded and distributed film is necessarily excised for that film will not be funded or distributed and I think that's a damaging thing,' Glover notes, 'But it's that moment when a person in the audience's back is looking up to the screen and thinking to themselves, is this right what I'm watching' Is this wrong what I'm watching' Should I be here' Is it right what the filmmaker's done' What is it''

'And that's the name of my first film, What Is It'' he adds, 'What is it that's taboo in the culture' What is necessarily excised from corporately funded and distributed film' I think it's a damaging thing because at that moment when people are having these questions, that there's a genuine educational experience. And my first film, that I started twirling around with last year and the year before, will be playing at the IFC theatre at midnights.'

Even more intriguing was the story behind what Glover hails as the sequel to What Is It'.

'I'm opening a new film, which is the sequel called, It Is Fine. Everything's Fine!, written by one of the people that's in the first film,' Crispin mentions, 'You can find out where that will be at crispinglover.com as I tour the film throughout the country, throughout years I will be touring both of these films. Most of the actors in the first film had Down syndrome, but it's not about Down syndrome at all, it's about, as what I said, a thesis on what I had just been speaking about, but the second film, written by a man who had a severe case of cerebral palsy, his name is Steven C. Stewart and he died within a month after shooting the film.'

'Cerebral palsy is not degenerative, but he was choking on his own saliva and one of his lungs had collapsed,' he adds, 'It had became apparent in the year 2000 that the first time after one of his lungs collapsed that if we didn't shoot something soon, we wouldn't be able to shoot anything at all. And it was right at the time when the first Charlie's Angels films was coming to me. I knew that I could take the money from that film and straight into his film. That's exactly what we did and we shot it over a period of six months and he died a month after shooting ended. Steven had been walking around in a nursing home in his twenties, when his mother died.'

'He had been difficult to understand and people were calling him at the place he was staying in at the nursing home, a MR, mental retard, derisively, which is not a nice thing to say to anyone,' Glover explains, 'In any case, he wrote a genre movie when he got out of the nursing home, kind of a murder mystery where in he was the bad guy. And this film, it will probably be the best film of the trilogy, when it's all done, but it will be the best film I'll ever have had to do with in my career. I'm really passionate about it.'

As seemingly disparate as this film would appear to be for a more commercial affair like Beowulf, Glover explained to us an interesting parallel between the two films. In some small way, as it has for much of Crispin Glover's incredibly distinctive and diverse career, it's a telling testament from the so-called 'eccentric' actor of how the gap between commerce and art in the world of film is not quite as wide as we would imagine.

'It was great and it's interesting,' Crispin explains, 'There's a good correlation between the character I play in Beowulf and Everything Is Fine! wherein I speak in Old English as the character. And within the context of what's happening, you can understand what's going on, because this is the exact thing that happens in the Steven C. Stewart film.'

'He's very difficult to understand, but within his story, with all the actors that are surrounding him, you're able to understand what's going on,' he continues, 'Also, he has a certain, you can see in this fantasy, he plays a bad guy in this genre film, kind of a murderer, that's also attracted to women with long hair and simultaneously, these women are attracted to him. This is fantasy and this is a particular documentation of him living his fantasy out.'