"Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, even the younger guys-
Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt- they've all made 20 or 30 movies.
But that wouldn't have worked for me."
-Val Kilmer
ICON Magazine Feb 1999
At First Sight
Irwin Winkler
MGM 1999
At First Sight, is another of Oliver Sack's true tales taken to the big screen. The story involves a blind man who, through experimental surgery, regains his sight. Virgil Adamson (Val Kilmer), a blind massage therapist at a health spa. Amy Benick (Mira Sorvino), a harried architect who goes to the spa and falls in love with Virgil. She brings Virgil to the city, he undergoes the operation and, miraculously, he sees for the first time since he was a baby. But sight does not automatically equal joy, and Virgil must undergo a painful learning period--both identifying what he sees and understanding his emotions.
Also Stars:
Kelly McGillis
Nathan Lane
"It's very peaceful being blind. I have a close friend in Santa Fe, an Indian who was blinded in Vietnam, and I learned a lot from him. What I learned is blind people don't dwell on it. It's all they know. So, as with most minorities, you get some people who are bitter, but most have a well-developed sense of humor about it. Sort of like actors."
-Val Kilmer
The Prince of Egypt
Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, Simon Wells
Dreamworks 1998:
The animated film story of Exodus. The movie follows Moses (voice of Val Kilmer) from the day when he is plucked from the Nile by the queen (Helen Mirren) to the day when he returns from the mountain with the Ten Commandments. What it emphasizes more than earlier versions is how completely the orphan child is taken into the family of the Pharaoh (Patrick Stewart); he is a well-loved adopted son who becomes the playmate and best friend of Rameses (Ralph Fiennes), the Pharaoh's son.
Also Stars the voices of:
Michelle Pfeiffer (Tzipporah)
Jeff Goldblum (Aaron)
Sandra Bullock (Miriam)
Danny Glover (Jethro)
Steve Martin (Hotep)
Martin Short (Huy)
"We don't have many opportunities as artists to be involved in a really high standard of story telling. It's our aim, it's what we dream of, but the very subject of this is miracles and to be involved in one is a rarity."
-Val Kilmer
The Saint
Phillip Noyce
1997 Paramount Pictures:
Sexy and suave espionage hero Simon Templar (Val Kilmer)aka the Saint, has been hired to steal cold fussion from scientist Dr. Emma Russell (Elizabeth Shue). When the deal goes bad, Templar finds himself running from the Russians, to protect Dr. Russell from capture. An array of sophisticated gadgetry is at Templar’s command as he plunges into a cloak and dagger nethrworld of move and counter move. Cool too, is Templar’s knack for coming up with the right disguise at the right time. Now you see him, now you don’t…or do you? Each close call escape is a breathless miracle-and no one knows miracles better than a saint.
Also Stars:
Rade Serbedzija (Ivan Tretiak)
Valery Nikolaev (Iiya Tretiak)
"I (as Simon Templar) have no interest in harming people or killing them … that's Simon Templar. He's not a bad man, he just grew up in an illegal world and it's what he does for a living. He has no morality as far as that goes until he meets Emma Russell who has a very specific objective with cold fusion, which is to give it away to the world which is mystifying to Simon."
-Val Kilmer
The Ghost and the Darkness
Stephen Hopkins
1996 Paramount Pictures:
In this 1896 East Africa adventure, there are two lions on a man eating rampage, and they have shut down the construction of a railway. The beasts hunt together, showing no fear of man or fire. What’s more, they’re killing for sport rather than for food. And they have an almost supernatural knack for knowing what traps await them. Big game hunter Charles Remington (Michael Douglas) and construction engineer John Patterson (Val Kilmer) set out to stop these unstoppable monsters. But, in this the hunters become the hunted.
Also Stars:
John Kani (Samuel)
Tom Wilkinson (Beaumont)
Bernard Hill (Dr. Hawthorne)
Brian McCardie (Starling)
Emily Mortimer (Helena Patterson)
Om Puri. (Abdullah)
Henry Cele (Mahina)
"I've been looking for years to tell an African story, and [John] Patterson's story is one of the more famous hunting stories. And it's a great adventure story and just had all the elements I was interested in. "
-Val Kilmer
The Island of Dr. Moreau
John Frankenheimer
1996 by New Line Cinema:
This update of H.G. Wells' 100-year-old novel is giddily entertaining, a tropical - horror potboiler with a wry sense of its own absurdity. Any movie that casts gnarly, intense David Thewlis as straight man is going to be pitched at a pretty baroque level. Thewlis, who gets stranded there after a shipwreck, Brando, who's trying to create the perfect human being, and his menacing, drug-dazed assistant, played by Val Kilmer with his own brand of quirky cunning. (While Brando is doing Morley, Kilmer does Brando.)
Also Stars:
David Thewlis (Edward Douglas)
Fairuza Balk (Aissa)
Ron Perlman (Sayer of the Law)
Marco Hofschneider (M'Ling)
Temuera Morrison (Azazello)
Nelson de la Rosa (Majai)
"I'll do what's in the script, but let's sit down and improve it. Let's not pretend this really isn't as ridiculous as it seems to be.'"
-Val Kilmer
Heat
Michael Mann
1995 Warner Bros.:
Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro)is a professional thief, skilled and gifted. Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) is the cop who has to bring him down. Val Kilmer Chris Shiherlis is a key member of Neil's team of bank robbers. In a top rate cops versus robbers film the truth is revealed,that these cops and robbers need each other: They occupy the same space, sealed off from the mainstream of society, defined by its own rules. They are enemies, but in a sense they are more intimate, more involved with each other than with those who are supposed to be their friends.
De Niro and Pacino, veterans of so many great films in the crime genre, have by now spent more time playing cops and thieves than most cops and thieves have. There is always talk about how actors study people to base their characters on. At this point in their careers, if Pacino and De Niro go out to study a cop or a robber, it's likely their subject will have modeled himself on their performances in old movies. There is absolute precision of effect here, the feeling of roles assumed instinctively.
Also Stars:
Jon Voight (Nate)
Tom Sizemore(Michael Cheritto)
Diane Venora (Justine Hanna)
Amy Brenneman (Eady)
Ashley Judd (Charlene Shiherlis)
Mykelti Williamson (Drucker)
Wes Studi (Casals)
Ted Levine (Bosko)
Natalie Portman (Lauren)
"No, I wrapped Batman on Friday, rushed across the from valley to a wig fitting and getting my hair dyed. Rehearsed all day Saturday and Sunday and then we knocked over the armored car Monday morning. And I thought I had been cursed because they handed me the hockey mask. (laughs) I get to work with DeNiro finally and they put me in a hockey mask again."
-Val Kilmer
Batman Forever
Joel Schumacher
1995 Warner Brothers:
From the moment you see Val Kilmer's rosebud lips protruding from Batman's cowl, you know he's going to inhabit the role in a way that Michael Keaton, with his dyspeptic uncertainty, never quite did. Kilmer doesn't get to show a lot of personality -- he still has to think and speak in comic-strip balloons -- but he's commanding enough to make you believe in Batman as a stoic natural force.
Also Stars:
Tommy Lee Jones (Harvey Dent/Two-Face)
Jim Carrey (Edward Nygma/The Riddler)
Nicole Kidman (Dr. Chase Meridian)
Chris O'Donnell (Dick Grayson/Robin)
Michael Gough (Alfred Pennyworth)
Pat Hingle (Commissioner Gordon)
Drew Barrymore (Sugar)
Debi Mazar (Spice)
Elizabeth Sanders (Gossip Gerty)
René Auberjonois (Dr. Burton)
"... Dangling and crashing through glass. It felt like what it looks like, I'm sure. And I kiss a girl, too. That was tough, that required the most takes - I never could ... get it right. I'd have to apologize and we'd have to do it over and over again."
-Val Kilmer
TOMBSTONE
George P. Cosmatos
1993 Hollywood Pictures:
U.S. Marshall Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) and Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer) team up to bring law to the lawless in a notorious showdown with ruthless outlaws at the O.K. Corral.
Also Stars:
Sam Elliott (Virgil Earp)
Bill Paxton (Morgan Earp)
Powers Boothe (Curly Bill)
Michael Biehn (Johnny Ringo)
Charlton Heston (Henry Hooker)
Jason Priestley (Billy Breckinridge)
Jon Tenney (Behan)
Stephen Lang (Ike Clanton)
Thomas Haden Church (Billy Clanton)
Dana Delany (Josephine Marcus)
Joanna Pacula (Kate)
Billy Bob Thornton (Johnny Tyler)
"That was my theory on why Doc killed so many people. He wore wool, in the summer, in the Arizona territory and that made him mad."
-Val Kilmer
The Real McCoy
Russell Mulcahy
1993 Universal Pictures:
The Real McCoy opens with bank robber Karen McCoy (Kim Basinger) being arrested in the middle of a job. Six years later, Karen is out on parole and looking to stay straight. She soon bumps into J. T. Barker (Val Kilmer), a hapless would-be thief who idolizes Karen. J. T. also has ties to Jack Schmidt (Terence Stamp), the man who blew the whistle on Karen six years earlier for refusing to work with him. Schmidt, who is in cahoots with Karen's sleazy parole officer (Gailard Sartain), again wants Karen to help him stage a robbery. This time he has some leverage: Karen's kidnapped son. Just when she thought she was out, they keep pulling her back in.
A Real Dog.
-Val Kilmer
Thunderheart
Michael Apted
1992 Tri-Star Pictures:
Ray Levoi (Val Kilmer) a hotshot FBI agent is thrust into a strange new world when he is sent to solve a murder on an Indian reservation. Hand picked because of his part Sioux ancestry, Levoi is teamed with a legendary older agent Frank Coutelle (Sam Shepard) to capture a raedical Indian protester. But once on the reservation,Levoi incounters the irreverent local sheriff Walter Crow Horse (Graham Greene) and the tribe’s religious leader Grandpa Sam Reaches (Ted Thin Elk), who know secrets about Levoi’s own lost heritage. And as Levoi’s awareness of the native culture grows, so does his belief that the U.S. government has framed an innocent man.
Also Stars:
Fred Ward (Jack Milton)
Fred Dalton Thompson (Dawes)
Sheila Tousey (Maggie Eagle Bear)
John Trudell (Jimmy Looks Twice)
Julius Drum (Richard Yellow Hawk)
"He realizes that even as a Federal agent, something is not right. The questions become harder to answer. Why all the fire power? Why is it a sensitive operations unit? Why does it involve national security? What is the threat that Native Americans pose?"
-Val Kilmer
The Doors
Oliver Stone
1991 TriStar Pictures:
The Doors is an intense but unsatisfying portrait of the darkest rockers of the late '60s and their self-destructive lead singer, Jim Morrison.
As Morrison, Val Kilmer gives a star-making performance. Lolling around in his love beads and black-leather pants, his thick dark mane falling over features that are at once baby-sweet and preternaturally dangerous, Kilmer captures, to an astonishing degree, the hooded, pantherish charisma that made Morrison the most erotically charged pop performer since the early days of Elvis.
Kilmer, who performed most of his own vocals, captures not merely the timbre of Morrison's voice but his phrasing, the way he seemed to be caressing every word.
The Doors has some memorable moments (the concert scenes are especially good), and it captures one aspect of the '60s better than any movie before it: the dark narcissism that allowed a strutting poet-stud like Jim Morrison to feed off his audience.
Also Stars:
Meg Ryan (Pamela Courson)
Kyle MacLaughlin (Ray Manzarek)
Frank Whaley (Robbie Kreiger)
Kevin Dillon (John Densmore)
Kathleen Quinlan (Patrica Kennealy)
"In his best light, it was Morrison's joy and explosive energy to be alive that were fantastic about the guy. He's like brutiful, you know, brutal and beautiful. He's a hero in that American tradition. Good looks, brains, that Wild West sensibility where people were proud of...where people utilized all their faults."
-Val Kilmer
Kill Me Again
John Dahl
1989 MGM:
This is a modern crime thriller with an archetypal plot--a love-on-the-run story about a femme fatale Fay Forrester (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) and a private eye Jack Andrews (Val Kilmer), pursued by both cops and crooks--but the movie makers don't get jaded or coy. They drape shadows over the walls, take us into cut-rate motels, hurl us down desert roads to nowhere, surround us with all the rotten neon glamour and quicksand sex of Las Vegas and Reno.
Kill Me Again doesn't look like the noir classics; instead of black-and-white, it's shot in slightly muddy color with vagrant green tints. But it feels like them. It has that nerve-jangling mix of pungent cynicism and thick gobs of pseudo-Expressionist style. It's not brilliant or original, but it's still a lean, fast, wide-awake sleeper.
Also Stars:
Michael Madsen (Vince Miller)
Jonathan Gries (Alan Swayzie)
Bibi Besch (Terry)
Willow
Ron Howard
1988 MGM:
Journey to the far corners of your imagination where dreams and reality live side by side. Enter the world of Willow, the biggest and most spectacular epit adventure to ever explode across the screen. From master storytellers George Lucas and Ron Howard comes this rare oddyssey of unlikely heoes, wicked villains and innocent sould caught in a mysterious relm of battle, magic and comraderie. It all begins with Willow Ufgood (Warwick Davis), who leaves his village to carry a special baby to safety. Aided by swashbuckling warrior (Val Kilmer), Willow’s quest is plauged by danger as the Powers of Darkness scheme to destroy the child - a child destined to bring everlasting peace and freedom to the land.
Also Stars:
Joanne Whalley (Sorsha)
Jean Marsh (Queen Bavmorda)
Patricia Hayes (Fin Raziel)
Billy Barty (High Aldwin)
Pat Roach (General Kael)
Gavan O'Herlihy (Airk)
"I really like Madmartigan,I like the fact that he's unpredictable. He's a hustler, so he has many different characteristics that come out of living through hard times. He's definitely one of the most interesting characters I've done. It's fun to play a schmuck - but he's a likable schmuck and I hope audiences find him enjoyable to watch."
-Val Kilmer
Top Gun
Tony Scott
1986 Paramount Pictures:
Brash young pilot Lt. Pete Mitchell (Tom Cruise), nicknamed Maverick for his individualistic flying style, is sent to Miramar Naval Air Station, where he trains with the country's best fighter pilots. The best student from each class wins the prized Top Gun award, and the privilege of remaining at Miramar as an instructor. Maverick's chief competition is Tom Kasanzky (Val Kilmer), nicknamed Ice Man, and eventually an international incident arises that allows the pilots to prove themselves.
Also Stars:
Kelly McGillis (Dr. Charlotte Charlie Blackwood)
Anthony Edwards (Lt. Nick Goose Bradshaw)
Tom Skerritt (Viper)
Michael Ironside (Jester)
Rick Rossovich (Slider)
Tim Robbins (Merlin)
Meg Ryan (Carole)
"Believe me, that movie didn't feel like it looked. I don't know how much movie there is if you take out the second-unit flying stuff and the soundtrack.... Then it made all that money, and people still talk about
it."
-Val Kilmer
Real Genius
Martha Coolidge
1985 by Tri-Star Pictures:
The saga of Mitch (Gabe Jarret), a brilliant high school student whose Science Fair project has revised the theory of laser beam technology. He is personally recruited by Professor Hathaway (William Atherton), a famous physics professor who wants the kid to work in his personal laboratory. Once on campus, the kid meets the legendary Chris Knight (Val Kilmer), the most brilliant freshman in history who is now a junior whose mind is beginning to be cluttered by mischief. The two students room together, and there seems to be a third person in the room: a strange, wraith-like bearded figure who disappears into the clothes closet, and doesn't seem to be there when the door is flung open. The professor is running a scam. He has a Defense Department contract for a sophisticated laser device so accurate that it could incinerate a single man on Earth from a base in orbit. The professor is using his students as slave labor to do most of the work on the project, while ripping off the government grant to build himself a new house. When the students discover what the lasor is for, they retaliate in true Pacific Tech fashion.
Also Stars:
Jonathan Gries (Lazlo Hollyfeld)
Michelle Meyrink (Jordan)
Robert Prescott (Kent)
Patti D'Arbanville (Sherry)
"Standard leading man characters tend to be angry young men," he complains, "and the drama in the film is centered on their neuroses. This character Chris I'm playing is very healthy.."
-Val Kilmer
Top Secret!
Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker
1984 Paramount:
Probably all you need to know about Top Secret! is that it was made by the Airplane gang. It doesn't zoom into orbit as giddily as Airplane did, but Airplane was one of the great spoofs. Top Secret! is a good one. It mainly wants to tee off on World War II spy movies, and it does. Its hero nominally is a young American rock star performing in East Germany. But it's an East Germany in which French Resistance fighters battle grim types who look and behave like Nazis. Top Secret! also touches base with the Beach Boys and Elvis.
Also Stars:
Lucy Gutteridge (Hillary Flammond)
Michael Gough (Dr. Flammond)
Omar Sharif (Cedric)
"What I really wanted was to do all the publicity for the movie in character as Nick Rivers," Kilmer said with a mischievous smile, "but Paramount kept throwing Andy Kaufman in my face, saying it would backfire. I guess they got scared."
-Val Kilmer
*Note: We have not highlighted the films where Val Kilmer's part was very brief.
