| COMICS SCENE: What attracted you to The Crow?
BRANDON LEE: The purity of the character. It's a very personal
story. As you know, it's a story about a man and the woman that he's
very much in love with, who are both murdered-and he returns from
the dead to hunt down the men who murdered them. It's a very pure
story, I've done many things where there has been a great deal of
action involved, but I've never done anything where I felt as
justified in carrying out the actions I do in this. It also really
appealed to me because of the situation that the character finds
himself in, which is one that immediately proposes a number of
questions to you: It's an insane situation, and if you were given
the chance to come back after a year of being dead, you would be
faced with some interesting dilemmas.
The core of this piece’s tragedy is that if there was one
person that you would want to speak to, one person that you would
want to get in contact with again, after a year of being gone (and
you must assume that all the people that you knew have had a year
now to get on with their lives, to deal somehow with the grief), the
one person that you would really want to get in touch with again
would be the woman that you loved-your partner. And in this place,
she’s not there.
CS: Do you see the hero as a superhuman figure? He displays
lyricism, but he obviously has a dark side too-the violence and
vengeance.
LEE: He is after revenge, but this is not Death Wish. The
situation is very different: He's not a living man who is stepping
outside of the boarders of the law in order to take his vengeance.
He is something that he does not fully understand, and that is
stepping outside the boundaries of everything that he understands,
in the course of taking his vengeance. And that makes it a great
deal more interesting to me than a vigilante piece would be.
CS: Does he become a sort of "force of nature"?
LEE: I don't think he becomes a force of nature. But there is
certainly a very basic good vs. evil theme.
CS: So, do you see him as heroic?
LEE: Not from his own motivation, no. In the film, he ends up
becoming involved in a situation that goes outside of his mission,
which is simply to find these guys and kill them. And when that
happens, he does become something of a heroic figure-because he
involves himself in the affairs of the living world. That's what's
heroic about him.
CS: Would you say, then, that by his very nature a hero must do
something unselfish on behalf of someone else in order to become a
hero?
LEE: No, I don't think so. I just saw the best film I've seen in
a while, Lorenzo's Oil; I really loved it. And you could say those
people were doing everything purely for their son, not for the other
children who were suffering from the same disease. However, their
actions resulted in a cure for the disease, which helped thousands
of other children,right? And there's this wonderful line towards the
film's end when Nick Nolte says to Susan Sarandon, "Did you
ever stop and think that everything we've done was for someone
else's little boy?" And it was heartbreaking, because it was
too late for their own son; I mean, they did save his life, but it
came too late, whereas it was able to stop the progression of the
disease in other children, and allowed them to live a very normal
life. That film was certainly very tragic and sad, but there was
something very uplifting about the possibilities of the human
spirit. And yet those people weren't really doing this they were not
just unbiased researchers looking for a cure for a disease; they
were trying to save their son. But through their actions they
created something which you would certainly think of as being
heroic. At the heart of The Crow is the love that exists between
Eric and Shelly, the two characters. That is what elevates this
beyond a simple vigilante piece, and that is what must work to
elevate it beyond an action film
CS: Is there something about the character that you don't like,
that you're critical of, or that you consider a character flaw?
LEE: I think the script is weighted a little bit heavily towards
the action. The most interesting things are about the script, to me,
are the parts where the character is given a chance to try and cope
with what has happened to him: the scenes where he's much more human
than this "undead" avenger, where he's dealing with his
own grief over having lost the woman he loves, his own life, all his
friends, all his family. Everything that he had, he has lost. So
even if he does kill this man, he's not really going to bring it all
back. I'm hoping that the pieces in the film that aren't action
sequences will be able to support the action sequences. what I would
be most fearful of is that they won't, and it will be too much
action.
CS: Do you think that you've brought some thing you learned on
earlier films to this one, physically and otherwise?
LEE:Absolutely, I did the fight choreography in Rapid Fire with
Jess Yamada, and he and I are doing the same for this one. I
certainly learned a lot more about that; I feel much more confident
doing that now. Rapid Fire was the first time I had done it; I was
much more apprehensive about it than I am on this film. And as an
actor, I certainly learned a great deal.
CS: Are you a fan of comic books?
LEE: Yeah, when I was a kid, I was quite a huge fan of comic
books-I had quite an extensive collection. Lately, my rapport with
comics has been through a couple of friends of mine who write
comics. The yalso have a band that plays all over town, but also at
some of the larger comic book and science fiction conventions. So
I've gone down a couple of those with the band. As a kid, I liked
the Hulk. The Hulk always had this tragic aspect about him because
it was the classic Frankenstein story, or the Elephant Man. He was
this man who hated turning into a monster. It's just something I've
always responded to, this classic theme. In Anne Rice's Vampire
Chronicles, you have these vampires who bemoan the loss of their
humanity. I have to tell you, personally I've always thought:
"Wait a minute! I get to live forever; I'm essentially
indestructible; I have supernatural powers; and I'm bitching about
it?"[Laughs.] And I think that if Eric hadn't lost Shelly, he
wouldn't necessarily be such a tragic character. And there are
certainly areas in the script that are a great deal of fun for me,
particularly choreographing the action, because you're dealing with
someone who doesn't have to play by the same rules a regular man
would-you can do some very outlandish things with the choreography,
like in this scene that we're shooting tonight. Eric is able to
exploit his abilities, and do things a regular man couldn't do.
CS: In other words, he doesn't have to duck when he's shot at.
LEE: He's not particularly concerned about it, you know?
CS: Given that, what did you come up with that was different?
LEE: Well, we've had fun with the choreography-in each of the
sequences where Eric has hunted down one of the bad guys responsibly
for Shelly's death-having Eric intimidate the living hell out of
them by letting them hurt him (almost), just to show them that he
can't be hurt, before he finishes them off.
CS: How do you play the living dead? This is not a George
Romero-type movie where you're dealing with "creatures".
How do you, as an actor, inject just enough life to keep the sense
that this is an otherworldly thing?
LEE: Well, there's this quote from [Paul Bowles' novel] The
Sheltering Sky, and the quote goes, "Because we do not know
when we will die, we get to think about it as an inexhaustible life,
and yet everything happens only a certain number of times-and
they're a small number. How many more times will you remember a
certain afternoon with your child? An afternoon that's so deep a
part of your being that you can't conceive of your life without it.
Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many
more times will you watch the full moon? Perhaps...and yet it all
seems endless..." And the reason I bring that up is because we
don't know when we will die. It's only in certain moments-such as
having someone close to you pass away, or having an experience
[close to] death-that you're really brought face to face with how
fragile your life is, and therefore how meaningful each moment of
life is. But the majority of the time, so many things pass you by.
For Eric, as a character, it's not the least intimately coherent
that nothing is trivial; and each moment that he has, in these two
or three days that he has to come back, is very precious. And very
simple things that a living person wouldn't even notice, or would
pass by, have the power to really capture his attention and
fascinate him, because he's very aware that he will never see them
again.
CS: And in terms of expressing emotion, is he emotionally alive?
LEE: He is emotionally hyper-alive, I believe. Because of what
I've just said, every moment, each object he comes in contact with,
anything a person says, carries with it tremendous weight because he
realises that each of those moments is never going to happen again.
That's equally valid for a living person, but we've always focused
on some distant goal.
CS: And his appearance, it it just a notion? Not something he
wears as an identifying mark?
LEE: Well, we have Eric wearing makeup. When he first comes back,
the sheer nature of his situation almost overwhelms him-he almost
becomes catatonic, growing completely insane, being unable to
function due to his awesome situation. One of the things that is in
the story, to help him deal |
