Austin360 blogs > Austin Movie Blog > Archives > 2009 > June > 04 > Entry
David Carradine dies
More obit here.
Here’s my interview with Carradine from the set of the Austin-made comedy “Homo Erectus” (which has since been renamed “Stoned Age”). It took place in November 2005.
David Carradine has long skinny legs that are stretched out like bamboo poles, naked, knobby, porpoise-smooth. They are exposed from the ankle to way up the thigh, several unsettling inches past the tan line to scary areas that make one’s eyes avert in a violent spasm. He looks supremely relaxed and casual, sunk deep in a chair with those bare legs leveled at the floor, elbow propped on an arm rest to keep the cigarette in his fingers close to his faintly duckish lips.
“This is only half of it,” Carradine says with a swell of pride. “I throw fur on top of it all.” He points to a heap of fake black fur on the floor of his actor’s trailer, which rests on the magnificently dusty moonscape of a limestone quarry in North Austin. Scenes from the movie “Homo Erectus” are being shot here, one of the film’s many locations, including Hamilton Pool and Enchanted Rock, that suggests prehistoric landscapes. (A limestone quarry? How very “Flintstones.”)
“And in the movie my hair is sticking straight up like this,” says Carradine, teasing out long, wild gray-blond strands to make a static-electric blast. “Out to here.”
What are you going to do when playing a caveman but go with it? Carradine seems to be having fun with the role of Mookoo, the blustering chief of his cave tribe. His son Ishbo, who is goading his species to evolve, is played by a Woody Allenish Adam Rifkin, the film’s writer and director. Talia Shire plays Carradine’s cave-wife and Ali Larter (“Legally Blonde”) plays Rifkin’s elusive dream girl. “Homo Erectus” is the third low-budget feature produced by the University of Texas Film Institute and its for-profit arm, Burnt Orange Productions.
Carradine’s last major role was the title villain in Quentin Tarantino’s martial-arts revenge opus “Kill Bill,” the success of which hurled the actor back into public view after a disappearance that seemed to have lasted decades. Actually, it did last decades. His most recent watchable film before “Kill Bill” was the Jesse James western “The Long Riders,” co-starring his brothers Keith and Robert. That was 1980.
“Playing in ‘Kill Bill’ helped,” Carradine says. “Up until then everyone was saying ‘Grasshopper.’ Now everyone says ‘Bill.’ “
Climbing into Carradine’s trailer, one is swallowed in a rich fog from his English Ovals, fancy, filterless cigarettes he lights the way some people pop peanuts. He has the grainy rasp and paper-bag flesh of a smoker and the gruff pluck of someone turning 69 on Thursday.
“He’s so fit!” says Carolyn Pfeiffer, head of Burnt Orange, on the set of “Homo Erectus.” “He’s doing lots of action scenes. Right now they’re shooting a battle. I wish I knew his secret.”
Carradine doesn’t rise or offer a hand when a visitor enters. He produces a flask from a leather satchel, takes a quick nip, puts it back. Smoke twists from his mouth and nostrils.
He took the caveman movie because he didn’t have anything else to do. Script unseen, he accepted the part, saying “Why not?” Eventually, he read Rifkin’s screenplay.
“It’s genius. It’s half-way between Monty Python and Quentin Tarantino,” Carradine says. “It’s full of philosophy while being funny.”
Gazing over Carradine’s extensive career in B bilge and drive-in titillations, it’s apparent the actor might take a lot of roles before reading the script. A magazine once dubbed him the “Most Working Actor in the Universe” because he made 19 movies in 18 months. “Actually,” Carradine says, “they missed a couple.”
Like Michael Caine if he made mostly genre and exploitation flicks, Carradine can’t say no. A dependable character actor, much like his famous father John, Carradine loves to work, and needs the money. He knows he’s made irrevocable rubbish. Many of his movies are exiled straight to cable and video.
But there have been significant movies. He was the lead in Martin Scorsese’s 1972 Hollywood debut “Boxcar Bertha,” played Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby’s “Bound for Glory” and co-starred in Roger Corman’s cult favorite “Death Race 2000.”
“I have made 112 feature movies,” Carradine says. “Some of them were great and some were phenomenal: ‘Bound for Glory,’ ‘The Long Riders.’ What about the one I did for Ingmar Bergman (‘The Serpent’s Egg’)? What other American actor can say they starred in a Bergman film?
“I always thought I should do everything,” including keeping up his longtime roots-rock band Soul Dogs, he says. “But you do movies that are straight to video, the studios don’t want you. So I’ve always been catch as catch can. I’ve turned down stuff that is odious to me. But if it’s at all interesting I tend to do it. It’s not always about the money. I just like to work.”
But sometimes it is about the money.
“I went through a period when I was trying to get out of a hassle with the IRS, and I said the way I’m going to do it is by taking every role and make enough money to pay them off,” he says. “It didn’t work. I’ve just about got rid of them.”
Despite “low-tide moments,” Carradine kept working. “I thought, What am I going to do to get out of this? I’m going to wind up like Zsa Zsa Gabor.”
Eventually Tarantino, known to revive atrophied careers, wrote a prime piece for Carradine, whom Tarantino plainly idolized. “Kill Bill” sparked Carradine’s comeback. “Homo Erectus,” he hopes, will fuel the momentum.
“This is going to be a very hot little movie. It’s really cheap but we’re doing it right. It’s going to look like it cost a lot more than it did. And I managed to get paid pretty well,” he says.
“I mean, hey, I’m living in a big house with a lot of land around it. I have a clay tennis court. I’m driving a Ferrari. I have no complaints whatsoever.”
He crosses his naked legs. Smoke seeps from a grin.
“I think people have woken up to the fact that I’m still around and that I can still kick (bleep).”
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment Categories: Austin Movies Inc.
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By Nicole
June 12, 2009 7:26 PM | Link to this
“Duckish” lips? Please! The man always had a beautiful mouth, from Kwai Chang to Bill!
By Looker
June 7, 2009 2:48 PM | Link to this
His death is shady to say the least!
suicide - one of the top 3 stupidest things I heard today on NBC
The guy had everything to live for.
He had got himself clean and into fitness years ago and was going to shoot a film in tailand in two weeks.
I heard from my buddy who works at MTV. He knows one of his groupies. He was found swinging in the closet of his hotel with his hands tied behind his back and an apple in his mouth.
tai mafia - thier version of a mexican necktie
Common in tailand I guess. They are famous for killing porn actresses this way. They probably know who is responsible but are paid to say suicide. don’t care either. Those responsible will never come to justice. Just counting their cash.
What a waste of life just for the insurance money on the production.
His talent will be missed.
Kill Bill is a classic.
By Scott
June 5, 2009 7:10 AM | Link to this
It’s sad….he won’t be remembered for his TV/film work, rather for the way he died.
By sallly
June 4, 2009 8:28 PM | Link to this
Autoerotic asphyxiation, how bizarre, and how sad for his children.
By Tom Jones
June 4, 2009 7:54 PM | Link to this
Kung Fu? Say it isn’t so. I am truly saddened. RIP Grasshopper
By nobrainer
June 4, 2009 3:56 PM | Link to this
Kill Bill was genius compared to Death Race 2000. That was a crappy movie. I liked Kung Fu, cool show in the 70’s. Grasshopper, you chose poorly.
By Timothy
June 4, 2009 2:57 PM | Link to this
What a shame for an actor to protray a character in KUNG FU and then go on to star in a stupid movie KILL BILL! He knew he (really) lost his (reality) life.
By Scott Unzicker
June 4, 2009 12:18 PM | Link to this
Man… Koko Taylor yesterday, now Carradine. Bummer week. I hope he found what he was looking for.