Dern Instincts : Character Actor Talks of Changes in Filmmaking and His Next Step, a USA Movie

Bruce Dern wasn’t happy.

The actor was impatiently sitting in the pristine, white marble lobby of the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel waiting for the formal dining room to open. He was there to discuss his latest project, “Into the Badlands,” this week’s USA movie, described as “The Twilight Zone” meets the West.

But Dern, who was wearing dark, wireless sunglasses, was scowling. A photographer wanted to do a surreal portrait of Dern, a la “The Twilight Zone,” and asked Dern if he wouldn’t mind wearing a cowboy hat. Dern picked up the hat. “I’m not going to do that,” he said sourly. “I’ll take a regular photo, but I am not going to wear this hat.”

Dern’s voice got louder. “The movie isn’t like ‘The Twilight Zone,’ ” he said. Dern took his index finger and put it to his own temple. “It’s about ‘The Twilight Zone’ in your mind!

“You go scout locations,” Dern told the photographer. “Give us the high-five sign when you’re ready.”

The incident played like a scene from one of Dern’s films. During his 30-year-plus career, the actor has played more than his fair share of wild-eyed, offbeat characters. He was murdered in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Marnie” after he beat up a prostitute. He killed John Wayne in “The Cowboys.” He received an Oscar nomination as Jane Fonda’s gung-ho Marine husband who loses his mind in Vietnam in “Coming Home.”

With the photographer off looking for locations, Dern stood up and walked into the deserted dining room. He picked out a table near the piano. He may have been a lion in the lobby, but Dern was now a lamb, his anger disappeared.

The Beverly Wilshire’s dining room is a favorite haunt of Dern and his wife, Andrea. In fact, for Dern, the history of fancy old hotels is something of a hobby.

“When I go on location, where I stay is the single most important thing to me and how nice it is, because I tend to be drawn to parts in which the character doesn’t live opulently,” he said matter-of-factly. “I have done my time in the Motel 6s in Durango, Mexico.”

Dern ordered a fruit plate and sat back, still wearing the sunglasses.

“I was talking to my wife and saying how times have changed,” he said.

“When we were first married in 1969, I had got a divorce (from actress Diane Ladd) and had a little girl, Laura (actress Laura Dern), who was 2 then. The first location we went on was Canyon City, Colo. We got to the motel and it was on the second story and a little walk-up. Well, we got there and we turned on the TV and there was absolutely nothing to do. The hotel was dreadful as can be, but on the TV they were walking on the moon.”

Dern shot “Into the Badlands” in just three weeks in Santa Fe, N.M. His hotel was presumably better than the shooting conditions, which, he said, “were unbelievably bad. We got snowed on one day. The wind howled every day. But we got it done--and a day quicker than we thought.”

In “Into the Badlands,” Dern plays a bounty hunter in the wild West. Mariel Hemingway also stars in the film, which is three stories in one.

One tale finds a dance-hall girl with consumption marrying a gunfighter who is one step ahead of the law. In another, a bounty hunter relates the story of two women (one is Hemingway) alone on the prairie in a log cabin surrounded by wolves. In the third story the bounty hunter catches and kills his man, but no one believes the dead man is the wanted man.

Dern finally removed his glasses: “That’s why they use the phrase ‘Alfred Hitchcock Meets ‘The Wild Bunch’ or ‘Sam Peckinpah meets ‘The Twilight Zone,’ because we don’t know how else to describe the movie.”

Despite the rushed shooting schedule, Dern said the movie “has a wonderful premise. If you think of the television that worked in the late 1950s, the Steve McQueen series (“Wanted Dead or Alive”), the ‘Have Gun Will Travel’ series, they were little movies. The plus side to this movie is that (USA) allowed us to make our movie-- period . Nobody bothered us. The negative in a $2.5 million Western is pushing the envelope. But cable is here to stay.”

Dern is savvy enough to realize more people will watch “Into the Badlands” than his last feature, 1990’s “After Dark, My Sweet.”

“Outside of here and New York, it didn’t do very well,” Dern said, shrugging his shoulders. He suggested that the low budget and lack of advertising thwarted the film’s chances at box-office success. “It was made by a small company (Avenue Pictures) and they put all their money into the movie,” Dern said. “They didn’t have the money to market the movie. For a $4.8-million movie, you have to spend another $4.8 million to sell it. They only had $750,000 and that means no TV spots or advertising.”

Dern said he felt the same fate slowed “Silent Running,” the 1971 sci-fi film directed by special-effects whiz Douglas Trumbull, which marked Dern’s first starring role.

“You have to have a campaign before a movie comes out,” he said. “ ‘Silent Running’ opened at the Cinerama Dome and it did fantastic business. We did like $50,000 the first week and $50,000 the second. Because they had a hit on their hands, they decided to open it in New York and Chicago with no time for advertising. It opened enormously in both cities.” But with no advertising, he said, the film was soon “history.”

“Into the Badlands” premieres Wednesday at 9 p.m. on USA (cable) and repeats July 28 at 7 p.m. and Aug. 3 at 2 p.m.