Whatever

M. EMMET WALSH / ACTOR

With 94 films under his belt--including the lead in the Coen brothers’ “Blood Simple” (winning the first Independent Spirit actor award) and Harrison Ford’s boss in “Blade Runner”--character actor M. Emmet Walsh shows no signs of slowing. The latest for the 65-year-old Vermonter: He’s the engineer driving Will Smith’s plush train in “Wild Wild West.”

CENTURION: “When I get to 100 [movies], I guess I die. I’m thinking of taking one of those self-aggrandizement ads in the trade magazine, just one-sixteenth of a page, a tiny corner, to congratulate myself.”

REMAKE / REMODEL: “I went back six or eight weeks ago to re-shoot for a few days [on “West”]. It was just tweaking, good work--not just changing deck chairs on the Titanic. [Director] Barry [Sonnenfeld] is noted for re-shoots.”

CHECK MATE: “Will [Smith] is wonderful. He’s handling stardom very well. I hadn’t played chess in a long time, but once I wasn’t bad, and he badly beat my ass. He’s a smart man. And he and Barry get along well. They’d done ‘Men in Black,’ and there’s cerebral play between them.”

KNEW HIM WHEN: “Barry was the director of photography on ‘Blood Simple,’ the first time he ever used a 35-mm camera. [Now] they came to me and said, ‘Barry wants you in this movie. It’ll cover about four months of work.’ That never happens in this day and age.”

OL’ PALS: “I did a little turn with Harrison Ford in Sydney Pollack’s ‘Random Heart’ in February. They all said, ‘Great, you and Harrison together--”Blade Runner.” ’ He comes on the set and says, ‘Uh, hi. We’ve done something before, haven’t we?’ ”

CLASS STRUCTURE: “Not to pick on Jim Carrey, but these days someone gets $15 million and the guy playing the fifth lead is at scale plus 10%. It’s really ruined the salary structure. Used to be you’d start at $500 a week, then $700 and keep working it up, never go below your price.”

FACE THE FACE: “If a movie opens and Jamie Lee Curtis is madly in love with me, you know I’m dead in seven minutes and she spends the next 90 minutes looking for the killer. I’ve looked in the mirror and know what it’s about.”

BLUE COLLAR: “I’m going to Benton, Ill., to do a film, ‘Goodbye Sunrise,’ with Sean Young. Nice script, low-budget film. I play a judge--you go there and do it for scale. If I wanted to just sit around I could, but I’d rather work.”