Two of a (Counterculture) Kind

“When ‘60s Icons Collide”: That could be the pitch for “The Limey.”

Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda star in the new thriller, which cleverly cashes in on their screen personas by incorporating old film footage and oblique references to both stars’ cinematic pasts--Stamp a ‘60s British cult fave (“Billy Budd”) and Fonda, a ‘60s American counterculture hero (“Easy Rider”).

In “The Limey,” Stamp plays a character named Wilson, a tough British ex-con who comes to L.A. on a mission of revenge. His target is a former record mogul named Valentine (Fonda), who was involved with Wilson’s long-estranged daughter and may have been responsible for her murder. The $9-million Artisan release, directed by Steven Soderbergh, opens Friday in Los Angeles and New York.

Stamp, 60, calls the role “the best offer I’ve had in 40 years” and acknowledges the quirky angle of Soderbergh’s casting: “By choosing ‘Captain America’ [Fonda’s character in “Easy Rider”] and the ‘Collector,’ [a 1965 Stamp role], he’s shaken every individual in the audience who has a memory or knowledge or imagination of the whole ‘60s ethos.”

Fonda, also 60, theorizes that Soderbergh, “for the first time in his life was able to take two actors who both had books written about them” (Fonda’s “Don’t Tell Dad” and Stamp’s “Stamp Album”) and use elements from their real-life pasts in improvisational moments during filming. (In one scene, Fonda tells Amelia Heinle, playing his new girlfriend, a story about his motorcycle-riding days while Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” plays on the car radio, an unmistakable reference to “Easy Rider.”)

In a recent interview, Stamp and Fonda reminisced about their first meeting, at a film festival in Taormina, Sicily, back in the ‘60s. “We were out there having a grand time,” Fonda recalls, “talking about our dreams, what we wanted to do, the people we were with, the models. . . .”

”. . . We’d shagged, and those we wanted to,” Stamp chimes in, laughing.

“We were not bad bad boys, but good bad boys,” Fonda adds, “and we said we should work together. He went to India and I don’t know what happened to him. And suddenly, 33 years later we make a film together.”

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Clearly inspired by such genre classics as “Point Blank” and “Get Carter,” “The Limey” adds a new dimension courtesy of Soderbergh’s nonlinear style--the flashbacks, flash-forwards and visualized thoughts that helped turn last year’s “Out of Sight” into a critical favorite--and his use of excerpts from “Poor Cow,” a 1967 film that co-starred Stamp as a young hood.

Initially, Soderbergh says, he and writer Lem Dobbs “went down the list of British actors who came up in the ‘60s, who were still known to audiences and could convincingly create a little bit of havoc. It was a pretty short list. Within 30 seconds we basically settled on Terence.”

Casting Fonda as Valentine was Dobbs’ idea. Soderbergh needed persuading. “Two stoics in one movie? That’s not going to work,” he recalls saying. Dobbs (whose wife is close with Fonda’s daughter Bridget) talked Soderbergh into lunch with the actor and, the director says, “immediately saw what Lem was talking about: this chatty, energetic, funny, gregarious personality, which I’d never seen on film.”

Both actors made a major splash back in the heady days of ‘60s cinema. Stamp landed an Academy Award nomination for his first film, “Billy Budd,” became a serial killer in “The Collector” and a soldier in love with Julie Christie in “Far From the Madding Crowd” before going on to make films with Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Fonda, in the wake of such Roger Corman classics as “The Wild Angels” and the LSD-laced “The Trip,” won an Oscar nomination for co-writing the landmark counterculture film “Easy Rider,” in which he played a biker known as Captain America.

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“That was another reason we settled on Terence and part of the reason we settled on Peter--at its most base, a sort of Billy Budd versus Captain America,” Soderbergh admits with a laugh. “That idea was really exciting to us, because their baggage seemed very similar to me. They were both guys who were very idiosyncratic, very much followed their own beat, who were at times very prominent in the business and other times not. They seemed totally in sync, yet from, obviously, completely different continents. I just thought it was a great Celebrity Deathmatch.”

In the film, Wilson, having spent half his life behind bars, is tormented by memories of his daughter, whom he barely knew. Helping to establish his past, particularly the happier times, are the clips from “Poor Cow,” Ken Loach’s directorial debut. Stamp played a young thief who winds up in prison in Loach’s portrait of a single mother’s plight.

“Poor Cow” was screenwriter Dobbs’ find. Soderbergh had been talking about illustrating Wilson’s background, and Dobbs, who, having grown up in London, has a thorough knowledge of British cinema, suggested the cinema verite drama, which is not well-known in this country.

The 32-year-old film influenced Stamp’s performance. “I went to a lot of trouble to take the dialect that I’d used in ‘Poor Cow’ and gave it the patina of 30 years of smoking Gauloises without filters. The thing that paid off was the movement. As I made a study of the voice, I also made a study of the movement I used, and how incarceration would have impinged on that movement.”

Stamp was intrigued by Wilson, whom he calls “a greyhound with nowhere to run. What’s he done? What sort of alchemy has he arranged for himself to not only survive prison but to emerge from it with a self-confidence that enables him to come to a totally foreign country and not allow anyone to get in his way?”

Fonda relished playing “this smarmy guy who absolutely doesn’t know how bad he is. I love playing semi- or fully sick people.” He says he based his characterization in part on “a very powerful man in the industry, a guy whose each new girlfriend was even younger, who had that magic special touch that no one else has had since. But I didn’t try to be that person. I don’t like to be the role; I like the role to be me.”

They encounter each other just twice in the film, at locations that Soderbergh said proved the most difficult during the 33-day shoot last fall. Both are spectacular homes owned, in the script, by wealthy industry player Valentine; in actuality, one is at the top of Nichols Canyon, the other built into the cliffs of Big Sur.

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Both actors are on the comeback trail, Stamp having played a drag queen in the popular ‘90s film “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” a cult leader who advises Eddie Murphy in the current “Bowfinger,” and Chancellor Valorum in George Lucas’ latest “Star Wars” epic, “The Phantom Menace.” Fonda received an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe for 1997’s “Ulee’s Gold.” “I love it,” enthuses Fonda, “to have people talking about you, this second breath of my career, this comeback, whatever.”

Stamp is more philosophical. “When you’ve had a long career, you kind of merge all your great roles together. So I don’t think about being good in an individual thing. I think of the collective total, of working with [William] Wyler and Pasolini. . . . I recently thought to myself, you know, if it had to end now, it would really be OK. From ‘Billy Budd’ to ‘The Limey,’ no actor could ask for more. So it’s a very great moment for me.”

Adds Fonda, ruefully: “Except that ‘Billy Budd’ was a hell of a lot better than my first film, which was ‘Tammy and the Doctor.’ ”

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“When you’ve had a long career, you kind of merge all your great roles together. ... From ‘Billy Budd’ to ‘The Limey,’ no actor could ask for more.”

TERENCE STAMP

“We said [in the ‘60s] we should work together. He went to India.... And suddenly, 33 years later we make a film together.”

PETER FONDA