I probably should’ve put this on Hollywood Actor Prep, because this interview is so much about acting.
Stephen Lang is a real actor’s actor. It’s in the way he sees the character he’s playing, and the acting choices he makes that give the roles so much dimension.
Between Public Enemies, and Avatar, this actor has had a really good year. After a lotta years, acting…
From Geoff Boucher, Hero Complex, LA Times
“Quaritch is number-orientated, he’s very squared away and there’s nothing raggedy about him at all,” said Lang, who has a history of playing military men on-screen. “He is in a constant state of code red.”…Watching Lang’s Quaritch serenely sip his coffee during the slaughter of an alien tribe in “Avatar” suggests that he orders off the same commando breakfast menu.
Lang has been “chameleonic” in his film career, as director Cameron puts it, and in a way that has given him a certain measure of anonymity with moviegoers. Whether the role was Ike Clanton in “Tombstone,” Harry Black in “Last Exit to Brooklyn” or a Civil War icon (he played Gen. “Stonewall” Jackson in “Gods and Generals” and Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett in “Gettysburg”), Lang is more of an actor than a movie star.
For “Public Enemies,” Lang said the settings became characters. The movie was filmed, in many instances, on the same sites where the gangsters and G-men squared off and wrote American crime history in bullet holes and blood splatters.
“We were in places where the history happened on ‘Public Enemies.’ I shot Johnny down on the same spot where the real John Dillinger was shot. Did that contribute to the performance? I suspect so. ”
That was a very different exercise, he said, than “Avatar,” which on many days was filmed in blank-walled rooms where unseen digital jungles would be added later.
Cameron said he had been watching Lang for quite a while. He took note of Lang’s lead performance in the 1986 crime film “Band of the Hand” and considered him for one of the military-man roles in “Aliens,” released that same year.
For Avatar, Lang secured the role of Quaritch during an audition where he pounced on the startled production assistant who was reading opposite of him. “He grabbed him by the head,” Cameron said, “and he pretty much got the job right there.”
The actor said working with [James] Cameron was demanding and invigorating.
“Jim is extremely focused and quite ferocious in pursuit of what we’re doing. He’s also a hell of a lot of fun to work with and has a good humor about him. He demands a tremendous amount not by saying, ‘This is what I demand of you,’ but by his own intensity and preparation. With Jim Cameron, you are challenged and supported and that’s a pretty great combination.”
Asked why he specializes in the roles of rigid men in harm’s way, Lang pondered the question but couldn’t come up with an answer that satisfied him. He pointed out, though, that despite the aura of discipline and chain of command, the military men he has played all tended to break the rules — or perhaps write new ones.
“They were mavericks,” Lang said of his own character corps. “They didn’t tend to do things by the book. They took it a place of the unexpected and the extreme. These are the guys who go outside and that go, as they say, above and beyond, the ones that do what cannot be done. The ones we go back to over and over again — Guadalcanal or the madness of Pickett’s charge. These are things that if you took a truly aerial view of, you would gasp and say, “What were they thinking?’”
“It’s fine with me,” said Lang, who pointed to his extensive background in theater as the perfect preparation for modern blockbuster-making. “But when you’re in a performance-capture setting or green screen, you’re getting back to the real basic stuff of acting. You don’t have a lot of things presented to you in a rehearsal room, either. In a rehearsal room your real resource as an actor aren’t the things around you; your resources are your imagination and your director and the other actors. In those close quarters your imagination and your skills are what you turn to.”
