For a guy who runs 6’4″, Kane Hodder can be hard to find when he’s on-screen.
Probably that’s because you’re not meant to see him – he’s either doing stunts
to make the other actors look tough and cool, or he’s been rendered
indistinguishable for a role. Hodder famously portrayed Jason Voorhees in the
late 80s/early 90s Friday the 13th movies, giving Jason a full-contact
physicality and image that has largely defined the character for the rest of the
world. And, most recently, he reprised his role as Victor Crowley in the
splattery Hatchet series,
with the second movie hitting DVD and Blu-ray today.
And on top of all that, Hodder is prepping the release of Kill!, his
autobiographical tell-all that details his rise into film, untold stories from
the Friday the 13th sets, and finally revealing the stunt that left him
with severe burns on over fifty percent of his body early on in his career. With
that in mind, we spoke with Hodder about his personal journey with the movies,
revealing his Five Favorite Films.
The Exorcist
(1973, 85% Tomatometer)
My all-time favorite. You gotta remember, I’m old enough to have seen it in theaters
when it first came out, with all the hype. The fact that it was such taboo
material at that time was so incredibly
powerful. If you didn’t live
through it you can’t really appreciate the fact that there was so much hype
going around, that people
were saying that, after they watched the movie, they were getting possessed. People were buying into that, so it made it even more scary to go see it,
because you were worried
about going to sleep. And the movie was so well done. It still
holds up. This many years
later, I still think it’s a pretty damn good movie.
I’ve always liked horror movies, even from the beginning when I was a
little kid and saw The Birds. Scared the **** out of me. It was
like the precursor to
Jaws. Every time you looked at a bird that was staring at
you from a tree, you
would think, “Oh ****, it’s going to come down and pluck my eyes out.” And I’ve always liked
action movies. That’s probably why I went into stunts. I always enjoyed watching
the guys perform feats
that looked like they were impossible, and I thought, “You know, I’d like to try
that.”
I typically don’t like Western-type movies that much, but Red Hill.
I really enjoyed that. I’m very picky about the bad guy, and whether or not he
looks intimidating to me, you know? Like, I saw the I Spit on Your Grave
remake, and all of the bad guys looked like soap opera actors that let their
stubble grow. They didn’t have the aura of being a badass. And I’m sorry to
those actors. They’re probably going to ****ing hate me, but this didn’t come
across as intimidating or scary or anything, or even convincing as criminals,
whereas this guy in Red Hill was the best bad guy I’ve seen in a long
time. Just when he would look, he would look scary as ****. I love a bad guy
that really convinces me.
85% Tomatometer)
Really good. I happened to work some stunts in it, but nothing big. I think
that was a very well done movie.
Monster
(2003,82% Tomatometer)
Unfortunately, I keep saying ones that I had something to do with. I was the
stunt coordinator on that, and I actually played the cop that arrested her at
the end. If I have any kind of acting ability, it’s from watching people like
Charlize Theron. I was on the set every day. I didn’t have all that much to do,
stuntwise — just safety issues and a couple of little stunt things — but I
could watch her work, and see how she got to certain places, and that’s the best
possible training I think an actor can have. [Theron did] subtle things
right before certain scenes, to get to a certain place. I think, even
subconsciously, I’ve incorporated some of those techniques. It’s nothing I can
really describe.
For the violent stuff, it doesn’t take long. It’s just very easy for me to get
from my personality to the murderously violent personality. I think I’m closer
to that than most people are, so it’s a short trip. [laughs] But for the
emotional stuff, and crying scenes and stuff like that, what works best for me
is to use music that means something to me, that reminds me of something in the
past that isn’t a good memory. Something like that. That helps me to where I can
convincingly cry, because I’ve seen so many actors — and these are whom I
consider good actors — who are not convincing when they’re crying. It’s just
not believable, it’s too forced. I think that’s obviously one of the harder
things to do.
Take [Hatchet series’] Danielle Harris. Most often, when you have a character
who has to have a lot of emotion like that, you start out as a regular character
and become that, like Tamara [Feldman] did in the first movie. Starts out normal
and then becomes emotional at the end. Well, because this picked up from the
very last frame of the first movie, from the very beginning, Danielle has to be
crazy emotional. She lost her whole family and found them dead. So, it’s one
thing to be able to get to an emotional point, but to have to do it so many
times is the hard part. Lots of people can make themselves cry once, but let me
see you do it ten times in one day, and some of those times being after lunch,
where you’re talking to friends, and then you gotta get back to that place. It’s
not that you just do it one time and they film it and you’re done. You gotta do
all the coverage and make sure the emotion matches. That’s the hard part.
Shutter Island
(2010, 68% Tomatometer)
Really interesting. Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the best actors in film
today. I hadn’t heard about the twist at the end, so it hadn’t been ruined for
me. It caught me completely off guard. I think the movie was so well shot, and
with DiCaprio’s performance, it was unbelievable.
Hatchet II is out on DVD this week.
