Smothered in Hugs

Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries

Dennis Cooper

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780061715617
• eBook ISBN: 9780062002952
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

"In another country or another era, Dennis Cooper's books would be circulated in secret, explosive samizdat editions that friends and fans would pass around and savor like forbidden absinthe." — New York Times Book Review

"His work belongs to that of Poe, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, and Georges Bataille, other writers who argued with mortality." — San Francisco Chronicle

"There's a stainless steel sheen to Cooper's sentences that is as admirable as anything this side of Didion." — Salon

From the internationally acclaimed author of Ugly Man and one of "the last literary outlaws in mainstream American fiction" (Bret Easton Ellis) comes a survey of his cultural criticism. From interviews with celebrities such as Leonard DiCaprio and Keanu Reeves; to obituaries for Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix; to writings on social issues—including the touchstone piece "AIDS: Words from the front"; Smothered in Hugs spans three decades of journalism from Dennis Cooper.

BALE BONDS

The Christian Bale Interview (December 1997)
Cowritten with Joel Westendorf

Enter the image-based Hollywood world of the Hawkes, Baldwins, and O’Donnells. You see the flashes pop, the emotionally unremarkable lauded, and the future plans for “slacker-esque” movies dancing in the eyes of these so-called stars. Yet you will witness the sensitive and shy, less worldly types we see on the silver screen usually having to settle for a position of less grandeur. High-profile is something that Christian Bale definitely is not. He is managed quietly by his father, an ex-pilot with scant Hollywood connections, he has no publicist, and has never been the focus of a major American magazine article. These elements would seem to be a drawback here. Yet his “in-the-biz-not-of-it” stance may just have been the key to his “performance rather than profile” popularity.

His fans are a vocal bunch who flood their idol with mail, particularly e-mail. He was more than a bit shocked earlier this year when America Online informed him that he is the third most popular subject of conversation in its “Hollywood Online, Talk about Actors” forum. Being just behind Brad Pitt and Keanu Reeves, and way ahead of more visible figures like Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Hugh Grant. He has large, active fan clubs in such unlikely places as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford universities. And Bale’s official, Toronto-based fan club raised thousands of dollars for charity this June in an online auction of items he wore or used while making the bizarrely popular film Newsies. Not bad for one still paying his dues.

A tall, lanky, big-boned twenty-two-year-old with a broad, childlike face, sensual lips, and prematurely wise eyes, Christian is unconventionally handsome. And apart from the odd burst of hesitant laughter, he maintains an impassive, thoughtful expression, occasionally bending his mouth slightly to accommodate a mildly bemused smile. Why the excitement over someone so low-key?

In 1987’s critically acclaimed Spielberg film Empire of the Sun, Christian delivered an incredibly stellar portrayal of twelve-to-fourteen-year-old J. G. Ballard in the story of his experience as a young prisoner of war. Remarkably, at thirteen, Bale got the role despite his film inexperience and lack of formal training, and to this day he has only participated in a couple of workshops, when he was roughly twelve. The merits of his do-it-yourself method became especially evident in last year’s Little Women. With his natural talent and charm, he stole most every scene he was in. While his experience between those two films included some box-office failures (Swing Kids, and Disney’s failed attempt to repopularize musicals, Newsies), Christian’s realness and non-pretention shines through in what would be considered his weaker roles. He has never given less than a solid and touching performance, and has never gotten a bad review.

So now he’s got Little Women and the vocal role of “Thomas” in last summer’s Pocahontas under his belt, and his two upcoming films include Christopher (Carrington) Hampton’s screen adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, as well as the long-awaited Jane (The Piano) Campion project The Portrait of a Lady (set for release this spring and fall, respectively). Seems the world may be witnessing a larger stride being taken by Bale.

Normally very wary of publicity, Christian has given very few (if any) in-depth interviews. However, he agreed to give us a rare look into his experiences. Possibly to do his share of the necessary publicity for both films, but more likely because of the fact that we’ve recently become friends as well.

A very knackered Christian had just returned to London after four months on location in England (Secret Agent) and Italy (Portrait…) when we managed to snag him for an interview at two a.m. his time.

Joel Westendorf: So are you up to answering a few questions? Christian Bale: Yeah. [chuckle]

JW: Okay.

CB: All right (self-convincingly). This is an ordinary conversation. Let’s just start.

JW: Right.

Dennis Cooper: So what’s the plot of The Secret Agent?

CB: It’s set in the 1890s in Soho in London in an earlier porn shop, which is very tame by our standards. In fact, we had to do two versions. One for the cinema, and one for television. One where they scan the racks and there’s loads of dildos. Then they scrape all the dildos off and do it again for TV.

DC: With troll dolls instead.

CB: [laughs] Exactly. No, that’s even more indecent, isn’t it? So, Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent was one of the first thrillers in the style that we know them today. I heard that it inspired people like Graham Greene and John leCarré. It’s a lot of characters, all up to no good basically. And they all end up dead. That’s the short of it.

JW: Could you give me an idea of your character “Stevie”?

CB: Well, most of the characters are caricatures. But I mean, very subtly done. My character is “innocence” basically. He’s the only one who’s completely innocent in the whole thing. He’s like nineteen or something with a mental age of let’s say seven or eight. So, he’s in his own little world, and he’s sort of fascinated with trying to solve the wrongs of what is going on in the world. And he has the advantage of his lack of perception really, he can see things as either purely good or purely bad. Whereas all the others have become quite mixed up, especially with Bob Hoskins’s character, who’s amoral. He just doesn’t seem to have a grasp of good or bad at all. So you’ve got this complete innocent trying to live in this world and he just can’t.

JW: What are the other characters like?

CB: Well, there’s Winnie, who is Patricia Arquette. In the film she’s my sister, my mother, she’s everything. Nobody else takes care of me. My mother, played by Elizabeth Spriggs, has gone a bit batty and isn’t in any state to look after a handicapped kid. So Winnie is sort of his whole world. She’s the only one he can talk to. Verloc, who is the secret agent, is Bob Hoskins. Because Winnie is married to him, without thinking too much about it, Stevie believes that Verloc is a good man. It’s one of the lines in the film that I always say. “Good man, Mr. Verloc.”

JW: What’s Bob Hoskins like?

CB: It was quite funny with Bob. My character is so submissive when he’s around, and treats him with such awe and respect—not to say I don’t have that for Bob at all, I’ve got an awful lot of respect for him—but I couldn’t just be me sitting there talking with Bob. When Patricia, Bob, and I met out in Los Angeles for the first time, we had lunch and had a few drinks and got a bit drunk and everything. And I really couldn’t see us doing that again once I had started playing my character. It would have felt a bit odd.

JW: How about Patricia Arquette?

CB: Of all the people on The Secret Agent, I sort of felt most comfortable with Patricia. Because with Stevie, she is the only one that he really chats with. She sort of adopted the sister attitude with me, and beat the shit out of me as soon as they shouted cut, doing kung fu kicks on me and shit, you know, in period costume.

DC: You told us a funny story about something that happened on the set…having to do with a bomb?

CB: Yeah, we were on Greenwich Hill in London, by the Observatory. I was doing a scene where a bomb went off in my face. It was a public place, and we cleared everybody out because there was this bomb and they could get hurt. Now I didn’t actually see him, but there was this guy who was hiding in the bushes taking a piss when this frigging bomb went off. And he came running out of the bushes afterward, I don’t know in what state of undress.

DC: How did you get on with Gerard Depardieu?

CB: Well, the first time I met him I was lying asleep in my dressing room, and I woke up because there was such a loud belch, and I sort of sat up and there was Gerard Depardieu standing there in his shorts sort of scratching himself. [laughs] And he said to me [adopting a French accent], “It’s okay? I can come in?” And he came in and we had a chat for ten minutes, and he was off again. We didn’t talk much during the filming. Mostly leering at each other. He’d come up and go [makes blubbery noise with his lips], “Christian!” And I’d sort of go [same noise], “Gerard!” And that was the extent of it really.

CB, JW, DC: [laughter]

DC: You’ve had no formal training as an actor, right?

CB: That is true! I did a couple of workshops when I was like twelve or something, but I’ve been able to work so, um…I just haven’t needed to. I thought about going to drama school for a bit. I just started to think, “Hm, this seems to be happening a bit easy.” I was in Kenneth Branagh’s film Henry the Fifth when I was fourteen, and Kenneth’s mentor is Hugh Cruttwell, the ex-head of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. So I spoke with him about it, and he said wait until you’re older because you get a lot of people, they go along, they don’t really have any of their own ideas, and so they come out being identical to each other. When I did Newsies I spoke with Robert Duvall about it as well, and he said essentially the same thing. So that basically decided me.

DC: You had to inhabit some pretty terrifying emotions in Empire of the Sun.

CB: I think what actually worked in Empire of the Sun was the fact that I didn’t have any sort of preconceptions about acting or what it should be or what I should be doing. I just got out there and did it. I really wasn’t a film fan at all, and Spielberg just makes everything incredibly easy.

DC: Your grandfather did some acting and stuntwork.

CB: Yeah, both of my granddads. You’re talking about the one on my dad’s side. He was John Wayne’s double for a while. I haven’t actually seen any of the films, but my dad watched one recently. I can’t remember which one it was, but it was set in Africa.

DC: Hatari!?

CB: It may have been. I keep wanting to say Uhuru, but that was somebody on Star Trek, wasn’t it? My dad says you can actually make out my granddad’s face in the shadows at some point, which you shouldn’t be able to do, but you could.

DC: Did you know him as a kid?

CB: Not at all. I went to South Africa at the end of ’92 to meet him. He had cancer, and he was basically hanging on to meet us. So only that one time.

DC: Was his being an actor an inspiration to you?

CB: Well, he wasn’t exactly an actor. His brother was. All of them on my dad’s side are enormous. They’re like six feet four, six feet six, and built like brick shit houses. So my dad’s uncle Rex, who I met, though I don’t remember it because I was so young, was an actor. I think he tended to play heavies all the time because he was so big. But I’ve never seen anything that he did. My granddad was more like…what do you call it, a white hunter, which just means he was a park ranger in South Africa.

JW: When you did Empire of the Sun, were you aware how big of a deal it was to have a lead in a Spielberg movie?

CB: When you’re thirteen…It’s not as if I was running around banging on doors at that age. I didn’t really care too much if I got the parts or not. Just sort of coincidences had happened and I was lucky. So I didn’t have an idea of the whole “big picture” of it. I mean now, when I’ve decided that I do like acting, and I’d like to continue doing it, you start to get slightly more self-conscious, and realize what on earth you’re doing. But when you’re just…doing what’s in front of you, you don’t think of that, you know?

DC: It was such a dream role. It was so expansive and involved such a range of emotions. Did it spoil you? Did it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Homocore Rules
• Placebomania
• The Keanu Reeves Interview
• No Mo’ Pomo
• The Queer King
• Burden of Urban Dreams
• Beauty and Sadness
• Love Conquers All
• Grain of the Voice
• Purplish Prose
• Larry Clark’s Perfect Childhood
• Too Cool for School
• Real Personal
• Phoner
• Junkie See, Junkie Do
• Minor Magic
• AIDS
• The Ballad of Nan Goldin
• Hipper Than Thou
• Flanagan’s Wake
• King of the Jumble
• Inside the High
• Ice Nine
• Rebel Just Because
• Letter Bomb
• Why Does Herr F. Run Amok?
• A Raver Runs Through It
• Drug Fiction
• Openings
• King Junk
• Bale Bonds
• Spooky House
• The Anti-Leo
• Nick Drake
• Odd Man Out
• More Than Zero
• First Communion
• Mystery Man
• Flailing Vision
• A Conversation with William T. Vollmann
• Like a Virgin
• Fuck the Canon
• We’re Desperate
• Naked Youth
• Back in No Time
• ’80s Then
• The John Waters Interview
• Loony Tunes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Other books by Dennis Cooper
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher