[IMG:L]It only seems like Kevin Bacon has been keeping a low profile, but he’s still adding co-stars to the long list of Hollywood names he’s connected to. His last high-profile feature was 2003’s Mystic River, but he’s continued to appear steadily in small, often controversial indie movies. He played a child molester in The Woodsman and a celebrity covering up a sex murder in Where the Truth Lies.
His next film is an easier sell. In the thriller Death Sentence, Bacon plays a father who watches a street gang kill his son in a robbery. He goes after the criminals on his own, trying to keep the rest of his family safe. Directed by Saw‘s James Wan, it is based on the novel by Brian Garfield, the same author who wrote the novel that inspired the Charles Bronson‘s Death Wish series.
Fresh from the set of his next movie, the HBO film Taking Chance, Bacon flew cross country to San Diego to show footage of Death Sentence to throngs of movie fans at Comic-Con, and even the press corps gave him a round of applause for such dedication.
Hollywood.com: It’s going to be fun to watch you get your revenge, but obviously this guy isn’t having fun in this situation. Was it difficult?
Kevin Bacon: I like to act so things that are deep and give me a lot to play are fun in terms of that. But it’s not really like maybe doing a comedy where you got to work and everybody’s laughing and it’s a big yuk-fest on the set. Now that being said, in the last section of the film, which has a lot of gunplay and a lot of cars and fights and stuff like that, that stuff is really fun. One of the things I’m really very proud about in terms of the film, I’m proud of James’ work and the stunt team and the special effects team. In this day and age, most action films are really driven by a lot of CG, by a lot of digital effects. There’s none in the Death Sentence so everything that’s there is real. It’s kind of like in a way going back to the way films were made in [Charles] Bronson’s days, or [Sam] Peckinpah. I think it’s definitely got that vibe.
HW: Is it an homage to Death Wish? It’s from the same novelist and it’s a revenge story.
KB: Yeah, Death Wish was actually a novel [too]. This is another book that the guy wrote. I went back and looked at the first Death Wish. I didn’t make it through all of them, which I knew very well as a young man but I had not seen it in a long time. The thing that’s really different about Death Wish is that Death Death Wish is a movie about a guy who takes the law into his own hands, becomes a vigilante and goes after all criminals. In fact, Bronson doesn’t even go after the guys who hurt his family. He doesn’t even focus on them. He just puts himself into situations where he knows he’s going to get mugged, turns around and smashes them in the head or shoots them or whatever. In Death Sentence it’s much more of a revenge movie than a vigilante movie. True, the guy does go outside the law and makes that terrible fatal mistake, but it’s really more about this cycle of violence that he unfortunately creates. He is then focussed on this one gang and seeking revenge.
HW: Is this the most physical movie you’ve done, or nothing compared to The River Wild?
KB: Really the hardest thing physically I ever did was Hollow Man. I was invisible but I was covered in this green suit or a mask glued onto my face or whatever. I thought that it was going to be the easiest gig in the world because I was invisible and that I would just float in, but in fact it was physically demanding, mostly from the standpoint of just claustrophobia and a lot of time in the makeup trailer and all that kind of stuff.
HW: How hard is it to shake off the raw emotion of a role like this?
KB: Shaking it off on Friday is difficult because you know that you’re going to have to get back into it on Monday. So it effects your thoughts, it effects my dreams. I feel a strong need to get back in touch with my family and see my kids and kind of reaffirm that they’re OK because I’m spending all this time with the opposite. Of course [I’m] using them, I have to use them, for my own kind of memories, if there’s such a thing. I tend to sort of get a little bit dark probably while making a movie like this [but] at the end of the film it’s pretty easy for me to say goodbye to it. I did a movie called Murder in the First which was really hard. I lost a whole bunch of weight and I was in shackles and there were like bugs crawling on me. It was a really tortuous kind of character but I’ve got a picture of myself on a beach in Hawaii holding my daughter, who at that point was about maybe six months or a year. I’m emaciated and my head is shaved but you can see in my face that the guy is gone. This is maybe two days after we finished filming that I’m able to just put them away and kind of say goodbye once the shooting is over.
HW: Do you find it strange that they’re remaking Footloose?
KB: No. I mean, I think what they’re remaking is the musical that was made from the movie. I think it feels like the same kind of idea of Hairspray. John Waters makes a movie, then they do a Broadway musical of it and then they remake the movie as well. And so I think it’s a similar kind of thing. So it sort of feels like it’s one degree of separation, if you will.
HW: SNL‘s Andy Samberg told the Con fanboys that a lot of babies were born because of Footloose. What is your reaction to that?
KB: Cool. I was very disappointed [when I saw] the You Tube video, which is called something like ‘The Evolution of Dance’. And it’s just a guy who dances and they skipped Footloose and I was heartbroken. I really felt like sending this guy a letter because he went right from Saturday Night Fever then jumped to Michael Jackson, “Billy Jean.” And it hurt.
HW: Do you have an eye towards directing again?
KB: We’ll see. Having worked with James I got really kind of excited about the idea of directing something with a little bit of action in it just because it was so much fun to see the way that he would put those pieces together. I know that the next time that I direct a film that I want it to be a more guy oriented film because I’ve done a couple of things that are very, very female driven. I just did another episode this year of The Closer. I did one last year and they gave me a chance to do another one. It was great because it actually had an action sequence in it and I was coming off of Death Sentence. I was really inspired to do that.
HW: How do you like directing Kyra?
KB: People say directing Kyra is like: Turn on the camera. Stay out of the way.
