“I’ve always felt that way”: Christopher Walken names the unsung heroes of cinema
There are many things that make Christopher Walken the icon he is, but throughout his entire career, he’s always made a point of lending an assist to the people he’ll defend to the death as the unsung heroes of the entire movie business.
Since the early 1970s, Walken has been regarded as one of his generation’s most gifted character actors, and the longer his career has worn on the more legendary he’s become. Whether it’s that unmistakable accent, the mannerisms, the manic glint in his eye, or the desire to dance on-camera as much as humanly possible, those tics and tricks made him who he is.
History is littered with great actors who either didn’t feel the need or weren’t blessed with a very distinct persona all of their own, but Walken has always felt like an extension of himself onscreen. He’s an unusual guy with a fascinating backstory, all of which fed into his performances and helped him carve out a niche as Tinseltown’s marquee wild-eyed and sinister madman.
Of course, he can play heroic, downtrodden, and downbeat characters if he wants to—and he has done for decades—but despite his ironclad preparation process, Walken is always thinking well beyond the director’s calling cut. He fastidiously learns his lines for every role he plays, which makes improvising a no-go area, but he always differentiates each take to leave something for the editors to play with.
Conventional wisdom would dictate that an actor who performs each line exactly as written would perform each scene exactly the same way over and over again, but that’s never been Walken’s bag. Instead, he’s always cognisant of how performances often don’t come together until post-production, and he’s always adhered to this mantra.
“I’ve always felt that one of the unsung heroes of moviemaking are the editors,” he explained to Interview. “I try to offer the editors as much variety as I can so that they can shape performances into something unexpected. I’ve always felt that way.” He’s been around long enough to understand the intricacies, and it’s better having ten takes delivered ten different ways than rinsing and repeating the same thing.
Walken has seen how “sometimes directors and producers just want to get on with it,” but that’s never been a methodology to which he’s subscribed. Even though he’s always been the guy who memorises every single word of dialogue he’s been hired to say and rarely deviates from the words on the page, he developed a habit very early on that would see the unsung heroes in the editing suite being given a bountiful array of options to cut together into the best possible version of any given scene.
