The movie James Caan hated with every fibre of his being: “Why the fuck would you bring up that?”
There’s a delicious irony to James Caan, one of the ‘New Hollywood’ era’s most outspoken actors, being borderline offended when he was asked to speak about one of his movies, which just goes to show how he hated every second of the experience, apart from one co-star he couldn’t speak highly enough of.
The Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Primetime Emmy nominee was regarded as one of his generation’s best character actors, but he could have been one of its defining leading men. Caan was offered a mind-blowing array of roles that won acclaim and made superstars, and he turned them all down.
He rejected Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson’s Oscar-winning parts in The French Connection and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, turned his nose up at headlining Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, backed out of being Francis Ford Coppola’s Benjamin Willard in Apocalypse Now, and he could have been Star Wars‘ Han Solo if he were interested.
Caan didn’t want to be a star, though; he wanted to be an actor. While that decision allowed him to thrive in pictures like Michael Mann’s Thief, Rob Reiner’s Misery, Buzz Kulik’s Brian’s Song, and Karel Reisz’s The Gambler, the downside was that when his career hit a rough patch, he didn’t have the clout to dig himself out of it as quickly as many of his peers could.
As a result, during one of those lean periods, he agreed to play a human detective in Graham Baker’s Alien Nation, a buddy cop sci-fi where his grizzled veteran was partnered up with an extra-terrestrial. The premise had potential, but when he was asked for his recollections by The AV Club, Caan bristled at its mere mention.
“Why the fuck… Why would you bring up that?” he asked, barely concealing his rage. “I mean, I loved Mandy Patinkin. Mandy was a riot. It was a lot of silly stuff, creatively. And we had this English director who I wasn’t really that fond of. I mean, nice guy, but it was just one of those things where, you know, you don’t quit, you get through it. It certainly wasn’t one of… I wouldn’t write it down as one of my favourite movies.”
He did at least find it within his heart to admit that Alien Nation was “pretty popular,” with the genre-bender doing a tidy turn at the box office before growing its cult classic status on home video, which eventually gave rise to a franchise that spanned several made-for-TV movies, a series, comic books, and novels.
Caan wasn’t even sold on the project at the time, but after only making three movies in the previous five years, he needed the work. He was too ashamed to even tell anyone at the time that it was about aliens, admitting it took him “about two weeks” before he could say the word out loud, and when people would ask him “what the picture was about,” he’d say, “it’s about two hours.”
It didn’t result in his greatest performance, with the actor abandoning all hope once the cameras were rolling: “I gave up trying to figure things out, and became an actor trying to get through a movie.” He achieved those modest goals, but he much preferred not talking about it at all.
