The 2003 movie that officially broke Christopher Walken: “I don’t want to go back”
As a general rule of thumb, if a filmmaker offers Christopher Walken a role in their movie, then Christopher Walken will accept a role in their movie, because that’s what he does.
By his own admission, since he doesn’t have any children or any hobbies, he’s devoted his life to his work. Why has one of modern cinema’s greatest character actors made so many abominable films? Because he was asked to do them, and Walken loves his job so much that he’ll almost never say no.
It has happened, though, but only once. Even though they’d already worked together three times, the Academy Award winner declined a part in Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales because he didn’t want to travel to Italy for the shoot, which is about as valid a reason as any for a born and bred New Yorker.
He didn’t turn down the title role in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, but he was vetoed by the studio, and he didn’t turn down Renny Harlin’s Cliffhanger, either, although he still quit. There are even movies that Walken has made that’ll never be released, but as it turns out, there is a specific condition that would most likely cause him to instantly reject any production.
“I do like to work,” he admitted. “Some jobs are better than others. That’s the thing: you really don’t know. I’ve enjoyed making movies for lots of different reasons. Sometimes, it was the other people. Sometimes, it was the fact that I was really good in it. Sometimes, it was the location, Sometimes, it was the paycheque.”
That’s a set of criteria that covers just about everything, which explains why Walken has been so prolific for so long. However, as much as he’s enjoyed some of his work because of the locations, there was one film that had the opposite effect, and swore him off ever returning to a similar neck of the woods again.
“There can be reasons why you’d like to avoid it the next time,” the veteran suggested. “Like the jungle. I’ve made a couple of movies in the jungle, and I don’t want to go back to the jungle.” Walken has made precisely two films in the jungle, and since everybody knows what one of them is, it’s got to be the other.
For his first filmic visit, he won an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, the movie that put him on the map and gave him everything that followed. Apart from that time it gave him the shits, he hasn’t spoken negatively about his experience, with most of the shooting unfolding on location in the jungles and forests around the River Kwai. By the process of elimination, that points the finger of blame squarely at Peter Berg’s 2003 caper, The Rundown.
Dialling the Walken way past 11, the actor hammed it up for the cheap seats as the villainous Cornelius Bernard Hatcher, who runs a mining operation in Brazil. As you can infer from its international title, Welcome to the Jungle, despite the action being shot in Hawaii and not the country in which it was set, the dense foliage was more than enough to swear him off the jungle for life.
