The director Val Kilmer was totally foolish to turn down: “I should have done that job”
He may have been known as Hollywood’s ‘bad boy’ heartthrob, but the late great Val Kilmer was a dedicated actor who often pursued opportunities that were outside of his comfort zone.
Kilmer would often find strange collaborators, but felt that he needed to ‘click’ with someone before developing a strong working relationship.
His passing led many of his fans to fondly remember some of his most famous works in classics like Top Gun, Heat, Tombstone, and Batman Forever, but these more commercial films represent a fraction of his filmography, for Kilmer was often someone who would take chances on unusual material and test his abilities as an actor.
Although he was sometimes labelled as hard to work with, he rarely turned in a performance that was not completely engaging, and where some movie stars struggle to maintain their authority while working with established directors, Kilmer embraced the opportunity to work with filmmakers whom he respected. Between Ron Howard, Michael Mann, Francis Ford Coppola, Tony Scott, David Mamet, and John Dahl, he certainly pursued working with the best of the best, however, the actor would later admit that it was “foolish” of him to turn down the opportunity to work with the great Robert Altman.
“I should’ve done that job,” Kilmer said, “What I learned from him, and then from my own mistakes about directors or other actors-especially with directors, they go really fast. Spielberg, as prolific as he’s been, he’s only going to make six or seven more movies, but we don’t think of directors that way. We think of them as prolific as actors. But actors can make three movies a year.”
He mentioned that there was a particular role that Altman had asked him to play, while also joking that the Academy Award-nominated filmmaker “used to live in a trailer” at the time. Altman may be a filmmaker so influential that the term Altmanesque has been used to describe films that utilise his style, but he was not exactly at the height of his career during the time that Kilmer was peaking in popularity.
Kilmer broke into cinema after his amazing debut role in Top Secret!, a wild spy comedy from the brilliant directing team of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, who had just worked together to helm the hit spoof film Airplane! Although Altman had been praised for his work in the 1970s, particularly McCabe & Mrs Miller and Nashville, he faced a significant decline in popularity after 1980’s Popeye became a massive commercial and critical flop.
It took him some time to restore his reputation, which may have explained why Kilmer wasn’t able to take time out of his own busy schedule to seriously consider a collaboration, and although the former had a few ‘80s films like Streamers and Secret Honor that would go on to become objects of cult affinity, he didn’t launch a true comeback until 1992’s The Player, an acerbic takedown of the Hollywood studio system that starred Tim Robbins as a murderous executive.
Kilmer mentioned that he was a fan of Altman’s Gosford Park, but the Oscar-nominated costume drama was one of the last films he ever did, and it was only a few months after the release of his final film, 2006’s A Prairie Home Companion, that the filmmaker passed away. The timelines of their careers may not have been reasonably aligned, but there would seemingly be many possibilities of what Altman and Kilmer could have done together.
