Val Kilmer names the four directors “you live your life to work with”
The bigger a star any actor becomes, the more likely they are to work with the biggest directors. It’s an obvious trajectory for any aspiring performer to aim for, which allowed Val Kilmer to collaborate with some true cinematic heavyweights.
After debuting in the classic parody Top Secret!, Kilmer’s visibility reached new heights when he co-starred with Tom Cruise in smash hit blockbuster Top Gun, which coincidentally leads into the only one of the four filmmakers he said “you live your life to work with” that he never got around to being directed by.
Even though he had a habit of getting in his own way on occasion and earning the dreaded tag of being difficult to work with, Kilmer nonetheless gathered together an impressive list of behind-the-camera colleagues that numbered Tony Scott multiple times, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, and Werner Herzog among others.
However, he was still left with a tinge of jealousy brought on by a newfound friend he’d first encountered on the set of one of the biggest box office bombs of the 2000s, which reunited Kilmer with a director he was already familiar with. Unfortunately, the results were nothing short of disastrous when the historical epic Alexander failed to live up to its billing as a passion project decades in the making.
“Colin Farrell, now who is a friend, has just worked with ten really interesting people: Michael Mann, Robert Towne, who never makes movies, Terrence Malick. Oliver Stone,” he explained to IGN. “Those are the last four guys, I mean, you live your life to work with one of those guys once and he’s just, it’s been three years, they are saying he’s the guy and there is always going to be another one.”
Of course, Kilmer was a key part of Mann’s seminal crime thriller Heat, he lent support in Stone’s aforementioned Alexander as well as The Doors, while he eventually got his chance to work with Malick on 2017’s experimental romantic drama Song to Song.
On the other hand, Farrell barrelled through that bucket list by starring in Stone’s Alexander, Malick’s The New World, Mann’s Miami Vice, and Towne’s Ask the Dust in the space of less than two years. Kilmer is right in saying the latter doesn’t make a whole lot of movies, but his old Top Gun buddy Cruise ended up becoming a fixture of Towne’s filmography.
As well as the A-list action star producing Ask the Dust, Towne was a credited screenwriter on Cruise’s Days of Thunder, The Firm, Mission: Impossible, and Mission: Impossible II. Not only that, but Cruise collaborated with Stone and earned an Oscar nomination for Born on the Fourth of July and played against type as a contract killer in Mann’s riveting crime thriller Collateral, proving once again that Hollywood is a lot smaller than most people think.
