James Wilder Interview

INTERVIEW WITH JAMES WILDER FROM TheCelebrityCafe.com ARCHIVES

DM) Well, most people would start out by asking you about "Melrose Place", but I find it rather interesting that only a few years before you were on television, you were performing as a street performer.

JW) Yes, I was a street performer in Sausalito, California. I did an entire one-man show with chain escapes and machete juggling and all kinds of crazy stuff. That was the germinating seed of my performance days. I wrote this one-man show for people who would just gather around. So the benefit was that if it went well, you instantly got a standing ovation. If it wasn't, then they kept on walking! People would part with what they felt they experienced, which is really a neat sort of exchange system between the performer and the artist, and I like this. It becomes unbalanced later on, but...

DM) So was that just a little weird, having to walk into the middle of nowhere and perform?

JW) Yeah, I guess so. They say that the biggest fear among people, even more than death, is public speaking.

DM) And you just walked into the middle of nowhere and started to play with the machete?

JW) Well, I started doing this one-man show, and the machete sort of evolved out of that. I find it an interesting concept, the public speaking being a higher fear than death. I guess it took a lot of effort to confront an audience, and since there wasn't a particular audience per se, you're just confronting yourself performing on a sidewalk. Then an audience gathers if so inclined. And if they do, it's just an audience of two or three; then it grows to audiences in the thousands--That's when it becomes a really fruitful venture. When I was fourteen, I was booked to play the Moulin Rouge in Paris, which was just a blast.

DM) How did that come about?

JW) Somebody spotted me performing in Ghiradelli Square in San Francisco. I was working with Harry Anderson. He'd take the stage from 1:00 to 1:30 and then I'd take the stage at 2:00. It was by audition only, and you'd have to get a permit. It was very sophisticated street performance, so to speak. It was great, it was a blast. It was a huge experience in my life, having so many people there that dig you...because what doesn't work, you throw out right away. So that's why it was the beginning of stage performance for me, then on to plays and then to television. When you're doing your own show, you can't buy your own equipment for a one-man show. You have to make it, create it, so since that started, it contaminated everything that entered my life. I was riding unicycles. I built this ten-speed unicycle at one time. Walks became more popular as a means of raising money for charity, and I was going to ride my unicycle like that.

DM) A ten-speed unicycle at that!

JW) Yeah, it's a bit of a wild concept, because there's less ratio gears. Every time you want to change the gears, you have to get up to change them. You can't coast, but you get a lot more ground covered per revolution.

DM) Taking the question to a tangent, how has that experience affected your career as of late?

JW) Well, I think I've become sort of the curator of things that move into my area. I find that with my work, with the kind of films that I've done as of late... for example, this one film I did with Michael Reiner, Mariel Hemingway and Jeff Goldblum was completely improvisational. The entire movie was 100% improvisational. On the one hand, as an actor, you're going, "Great. No lines to learn, I love it." The other end of the spectrum is, you show up on the set, now what do you say. You have to do it on the spot and it has to somehow have some cohesiveness, because it has to have cut points. There's one huge master that cuts with nothing else. The improvisational aspect of street performing, and live stage performing, is hugely helpful for doing improv and improvisational films.

DM) Now, in addition, you're pretty handy from having that experience, though.

JW) Oh yeah, I built my own home. Either it's designed, built or created by me. One reason was because of pure economics, as it's far less expensive to build it or make it on your own, on retail consumer end. On the other side, there's a whole creative element that goes into a project... it's yours, it's got your thumbprint on it--nobody can take that away from you. It's exactly what you want. The only thing that's working against you is time, because when you're building something, the element of time weighs in quite considerably.

DM) Nothing that you're describing seems to match up with the stereotypical Hollywood lifestyle. With the passion that you talk about in building, I could actually see you going into a career path of a sculptor, carpenter or painter. Something more manual, so to speak.

JW) You know, I was actually doing work with welded sculpture. Just like Florence leaned heavily towards its artists, San Francisco was the same way. It leans heavier towards the sculptors, painters, poets, just curators of art. And so, growing up in that environment sort of endeared every element to me. My mother is European, and so I would go back with her to Europe, and that whole culture also influenced me. So my roots were raised in the arts, and the natural progression said, "To make money, come down to this end." These roots were, I rooted myself down as a performer, and the artist's roots stick with you your entire life. That's sort of along those lines. However, what gets the most viewership is the people you're directly associated with. When you think hamburger, you go to McDonald's; when you think soft drink, you immediately think of Coca-Cola. But it isn't necessarily what might be the best hamburger or the best soft drink. It's product identity, and product identity is fundamentally based on heavy commercialization.

DM) Considering that idea, what do you feel are your two most popular pieces, one being the most popular artistically, and the other being the most popular commercially?

JW) I really like the series I did with Sarah Jessica Parker and Joe Morton, called "Equal Justice"; another project I liked doing was a black and white film called "The Coriolis Effect." And then I would say that the biggest brand identification that I've ever experienced was doing "Melrose Place." Everybody in the world watches this show and loves it. So that was an interesting synthesis.

DM) Was it frustrating that it might not have been as artistically what you wanted?

JW) Well, I certainly had that viewpoint, but one thing that I really know is that the "New Hollywood" that wasn't "Old Hollywood" was that, as in "Old Hollywood" it was taboo for stage actors to do television and film, and it was taboo for television and film actors to do stage work, but you do it once just to prove that you can do it. Once you've entered the realm of television, you've been over-exposed. The lack of exposure creates more of a reach, so if you become too easily identifiable, nobody's going to go to see you. Well, those taboos have been shattered. Today you have Marky Mark; the movie stars of today are television stars as well. You'll find everybody from Merrill Streep and others (I don't want to go name for name), but they're doing a "Movie of the Week", or they're doing TNT. It's not taboo anymore to jump around. It's multimedia. It's okay to do albums, movies, and television, whatever you'd like. Now it isn't creating a loss in the area, it's creating more in the area, so that the more products somebody creates, the more they're heralded, as opposed to being punished for creating too much product. Before, you had to have one hit every two years--that was the movie star formula--and now you have people who are major, major movie stars, and they are making in the millions of dollars putting out three or four movies a year. It's all calculated risk; it's all commerce. When it comes to art and commerce, I kind of liked the blend.