When I was given my choice of interviews with the cast of Bounty Killer, I chose Beverly D’Angelo. Somehow in 14 years of entertainment journalism our paths had never crossed. D’Angelo plays a character in one scene, Lucille, a bartender who gives the main bounty killer some important information, but she joins good company of big cameos like Gary Busey and Alexa Vega.
Bounty Killer is from writer/director Henry Saine, telling a post-apocalyptic story in a world where bounty killers are celebrities competing for the highest body count. Christian Pitre stars as Mary Death, and D’Angelo was happy to tout this vehicle for her. Anyone watching me on the phone probably saw animated hearts shoot out my ears when Ellen Griswold herself playfully chastised me for watching the R-rated Vacation as a child. We talked about American History X, Hair, Every Which Way But Loose and “Entourage” too. Bounty Killer is available On Demand and in select theaters Friday.
Crave Online: This means a lot to me because you must have been in my house every day growing up. I would watch those Vacation movies over and over.
Beverly D’Angelo: Relentlessly? How old were you?
in the ‘80s I would have been about 10 when the first two were on video.
Well, the first one was R-rated, Fred. You shouldn’t have done that?
And look where I am today being an entertainment journalist!
Look where you are today. It made you the man you are today.
It sure did. My parents were pretty cool about movies.
That’s the bizarre thing about that movie because it was R-rated and the anticipated audience was Chevy Chase’s audience and “Saturday Night Live.” It was a satire and there was murder, there’s theft, there’s adultery, there’s incest. There’s all kinds of stuff in it but I was living in Italy at the time. I got a phone call from my friend. He said, “You’re the number one movie this week.” I went, “What?” He said, “Yeah, Vacation.” I said, “Huh?” It was a movie I almost didn’t do. My husband at the time told me I should do it. The Italian duke that I was married to said I should do it. He thought it was funny.
Wow, you would have missed out on four if you hadn’t done that.
I would have missed out on a huge part of my life. I was embarrassed almost the first time I did it, for the first one. At the time also in Hollywood, it was a big time for drama. Comedies were considered eh, kind of less than. I’d just done Coal Miner’s Daughter and all this stuff and gotten nominations for a lot of stuff so it was kind of like, “Oh, you’re really going to do a comedy with dogs and animals and kids?” All the things you’re not supposed to do. I was 29 years old and playing the mother of a 15-year-old but I’m really glad I did because of, first of all, my lifelong friendship with Chevy and his family and also it just connected me with the culture in a way that I never would be connected like this.
I think I was a pretty sophisticated 10-year-old because I got it.
Well, you are sophisticated, Fred. I can tell.
So obviously I have a lot of Vacation questions but to be fair I have to ask about Lucille. When I saw your scene in Bounty Killer, I wondered if you had met Henry Saine years ago, could you have done the Lucille movie?
I did meet Henry years ago. Henry was in the art department on “Entourage.”
Is that how he reached out to you when he was making the movie?
I don’t know. I became aware of it when he wrote a graphic novel, Mary Death, and then he made a short, a cross between animation and live-action short that I watched and I was just blown away. He came over to my house with Christian Pitre and I just fell in love with both of them. To this day they’re both really close friends of mine.
Do you know why he saw you as Lucille?
You’d have to ask him.
Did he pitch you the role, what the scene was going to be?
Oh yeah, he did offer it to me but the thing about Henry is the way he works, he brings people to him and it’s like a family gets formed. There were T-shirts made that said “In Saine We Trust.” And Christian’s the best. She’s authentic. She’s a wonderful actress. I really want people to see her in this movie and plus, don’t you want to see a movie where the people responsible for the apocalypse are the corporate heads, and the cultural superstars are the bounty killers that take them down?
Yes, but I sort of wanted to see Lucille get in on the action.
Next one.
Did you shoot your scene in just one day?
I think I was there a couple days.
You still give that scene your all. It’s so full of history.
It had to do with Christian, Henry and the whole scene. Everybody was emotionally involved. Everybody brought everything they could to the picture. We had a limited budget, we had limited time and everyone on that picture was devoted to it. Nobody was just sleepwalking or anything like that.
It is a limited budget but we should tell people that all of the action is clear and you can see it.
It’s really worth seeing it on the big screen. It’s released same day on demand but it’s really worth seeing on a big screen. I’ve seen it on both, on home screen and in a theater and it’s just big. It’s big.
In the bigger budget movies now, everything is shaking around and you can’t see anything.
I think it’s because it’s a human interest story. There’s a love story. There are very human things about it so I wouldn’t classify it as an action picture per se. That isn’t the point. It’s not gratuitous action. All the action happens as an extension of who the characters are which is a little bit different than just piecing these characters together so they do these actions.
And science fiction is supposed to be a comment on where we are today, really.
Now see what a sophisticate you are? You’re incredibly sophisticated.
So when you hear Ed Helms is going to play your son in the new Vacation, how does that make you feel?
We’ve been talking about this Vacation movie for 5,292 years. I know that in June it looked like it was really close. They got Christina Applegate, they closed the deal with her, they closed the deal with Ed. Then Chevy and I went in to negotiations and the next thing we heard was they’re rewriting the script so we’ll see what happens. Chevy and I want to work together no matter what, somehow, someway and maybe this’ll be it.
