This hectic battle scene was created for the MMORPG Jumpgate Evolution – the unreleased sequel to Jumpgate: The Reconstruction Initiative.

For a wallpaper-sized version of the image (3000px wide), click here.

A greater threat is found in the heart of their capital Dokuzen where factional fighting is threatening to tear their society apart. On the one side Jaken, leader of the powerful Tadayoshi clan who wants to subdue the pesky magic weavers and take over the Elven council. The magic-weavers’ leader, Sumiko, has plans of her own and no sense of restraint.

In the middle of their conflict is our protagonist Sendatsu, son of the ambitious and sadistic Jaken. Sendatsu is not, as he will keep telling us over and over again, a hero. He just wants to stay home with his children and live a quiet, domestic life. What a surprise that despite his protestations, Sendatsu will be thrust out of his comfort zone and into adventure. It couldn’t be that this unlikely hero will discover that he has strengths he never imagined could it?

After he is sent unceremoniously the world of the humans, Sendatsu meets Rhiannon and Huw, a pair of performers from the Forlish lands to the South.  They are on a quest to save the land of Vales from the imperialist ambitions of the Forlish King, Ward. It seems Ward has plans to trick Vales into submitting to his rule by harassing their villages with teams of soldiers dressed as bandits. A few months of raping and pillaging and the Velsh will be begging for his protection. Unless, that is, Rhiannon and Huw can unite the Velsh to stand strong against his attacks. Could Sendatsu be the key to their success?

Duncan Lay.

I am sure that a great deal of what I did not like about Bridge of Swords comes down to personal taste. I, for example, do not particularly enjoy detailed descriptions of battles. Especially when given in forensic detail. Sendatsu’s ninja-like fighting style was a little bit thrilling, the first three times I read about it but, after a while, I began to wish that he would just go home and play with his children for a bit. And if I had to read about one more soldier having his guts spilled onto his shoes, I was going to throw the book across the room. I am forgetting to mention the thrilling accounts of village fortification which take up a third of the book. But perhaps I am being ungrateful – at least now I can be confident that if anyone ever tries to attack my village, I will have a pretty good idea of how to defend it.

Lay also seems determined to make his novel funny, but for me, most of the humour falls flat:

“‘You need to re-plaster the back wall with pig dung, then fertilise our field.’

‘I always get the shit jobs,’ Bedwin grumbled…”

Boom-tish.

It is probably pretty clear that I really disliked Bridge of Swords. Where Lay is innovative, he is confusing – the Japanese culture of the elves lying somewhere north of his Welsh-like land of Vales for example – and where he is clichéd and predictable, he is usually writing about his main characters.  If, however, you enjoy epic battles, Japanese sword play, and endless camping, this may be the perfect choice for you.

- Amelia Gledhill

One of them was about shenanigans on the set of Star Trek Into Darkness – where he fell victim to a prank of epic proportions, instigated by Mr Simon Pegg, also one of Popcorn Taxi’s favourite guests.

You may have heard some rumours and variations of this story , but here’s the full story of ‘Neutron Cream’, straight from Karl Urban’s mouth:

Karl Urban:

“All right, I’ll tell you this story; it’s not so much dirt but… we were shooting Star Trek 2 – there’s not much I can say about it but I can say this: in San Francisco, in this top secret facility, you know, the kind of place they fire laser beams at shit and see what happens. They’d been shooting there a week and I came in and went out for drinks the night before with Pine and Pegg and those guys and they’re talking about this ‘neutron cream’, to combat the radiation.

So, I’m like, ‘What?! Radiation?’ And they said, ‘Oh yeah, there’s a low dose of radiation that comes from this facility and they’ve given us this cream.’ And I was like, ‘Ah… ok,’ and for some reason I just bought it, of course.

So I turn up the next day and my make-up artist said, ‘I’ve got your neutron cream here: you’re going to need to take that, you’re going to need to wear that when you’re on set.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, ok, no worries’ thinking, ‘F#&k! This must be true – she’s this f#$king 60-year old Spanish make-up artist’ – f$&king lying bitch!’

“So I get half made-up and then get called to set to do a block-through – and for anyone who doesn’t know, before you actually go and shoot a scene, you get just the director and the actors walk on set and we figure out what we’re going to do. Most block-throughs last 15 minutes, 20 minutes max, and then it’s you’re cracking on, you’re shooting it. For some reason, this block-through was the longest block-through we had on the entire shoot – it was like an hour and a half… and I swear to god I had radiation sickness by the end of this block-through. I was feeling woozy, because I hadn’t had my cream on.

But, I went back to the make-up chair and got my make-up on and before I went on set, my make-up artist dabbed me with dots, all over my face. And I walk on set and there’s a couple of others who’ve just got a couple, one or two dots here and there, but I look like I’m a f#*king freckled, measled kinda guy with these dots all over my face.

And before I got to set, I have to do some press, so I’ve got to go and do the press with these f#&king dots all over my face?! So anyway, my make-up artist comes and just wipes them off, then we start and do a couple of takes and then she comes back and re-applies the dots all over my face and then the first AD, Tommy Gormley, this Scottish guy goes, (imitates his Scottish accent) ‘All right! Come on now crew, let’s shake it out! Let’s shake it out!’ And I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ And he goes, ‘You’ve gotta shake it out, help get the neutron radiation, you’ve got to shake it out!’

So then the crew’s standing there like this (shakes his body frantically) and I’m standing there shaking – as if shaking your body is going to get rid of the f#&king radiation! So, and then I periodically through the day, I’m not feeling too good, so I start shaking, here and there, spasms – and I’m subsequently told that these guys are just f#&king pissing themselves laughing.

So we got to lunch, come back and we have to do this public service announcement. So, Quinto and Pine go first and they have to read these cue cards for a camera and what we’re doing is a public services community announcement about this place, and I’m listening to them and they’re talking about, ‘Look, despite what you’ve heard in the community, this place is actually really safe.’ And I’m thinking, ‘What the f#*k is this place?!’

So then it’s my turn, for John Cho and I to come and do our public service announcement and so we stand there, and they’ve got the cue cards and we start reading them and it sort of goes on to say, ‘We all just want to make sure you come to this NORAD facility, you have fun and it’s important to remember most importantly that you’ve… been…’ and then they pull the last card away and it says, ‘Had!’ (Audience laughs)

And they f#&king pissed themselves, pissed themselves! The entire crew, J.J., everyone’s just laughing their arses off… and I can find it funny now.

But it was elaborate, very elaborate, and it all started because Simon f#&king Pegg on Day One of working on this amazing nuclear f#&king, high security facility, turned to Chris Pine in the make-up chair and said, ‘Oh have you got your neutron cream, mate?’.

(Audience laughs)

‘Neutron cream?’ ‘Yeah, for the radiation, have you got your neutron cream?’ And he got Pine for a good five or ten minutes – and he kept it going. Then Pine thinks, ‘Wow! This is f#&king great!’

So then, every day when somebody would come to set, one of the new cast members would come to shoot on this location, they’d get got, and of course, I was there on the last day, so I got it at its most elaborate form. They had f#&king radiation gum, they had the proper cream, they had t-shirts, they… and it was… so yeah, Simon Pegg will keep… he’ll f#&king keep, because I remember these things… I’ve got a long memory.”

 And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of Neutron Cream.

Tweeted by @SimonPegg, showing him with another victim, Benedict Cumberbatch

This story first appeared on Popcorn Taxi’s website.

“For me, the ‘Halo’ universe is an amazing opportunity for the intersection” of “mythmaking and technology,” Spielberg said via a video.

Here’s what the new Xbox Console, the ‘Xbox One’ (not the 720, dammit!) looks like.

Halo has had a long journey coming to the screen – it was slated for a big screen release, under the auspices of producer Peter Jackson. District 9 director Neill Blomkamp shot some test footage (Weta built a warthog) but development indicated that the film would be too costly.

The Web Series Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn, recently released via Machinima, and now available on BD/DVD, won a Streamy for best online series, with a budget of just under $USD 10 million. It was going to be the ‘stepping stone’ to the big screen Halo, but now – it’s coming to TV.

Weta’s Warthog

Via: Hero Complex

The extended cut. Lots to like here.

These days, his involvement seems to be all that is required when you want a project greenlit. Of course, there are some who hate what he, a non-Trekkie, has done to Star Trek, but for the most part, regular folks seem to enjoy it. What will he do to Star Wars? Take out as much CGI as possible, that’s pretty much guaranteed.

JJ began a gruelling worldwide tour to promote Star Trek Into Darkness with a visit to Australia, and faced a barrage of questions from some of the internet’s finest minds. Here’s the choicest cuts from a roundtable Q&A that JJ  hosted at the Park Hyatt Sydney, just across the water from the Sydney Opera House.

Q: When you cast Benedict Cumberbatch in the role, what did you see in Benedict to play that role? Because he didn’t have much background in cinema.

JJ: We were looking for an actor to play our villain and we just wanted to have someone ideally who didn’t just feel like the two-dimensional bad guy. We looked around and Damon Lindelof said, ‘you really should check out this guy in Sherlock‘, which I had not seen. So I watched Sherlock and was obviously blown away. We sent the pages and he auditioned and it was just unnecessary. And we cast him. He’s obviously just extraordinary.

Q: What advice do you have for aspiring filmmakers?

JJ: I would say the following thing, which is that when I was a kid this kind of question was a tricky answer because, you know, I guess the best thing you could say is keep writing and keep trying to write a great script. Now you can just make your movie. That’s the thing that’s so crazy. There are so many opportunities, tools and resources that it’s unbelievable. The thing that you’re recording this conversation with can be used to make a movie. No, of course it’s not a Canon 5D or Red Cam but the fact is most everyone has access to some form of moviemaking so the beautiful answer now is – make your movie. There’s nothing stopping you. You could actually create the thing using off the shelf software and hardware. And I understand that not everyone can afford that equipment but it’s readily available. So whether it’s about renting or borrowing or owning and anyone it seems has within their reach the tools to access their movie. So I would say make your movie and distribute it to the world the second you’re finished with it.

It’s an amazing thing how many movies at Bad Robot we’ve seen and filmmakers we’ve met with simply because we saw their work. There’s a filmmaker we’re working with now from Germany, we saw his stuff online and talked to him and flew him in. He’s doing some work with us now. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it’s guaranteed but my advice is follow your bliss. Make your movie. If it’s good it will get noticed. 

Q: JJ, you seem to have a real passion and love of the science fiction genre. Are we ever going to see a J.J. Abrams rom-com? Or a J.J. Abrams romance?

JJ: It’s a weird thing, it’s not seen this way, there is something kind of romantic and comedic about Star Trek. I know it’s not an obvious rom-com and I’m not trying to sell it as that, but when you think about it, my favourite movies have incredible amounts of comedy in them, even though you might not think of them as comedies. And I think the fun for me about working on this was it did everything I love in one movie. If there was a great movie that was just about people – I would love to do something. When I wrote Felicity -

- I’m really glad Felicity came up.

JJ: That’s very sweet. Thank you. There’s something incredibly sweet and fun about that. My favourite films – whether it’s The Philadelphia Story or Jerry Maguire – movies that I’ve just really loved that haven’t got a special effect to be found, and it’s just about people. I mean, I would love to do that. Whether I would write it or not, I don’t know. But that would be a fun thing to do for sure.

Q: Really, really enjoyed Trek and I’m not a huge Trek fan, but one thing I loved about where you took this – and I’m not going to spoil anything – is they’re not quite perfect, the characters. Was that an allure for you to kind of go back to this and not quite be at those mythical versions of these characters yet?

JJ:Thank you for saying that. I, like you, was never really a Trek fan. I never really got it. It was a little boring to me, frankly. I don’t know why you didn’t like it, but I was just never interested in it. And I tried. Really. My friends loved it so I was like, ‘this time I’m going to get it’. And I’d sit down and watch an episode and be like ‘nope’, and I’d just go.

But the thing for me is that, I think at the core of it, the imperfection is the thing that makes me feel like I have a way in. I never had that swagger that Kirk had so I wasn’t him. I was never as smart or logical as Spock so I wasn’t him. I wasn’t as grumpy as Bones, I was never Sulu or whatever. I might have been Chekov but I didn’t feel it. I just never found my way in. So that imperfection – and you know, Chris Pine, and all the cast actually, but Chris and Zach at the centre – they’re so willing to be vulnerable and not have the answer and be terrified, and they’re never afraid to be seen as imperfect.

A lot of these handsome young actors want to protect their image and that actually can hurt their image sometimes because they’re not willing to be as vulnerable. So for me the thing that makes Chris and Zach so cool is their willingness to be uncool.

That uncool is the imperfection that gives me my on ramp to get into the story.

Q: I want to touch on the mystery that surrounds this film and the mystery that surrounds a lot of your work.  I want to know, in our world now, in 2013, how important is it to have mystery considering our whole lives are kind of open for everyone?

JJ: Not only is that obviously the way we live but there’s an odd sense of entitlement to information. Where it’s like: if you don’t have it, it’s an affront somehow. Like, ‘how can they not be telling me this information? I want it now!’.

But for me, the only thing I care about in my life, like I don’t harbour secrets in my life, I just want the moviegoing experience to be a good one. When people go to see a movie for the first time, it should be their first time. It shouldn’t feel like it’s the confirmation viewing. Or like a second viewing.

I cannot tell you – I’m sure you’ve felt this – how many times I’ve gone to a movie, seen it, and I was like, ‘holy shit, that literally was what happened in the trailer’. It’s not like mis-direction or like almost telling me, it literally was the movie in short form. I feel like to me there is nothing more frustrating then seeing the movie long before you see the movie. So we worked really hard talking to the crew and the cast and limiting the distribution of scripts as much as we could. Just to say ‘let’s respect the moviegoer’. Let this be something that actually gets to be a thrill for them.

By the way, there’s no guarantee that it’s gonna be a thrill. But at least give them a shot. Let it be fun. Let it be a ride. Later on we can all talk about that stuff. But there’s this weird thing, it reminds me of being in school when certain people would – not hoard information – but had power over knowing stuff. It was this weird thing of claiming the one who revealed the information, and it was a weird power play. But in movies there’s no value in it other then being the first person who ruined it for people. So for me I just think the more fun thing is let it be a surprise. Let it be fun.

I’ll say one more thing and then I’ll shut up, which is that there are certain people who look at the back of the book first to see whodunnit or whatever the thing is. And it’s like, at least let that be a choice for people. But when it’s force fed and you can’t help but stumble upon spoilers, I just think it ruins the experience.

Q: First of all, thanks for making the Star Trek movies that me as a life long Star Trek fan have wanted to see.

JJ: Oh, you’re very kind. Thank you very much.

I mean, I’ve tried to watch it with my wife. ‘Trust me it’s really good’. And every time I’ve done that, she’s disliked me a little bit more. But with your films I can take her along as your average punter and she enjoys it. So in this film especially, there’s a lot of nods that Star Trek fans will get that other people won’t get. How did you go about striking a balance so you’re not losing your average joe and pleasing us?

JJ:Well thank you for that. I will say that I couldn’t have done that because I didn’t really know those things. But luckily the writers do and Bob Orci particularly. I would say he’s insane about Star Trek. He knows everything, like the arcane details you cannot believe he knows, without having to reference and look up stuff. Every once in a while there’s something he’s like, ‘I dunno’, and I’m like ‘what?’

He knows everything. So he’s the guy. And the other writers in fairness as well really do know what are the things, the characters, the references to ships and like the Section 31 reference. I wouldn’t have known Section 31 but they of course did. So there are things that you don’t need to know. My favourite movies reference things outside the purview of the film itself and it expands the world and makes it feel like it exists in a universe. Certainly this movie does that as well.

Some of these references, if you happened to see the movie that we did in 2009, if you happened to watch the series you’ll get an extra bonus. But it’s all icing.

This movie was made for you to not have to of seen anything. In fact, I would say our goal was to make a movie that doesn’t rely no the last film.Especially because a lot of sequels that I’ve seen make this mistake of assuming you care. And sort of starting the story without really re-investing you in the characters. So suddenly you’re in the second act and you’re like, ‘there was no way in’. And I think it’s critical that we say, this is it’s own thing. If it works, it’s going to work on its own merits. If you happen to have seen any earlier incarnations, great. But not required.

This one works fine on its own but it also works as a companion piece to a certain other film in the series. How was it finding that sort of balance? All those certain reversals in the film, if you have seen that film, it gives you an extra joy seeing this. ‘Oh, he’s done this’.

JJ:Yeah, I’ve been in a theatre with an audience watching this movie and it was just fun to hear the reaction – the sort of screams and gasps at certain moments. So I would love to preserve that for people if it’s even possible. But again, who knows what anyone will think?

Having said that, it was very important to us that we honour what came before. And again at the same time, I wasn’t someone who honoured it.

I honour it because I respect the fan base and I want to make them happy. So it would be disingenuous of me to say, ‘I totally know where they are, I totally get it’. I never did really. But I work with these people who are those people and I love them. So I feel like it’s a really interesting thing to try and figure out how much to use, how much to discard.

The key to this is something that we came up with when we did the first film, which was don’t discard the thing that those fans love. Don’t deny it, don’t reject it, don’t undo it. Completely embrace it, love it, respect it, honour it, but then we’re also here in this parallel thing, so we’re like moving right alongside them so all this stuff that you love is still there. If you want to, also love this.

I mean, you can have an ice cream cone with two scoops, but if for some reason you don’t like this one and you only love your thing, I get it. We can’t please everyone. We’re doing the best we can. But it really is just a balancing act of trying to figure out how much you use and how much you let lie.

Q: Unlike you, my wife is the bigger Trekkie in the family even though I’m president of the fan club. So that’s a long story. I’m more of a Star Wars person.

JJ: You’re president of the Star Trek fan club even though you’re more of a Star Wars person? Do they know this?

They do. And she’s on the committee of the Star Wars fan club as well. It’s a long story.

JJ: Oh my God. Do you have kids?

No, not yet.

JJ: By the way, I’m Jewish. My wife is Irish Catholic. That’s a bigger problem.

My kids are probably gonna love Babylon 5. Who knows. Anyway, the scale of the film was massive. Why so big and what was the influence behind it? The sets were so big, everything was big and it was fantastic.

JJ: Well thank you. Yes, the scope of the movie is huge.

It’s funny. When we were doing the 2009 movie, I didn’t realise this and it took some education and trial and error. I didn’t realise when we were doing it that, for example, to do an establishing shot, you couldn’t show a building or a city, you had to show a planet. Like it was a whole other scale looking at the scope of things. I knew this movie was going to be much bigger. Much broader then the first film. And because of that, the challenge for me was to have a kind of symmetry so that the further we went in terms of scope and scale, the further we would go in terms of intimacy and emotion.

So it was that bizarre thing of, okay, once we knew we were going to be doing whatever, Kronos, we were going to be doing something that was a giant set-piece or a huge chase in San Francisco or any other things that were going to be big action set-pieces, we were always like, ‘well we have to make sure we’re balancing that with the intimate, and the stuff that really connected you to the humanity of the story’. So again, I don’t even remember what comes first.

I remember thinking things like, ‘it would be cool if there’s a big, scary, black stealth version of the Enterprise’, without even knowing what that would be. I remember when we did the first movie and the scene when the shuttle leaves San Francisco, and thinking, ‘God, it would be so great to be in that city. What does it look like in the city?’ and wanting that. Not knowing who’s going to be chasing who or if there was going to be a chase or anything. I also remember talking about why does Uhura stay with Spock? Or how does Kirk become friends with Spock? He got the chair but how do you earn that thing?

Like there are all these huge things, and then these little, small, interior, personal things. So it was all about developing with the writers, how do we use these pieces that exist.

So the scale and the scope, we tried to film things as much as we could practically. We tried to build as many sets as we could. I hated the idea of people standing in front of a green screen and blue screen. So we never did that. You know, there was of course use of blue and green screens within sets but they were tangible things. There was always a set that was built. We built the jungle that they run through in the beginning. It was all practical, much smaller then it looks like in the movie, but we built it.

We tried to use sunlight. A lot of movies that are supposed to be scenes outside are shot interior and your eye just goes, ‘something’s weird about that’. So we tried to shoot things as practically as much as possible. All the chase stuff in cities we shot in actual locations and expanded them. It helped to give a sense of reality to it. But again, like with everything, it was a big, crazy balancing act.

Q: How the film goes with fans is one thing, but what is it that you need to see for Into Darkness to be a success in your eyes? What is it that you’ll go, ‘hmm, I feel good now’?

JJ: Honestly, it’s a very odd thing. And it’s one of the comforts of being back in Sydney. When we did the first movie we never got to really experience the movie with a real audience. We had a lot of friends and family screenings, we would ask people to come in and watch it, but we didn’t have any – and the feeling I have when I think back to that time, how nervous we all were when we showed up and how warm the reception was and how nice it was to watch the movie with a real audience. And it was such a great relief.

So part of it is I feel comfortable just being here again and being able to premiere the movie here. To me, honestly it’s not about a number, it’s not about critical response, it’s just sort of the feeling that people have appreciated and enjoyed the work.

I watched hundreds and hundreds of people put into this project and so I’m honoured to be a part of it. I know that as a director and producer it seems like I make all these decisions and it’s my movie, but it is hardly my movie.

It was a movie made with the work and ideas and inspiration and blood, sweat and tears of literally thousands of people, which is incredible when you think about it. Not just in terms of the production but like the people who did the 3D conversion.

I mean hundreds and hundreds of artists worked on that, doing a spectacular job by the way. So I want to make sure I do them proud.

A lot of times when I’m on the set and it’s incredible, for example when we did the sequence on Kronos, they built this gorgeous set that was very much this giant, old-fashioned Hollywood movie set, which is not frequently done. Often when we go to a set like that, I have to make this look great. Not just for the movie, but so that the crew who’s here goes, ‘yep, wow’.

My fear is that anyone involved in the movie sees it and goes, ‘huh, it looked much better when we were there’. I want people to go, ‘you honoured this amazing work that these artists designed and built and put together’.

So I always feel like I want to do proud the people who are there putting their efforts into it. And again just hoping people like the movie. It’s the simplest thing. How to quantify that, I’m not sure, but it’s the sense of hopefully it all working, because I don’t want to disappoint the people that put their lives into it and many, many hours.

Star Trek Into Darkness is out now in Australian theatres, and out in the US May 15.

“You think you are safe – but you are not!”

Your spaceship of the day – the USS Vengeance, from Star Trek Into Darkness.

Whopping great big wallpaper version here.

This video will have you hooked in the first two seconds.  It’s a revised version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield, on board the International Space Station.

Please note unintentional homage to the work of JJ Abrams…

Ever since I heard Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity described as ‘if Avatar was released in 1927 a week after the Jazz Singer‘ I’ve been super -hyped to see it when it comes out October 2 (in Oz) this year. The trailer is pretty cool – I think it only hints at the big screen 3D experience.  I think Children of Men was a great film – if this is in that league, we really could have something special on our hands.

He’s been working steadily in film and TV ever since his first role as a Sandman in the 1977 TV series of ‘Logan’s Run’, although not quite with the same profile as his Jim Cameron films – and he’s just fine with that.

After getting an explosive introduction to the world of grindhouse when he starred in Robert Rodriguez’s ‘Planet Terror’ (the other half of ‘Gindhouse’ that featured Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Death Proof) in 2007, he was inspired to create his own films.

So, he turned his hand to directing, and script writing. And producing. The ultra low budget result, ‘The Victim’, is out now in Australia on DVD, and a slate of films from BlancBiehn Productions, that he runs with his partner, Jennifer Blanc, are in the pipeline.

O: What hit you as a director for the first time? Having worked with big time directors, did you think back to them and think “Now I know what they were on about”?

M: Well, the thing about directing is that ‘The Victim’ was made in a way that was unlike and movie I’ve ever worked on before. I mean, whenever I’ve worked on a movie, it’s been a normal movie; it’s had a normal budget, it’s had a normal pre-production, it’s had normal casting session, sometimes even rehearsals and a normal schedule. Anything from four, to six or twelve weeks. I think it was twenty weeks that we shot ‘The Abyss’. ‘Aliens’ was I think eleven weeks and ‘The Terminator’ was eleven weeks.

I had twelve days to shoot this. So you can’t really compare them. This was just a mad dash and a mad rush of me running around screaming “Alright, let’s move to the next shot! Let’s go! Let’s go! Set it up! Take one!” — “Can we have another take?” — “No. Let’s move on”. That kind of thing.

It’s not really the optimal way to shoot a movie by any long stretch of the imagination.

When I made it, I don’t know why, but I didn’t really think it was going to be a movie that people really would appreciate. I just thought that nobody would really take notice of it. But then it ended up getting reviewed by The New York Times, and I just thought “this is Crazy!”. I don’t know what I was thinking, I just thought it would slip by and go straight to NetFlix or something like that and it would have just been a fun little experience.

So it’s hard to compare it to anything I’ve done before, but I’m very proud of it because I think it holds up very well for a twelve day shoot.

O: How do you approach being an actor? Do you just want to act, and get paid, or does the fame thing mean anything to you?

M: Well the fame thing doesn’t mean anything to me. And I don’t just want to act and get paid. What I want to do is work with the best people possible. I’ve always considered myself a colour on a painter’s pallet. If I was, like, a yellow, and I was working for Jim Cameron or Billy (William) Friekin or Michael Bay, I wanted to give them the opportunity to use that yellow in as many places as possible and give it as much texture and as many shades of that yellow as possible.

I’ve always been about that creativity, and making the characters that I play real. That to me has always been me Achilles heel sometimes, because a lot of times I would get into fights with directors and stuff because I don’t want to do stuff that is really stupid or doesn’t make any sense. There’s a lot of that sort of stuff that’s around. But I never really wanted to be a movie star either.

I recently was on a trip at the same time David Beckham was traveling around with the LA team. And the adulation that he got with hundreds of people coming up at the airport, and he had to wait, and wait, and he was very gracious with signing autographs. But I couldn’t handle that. Someone like John Travolta, someone like Charlie Sheen or Mel Gibson, they have to live completely different lives, when I can just live a kind of normal life with my wife and kids, and it’s all good.

When I first came to LA, I never thought to ever, ever, ever to achieve the notoriety that I have or to work with the directors I’ve worked with. I thought I’d come over here and and maybe try to be a model or maybe in commercials or stuff like that. I had very, very low aspirations and kind of thought if I could make a living making commercials that would have been fine with me. I probably would have sold my soul for that if someone would have  offered it to me me when was 18 or 19 when I moved over here.

It wasn’t really until I saw ‘Taxi Driver’ and it kind of rocked my world a little bit then I started taking acting a little more seriously.

O: Has the writing or directing of ‘The Victim’ sparked something in you where you want to do it again?

M: Well. No. I don’t think so. I’m not a director, really. I’m an actor. That was an experience that I had, but I think that there are people that are around that are very, very visual and very good. I could go out and get a good director of photography and direct something again. But what I do want to do is produce. I want to be the person that makes the decisions about what movie I make, what the script looks like, who’s cast in it, what the music sounds like and work with other directors.

That’s what I’ve put together and I’m working with directors and we’re putting small movies together that they’re making decisions, but when it comes down to it, I kind of oversee it all and giving them a chance to make their first movies and at the same time be involved and be the final decision maker and be able to say “hey, that’s stupid, that doesn’t make any sense”.

I’ve been in eight or ten really good movies, or five or six really good movies, however you want to look at it, but the rest of it has kind of been so-so, and I’ve been in a lot of really bad movies, and in all those bad movies I’ve had to say things I din’t want to say, I had to be on sets that looked stupid, wear wardrobe that looked ridiculous. No one forced me to do it, I did it because I was getting paid to do it.

But it was very painful for me to do bad work. I was always trying to make it better. Polishing turds is what I call it. I was always rewriting my characters and rewriting the scripts as far as my characters were concerned and that’s how I think I was able to write ‘The Victim’. And I do have a couple of aspirations, I don’t think I would want to direct them but I’ve always wanted to do something about the American Indian and what happened. Sort of a ‘Schindler’s List’ version of that. We’ll see; it’s a long way down the line. For the moment I’m working on small films with young film makers.

O: It sounds great to finally have a say on what’s going with your career and what you’re producing artistically.

M: It really is. They didn’t have a lot of money to make this movie, but the one thing I said when these guys came to me was “I’ll do it, but I have to be able to make all the artistic choices and all the production choices. Where we’re going to shoot it, how we’re going to shoot it, how long we’re going to shoot it for, we’re going to shoot it day for night, blah-blah-blah”, and then I was going to make the decision of who we’re going to sell it to. So I had total control of ‘The Victim’.

I wish I had some more money because it would have been a different movie, but, that said with the money that I had there’s nothing in that movie that I didn’t look at and say “Okay, well if that’s what we gotta go with, then that’s what we gotta go with”.

It’s really the story that’s more important than that kind of stuff. You can have the best special effects in the world but if you don’t have a good story then you don’t have anything.

O: James Cameron comes across as a sort of force of nature – his movies elevated you to stardom, but since then, that kind of success hasn’t repeated itself. I was wondering that if you saw him again today would you initially want to punch him, or hug him?

M: (Laughing) Oh I would want to hug him. I showed Jim ‘The Victim’ actually. Jim is someone who made me, as an actor, in Hollywood. And the movies that I did for him, ‘The Terminator’ and ‘Aliens’, people look back on them as classic movies and he is somebody that I’m very close to and can talk to. Everyone else is kissing his ass these days when it come to doing his movies. And we talked about ‘Avatar’. But I can just be open with him and honest with him because I’ve known him so long.

Robert Rodriguez turned me onto the grindhouse movies and taught me about them. And he’s kind of a force of nature kind of guy too. I saw a guy while I was making ‘The Divide’ with Xavier Gens reading Robert’s book ‘Rebel Without A Crew’, which I had already read, and thought after ‘The Divide’, “maybe I’ll go out and do a little movie like that”. So Robert kind of inspired me, so I gave him a little credit in the movie as ‘Thanks for the inspiration’.

Robert inspired me to make ‘The Victim’ and I would take a bullet for Jim Cameron. And that’s true – I would.

Jim has given me the opportunity to have a full career and make a lot of money and been able to enjoy it with my family and between ‘The Terminator’, ‘Aliens’ and ‘The Abyss’, he made me kind of who I was. He gave me the opportunity to go out and do ‘Tombstone’ and ‘The Rock’ and they’re just iconic films. To this day, what is very interesting about Jim’s movies, especially ‘Aliens’ and ‘The Terminator’, is I get kids that are twenty years old that come up to me all the time, more so than people in their fifties and sixties, that say “I loved Aliens, man. It’s my favourite movie. Hicks is the greatest character”.

Or I’ll be in the gym and will be riding a bike and somebody will tap me on the shoulder, I’ll turn around and it’ll be a twenty year old kid they’ll say “Aren’t you Michael Biehn?”, I’ll say “yeah” and they’ll say “Hi, my name is Kyle-so-and-so, and my Dad and I love your movies”.

Those two movies with Jim have become, I don’t like to use the word, I need to find a better word, but they have become classics. Children love those movies. And there are not a lot of movies that were made back in the eighties that people still look at and remember so well and identify with like ‘The Terminator’ and ‘Aliens’. So I don’t know what would have happened to me with out Jim, it’s the truth. I probably would have done a soap opera some place for twenty years.

O: Having that kind of impact – is that something you get freaked out by, an enduring legacy that’s something beyond just your normal life?

M: I don’t really give it much thought. I din’t really want to be a movie star, I didn’t want to be somebody that could walk down the street and be like Arnold Schwarzenegger and have to sign autographs everywhere they went, I just wanted to be an actor and those films gave me the opportunity. I’ve managed to sort of stay under the radar as far as all that kind of stuff goes. It’s something that I can only describe when I have a twenty year old  come up to me and say “Aliens is my favourite movie of all time”, and when you think of all the movies that have been out the last five years, ten years, whatever, and “Hicks is my favourite character”, this wry smile comes to me like, “Wow, isn’t life interesting”.

It’s kind of almost a spiritual moment. I’m not  a religious person or anything like that at all, but something like that kind of touches the universe for me. It’s not like it feels great and I say “Oh my God, this kid said this to me” when I get home, it just makes me feel warm and makes me feel there is something going on in the universe. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain.

O: I think the more you try to explain it, the less it’ll make sense.

M: (laughing) You’re probably right!

- Oscar Hillerstrom

‘The Victim’ is out now on DVD.