CHRIS NEUMER: It's not very often that I get excited. Most people don't have a panache. The first R-rated movie that I ever saw was The First Power.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Excellent. It's one of my wife's favorites.
CHRIS NEUMER: I realize this might be dating you slightly
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Everything dates me these days. The fact that there is a DVD 3-pack out on it dates me. I've done a couple of interviews and I start talking about how much work I've done and when I started. 'Bamba was filmed in '86. I don't feel old but my resumé certainly seems to carry the wrinkles for me.
CHRIS NEUMER: I liked it and I didn't realize that there was a movie Trespasses. Some places that I looked and some places that I talked to said that you had actually written
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: You mean that you actually bought all of them? I thought I had gotten rid of every single copy.
CHRIS NEUMER: Certain sources, certain authors, said that you had co-written and directed it. Others said that you were just a star in it and had helped with things.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: That is one of the most educational and interesting films that I have ever done, only because it was a class in Writing 101, and even in Directing 101. I was working with a man named Adam Roarke at the time who was a huge sort of biker movie guy. He did Dirty Man Crazy Larry and Hell's Belles and Hells Angels on Wheels. He was the biker guy for the early seventies. The only film he ever turned down was Easy Rider, much to his chagrin. He and Hopper and Nicholson were running buddies in the late '60s and early '70s. I was teaching acting at the time in Dallas, Texas at the Film Actor's Lab.
CHRIS NEUMER: Now I just have to ask. You are from Texas. Are you proud to be from the same state as the president?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Well, when you couch it in those terms We shot Kennedy. Henry Lee Lucas is from there as well. Texans still manage to have a bunch of national pride. I don't necessarily agree with the man, that's no secret, but
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, I'm with you there. It's interesting to come out here and talk to people There's a lawyer over at Fox who I had dinner with last night. I stopped off at his office to pick him up. Not only do I see copies of The Atlantic Monthly lying around his office, which for me is a step in the right direction, he was swearing loudly about the FCC deregulating even more on Monday. I told him, If I known that was up on Monday, I would have bought so much stock in Clear Channel or Fox.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: The one thing that I find worrisome of late is this attitude that we have to squelch anyone who has a differing opinion or even has the bravery to express their opinion. It's what America is all about. You don't have to agree with him and if you disagree, that does not make you unpatriotic or un-American.
CHRIS NEUMER: Quite the contrary.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Our country has been built on dissonance and has only gotten stronger because of it. Not a revolution, but people have a right to ask questions, to doubt, to expect a system of checks and balances.
CHRIS NEUMER: To express their views. Rule number 1 in the book.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: So anyway, that's unfortunate. Back to Texas, I was teaching Film Acting at the time and the Film Actor's Lab had sort of become this Mecca for film acting in Texas. There really was no program at all.
CHRIS NEUMER: Is there much theater in Texas?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Very little. There's some in Houston at the Alley Theater. I started in theater at Stage West in Fort Worth, which is a wonderful little theater. But as far as the big ones in New York, it's not the center that it could be or even the film center it could be. I was told it was a [location] of the Deep Elements Film Festival. It's a new festival in Dallas and a buddy of mine from college runs it. He now runs the Santa Monica Film Festival as well; his name is Michael Caine, no particular relation to the Cockney man. So at any rate, we were fairly known for teaching film in Dallas.
CHRIS NEUMER: Which school was this or program that you were with? I know that you went to UT.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Yeah, I went to UT-Arlington. We actually taught the SMU drama class for a while and I taught Adam's program at the American Film Institute. It was a great program! It was incredibly nuts and bolts very practical. How do you match
CHRIS NEUMER: So more of the technical aspects of acting as opposed to
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Yeah. I used to never say I taught acting because I didn't teach acting, per se. I used to teach how to take your ability and what you've learned in other classes and apply it to film.
CHRIS NEUMER: Very interesting. You don't hear about it that often. You hear about
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Lie on the floor and be an egg. That kind of thing.
CHRIS NEUMER: There's a guy, I'm going to kill his name, Stanislavski?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: "Stanisloffski." The whole Actor's Studio in New York. We encouraged this sort of thing but we were very here's how to make a movie. When the sun's going down and you've got one take, how are you going to get your best performance. I might be nervous and I might be stiff and
CHRIS NEUMER: How do you do that?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Practice, practice, practice and getting to know yourself on film being objective about it. I've always said this is your tuck worm and you need to know your wares. So we had gotten this reputation in Texas. This was right about the time that Robert Duvall won the Oscar for Tender Mercies. So all these people in Texas are looking at Duvall's performance going, Oh, God. I could do that! He was not doing anything. Little do they know. So this rancher down in Austin mortgages his ranch, raises enough money, knows a few people in the film department at UT. They write a script with him as the star, cast a bunch of local talent and the film is terrible. Terrible!
CHRIS NEUMER: Which film?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Trespasses. So they come to us, Adam and me, in Dallas and they can't sell his movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: This is the rancher?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Yeah, this is the rancher. He very bluntly says, I've spoken to one company that says if I put in two fight scenes and a rape, they'll buy the movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: Aw, you got to love it.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: So he leaves and Adam uses his Brooklyn-New York, Hey Lou, how you doin'? I've been writing all the exercises for the class. He goes, Can you do it? And I said, And make a good movie? Well, we can definitely make a better movie than what's there, but I said, I think so. Literally, what they did was they handed me the finished film, they handed me all the outtakes, the scripts. I literally did an autopsy, took out some parts and then put in the parts that we needed to. The funny thing was, with respect to the rancher, the guy's performance was just terrible. He was ridiculously wooden. Adam said, You know what we're going to do? We're going to do the old Kulikov experiment. It was an experiment way back in the beginning of film when a film professor filmed the most famous Russian actor at the time and told him to look at the camera with a totally blank face. Then he filmed a bowl of soup, a duck falling down on a frozen lake and a burning building. He cut that non-reaction to every single one of those other clips and then showed it to his film students. And all of them said, Oh, this actor is brilliant. He's so hungry, he's looking at the soup. Oh, look at that deadpan when the duck falls down on the lake. That's what he says. We're going to rape the woman he loves in the movie, kill her son in front of her and then every time the guy goes blank we're going to flash back. And it worked! He raised enough money to shoot for another 10 days. We fixed his performance. Adam and I played the rapists, these bad guys. I'm in the movie for eight minutes and yet I'm the one on the video box because this was before La Bamba. I had to do things like literally put lines in over people's shoulders to carry the plot. The girl who played his daughter, aged from 10 to 12, shot up eight inches so we put her in a car accident, wrapped her in bandages and put her in a wheelchair.
CHRIS NEUMER: It seems more of an effort of how to craft or get away from things than actually creating anything.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Yeah. Also, it's the study of the structure of the story of when can we insert these arbitrary plot elements and make it work. If we had just stuck a fight scene in a bar, it would have had no bearing on the plot. What I'm actually proud of is that the movie made sense. Between the original film and what we shot two years later, it's a better movie. It's actually a little more psychologically compelling.
CHRIS NEUMER: That's more than I can say about How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Which I didn't see.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah, it is what it is and it does that well. Sadly, what it does is crap, but
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: That depends on where you set the bar. All we wanted to do was sell the movie and get the guy's ranch back. We accomplished that, so as terrible as the movie still is, it's better than it was and I'm very proud of the script-doctoring job that I did. I'm credited as the writer and Adam directed the 10 days that we shot, and got the director credit.
CHRIS NEUMER: I know that you directed a couple of episodes of "Outer Limits," maybe.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: I most recently did a "Twilight Zone" and I did a "Resurrection Boulevard" last summer that I was very happy with. Elizabeth Peña had a wonderful story line and [Van Blake] was our guest star.
CHRIS NEUMER: It's funny that there's another guy in New York, Bob Balaban, who is getting more involved in the producing and directing end of things. He started out with the exact same credits [as you]. He did an episode of "Twilight Zone" and he did "Outer Limits" and this incredibly bad movie called My Boyfriends Back. I guess I was one of the seven people who saw it in the theaters. Is that something that you are looking to get into more?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: I'm not looking to get into it more. It's something I would do if it pops up. I just recently wrote a family action adventure. I was in the mood to write. I literally was washing dishes at my house and I, sort of off-the-cuff, said I wanted to write something. My wife didn't miss a beat. She said, Write something your daughters can watch. I love directing. I truly love directing. I tell you the episodic gig is perfect, man, because you prep a week, you shoot a week. They give you a day, two days, to cut and then you turn it over. You know it's not an authorship situation. You know you are going to have to bend to the whims of the producers and the network, but it's a great way to keep those muscles alive. Directing, setting the shots, working with the actors. Hopefully, maybe, I'll see this in the next couple of years, but it's such a long and, many times, a heartbreaking proposition. The family film I'm not even showing to the studios. I'm not going to go the Disney route or any other route because if you have no power as a director, you get rewritten eight times. You know it's going to be direction by committee and that's not why I direct.
CHRIS NEUMER: And it will end up looking surprisingly like Spy Kids.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Surprisingly. I'm not interested in that. When I direct I feel a bit more possessive of it and as I said, it's a heartbreaking endeavor. I was supposed to have directed a film with Tom Berenger a couple of years ago. [ ] came to me not as an actor but as a director and we attached Tom. Rogers wanted to do it. Bert Reynolds was attached. We had an offer out on Jennifer Connelly. I could have smacked them because they offered her far below what she deserved. This was before the Oscar. I was literally down in Houston; that's one of the reasons I wanted to do it because I wanted to shoot it in Houston. I was there two weeks. I had half the crew hired. I had the location set. We were rockin' and rollin' in pre-production. The next thing I know, I get a phone call literally after we write "The End" on my director's polish. The producer goes pale and looks at me and gives me one of these, What is this? He says, You're on a plane at six back to LA. I asked, Why? He says, They pulled the plug. What it was was smoke and mirrors. They will attach stars and they will scramble to sell off foreign] territories. They [dont have any] money themselves even though they may represent themselves that way and so it's a race against the clock. It takes 90 days or 30 days at the very least to paper the bank loans once they've gotten commitments from x amount of territories. That was the problem. I was rolling right along in prep and was going to meet my start date, but they weren't going to meet it financially. So they took a loss on two weeks pre-production which probably wasn't that much of a loss anyway seeing as I was [cheap]. I'm joking. That's why I'm not pursuing directing. There are projects out there that I would be happy to direct if, at this point in my directing career, it pays me a third of what I make as an actor for three times the time commitment.
CHRIS NEUMER: Having directed yourself, you obviously have to be able translate certain things over to what is and what is not either acceptable or good practice. Altman is famous for being able to deal with actors He sets up the cameras and tells them to do their thing and then he leaves and goes to have a sandwich. Then there are other people who aren't so diplomatic about things.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: I'm very proud of the performances that I've gotten. I'm a very good actor's director. There's one that won an award, not just for what she did for me, but for a series of performances that she did last year. Samantha turned in a beautiful performance in "Twilight Zone." It's because I'd like to think that I take a lot of the pressure off of them. I hire the right person and I'm not trying to turn
CHRIS NEUMER: Right person, right actor?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Yes. Meaning this person is right for this role. I'm not expecting anything from them that I don't think they can do. I'm not trying to tailor-make someone's performance. You're the person I wanted for this so bring what you've got to the party. That's my philosophy in directing, anyway.
CHRIS NEUMER: So Tom Berenger wasn't cast as a black guy or something like that.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Oh, absolutely. A black woman, as a matter of fact.
CHRIS NEUMER: It allows you to stretch your chops a little bit more.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: However, it was a comedy and that was the thing that I was excited about because Tom was going to be brilliant. He would have been brilliant in this and that's something that people see and do all the time Some directors think they have to teach, which is not their job. It literally is what it is: you direct, a little more this way, a little more that way. I'm very trusting in my actors' talents.
CHRIS NEUMER: So long as they are hitting their marks and making sure they do well.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: I tend to make them look good. I shoot them the way I would want myself to be shot.
CHRIS NEUMER: Which is what?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Supportive of what you are doing. It's when you play an emotional scene; I want to give them the latitude to do it, to be close enough to see what's going on.
CHRIS NEUMER: So, not intrusive, but
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: You make movie stars, sometimes. That's the thing. Here's the hero shot, here's the leading lady shot.
CHRIS NEUMER: In your long career, are there any experiences that you had ? I know during the first couple of years, there was some you worked with a lot of writer-directors. There was a point, probably around The Dark Wind or Courage Under Fire, that you started working with directors who are like Ed Zwick, he's a man.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Finest director I've ever worked with. And I've worked with some good ones. Talk about an actor's director. Unbelievable! I fought for that role. They wanted an unknown and it was literally at a point in my career where I was watching movies and saying, Why didn't I see that script? Why didn't I get a call on this?
CHRIS NEUMER: Were there any examples of things that you saw that you were like, Why didn't I ?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: That's just sour grapes. There were just things that were passing me by and I had to investigate why. You can niche yourself out of the market if you will only work for x amount of money. Well hold on, the nature of the industry is changing and if I have to take a little less money for a great role, then that's what I need to do. If I have to go in and audition for a role that is not necessarily open, then it's worth doing. Courage Under Fire was the first example of that. It was like, No, we don't have enough money and we want an unknown. They knew I was unknown in that. Seth Gilliam was unknown in that. They had their start. They didn't need another name. So I said, This is an incredible role and I want to fight for it. And Ed, whether it was in his wisdom or his kindness, decided to see me. For once, the role went to the guy who acted it best, which isn't always the case.
CHRIS NEUMER: No, you're kidding. Really?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: How about that? I kept going back in, but every single audition You hear the horror stories about going into this cold, frigid room and they just get intimidated and they can't do their best work. They walk out kicking themselves going, I screwed up. But Ed was supportive and patient and in the last go-around he literally had every one of us, including the main actress who was not Meg Ryan, in the room and a couple of other young actors that I knew, who were not necessarily known, but are known now. He just literally put all five of us in the room together and he said, Listen, where the script leads your head, just go. We're going to do all four scenes right now. He had recorded machine gun fire, helicopter rotors, mortar blasts, and just let us dive over his desk and roll on his couches. He had the video camera up in the corner sort of like a security camera so that he could catch it all.
CHRIS NEUMER: It certainly seems like going above and beyond for you guys. I'm sure in certain cases, there are some actors who wouldn't even make the final cut.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Yeah. No one I was in the room with made the film, but they never argued that they weren't given the best shot.
CHRIS NEUMER: Were you surprised at all, I mean that, like, Meg Ryan's I'm not Sally anymore. Were you surprised when you heard that she was cast?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: I wasn't surprised in the least because when you look back at some of Meg's other work, the stuff that I don't want to say is obscure, but it hadn't done as well as her romantic comedies When A Man Loves a Woman or Promised Land which she did with my buddy Kiefer [Sutherland] she was frickin' brilliant. She's an incredible dramatic actress and yet when you've had that much success in a particular genre, it's hard to expect the audience not to come in with that baggage. A few people well, her constant co-star Tom Hanks has done well going back and forth, but very few people are granted that latitude.
CHRIS NEUMER: No one is quite sure how he does it so very well.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: You look at Streep and Streep is a brilliant comedienne, but she's been known for her accents and her dramatic work.
CHRIS NEUMER: She was good in Adaptation. You had such an untimely demise in Courage Under Fire. It was like, There goes Lou driving into a train. That was kind of cool.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Which I think is why they ultimately cast me. But, OK, nobody will expect me to be the bad guy. Nobody will expect Lou to off himself with a 911 from Houston. In that respect, my baggage worked for me because everybody figured I'd play a
CHRIS NEUMER: Now when you say 'your baggage' I have to ask.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: The films that have done well. Even things like The First Power orStand and Deliver. I was always the tough guy with a heart of gold. I think that's what people expected in Courage Under Fire. At some point they expected
CHRIS NEUMER: So you are sort of playing with your image?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Sometimes, yeah. Especially in that film.
CHRIS NEUMER: It seems like kind of fun to do in certain respects.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Yeah, exactly. The film I did after that was The Big Hit and turned that totally on its head, which is just a lot of fun for me.
CHRIS NEUMER: I know he goes by Kirk Wong here, but did you deal with him in that? I just don't want to refer to him as
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Yeah, well, it's funny because I called him Kurt for four months and then it just came out Che Kirk Wong. Well, what it that, Che? Is he a Latino revolutionary now?
CHRIS NEUMER: It's like sushi. I've eaten it several times. It's not that it's horribly bad; I just don't find it particularly
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: I didn't eat sushi until I married my wife, Kelly. She's opened all sorts of horizons for me.
CHRIS NEUMER: Most of the time when I eat sushi, I guess it's the California style that is wrapped in seaweed, and I can't use chop sticks which is bad because half my time is spent trying to flip the seaweed off. One time I'm doing this, trying to be very discreet about it. So this huge piece of seaweed goes flying and lands on the glass right next to where I'm sitting. Should I play it cool or do I just reach over ? No pretenses anymore.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: My wife was trying to get the meat off and it went flying and smacked a lady right in the head.
CHRIS NEUMER: Can you laugh at that or is that the kind of thing where you have to play it cool?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: I tried to play it cool but I couldn't help giggling softly at it.
CHRIS NEUMER: Aw, it is tough. [Looks into his food] Oh, this looks like the whole crab.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: It is. It's the whole darn thing. Hope it doesn't put you off your soup.
CHRIS NEUMER: No. My attitude about food has to go back to: Sylvester Stallone is eating a burger underneath. Somebody says they don't have any cows down here. He looks around, takes another bite, etc. On The Big Hit about the first scene where Mark Wahlberg is rolling down the banisters. I thought that was cool. I didn't think the rest of the movie was that great. Was it interesting working with a first-time director in America? Were there any translation issues?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Kirk is heavily accented but very fluent. What was amazing is that he brought his Hong Kong stunt guys. So the stunt coordinator was Chinese and had done all these things with Jackie Chan. He would look at moves at six in the morning, and then show us the sequence. Twelve kicks and spins and punches later Mark and I kind of look at each other and go, Slow down. They just had a different mentality. There's one scene where Lela Rochon is in a car with her boyfriend, and all of a sudden my fist comes through the window and takes the guy out. Well, we're setting up that shot and I'm talking to the stunt guy and translator. So where's the camera? Where do I need to put the hit to be a miss? They translate to him and he looks at me, shakes his head. They wanted me to smack the guy.
CHRIS NEUMER: This is the stunt guy in the front seat?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Oh, no. He's an actor. He's a day player. I said, Let me call the actor over and see how he feels about this. He's a good-looking guy and he walks over. The translator says, The stunt coordinator would like you to be hit. He says, I know. I've taken hits before so I can take it. The stunt guy goes, No, no, no take it. Lou hit you. He says, Lou's going to hit me? We explained to him that that's not exactly how we do things here.
CHRIS NEUMER: I can't imagine that's the way they do things. Is that the way they were used to doing it?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: I guess. I think it's a point of pride for some stuntmen to take some shots, man.
CHRIS NEUMER: That wasn't even a stuntman, which makes it even stranger.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: When you've got Jackie Chan doing all that he does, it's a different mindset.
CHRIS NEUMER: That is interesting.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: He shook his head at us a lot. I think he thought we were wimps. I've broken far too many bones in films to take undue risks.
CHRIS NEUMER: Not only that, from the people that I've spoken to, it seems that when people actually get hit
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: It's not very dramatic.
CHRIS NEUMER: It's not very dramatic. It doesn't look very good. There was an actor I was talking to. I guess he's getting much bigger, both physically and his presence, Franky G. He was in The Italian Job, I don't know if you saw it. He's this big Puerto Rican guy, looks like a prison guy. He was in Confidence with Dustin Hoffman. There comes this point where Dustin is supposed to punch him. Dustin just hauled off and nailed him in the face. The guy is thinking, Oh my God, did I do something wrong? Of course, Dustin Hoffman is quaking in his boots because he just punched this 6' 3" guy who weighs 230 and played D-1 football.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: I had a film, but I've been wondering when it's going to come out, if it's going to come out. It's very good. It's Stark Raving Mad with Seann William Scott. I'm the bad guy in it, with platinum white hair and a black goatee this very quiet, lethal, mob boss type. It's actually very funny. I'm hoping that you will go see it eventually, but I'm doing a scene and I'm supposed to cut the guy off. And I turned to Dave and Drew, the two directors. I said, I should just smack him. You can do it in a way that you make contact without taking the guy's head off. That's a good idea, that's a good idea. So I tried to take him. Is that OK? He's, That's great. Don't worry about it. So six takes into the shot, four close-ups on my part, and he's getting walloped and the intensity was going up with each take. We do a few takes on Seann's close-up and he's like, You can go a little bit more. Dave and Drew walk up to me on the last take. On this one, bring tears to his eyes. I said, Are you serious? This is the last take. Bring tears to his eyes. All right. I hauled off and whacked him and sure enough, he welled up looking at me. Oh God, why did I do that? No man, it was cool.
CHRIS NEUMER: Aw, man, that's funny. It's interesting when the director tells you to hit him and he's expecting something different. So he's playing with you guys, to a certain degree.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Yeah, but sometimes you get the desired effect.
CHRIS NEUMER: Speaking of movies that haven't yet come out that are youve got Hollywood Homicide in the can too. Now I've heard so many bad things about this. I haven't seen the screening of it yet.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Really?
CHRIS NEUMER: I have not heard Kilborn was bashing it. He was doing his movie poster thing and was just tearing it apart.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: I'm going to be with Kilborn on Monday. Oh boy, am I walking into a trap here?
CHRIS NEUMER: It was just kind of funny because Josh Hartnett was holding his gun like this. [Demonstrates] Kilborn's remark was something to the effect of Freeze or I'll shoot your balls off.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Yeah, that's exactly right.
CHRIS NEUMER: Harrison Ford is calling this, and Kilborn's remark was, Yeah, look at me. I'm nailing Calista Flockhart. Oh, that's pretty cool.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: I'm sure there's a little [truth] to that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Everything that I've heard from people, granted these might just be rumors, is that the ending has been tinkered around with and there have been reshoots and that testing audiences have just hated it. I hope I'm not breaking bad news to you but Is this news to you?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Yeah. I'd heard they had done some reshoots but they obviously didn't include me. Maybe they should have had more of me in the movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: That would have solved the problem?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Absolutely. You would think.
CHRIS NEUMER: What's it need, guys? More Lou.
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Yeah, more Lou Diamond. It's a small role but it's a fun role. I play a vice cop who is a friend of Harrison's, but I'm in drag for most of my appearances.
CHRIS NEUMER: Ah, do you ever get clued in? There was a movie
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: I totally get clued in eventually.
CHRIS NEUMER: The first time you're on the screen, we don't know it's you?
LOU DIAMOND PHILLIPS: Not until they show a close-up and they're speaking with me. Ron [Shelton], who is very plain about it, says, You're the guy in the locker room who drew the short straw. You don't want to be doing this. This isn't something you are enjoying. The female cop got busted up and you're all that's left. So, OK great. I'll put on a skirt to work with Harrison.
CHRIS NEUMER: That's all it takes. It's funny that you mention vice. I was looking at your filmography on IMDB and you were credited with guest-starrin