“I’ve been all over Texas,” Lance Henricksen tells me during a story about how he ran away from home at age 16 to go to Texas and acquire one of their license plates. “Every time I go to Texas or something good happens, I swear to god.”
He’s on the phone to discuss his latest role, the grizzled outlaw Taylon in the heady, highbrow Western Gone Are The Days.
“It’s unusual for a Western to sort of go beyond a standard Western motif,” Hendrickson muses. His character is in what describes as “the finale of his life,” and is finally trying to face down some of his most regrettable choices. To match the existential overtones, the veteran actor explains that “this one gets a little heady. It has a lot of overwhelming themes to it.”
The most prominent of these themes is a story that runs parallel to Dante’s Inferno, with references that are readily apparent without being obvious or obnoxious. “That’s what hooked me when I read that script,” Henricksen says of Gregory M. Tucker’s ambitious script. “This guy took a lot of chances in this and [I thought] if we can pull it off, it’s going to be something.”
Henricksen took considerable interest in the movie as a whole, particularly when delving into the nuances of his character. “I wanted to pick my horse. I found an old horse and had multiple brands on him and you know, and the saddle was a piece of crap and the saddle blanket was shredded — and that’s exactly within the characters.”
He even went with the location scouts when they were choosing where they’d film. “I mean, it’s a lot about gathering all the details and using them all, including my gun. I wanted a Scofield because it’s probably the most flashy gun that existed and it’s hard to use. You’re going to eject all your shells. I wanted as many issues as I could muster because that’s the nature of that character. And so, the fanciest stuff wasn’t there, but the details were.”
Many of these kinds of details that tell the story are found in the film’s first act, which shows us exactly where Taylon’s at without a word of dialogue. “The biggest challenge in the world is when I read the first 20 pages and [know] I had to do all that work,” explains Henricksen, who says he channeled Buster Keaton for those opening scenes. “The fact that Buster Keaton ever existed gives you permission to go understand that direction, that kind of feeling. And that’s exactly what was going on.”
Though he was channeling a comic giant of the silent film era, Henricksen was quick to explain that he did so without purposefully making it lighthearted. “I never meant to be funny. I never did. I did a comedy of about four months ago. I had never done one, and it suddenly dawned on me is I don’t think on funny. I just think that situations are funny by their nature. I wasn’t trying to be funny at all, but there are elements of just being a human being getting up in the morning. That’s a situation. We are not perfect. We are not.”
Helming the film was first time director Mark Landre Gould, who was able to tackle the ambitious material with a fresh perspective. “I think as a new director, [an] independent director like that with a difficult script, we were in the same boat in a sense. We’re in a lifeboat, [and] we’re gonna we have to survive this and do good work. So it took on its own life, as it always does.”
Part of that life meant Henricksen taking a distinctively meta approach to his character. “They kept hiding my gun and every day I came to the set and I’d say, ‘Where’s my gun now?’ It kept a certain level of frustration going on. That was very useful, you know, even down to that beat.”
Henricksen even stayed involved after it’s release, attending the first screening in New Mexico to gauge the audience’s reaction, and whether or not they’d pick up on the text that helped inspire the story.
“We did Q&As and stuff to try to get people interested in it. And it was really very fulfilling for me because they were getting it, there are some sophisticated twists and turns in this thing and they were all getting it so we don’t have to blast them,” Henricksen explains. “I’m really a believer in that all this was a special effects stuff is just taking over, rather than feeling what’s going on.”
The actor even likens his character’s struggle to one of Thoreau’s more telling quotes. “There’s a writer who once wrote that ‘Men live in quiet desperation.’ So in a way there’s a non-judgmental aspects of this that in the final analogy, when we’re going out the back door of life, that the things you tried to do and failed, [and] things that you could pass, you go on.”
Gone Are The Days is available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VOD now.
