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CAREL STRUYCKEN AT CONDUIT '91 -------------------------------- Recorded and Edited by Simon Plumbe ------------------------------------- There are a great deal of actors who are described as having a "presence" on screen. There is no other actor I can think of that is ideally suited to that description as 7 foot tall Carel Struycken. Although his role on Star Trek has been little more than to stand in the background with no dialogue (apart from one line in HAVEN - "Thank you for the drinks!") he is one of the few guests to have appeared on the show that are instantly remembered. His other appearances have included the giant in "Twin Peaks", the butler in "The Witches of Eastwick" and Lurch in the movie version of "The Addams Family". This material was recorded between 24th and 26th August 1991 at Sacha's Hotel, Manchester at CONDUIT '91. Many thanks must got to Carel for his assistance in putting this article together. CAREL STRUYCKEN - THE MAN AND THE ACTOR --------------------------------------- Although Carel lives in Hollywood, he originally came from Holland. "I was born in Holland but I grew up in the Caribbean on Curosow. My father was a doctor there. He works for the government, so each school holiday he would go to make a whole trip in the Caribbean to all these different islands and do mass surgery on the children. So in the school holidays I would join and I saw quite a bit of the area." As I said, Carel is an amazing 7 feet tall. Does height run in his family? "All the men in my Mothers family are 6ft 9, 6ft 10. In Holland the cut off limit for Military service is 2 metres and one of my best memories about being this tall was having to go to this hall very early in the morning. There was this huge hall, with thousands of people my age and you had to get on stage one at a time to be measured. That was the first thing they did. So I came on stage and all these guys were laughing about it. Then of course I was over 2 metres. So I went off to and had to study for 2 more years!" How did Carel first get involved in his acting career? "Well in the 20's or 30's when all the people went to Hollywood and they wanted to be discovered, they would congregate on the corner of the main intersection of Hollywood, Hollywood Vine. I had no such ambitions when I was walking there. But one day I was going around a corner just on my way to a movie and this girl jumps out of her car, abandons her car in the middle of the street and walks up to me and says, `We need you tomorrow' and that was for Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. Apparently, they were starting the movie already, I think they were already shooting it, but were missing one character and that was me. So I think thats how I got involved with making films." Did he always want to be an actor? "No, I went to film school in Holland and I was mainly interested in making movies and I never dreamt I was going to be in front of the camera, but Hollywood has its ways to convince people to do it." What do Carel's family think of some of the roles he has played, and which one of them is his biggest critic? "My Mother is my biggest critic - she doesn't understand why I'm doing it! I think she always wanted me to be a doctor. No, everybody enjoys, I've started to enjoy it too, after a few of these things. I never took it that serious, but when you stay in Hollywood, well, it just becomes part of your life. Now I really am almost looking forward to it." Did Carel feel that his height has caused him any problems with his acting career? "Well I've never really thought about it, partly because I never wanted to be an actor, so it always kind of just happens to me and it probably happenend because of my height that they wanted me in a movie. At the moment I get the feeling I'm type-cast a little bit. Although I did one movie last year, The Circus of Twilight, which is after a Dean Koontz horror story, and that was quite different and very enjoyable to do because I got to be this extremely crazed person, who was very much in doubt. He has to kill somebody, but he, even though he is a professional killer, he's the only one in this whole group of people that he's dealing with that doesn't want to kill. So it was a very interesting challenge." As Carel seems to do more silent roles than speaking ones, Carel was asked if there are any silent film actors that he admires. "As a comedian I like Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy, although I don't think I'm using anything that they do. I mean not that I mind doing it, I'm not consciously aware of trying to follow in their footsteps. I had to do a lot of that stuff in The Addams Family though, because again I didn't have any lines, but I've been told that it worked very well. So almost by default I'm kind of a silent movie comedian in these movies." Carel also appeared in one of the Star Wars spin-off movies featuring the Ewoks. How did he feel about doing that? "Yeah, the Ewoks movie was the first movie that was, although a very strange one, a kind of challenge to act in and even though I was wearing all of this latex on my face, layers and layers of it, I still got to be this tyrant who was ranting and raving in his own castle and so that was the main attraction of it. Even though it was pretty horrid to be imprisoned in this mask. They would put it on at 4:00 in the morning and I wouldn't be able to eat anything. The only thing I could do was drink through a little straw... oh, and macaroni! And it was about 110 degrees and we were wearing, well, this much coustume! We had girls with little fans (!) and everybody who had to wear all this stuff had one girl following him around... that would cool us off a bit. That wasn't the reason I liked doing the movie!!" What sort of films does Carel enjoy working on the most? "Well, I've really liked, I like everthing that's been overblown. So everything that's a bit, what would you call it.. bigger than life stuff. Thats why I liked doing The Circus of Twilight a lot. I was this extreme character. I would like to do a bit more of that. I think I would be good at comedy too." TWIN PEAKS ---------- What did Carel have to say about his work on David Lynch's "Twin Peaks"? "Twin Peaks was a very special experience, because David Lynch is a very special kind of film director. He had his own soundstage. He had rented this huge industrial complex and set up all the sets of Twin Peaks under one roof and everything was there permanently, so you could actually get lost. I once was late for a scene because I was lost somewhere in the set and the amazing thing was that the whole crew, everybody was kind of almost as if they were in a trance which is quite unusual on a film set, and I think that's because of the way David Lynch deals with the shooting schedule and talks to you, you never get your typical direction from him. The only thing he'll say is, `Now just try to say this as if you are underwater. Very slow'! For instance, the gentleman who was with me, the waiter, the very old man, he walked in as you may have noticed into the room very slowly and because I've been involved with a lot of very low budget movies on the other side, I mean doing various production things, I'm kind of in a panic about time, because I know how much it costs just to roll that film through the camera, so I thought, `Oh! This is going to be terrible', and the first thing that David Lynch talked to this man after the shoot was over was, `Now I want you to do it twice as slowly'! So thats kind of what it was like. It was very nice." What was it like to work with someone like David Lynch? "Well he talks, he has the vocabulary of a 6 year old (!) and he manages to get across anything he wants to say with that very limited vocabulary. I mean it must be an exercise on his side to be able to do that. I heard for instance with his composer, Angelo, they'll sit next to each other behind a piano and Angelo would be playing something and David Lynch would say, `Can you make it sound a little more orange' and Angelo would say, `Oh! Yeah!'! The instructions we would get as actors were the same kind of semi-cryptic instructions." In the final episode, there were a number of scenes where the cast were all speaking in a slurred, warped voice. How was this effect achieved? "Well the little guy, Mike, he talks backwards better then he talks forwards! He has a little bit of a stutter when he talks normal but he can say anything backwards without stuttering, so he was kind of the consultant on the set and David Lynch would give us our lines and then Mike would translate them backwards and thats the way we would say them. Then later on it was reversed again on the tape, but we actually had to say it backwards. The very last show... has it already been shown here? Well, that was a very strange shoot because there was no script. So David Lynch was sitting in his chair and was just making everthing up while they were shooting it! The crew was kind of hovering around him, rather nervously, and there was this expert with contact lenses and he had no idea way he was called to the set and neither did anybody else. Now and then he would get instructions from David Lynch to try them out on somebody, but nobody had any idea if they were going to wear them, or why they were going to wear them, anything like that! So it was a very interesting experience. We also, of course, had to walk backwards and do everything backwards, and then so not also only was the sound reversed but also the action." Talking of the last episode, could Carel actually explain what it was all about? "The last episode is even more of a mystery to me than any of the others! I think that was the idea. I was a bit surprised that my character was at all associated with the bad side of that other universe. I thought I was strictly a good guy. But I think what he wanted to do was just mix everyhing up in the end just to make a statement - `There is no good without bad and no bad without good'. I'm strictly interpreting here." Overall, did Carel actually understand what TWIN PEAKS was all about (did anyone!)? "Not a clue! But I always watched it though. My 9 year old daughter understood a lot more what was going on than I did, so I would ask her! The way I experienced the whole show was to just sit there and watch it and see all these amazing gallery of characters pass by. I think, in the near future, Twin Peaks is going to be used by a lot of people who want to write a thesis, alot of Psychiatrists. Because there's a lot of amazing psychotic characters in there." YOU RANG? --------- As I said, Carel appeared, albeit in yet another non-speaking role, in the recent ADDAMS FAMILY film. How did Carel get the part of Lurch in the first place? "The way it happened was the producer used to be a casting director so for this movie he did his own casting and I was invited over to his office. It was just him and the director and it was one of the shortest casting sessions I've ever had. I said, `I'd been living here in Hollywood for 15 years and about once a week somebody walks up to me and says `Are you Lurch?' so I think you found your Lurch'. They said `Yeah that's right' So that was the end." Did Carel find it difficult to be in yet another non-speaking role? "It's not easy to, when you don't, because the way that you build up your character is through a large part of, it's through what you say and the way you sustain your character is also through what you say. So if you aren't allowed to say anything, it's very hard to stay in character so to speak. It also means you have to do alot of, well, you have to express everything through facial expression and emotional epression and so on." As is the norm for many UK conventions, you usually find that guests "sit in" on each other's talks. While Carel was on stage, Guy Vardaman was in the crowd and he asked Carel what he thought about working with Christoper Lloyd. "Well you never saw him anywhere. He was always, if he was on the set, he was very concentrated on what he would have to do next and then as soon as his scene was finished he would disappear into his trailer, and just in general people were kind of disappointed that they wouldn`t get to talk to him. But after the movie was finished I heard out that every night he would be in some bar on Melrose (Avenue) and people would just walk up to him and not stop and he would talk to them. So it must be some kind of policy of his that he doesn't want to deal with people on the set. It must have something to do with wanting to stay in character, or something like that." One of the less memorable experiences Carel had on The Addams Family was in terms of wearing make-up (or not as the case may be)! "I had a few people walk up to me and look at my face and say `Oh, that's prosthetics. You can't see the lines!'" Speaking of make-up, they production crew were originally planning to have Christopher Lloyd in make-up as well as Carel. Carel describes what happened. "The Addams Family started out with the producers at first wanting to put, especially Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd) and Lurch, me, in layers and layers of latex. So you have to go through this whole process where they make a cast of your face. The way they do that is they take a large bucket of the same stuff they use to make imprints of your teeth - it tasted a bit minty - and then they basically empty it over your head (!) and you get to breathe through a little straw and that's it. Most of this hardens into this paste that they put another layer of plaster over it and then they cut it in half and make a cast of your head to work with. And poor Christopher Lloyd started with layers of latex on his face and the only thing you could see was his eyes and then we went through a week of camera tests, but of course with all this latex you can't see any facial expressions, nothing moves anymore, so finally they decided to do without the latex... I started out with make-up sessions that lasted 5-6 hours the first week when they were trying out all this latex, and they finally got it down to 20 minutes. So that was quite a relief." MR HOMN ------- Although Carel is now a familiar face as Mr Homn, he was originally asked to appear as one of the market traders in Encounter At Farpoint. Carel continues... "Well what would happen to us was the first time they invited me for a casting call they wanted me in a tiny little part and I said to them, `I just had the feeling I belong somewhere in this show so I want to hold out for something better' and they said `Oh sure, it's ok'. A few weeks afterwards they called me for Mr. Homn." Whenever Carel appears as Mr Homn, Lwaxana's near-legendary luggage is never far behind. Is it actually heavy? "Actually first it was very light and then they saw me carry it and then said it dosen`t look real. So they really put something very heavy in there and then I had some back problems after that." As well as THE case, Carel is also noticable for not having any dialogue in the series. Why did Carel think that was the case? "I think they were, in the first show, still a little embarrassed about not giving me any lines so they threw in this one just to get me interested enough to do the part at all and then afterwards they thought from now on we can do without! But my personal interpretation of it is, that because my mistress and I come from a planet where we do a lot of ESP communication that I actually have very lively dialogue - it's just that you mere mortals can not hear it! Did Carel think that we would even get to hear Mr Homn speak in the future? "Well, a friend of mine is working on a script that will set things straight in the dialogue department. I think the idea's great. Now it's up to us to make a good script out of it. If that works out I'll have something to say!! However, we don't really know much about Mr Homn apart from the fact that he is Lwaxana's Valet, unlike Lwaxana who we all know is the Daughter of the Fifth House, Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx and Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed! What does Carel think about his character? "Well I think Mr Homn is a more primitive form of Mr. Data, a more primitive generation of android. To compensate for his lack of ability, he has been given kind of an overblown ego (!) and thats the way I see Mr Homn. Mr Homn, from what we have seen, appears to be a little bit (!) partial to alcohol. Has Carel had any drinking experiences to rival Mr Homn's? "Well I once, well I should say in the past, but anyhow, I had once been invited by a friend to a tiny little village high up in the mountains in Switzerland and the people there were so happy that there was somebody from outside the village that they decided to take me into town and I had to try all the different kinds of Swiss beer and there's just an amazing amount! So I was sitting at the bar and there was this whole battery of bottles all around me and then they had warned me that you should never drink beer and eat cheese fondue at the same time, which of course I did and the most amazing thing happened to me! It only has happened to once and that was rare. I stood up and just passed out right away!!" Although we all know now that Carel DID appear in Season 5 as Mr Homn, he was asked this by some of the fans. "We never know in advance. They always just assume that you're going to be around. For instance on the last episode (Half A Life) I almost couldn't make it. They had to shoot everything at night because i was doing THE ADDAMS FAMILY during the day. So they also cut one scene out of it because they couldn't do it all at night. So I don't know, maybe Lwaxana Troi has fired me and gotten another butler (at this point, the fans all `booed'!). But fair enough, it's every bosses perogative!" A DRIVING AMBITION... --------------------- Because of his height, you may think that Carel wouldn't drive, but when asked he gave this response, "My first car was a Mini Cooper (!) and it's still my favourite! No actually, those Mini's were pretty roomy cars on the inside! For instance, a Cadillac has less room on the inside than a mini - you'd be surprised. A Cadillac has all this useless padding inside - there's about 20 inches of padding on the insides and it takes over all the space. The reason that American cars need all that padding is so that won't hear all the wrangling and creaking that goes on!!!" THE SECRET INVENTOR ------------------- Carel is fascinated by science and he considers himself to be somewhat of an amateur inventor. Did he have a background in working in electronics? "The first thing that I wanted to do was genetics and all that studying was way too slow for me, so I thought, `Well, it's much nicer to write about it, to deal with science fiction and just pretend it's already happened!'. So then I went to film school and the idea was to be a writer and produce movies and then I went to Hollywood and I was just walking on the streets of Hollywood and this lady abandoned her car in the middle of the road and jumped out and said `We need you!' and that was the first call on the other side of the camera which I never imagined would happen. I never had any ambition in that direction. I`m kind of an amateur scientist so to speak, so I like to work with those things and the first thing I did with electronics was I built these goggles that provide you with some kind of electronic hallucinogenic - you see the most amazing patterns, I even thought of bringing it out commercially but I was afraid that, in America you get sued for anything so I didn't do it, and now a few other people apparently have the same idea about the same thing that I was working on and now you can get it, unfortunately. So the virtual reality thing is also an outcome of that. I do some very low budget computer graphics work so I already have the computer and now I just have to get some other things to make it into a great system for virtual reality." One of the subjects Carel seems to be very interested in is Virtual Reality, an area in which the Amiga seems to be excelling (the Virtuality arcade machines are built around Amiga technology!). Carel tells all about his own VR project... "I'm trying to put together a very primitive version of the Holodeck - you won't have the feeling that you're really in it like you are in the Holodeck but you will be able to interact with something with a screen in front of you, and on your screen you can project something like an asteroid field that will be coming at you and you try to duck it. Or you can put up all these virtual instruments, then you can actually play them, or you can put up a giant typewriter. I hope to have that system together in a few months from now, and maybe take it with me on some future conventions so the people can play with it themselves... We put together a prototype about a month ago and we showed it in Los Angeles. We had a special Virtual Reality show just to introduce the concept to people, and right now it's being used by NASA as a method to do repairs on the outside of Spaceships where people can't, they actually send a robot and the person doing the repairs wears these goggles and gloves and the robot mimics everything that he does inside the spaceship, or on the ground." "The other thing I'm working on or that I'm involved with is something called nano-technology which was also a subject of one of the Star Trek episodes. It's really a lot more involved than one could guess from seeing that show, and well, it's maybe a bit too complicated to explain it now." Just hearing Carel talk, you can see his enthusiasm and interest in nano- technology. "One of the things I liked so much about Star Trek is that they always make all these an issue. So I think Star Trek is very much about responsibility with the tools that we make for ourselves. Of course the further we get with this technology the more knowledge we can use. The thing that's coming up now is called Nano-Technology which instantly we'll be able to build devices, be it tools or houses or mountains whatever, atom by atom and we will be able to program these things to grow just like we are being programmed ourselves to grow old too. Animals are Humans. That's the most exciting thing we are working on right now. Of course that could be absolutely devastating, so that makes it also very interesting as a field of research because the people working on that realise that they have intergrated that part of our responsibility with this Nano-technology as part of the research. So whenever they talk about Nano-Technology they also talk at how we should safe guard ourselves and how we should structure society to be able to deal with that." What does he consider to be his most interesting project? "Well the main thing, the most interesting thing to work on was really these goggles. Because they DO work and one interesting, I had a lot of interesting experiences using them, and also using them on other people. I found out that people with a phobia had one particular frequency, because you can change the frequency of these goggles. It's basically two little incandescent lights in front of your eyes that flicker at certain frequencies to which your brain starts to try to keep up with that frequency and it makes you see all these colours and it puts you in a certain alpha brain state. I noticed that people with a phobia had one particular frequency that they absolutely can not deal with, and then I tried that frequency out on myself and then I tried to find a frequency I had problems with, and I had kind of a phobic response. Only it wasn't scary to me. So it had kind of the same effect but to me it was more like a roller-coaster ride effect. Then I thought well in the future, because the whole reason I started with these goggles was I wanted to build a device where you could transfer a brain wave pattern from one person to the other, so that for instance, people who are natural short sleepers who only need to sleep 2 hours a night, that you could transfer that brain wave pattern over to yourself and become a short sleeper yourself. So I thought well, it would be interesting to transfer phobias and other things over to other people and follow their report and to see what happens to them." A WITCHING TALE... ------------------ As you know, Carel appeared in The Witches of Eastwick, but did you know that he also composed most of the piano music in the film as well! How did all that come about? "Well first of all I got involved with the Witches of Eastwick because I was such a fan of George Miller's and then George knew I had the idea that he wanted to rehearse with the actors a few weeks in advance, which hardly never happens. So Jack Nicholson and Susan Sarandon, well all the people were there rehearsing and even though I didn't have any lines I was supposed to be there. There happened to be a piano in that room so I started playing and George Miller said, `Oh that's nice. We can use that in the movie.' I was so flattered by that I said, `Oh you can have it!' and to which Jack Nicholson said `Are you crazy? They have more than enough money. Let them pay for it!' So that's what happened. I just had your basic childhood experience of wanting to play the piano but never really working on it. I lived in the West Indies in Curosow and a week before I left all of a sudden I realised that I lived on this island which had this wonderful musical culture and I couldn't play any of the music so in one week I kind of in a rush tried to learn how they played, which is really complicated because it has a really complex rhythm. And that's what I took with me when I went back to Holland. The tunes that I came up with in those few weeks are the only things that I've ever really composed. But now after having been on the cruise, the Star Trek cruise, I got so much encouragement that I think I'll make some more music and make a 40 minute tape." Whenever films are made, the costumes are usually kept by the studios, but in The Witches Of Eastwick Carel managed to keep his own wardrobe (not that anyone else would have fitted it!). "Actually the movie production people usually, especially for Witches of Eastwick, had a very elaborate wardrobe and they only used about a third of it. So people, while they were shooting it, kept asking me `Are they going to give you the wardrobe?', because what else can they do with it, right! I said, `No they don't want to give it to me' and when Jack Nicholson heard that, he walked up to the producer and said, `If you`re not going to give him that wardrobe I'll buy it, but I'll make sure that everyone knows'! Within 3 minutes the producer walked up to me and said, `We've decided. We'll GIVE you your wardrobe'!" As Carel said earlier, he was a fan of the film's director, George Miller, so what did he think about working with him? "Well as I said, I was a fan of his and I never had the sense while we were doing this movie that this was his kind of movie. Although I think he did a wonderful job with the material that he had. He's just a nice, great guy and very different from your typical Hollywood director. So he's much more used to work, to think in terms of teamwork and I think he explains that himself because he's a twin, so he feels of himself as being almost interchangable with other parts of the team and that's very unusual for work in Hollywood." THE PRINCESS BRIDE ------------------ Once again, Guy Vardaman was asking the questions! This time he asked Carel if he was originally going to be in The Princess Bride. "Oh yeah, yeah. I saw Rob Reiner a few times for THE PRINCESS BRIDE which was going to be shot at the same time I was going to be doing THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK. He really wanted me for this part and of course, that was a much more interesting part than Witches, so I really wanted to do that and I didn't have any contractual obligations yet to stay with Witches because Warner Bros. are very casual about those type of things because they always assume that you want to do anything to be in a movie of theirs! So when I told them I wanted to do the other movie the lady who was in charge of Warner Bros. casting said, well, what they always say, what they always hear, people say about other people in Hollywood, `You'll never work in this town again'! But what finally convinced me to stay with Witches was that George Miller said that in his mind he had built the other chracters around this one character of the butler, and even though he wasn't a very prominent character, he was kind of essential. So I had to do that. So I thought I was obligated to do it for him. I stayed with Witches." STAR TREK --------- Did Carel think there was any difference working on Star Trek compared with other TV series or films? "Not so much with the characters, but you do notice a huge difference in just the way a movie's being put together. They've got their things like, lighting and sound to an amazing perfection for a TV series. I don't think anything has been shot with so much care for detail than Star Trek, and you'll also notice that just the sense of security and success that they have had over the years has given them the chance to really try to work with more unusual ideas and things like that. So it's very much a show, well I don't have to tell you that (!), but it's very much a show that want's to deal with issues and ideas, and things like that. And that you get more and more a sense of that while the show continues." Do the cast get one payment for appearing in Trek, or do they get paid each time the episodes are transmitted? "No, we all get paid royalties. It's some kind of a scale and I have no idea how it works. It's like you get a little Christmas present in the mail now and then." Carel has said that he'd love to do some directing. Would he like to try his hand at directing a TNG episode? "The difference I guess is that the people who get a chance to do them are regulars and I'm only on once a year. Oh but definately - that would be a dream come true." What did Carel think of British Star Trek fans in comparison with the American fans? "Well erm. Oh this is dangerous territory - I do have to go back there! I think in America things are a bit more extreme, so it's more a question of size. There's not as much control in daily life so people can live in much more fantasy worlds over there and they can live and they can live with most of the rest of the world. Consequently you are sometimes confronted with people who live in fantasy worlds like that. Thats the main difference there is." MICRO ORGANISMS ABOUND! ----------------------- Amongst his favourite films include BLADE RUNNER and the original TERMINATOR. What did Carel think of the sequel and it's computer graphics, which are also involved heavily in another film he is working on? "I thought the special effects were great. I just thought the original was more powerful as a story. But just amazing computer graphics. I'm going to be working, doing some production work on a movie in which we also use alot of computer graphics, but with about a 100th of the money to spend! It was inspiried by an American Micro-Biologist who has this theory that we're all wrongly talking about evolution, about higher and lower orders and it was really microbes through an act of co-operation, that put us together. So we are really a huge co- operative of micro organisms and not the Human beings we think we are. We use that for the story point for a movie where the micro organisms get a voice to talk to us Human beings and they do this from within a house and so the house becomes alive and starts to grow. That's really for a lot of computer graphics. It will have some horror elements in it but it's not primarily a horror film. The microbes do a few rather horrible things - nothing we don't deserve!" Does Carel find horror films repulsive? "Well I had kind of a mixed feeling about it because I love to do it, but I'm always a bit squeamish watching it! The reason I love to do it is because, it's great to be able to overdo things, to kind of be allowed to be really larger than life. There are a few horror movies that I really like, just because they put an emphasis on that part of me, but as soon as they start to cut up people and animals I look the other way!" Thanks must go to Carel Struycken for allowing us to use the material from his talks during the course of the con and to Colin Gunn for getting it all typed up! Next Issue:- Richard Arnold, Guy Vardaman AND George Takei!