And it's just a terrifically dark story.īP: I've always liked my horror neat, you know? I remember the classic horror films that I grew up watching on television and that my dad would take me and my older brother to see at the theatre. It's not often that a first-time director who's also as well-known as you are as an actor picks a religious serial killer flick right out of the gate. But we didn't earn.ĪC: Frailty struck me as an interesting - even odd - film to choose for your directorial debut. He worked us hard and didn't pay us much but, God, it was a real opportunity to learn. He made non-union features but, hey, it was a great playground for a lot of us. Corman was in those days the first guy to exploit new talent coming into town. And just the way we put those sets together and the bang that we were able to get for the buck in terms of getting the stuff on the screen and the creative freedom that we had was remarkable. I don't think Jim and I ever even saw the movie - when we were working on it, it was called The Quest. I met Jim Cameron on a Corman film in 1980 that Jim was art directing called Galaxy of Terror. Grim by anyone's standards, Frailty is as atypical a debut as they come, as lucid as a waking nightmare and nearly as hard to shake, chock-full of memorable performances (and Texans) and one particularly stunning turn from a character named "Otis."Īustin Chronicle: You started off as a set dresser for Roger Corman, and I was curious if any of his legendary parsimony carried over into your directorial debut?īill Paxton: I've got a little bit of a producer's heart, and I've always had a great appreciation for efficiency on a film shoot, trying to find ways to economize while maximizing what's up on the screen. Trouble is, all those demons look just like ordinary people. Paxton's directorial debut Frailty is hardly a vanity project, though it's a Texas gothic tour de force that focuses on a father of two young boys who believes he's been charged by God to slay the demons that walk the streets of his rural community. So what's an almost-leading man to do when his career's on the upswing? Why, get behind a camera, of course. Hudson ("Game over, man! Game over!"), but more recent roles in Twister, Apollo 13, and longtime friend James Cameron's behemoth Titanic have made him a bankable commodity to fickle studio heads. Paxton headed out to California from his hometown of Fort Worth in the mid-Seventies with the idea of working behind the camera, but, in-between work as a set dresser on various low-budget ventures, early acting gigs in films as varied as Stripes and The Lords of Discipline led him down another road entirely.Ī solid character actor with charm to spare, to this day Paxton's probably best known as Alien's doomed Pvt. Texas native Bill Paxton has established himself as one of Hollywood's best middle-ground actors, which is to say that he's not quite a household name he instead falls some place between the "I know that face from somewhere" camp and the golden fields of leading man-dom. Bill Paxton stars in Frailty, a Texas gothic that also marks the actor's directorial debut.
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