Serial Adventurer
Fan Favorite Michael Biehn is back in action again & again & again.
Looking for that lost item you never thought you would again? The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? The Lost Dutchman Mines? Amelia Earhart's plane? Well, Judson Cross and his crew at Adventure Inc. are just the people you'll need.
New to syndication, Adventure Inc. arrives early this month. It's an action-adventure romp based on the life and times of real-life explorer Barry Clifford, who has salvaging and displaying sunken artifacts for more than 16 years.
Portraying Cross - Adventure Inc.'s rugged explorer - is a familiar face to SF fans: Michael Biehn. Known for playing tough characters in such movies as Terminator, ALIENS, and The Abyss, Biehn keeps the excitement flowing as captain of The Vast Explorer, tracking and tracing the things people believe can't be found.
Getting involved in Adventure Inc. was simply a matter of who Biehn knew. And it was a longtime associate who pulled him in. "I did Clockstoppers, kind of a kids movie, last year. It was produced by Gale Anne Hurd," Biehn explains. "She produced Terminator, ALIENS, and The Abyss, so I've worked with her and, of course, Jim Cameron a lot. And Gale and I have stayed somewhat in contact over the years. She cast me in Clockstoppers, and as we were doing that, she started talking to me about her friend Barry Clifford, this diver extraordinaire who discovered the Whydah [a sunken pirate ship] and Captain Kidd's boat and all this stuff. She was thinking about doing a TV series about him.
"It sounded kind of fun because it would be very adventure - and action-oriented. I've got, I guess, a reputation for - or I've been kind of stuck in my career - usually either bad guys, antagonists or very, very intense tough guys like in Terminator and ALIENS. I'm in the military or a D.A. or a cop, and I'm always tough - or a very intense or bad guy. The guy who inspired this series is really different from that. Barry's fun-loving, always has a big smile on his face, is very much the optimist, always sees the good in people and situations, has a great sense of humor and never gets angry or ruffled. So it was something that I thought would be fun to do. It was different.
"People have never really seen this part of me," Biehn adds. "And this is probably closer to me than all those tough guys I play. I'm not really tough at all. Cross is just a fun guy to be around. And while my character has to handle himself in certain situations - there is a lot of action, guns, and all that stuff - it's different than anything else I've ever done. But mostly, I'm doing this because of of Gale, to answer your question from like 10 minutes ago."
Cliff Hanger
It you think you haven't seen Biehn in a while, you're right. That's why he's glad to have this gig. Keeping busy is one of his favorite pastimes, and this TV series is solidly in action territory. "It has been fun," he says. "I did another series for awhile, about 22 episodes of The Magnificent Seven. I like to work all the time. And TV is busy: You finish one [episode], then you get a new script, there are rewrites, some new people come in, there's new casting, six to seven pages a day and it just keeps you busy. It's fun. I've been working on a movie a year for the last two years. Last year was a bad year. I did one movie [Clockstoppers]. It's fun to be busy, and this fits the bill as far as that goes.
"I'm content working. I'm content working with people whom I enjoy working with. I like making movies. But over the last two, three years, I've had such long periods in between movies, I've felt my kids were looking at me like I'm a bum," he jokes. "I would get calls and they would hear me negotiating something and they would be like, Do it, do it! I would tell them, I might have to leave for three months. And they would say, Do it, do it, do it! Everybody wanted me to go back to work, so I went back to work."
And work he does. Filmed in Toronto, with some location shoots planned for various places around the world, Adventure Inc. is escapist fantasy with a little something for everyone. "I think if anything, the fun [factor] is why people will watch this show," Biehn remarks. "I hope that we're able to achieve that thing where people say, Oh, gee, I wonder what's going on with Judson this week? or What's happening with Gabe? or Oh, they're kind of fun! It's very light fare. We don't take ourselves seriously. We're doing an ad campaign that says: We're putting this show on, but we're not taking it all that seriously. And that's what Adventure Inc. is more than anything else.
"If you want heady, watch the Discovery Channel. And by the way, we're always talking about the Discovery Channel [on the series], because supposedly Judson Cross has been on that channel quite a bit. I think our stories are cute and fun, a little out there. But we'll see soon enough if other people think so, too. Who knows whether it will pay off or not. We hope so. We hope we'll get to ratings heaven."
Biehn is a candid kind of guy, someone who doesn't mind talking or joking about himself. "Yeah, I like talking about myself. I have no problem with that," he grins, and then backs up his statement by segueing into a recent contribution he made to an episode. "I actually added a line that I always wanted to put in a movie. [In the scene], they're torturing me, and I have no information. I was supposed to say all this flip, tough stuff. But I said, No, no, no. I should be really scared. So I had them write a line for me, which was: You'll have to torture me to shut up. It's one of my favorite lines."
One of Biehn's favorite episodes thus far "is about a Vietnam vet. He's becoming a very heady political figure, and he wants to go back to Vietnam because he has buddies who were killed and buried there. He wants our help to bring their bones back, so we go to Vietnam - actually, it's Cambodia - but he takes us there under false pretenses. It turns out that he's going to be the head of the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] and there's somebody from his past dealing in heroin in that area, and so the vet must come back to make a deal with this guy. It's a funny little story where we think we're doing one thing, but it turns out we're getting ourselves involved in something we didn't expect. We have the right intentions, but we always end up stepping in, as they say."
Another episode involves Cross' past. "There's one we're working on now," says Biehn. "A widow has been dealing with a psychic and believes that her dead husband is talking through this psychic. This guy did the same kind of thing I do, as a matter of fact, and his name was Cap. I used to crew with him when I was younger, so Cap was Cross' hero. When Cap's wife shows up and says, Cap's asking me to do this, we're like, What? You know, he has been dead for a year. But the psychic is telling her to go back to this area where Cap found this ship.
"So I take her back there and say, You know, I kind of feel it. I understand what's going on with her. She wants to stay close to him, but I believe the psychic is taking advantage of her. It's like a ghost story, but it's not really a ghost story because, you know, there are no ghosts," Biehn laughs. "But it's, Is there a ghost? Is Cap a ghost? Did he come back through this psychic? It becomes very adventurous. It's very good guys/bad guys. There's always something for us to solve.
"Those are two of the stories," Biehn comments. "The one we started off with had to do with finding some ancient bones wanted by people on the black market. We get a hold of them, and they try to get them and harm us. Then it's revealed that these bones are from a very, very special kind of prehistoric man. It's all kind of action-fun-adventure, you know?"
Treasure Hunter
With such exploits edged in historical themes and political significance, one might assume that Adventure Inc. is, to use Biehn's term, a heady, cerebral action series. Not quite. "Nah, I wouldn't call this heady at all," he laughs. "It's very light entertainment. I think of it as fun, well-done and with very good production values for a syndicated show. We have pretty good scripts and a very attractive cast. We also have quite a bit of money to do it, so it looks really good. It's almost like the old serials. They used to put them on TV all the time, and I was addicted to them.
"I don't want to compare this series to B-movies, though, because that doesn't sound very good. But it is kind of like a serial. We try to find the fun in the situations. We give you a little action, pretty girls, some humor, a bit of intrigue and, hopefully, we do it well enough and you like the characters enough that you'll come back to watch again. The bottom line is: You can have action, ships, underwater footage, explosions, guns, fights - you can have all that, but unless you have attractive characters people like and want to revisit, you're really in bad shape. I think we have that. I feel good about what we've been able to do so far, and that's the most important thing."
Cross is the leader of the globe-hopping trio who search the world for treasures. "He's the boss," Biehn states. "He's the guy with the experience, he owns the boat, he's the one who hired the other two. Mackenzie Previn [Karen Cliche] is a dive master, so she's very skilled in underwater stuff. Gabriel Patterson [Jesse Nilsson] knows all the history; he's kind of blue-collar educated-not through schools, just through years of experience. He knows where all the treasures and shipwrecks are, and he knows everybody in the business, good guys and bad guys.
"Adventure Inc. is basically the story of a guy living on his boat, who has two people working for him. One's a young character, Gabe, and he's inspired by John F. Kennedy Jr., whom Barry Clifford had on his boat one summer. Gabe is running away from his political family and wants to do his own thing. He wants to be who he wants to be, and doesn't want to be saddled with all this responsibility he never asked for.
"And then there's Mackenzie. [She's like] Demi Moore in G.I. Jane - one of the first women Navy SEALS. Mackenzie really worked her way up, became a SEAL and then became frustrated because she never saw any action. So she quit and joined the Israeli army. She's really a tough fighting machine. She's the brawn of the three of us. Gabe is the youth; I'm the experience. Karen is doing the character that I usually play in all my movies."
So, if you think about it, Biehn is really playing opposite himself. "That's exactly what it is," he chuckles. "When I first got the role, I was very concerned because of the woman with a gun, tough woman aspect, especially when the woman is very pretty. It never works for me. They did that kind of thing well in La Femme Nikita, but usually women with guns, women fighting, women beating up men, I just don't buy it. And I've never bought it.
"But then I met Karen, and I swear to God, she really turned me around," Biehn says. "She comes from a military family herself. She's very pretty, very sexy, very tough, very much a tomboy, kind of a brawler and kind of loud. She has this obnoxious laugh. And when she fights, she's always concerned with how tough she looks, not what her hair looks like. Same thing when she gets a weapon: She just wants to shoot and shoot. The more the audience sees of Karen, the more they're going to like her character. I like her character a lot."
Show Stopper
Considering the series' fast pace, one of Biehn's most important tasks is to make sure that all the various pieces fit together. "The Magnificent Seven didn't have as much action in it as this," he notes. "But I've learned so much over the years, shooting movies like Terminator and The Abyss. I've done a lot of action, so I've gone from somebody who was learning to somebody whom people look to for knowledge about this stuff. That's all it is, experience. I've been around a long time now, and I've done so many of these kinds of movies. I know all about staging action and making action look good and feeling comfortable doing it and trying to find dialogue that's fun in the action sequences. It has prepared me very well for Adventure Inc."
Just don't expect him to jump out of any windows. He leaves that sort of stuff to the professionals. "I've always done some of my own false fighting, rolling, jumping and anything that I felt I could do, that didn't involve any danger," Biehn offers. "But anything that looks like a real stunt - somebody crashing through a fence, diving off a wall, a high fall - most of that is my stunt guy. I don't do anything that's dangerous. I'm in pretty good shape, though, so I've done lots of running, jumping, rolling, fighting, weapons. I've been doing that stuff for years. And I've never been hurt doing it. I don't do all of my own stunts, though. Let Tom Cruise do that."
After all these years, Biehn knows how to get an action story across in an exciting way. "I never like exposition scenes because it's tough to tell a story. The thing about exposition scenes is to tell them well, and Jim Cameron taught me that. Although we don't always do it in this show, the best way to tell a story - if you have to explain something to the audience - is to do it during an action sequence. So we try to take all our exposition and have as much fun as we can with it, whether it's humor or action. But sometimes we don't."
And since Biehn is the lead character, it's often up to him to make the main points understood. Which is something the actor looks forward to. "I have a lot of dialogue and talking to do, and although there's tons of action, there's also loads of dialogue to learn every night. So it's challenging. And not because I can't learn the dialogue, but because I have to work with new directors every week, do what I think is a good job, make the individual scenes work on their own with the dialogue and [collaborate] with two other actors on the story at [an accelerated] pace. Hopefully, it's fun to watch. It's fun to make, but it's challenging."
Even with all the talk of hopefully, Biehn appears optimistic and enthusiastic about Adventure Inc. So optimistic, that he's willing to make some long-term plans. "If it's a big hit," Michael Biehn offers, "then you can call back in six months or so, and we'll talk about what the next season is going to be like."
© 2002 STARLOG
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