Detour - 1994
Detour Magazine 1994
Written by Kathryn Harris
This was Clearly not going to be your regular interview, but a mind altering experience, a piece of theater, an independent bit of art. I watched and listened, for this wasn't a static, one dimensional side of Billy, but a moving, flowing, live Billy Wirth, to whom he was opening the door. "For why," he says, "When I am trying to understand life, and am living it to the full, should I stop to do an interview? What is that all about? To sell my career?" he ponders.
Billy, dressed in hobo gear, has a distinctive style, but is also reminiscent of some -maverick movie characters. His desire to articulate reminds me of Matt Dillon's character in Drugstore Cowboy, his throwaway sensuality and confidence suggest Mickey Rourke in Body Heat, his hoarse, sexy voice is very New York, almost Tom Waits, and his sincerity, believe it or not, is a lot like John Boy's on The Waltons.
Today he sports a black-and-red plaid shirt and white long johns cut off at the knee, with a cool-looking hat and leather boots with their side zippers carelessly flailing open. Lots of metaphysical-looking jewelry hangs from his neck. He has a ring he purchased because, hell, it was just like one his brother had, and some beads from a health-food store in Santa Monica. "The woman who sold them to me said they come from the Bodhi tree, the kind the Buddha was enlightened under. This is a sprocket, circular thing that I picked up," he adds.
He also wears a feather pendant, a bear necklace, and a ring inscribed, in Latin script, "Think of me." Damn, this guy positively jangles when he moves! All were given to him by his girlfriend, he says, as a gentle smile brushes his face. At times it was as though I was hardly there; he conducted his own interview, posing and answering questions almost simultaneously. He clearly has a very strong urge to communicate, and a desire to be as honest as possible in that communication. After talking at some length about his recent movie, Body Snatchers, directed by Abel Ferrara, he pauses. "Could we start again?" he questions. He tries to come to terms with the whole interview thing. We discuss throwing away the tape recorders-for there are two, his and mine into the pool. For the first time, as his face lights up at the thought, I understand why my girlfriends were envious when they learned I was to meet Billy Wirth-his swarthy good looks, his poignant thoughts, and his tangible energy shout out sensuality. He thinks maybe trashing the tape would be a good idea, but what would his publicist say?
"Why did you bring your own tape recorder anyway?" I ask.
"So I can listen to it afterwards, and shoot myself," he says, laughing.
Billy Wirth, originally from New York City, spent most of his adolescence on the athletic field, competing in a myriad of sports, including baseball and basketball. At Collegiate High School in Manhattan, he began high jumping, and competed in the Junior Olympics U.S. Youth Games and the Empire State Games. He attended Brown University, where he continued to compete, and break track and field records. He became interested in acting during his junior year, and segued into acting via modeling, making his feature film debut in Joel Schumacher's hit, The Lost Boys. His other film roles include Seven Minutes In Heaven and War Party, directed by Franc Roddam. On television he has starred in Zalman King's Red Shoe Diaries. Of Zalman King, he says, I guess you see movies of that genre, and you wonder what the director's like, but he is really a great guy, a family man."
Billy's ready again to talk about Body Snatchers, which stars Gabrielle Anwar (Scent of a Woman), Terry Kinney, Meg Tilly, and Forest Whitaker. "It was a great film to work on," Billy says. "I have been a big fan of Abel's work ever since King of New York.
"The film is about aliens who take over a military base, creatures that form themselves into human beings-pod creatures, that look a little like brussels sprouts, found in the surrounding swamp land. They attach themselves to human beings and reform themselves." Billy pauses to follow the path of a helicopter passing overhead. You can almost see his brain circuitry working overtime. He tries hard to put his finger on the truth of the matter, what he found interesting about the film.
"The movie is exciting on a suspense level, but it is also exciting on a metaphorical level," he explains."I think that it is a call for everyone to wake up, to wake up to their consciousness, wake up to their experience. It is finally not just about the alienation between people, but on a more optimistic level it is about the triumph of the spirit." A good American theme for a movie, I think to myself.
"There is one great scene with a little boy played by Reilly Murphy," Billy says animatedly. "He's in a kindergarten class, and the teacher holds up the finger paintings the kids in the class have done, and Reilly's is very different from all the others. Reilly's realization that all the other kids have been taken over by pods induces fear, and he runs. This is pretty much a call to the expression of the self, and it was great to see this movie work on those levels. You never know what it's all about, until it is somehow magically edited. It got me excited in terms of the pace and action, and it was intelligent, too . Abel, he's a clever man, and he works from a very intuitive place, or at least you can't really make sense of what he's doing when he's doing it. But he clearly knows. It was fun to do, and as far as watching it and seeing where I'm at, it's so, I don't know, I'm not even going to comment on that. But I had a great time doing it. Meg Tilly was phenomenal, and Forest Whitaker, too." I laugh. Billy has said so much in one breath. I'm left astounded by his thought processes, reminiscent of an overview of the Los Angeles Freeway system before the earthquake. As preparation for the film, Ferrara sent Billy and Elvis Phillips, who plays his best friend in Body Snatchers, to a training camp run by a Colonel Webster. Billy learned to shoot militaryissue M-16s and .45s, and was taught the most efficient way to kill people. He says this introduction to the military system was fascinating. "They bring you in, they break you down, and then they build you back up again, only to break you down again." He explains how the people he came into contact with were pleasant enough, but "programmed."
"We are all programmed," he says, "programmed by television, by the food we eat, but they actually choose to be programmed. I don't want to become too political. I mean, we need a military, but it was fascinating to experience.
It was a pretty exciting few days, and it was also good because we bonded-Elvis and I, and some of the others."
Shooting the movie in Southern Alabama was another eye opener for Billy, who's always eager to learn from each new experience, and this one increased his awareness of racial division.
We end up sitting on the grass-green carpet. You know the kind. It is pretty hot up there on the roof of this two-story motel on the edge of Beverly Hills. We look down at the traffic below. "Films," Billy mutters.
"What is your next project?" I ask. Since Body Snatchers, he has also completed Final Mission and Who Killed the Baby Jesus. In Final Mission, he plays an air force pilot whose strength of spirit wins over his evil superiors, who are trying to brainwash him. Of Who Killed the Baby Jesus, he says, "I play a hit man who is longing for a deeper connection than the life he's leading, and I find it in my love for a woman who finally betrays me. I was attracted to the dark quality of the piece."
Watch out for another of Billy's movies, My Love, Your Honor, directed by Bill Bentley. Bonnie Bedelia stars as a woman judge responsible for putting Billy's father in prison, and upon whom he seeks revenge.
Billy says he sometimes has difficulty discussing his films. "I mean, I like to talk about them, and they're fun, and I do them, but when it comes back to analyzing them, sometimes. . ." A long pause while he considers, and then, "Each person is going to have their own experience. You go into a movie, and you get hit with images, ideas, and stories-film is a very powerful medium to communicate ideas and thoughts-they have a different meaning to each person.
They're entertainment, and mirrors of where we're at in society. In terms of spirituality, understanding, and growing to understand, it's, wow, it's pretty amazing to me to try to make sense, to try to balance it. What is there to do? What is the point of anything, you know? I've had experiences of connectedness, where I didn't exist, and yet I was totally present, totally awake-it's hard to talk about these things, because language, words, can't always get there.' See, the point where you drop the concept 'I,' mind, body, and all concepts-you are just awareness, and you see, you don't judge, you take pictures with your camera, with your lenses, and you don't attach anything to those pictures. You stay in that space, breathe it, wake up to your self, the connectedness of everything. Let's erase all that. It doesn't make sense." Billy recently starred in an as-yet-unreleased movie entitled The Fence, directed by first timer Peter Pistor. Billy plays a man who has spent most of his life locked up, initially in a juvenile hall at the age of 13, and then onto a minimum security prison, from which he is finally freed at age 29. Erica Gimple (Fame), plays the woman with whom Billy falls in love when he gets out of jail, and Paul Benjamin (Escape From Alcatraz), plays his friend in jail. The role is arguably one of his most challenging to date, and the experience was so grueling and brutal, he says, he still feels the effects of it today.
They spent four days in Joliet Prison near Chicago doing research, which left him feeling very, depressed, seeing a side of life which remains hidden to most of society. The production crew later returned to actually shoot the prison scenes at Joliet, using real inmates (on good behavior) as actors. He describes his attempt to have respect for the prisoners in what is essentially their home, and to find a way to meld into their environment.
"Being a New Yorker, hanging out on the street playing basketball, helped some," he says. "I'd ask them what they were in for, and they'd say, 'Murder,' and the interesting thing is, they did kill people, and yet you could still see the playful children in them." Billy says that that signifies to him their potential for rehabilitation, and yet, he maintains, there is no effort on the part of the authorities to facilitate that. Sure, there are libraries, and sure, he met some genius guys who had studied or found God, but they weren't the majority.
"I don't know," Billy sighs, "It's fucking hard-core. Stone cold cells. We all worked together, and despite the knowledge that these guys had committed horrific crimes, you could see the goodness in them. And yet the guards couldn't and I couldn't see the goodness in a lot of the guards. There was one occasion when we walked through a corridor lined with the really hard criminals, the ones never let out of their cells. They had mirrors which they shot out and used to see us when we walked by, and they let out the most violent, primal screams I have ever heard. I guess they were just releasing the repression and anger they felt, and just trying to scare us. I guess that's just how they get their kicks. Prison is hell," Billy concludes. "It's certainly not rehabilitative. The inmates who were acting with us were getting attention, direction, and love, and you could see that. I made friends with all of them, and it was hard, at the end of the day, to leave and hear the bars shutting behind us."
Billy talks about love being the starting point for any kind of reform.
"But what we think of as love, and what love really is, are two different things. Love is like being totally open, present, so energy can flow right though you, and resonate into others. You don't even have to make physical contact to express that kind of love. Responsibilities, that's love too, but the love connection is like a silent window."
Billy has already started rehearsals for his largest movie yet, Boys On the Side, with director Herbert Ross (Steel Magnolias), and starring Whoopi Goldberg, Mary-Louise Parker, Drew Barrymore, and James LeGros.
"Herbert let me try all sorts of things, and he really knows, moment to moment, what's working, and then together we lock it in,' Billy says. "The movie's about a girl with HIV, played by Mary-Louise, who advertises for someone to go with her on a road trip. Enter Whoopi, two characters who are totally polarized.
On their trip, they stop to visit Whoopi's friend, played by Drew. I play her out of control boyfriend-musician-drug pusher in a relationship that is going sadly wrong."
He feels he's been lucky to work with a lot of talented first-time directors, and now, to work with not only talent, but with people who have had a lot of experience, can only be an additional delight.
Billy's friends casually and unobtrusively click their cameras and shoot some videotape of this and that, and of us talking. His stream of consciousness dialogue is both raw and revealing. He comes back at you with the continuation of a thought from several subjects past. And any direct question I ask is answered not with a single idea, but with a flow of several ideas, and usually incorporate some kind of metaphysical consideration. "Are you writing anything yourself?" I ask.
"Yes, I want to work with my friends. And that's what we are doing. Writing several different projects about the power gained through understanding and healing and the giving up of the 'I' concept. "
"Eye, Eye," I think to myself. What's this one on about?
"No, No," he says "the personal 'I,' when you give up the ego, when you drop that, you become a vessel, a transformer, a transmitter of information. Then real creation happens. When I get out of the way, it comes through me, yet I can be totally aware of it. So then you get into these understandings of ego and what real creation is. So much is a matter of getting to that space, working from there-in writing, acting, and all aspects of your life." Billy looks pensive.
"I am playing with a band again. I sing, something which I thought I could never do before-not even 'Happy Birthday.' The frequencies and the tones that you hit, that vibrate through your system, and the healing power of music, are phenomenal. The experience that I get when I let go and let the joy in.
Most of all, it's fun. "If I am going to say anything to anyone, for me it's just about love, peace, and nurturing." He sighs. "Wow. So what else can I talk about? I haven't connected on anything because I didn't still myself for it. Find that center, and when you do, it comes out effortlessly-just what you need to say. Instead of trying to figure out what it is." "How do you like living in Los Angeles?"
"I've been here for about four and a half years," he says. "I travel around a lot, and this is a good base for me. I have a lot of friends here, and the environment is a good one creatively for me. It's a place where I can work with other people. Ideally, I would like to have a place out in the mountains somewhere and be able to go back and forth, back to nature. That's where we're headed."
"Do you think we're all going to get there?" I wonder.
"Yes, some of us will get there," is his cryptic reply.
"Tell me about some things that fascinate you.
"The time wave idea, the Mayan calendar, the end of time as we understand it.
Galactic light beams. Did you know that everything, all information and ideas, are transmitted through light? The I Ching. Terrence McKenna. I've been reading a lot about these things."
"How long have you been interested in this kind of stuff?"
"For like ten-odd years. None of it makes any sense, though. I can't explain any of it. But it's mind boggling. Scientists realize that the world, and the linear way of thinking about time, and the conventional idea of matter, aren't the case. It's multi-dimensional. Tribal cultures and shamen have always understood this because of their understanding of nature. We're in a fascinating time right now. The next 10 years is going to be like 100 years in terms of the rapid rate of events which will occur. Just get ready, it's gonna be wild and crazy, a renaissance period in terms of artists, chaos, faster and faster, coming to this time wave. Spirituality and synchronicity- I know is that I wish I wasn't giving this interview." He laughs.
"Let's design a couple of words on a page instead, for the magazine," I suggest.
"That would be cool."
"What would we say?"
"Billy Wirth doesn't exist." He grows silent for a moment, then continues.
"What really interests me are the spirit powers that we possess, and that we're not even aware of-that we are on a path beyond technology, that technology is a diversion stopping us from realizing our true selves, and we're really super transmitters, intergalactic."
This is getting too heady for me. I want to move him onto solid ground. The word "track" comes to mind.
"You are a former athlete," I offer.
"No, I am still an athlete'. He chimes.
"OK, then. What kind of training do you do?"
"Push-ups, sit-ups, stretching, basketball, and skiing," he affirms. I glance down at his washboard stomach.
"How come no one has ever said in print how old you are. Is there a reason for that?
"No. No one ever asked"
When were you born?
"June 23, 1962. I'm 31.
What star sign does that make you?
"Cancer. What sign are you?"
We are interrupted by one of Billy's friends, who asks how the interview's going.
"Horrible but good. Beautiful but chaotic. Nonsensical but interesting," Billy says. "What are we really doing here?" He turns to me. "Giving a little piece of yourself. People probably want to know about your personal life."
"Yeah, everyone wants to look outside themselves, I do, too. The hardest time I have is finding my stillness, and when you find it, you ask yourself, What have I been running from? Wake up to the national call, the real flow of life, and it's all miraculous. Then you have real clarity, not even that-you have nothing and everything, you drop into the now and you lose the mind."
He talks about visionary film directors who are inspired, forced to express their particular view of the world. People who have sensitivity and an inquisitiveness for the truth.
"What is the truth?" he asks. "Their sound their vision," he answers. Billy's ideal is a truth not controlled by the mind, where you are not dominated by a need to run the show, where you step out of the ego state of mind and allow the creative process to work of its own accord. "Life is flux. Continuous. I step out of the way. It does itself," he says.
Billy gets out his recent photographic experiments. Polaroids which he has scratched and manipulated and blown up with a laser printer. Some of them are quite beautiful. Flowers, eyeballs reflected in the sun, blue skies, and all manner of strange and exotic images.
"It's about being present for the miracle, witnessing it. When I try to act, or try to make sense of a movie, or do this interview, when I try too hard to say something, I need to slow down, let it say itself."
I ask him to speak a little about how he feels about his acting. "Good material helps," he laughs. "I know when I'm really there in a scene, and when I'm not. It's happening more and more for me, that sense of connectedness. A little moment here, and one there. The experience I enjoy isn't just the sum of what you see up on the screen. It's each little moment.
I'm still new at this.
"I asked Magic Johnson how long he was ever in the 'zone,' when you have no mind, you're just doing it, you're totally connected. Like doing a movie, when you play basketball you don't have to think how far away you are from the net, you just know intuitively."
When talking about how he feels about the quality of work he does, he says he tries not to look back, or took too hard, opting instead for being in the present. We look around at his friends, still busying themselves with musical. instruments, or just sitting and chewing the fat and painting.
"I'm just having a good time in life-eating good foods, natural foods. If it wasn't for those, I couldn't do what I do." And smoking American Spirits. He puts one out on the sole of his boot. "And staying hydrated. That's important."
" I think that I have a fair idea of who you are," I say in conclusion.
"No. It's a moment to moment thing. You've known me in this moment. If I think I know my friend, Adrian, and I lock him into that, I won't be able to see who he is right now. I don't know Adrian, I find out about him everyday.
He is ever flowing.
Thank you, Billy, for a great afternoon.
HOME
Magazine Links
Movie Links
Music Links
TV Links
Gallery
Lost Boys
Fan Comments
![face36[1]](http://static.wix.com/media/2a640f1e0bd6e7e800d8326d822e14a6.wix_mp)