Wanted: Kris Kristofferson

Interview, Sept, 1998 by Jack Mathews

And he keeps right on a changin' for the better or the worse, Searchin' for a shrine he's never found - Never knowin' if believin' is a blessin' or a curse, or if the goin' up is worth the comin' down -

Kris Kristofferson wrote the opening lines to his country hit "The Pilgrim; Chapter 33" in 1970. It was a whimsical tribute to a bunch of friends, some of them fellow Nashville songwriters, who had all just turned thirty-three - supposedly the age of Christ at the crucifixion. It was a pivotal year for Kristofferson, who was also thirty-three and on the verge of becoming a major music and movie star.

Since then, Kristofferson has gone up, come down, and gone up again. In the '70s, his soul-searching voice spoke to a generation liberated by the '60s, and his rebel image pushed country music into the countercultural mainstream. He also became an A-list Hollywood star, working for such hot directors as Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese and sharing a marquee with Barbra Streisand. Then came Heaven's Gate (1980) and the Reagan era - and with them, the coming down.

A chance role in John Sayles' Lone Star (1996) reversed direction for Kristofferson, and two years later he's barely able to catch his breath between acting assignments. He's done six films In quick succession, claiming costarring roles with Wesley Snipes in the current Blade and Mel Gibson in next year's Payback, and the starring role in James Ivory's heartrending A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, adapted from Kaylie Jones's fictionalized portrait of her father James Jones, the author of From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line.

Kristofferson spoke to us by phone from his home in rural Hawaii, where he lives with his third wife, Lisa Meyers, and their five children. He was squeezing in what time he could there, between shooting a movie adaptation of a Tom Clancy novel, Net Force, in Los Angeles and working on a film about Father Damien, the leper-colony palest, in Molokai. He was due soon in Alaska to begin work on Sayles's Limbo.

JACK MATHEWS: Have you ever been busier?

KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: No, I really haven't. It's kind of ironic, too. Right when I get very happy with where I am, with my family and my home here, I'm away from them a lot. But I can't complain.

JM: You played a cold-blooded killer in Lone Star, and the critics loved you. Were you surprised by their reaction?

KK: I was surprised that the movie was so well-received, because a lot of the people who write criticism seem conservative or more oriented toward the big studios and the big movies. Lone Star wasn't a big movie.

JM: Did you come away from that feeling you were in a position to see good material again, and work with people like James Ivory?

KK: Absolutely. It's a blessing to get work like that; I feel very blessed at this point in my life.

JM: Bill Willis, the James Jones character in A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, seems to fit you like an old shoe.

KK: I really felt lucky to get a shot at that role. I loved the script, and the more research I did on James Jones, the more I felt I could identify with him - with his love-hate relationship with the military, his devotion to his kids, his need to fulfill his destiny as a writer. I feel all the same things.

JM: Let's talk about your destiny to be a writer. When did that urge hit you?

KK: It was what I was aiming at ever since high school when I started writing stories. When I was at Pomona College, I submitted four stories for an Atlantic Monthly writing contest. They told me that they were the four best stories, but they didn't want to give me four awards. So, they gave me a fast, a third, and two honorable mentions. I felt pretty stoked.

JM: Most writing professors tell you to write about what you know.

KK: Yeah, so you gotta go out and get to know something. I remember the first rejection I got was for a novel I was working on while I was at Oxford. They passed on the book, but they said they were definitely interested in anything I'd do after I'd lived a while.

JM: You were writing music then, too?

KK: Yes, but I viewed it as a sideline. Then, when I was over at Oxford, I got hooked up with a guy named Paul Lincoln, who was managing some rock 'n' roll acts. He got me a record contract and they changed my name to Kris Carson and I was going to be a rock 'n' roll star. Fortunately, that didn't pan out.

JM: You ended up in Nashville trying to sell country songs.

KK: Yeah, after I got out of the army, I went to Nashville and fell in love with the songwriting scene. I wrote prolifically for about five years, but it takes a while for people to take you seriously down there. They had two thousand registered songwriters in Nashville. They called us bugs.

JM: Meanwhile, were you getting some of those life experiences?

KK: I tried to get as many varied experiences as I could, different jobs that didn't take any kind of brains: gandy dancer, forest firefighter, bartender. I got a job working in the Gulf of Mexico on an oil rig.

JM: And what changed?

KK: If there was one thing that happened, it was me getting fired from that job in the Gulf. I left there on April 15, 1969, and I went back to Nashville, thinking I'd be sent to jail - I had a lot of child-support obligations. But I called up a songwriter friend and told him I'd lost my job. He said, "Great, Johnny Cash is doing a new TV show down here, so we can just pitch songs to him." And that's what we did. During the first month, I had four songs on. Roger Miller did "Me and Bobby McGee," Ray Price came out with "For the Good Times," Johnny recorded "Sunday Morning Coming Down" on the show, and Sammi Smith cut "Help Me Make It Through the Night."