James Legros: Making A Big Impact In Small Films

If Parker Posey is the "queen of the indies," as Time magazine once dubbed her, surely James LeGros is king. Since his movie debut 13 years ago, he may have appeared in more key independent films than any other actor.

He landed his first attention-getting role in Gus Van Sant's "Drugstore Cowboy," as Matt Dillon's junkie companion in drugstore robberies. He was hilarious as an obnoxious movie star in Tom DiCillo's "Living in Oblivion," and more subtly comic as Diane Lane's gun-borrowing next-door neighbor, Skippy, in Stacy Cochran's "My New Gun."

He also had the starring role in Peter McCarthy's 1994 tale of a Venice Beach slacker freaking out in post-riot Los Angeles, "Floundering," and he appeared in Michael Tolkin's "The Rapture," Cameron Crowe's "Singles," Tamra Davis' "Gun Crazy" and Kathryn Bigelow's "Near Dark."

Some of these roles have been supporting, like the ones he took in Todd Haynes' "Safe," as Julianne Moore's encouraging pal at an institution for people with environmental illnesses, and in Bart Freundlich's "The Myth of Fingerprints" (which opened at the Seven Gables this weekend), in which he plays Moore's childhood friend, Cezanne.

"The character in `Myth of Fingerprints' is not so prominent," LeGros said when he brought the movie to the Seattle International Film Festival this spring. "But I find as time passes that that's somewhat of a secondary consideration.

"It's more fun for me to be in something that turns out as a stronger whole than to have my individual performance stand out. I'd rather be in a good picture than be good in a picture that doesn't hit its mark. The sports analogy works here: You don't want to have an all-star performance in a losing game."

LeGros works often with directors he likes. He was featured in Bigelow's big-budget "Point Break," he appeared last year with Winona Ryder in Cochran's "Boys" and he went along with Davis' ill-fated attempt to make a 1994 studio Western, "Bad Girls." She was fired early in the production; the movie ended up a critical and commercial disaster.

"Any chance of that picture being good left with her," said LeGros. "It was just dreadful. It would take me a day to tell you what wrong with that. She was fired because they (Twentieth Century Fox) had it in for her, basically."

The experience brought back unpleasant memories of his early career. He had done a lot of regional theater before trying movies, first turning up in such lame fantasies as "Solarbabies" and "Phantasm II."

"It was slow at first but you know, I was a good age and a good type," he said. "I didn't really start out with a bang. I did small roles in bad movies by bad directors. Mostly it was a question of `How do you take terrible material and not embarrass yourself?' So often you're just trying not to be awful."

He wasn't Van Sant's first choice for "Drugstore Cowboy," which turned out to be his first major film, but eventually Van Sant and the producers, Laurie Parker and Cary Brokaw, decided he could bring a necessary balance to the picture. The National Society of Film Critics named it the best picture of 1989, though it was not a commercial success.

His next break was a small role in "The Rapture," a much-debated story of religious fanaticism that was released late in 1991: "Filmmakers like that picture but the public is a little more ambivalent. You really had to have your thinking cap on. That doesn't happen often enough in the disposable culture we live in."

"My New Gun" (1992) was "another tremendous experience," though it too had trouble finding an audience: "They didn't really have a venue for independent films at the time. The studios had closed them out. It wasn't really until the Quentin Tarantino craze that the venues opened up for independents."

He has mixed feelings about "Floundering," though he claims it has a devoted following of people 24 and under: "Uniformly they all like it. People over that age all hate it. There's no middle ground. The director may have been too close to it, but I look at that picture and say `I did my best.' If I had to do it all over again, I'd still do it."

His best post-"Myth of Fingerprints" experience was Jim McBride's "Pronto," an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel that will be shown as part of the Eastside Film Festival, at 3:30 p.m. next Sunday at the Meydenbauer Center in downtown Bellevue.

With 35 pictures under his belt, LeGros thinks he knows what it takes to create both a memorable film and a memorable filmmaking experience. He feels they all came together with "The Myth of Fingerprints," which was filmed in Maine.

"If the picture's good and the group of people are intelligent and compassionate, you can really have a great time on a location like that," he said. "There's a bonding that takes place that can't happen in a large city or if you're at home. I look back on that as one of my best experiences."

He also admits he did "Myth of Fingerprints" because he wanted to work with Moore again.

"Some people you just find you have a kind of chemistry that fills in all the blanks," he said. "Sometimes when you work with an actor or actress, you have to work out every detail. With Julie it just flows more easily. It picks up its own rhythm naturally. She's smarter than me, so she did all the hard work.

"We met on `Safe' and just hit it off right away. She was losing a lot of weight for that part. I on the other hand was gaining weight. I would sit in her dressing room and smoke cigarettes and eat ice cream, while she would suck on an ice cube and look disparagingly at me. We've been friends ever since."