Rutger Hauer

Rutger Hauer

Rutger Hauer has a message up on his official website about working with Morgan Freeman and Liam Neeson on the set of Batman Begins, the Year One type tale that Darren Aronofsky's making about the Dark Knight.

Now, I was overcome with so many different reactions from this post.

First: Rutger Hauer has a website? I'm not surprised that he does. Everybody and their dog has a website. Hell, I have a website, such as it is. So the man of a thousand roles (as long as the character Rutger is playing is Rutger Hauer) having a website shouldn't be surprising in and of itself.

What I'm surprised about is that I did not know about it.

Considering that "The Rutger" is one of the Evil Hippy's most favorite performers. Once upon a time, he set it as a goal for himself to create the world's largest private Rutger Hauer Film Library. He worked it up to some ungodly number of movies starring, featuring or even having just a bit part from The Rutger. Mostly on VHS, mostly bought cheap at second-hand VHS and CD stores.

I think the advent of DVD kind of took the wind out of his sails, as he never really went about collecting DVD movies of Rutger's work with the same passion he did with VHS copies. I always thought it was because Rutger represented the old ways, and for Bill, those were two circles whose borders should never meet.

Or perhaps it was because the rights to so many of Rutger's films were so open that you could find five DVD copies of Escape from Sobribor in a decent media outlet. It was just too daunting a task to even try to pick up the library.

I was surprised that the Hippy does not have a link up on his site to Rutger Hauer's page. Surprised, and dismayed.

But also, I was surprised at the nonchalance with which Rutger describes his meeting Morgan Freeman, with whom he's never worked:

"....the moment he arrived I grabbed and hugged [Morgan] telling him what a pleasure I thought it was [to work with him]. He agreed.

Now, what I picture is Morgan Freeman (classy guy) walking on set, and suddenly being accosted by this boisterous European gentleman, whom Morgan thinks he's seen, but decides that Hauer must have been a craft services guy on Hard Rain, or something. And Morgan is simply being polite when Rutger tells him it's great to be working together.

Mr. Freeman is a classy guy. Even to craft services.

But I also liked Rutger's version of meeting Michael Caine:

Michael Caine knocked on the door of my trailer and stepped in. We embraced furiously and he was just as happy to see me as I was to see him. We worked in Kenya in pffft '75. What a nice man he is. Told him I was happy for him in the gem of a role he's playing. So it was a great heart warming day.

I just love that line at the end: It was a great heartwarming day. See? Rutger's just a sappy dope like you and me.

But the line that caught my eye first was the one where Michael Caine's just stepped into Rutger's trailer. They embrace furiously.

Now, furiously's a word that gets thrown around quite a bit nowadays, and has lost a bit of its impact, in my mind. To me, to do something furiously is to do it in a mad, angry passion. I always think if somebody's furious, they're insanely angry. And personally, I wouldn't want to be embraced furiously. Especially by Rutger Hauer.

It's a semantic argument, and your interpretationg my differ from mine. But that line got me to reading between the lines in Rutger's tale.

See, I don't think Michael Caine was terribly happy to see Rutger. At all. I kind of think the trailer Rutger calls "his," was actually Michael Caine's trailer. Rutger gets on set, asks where his trailer is, and finds he doesn't have one. Amiably, he calls it a mistake, and finds an unoccupied trailer, where he squats. And there he stays, until Michael Caine gets done shooting his scene, comes to his trailer to take a dump, finds a naked Rutger Hauer sitting Indian Style in front of the TV watching soap operas and crying. Crying hard. Furiously hard.

The furious embrace? That's Michael "Insanely Strong for a Classically Trained Actor" Caine grabbing Hauer by the torso and bodily carrying the star of Blind Fury out of his trailer.

I don't have a good way to segue out of my post. I'll just finish with a link to Rutger Hauer's front page, where you can see the many, many, many roles that Rutger has played in his career.

Many, many.