On screen, Crispin Glover has earned notoriety and acclaim for playing geeks, eccentrics and outsiders. Off screen, things aren't really that different, writes Donald Clarke
CRISPIN Glover huddles over his laptop like a gifted teenager engaged in some bafflingly cerebral hobby. "I'll come down to tea in a minute, Mom!" he doesn't quite say. "I've just got to finish this last circuit diagram." Glover, a freshly varnished stick insect, is putting the finishing touches to the Dadaist slide show that proceeded a screening of What is It?, his dizzyingly weird first feature, at the recent Darklight Festival in Dublin.
When word oozed out that Glover, still best known as a character actor, was moving into film direction, few of his fans expected him to focus on Jane Austen adaptations or Fluffy Bunny animations. Sure enough, What is it?turned out to be an indescribably surreal nightmare featuring a cast largely composed of young people with Down syndrome. The pseudo-sequel, It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE, is marginally less disturbing, but every bit as unhinged. Would you expect anything else from Crispin Glover?
Well, you might. Yes, Glover made something unsettling out of George McFly, Michael J Fox's harassed dad, in the first Back to the Futurefilm. He certainly delivered further variations on the deranged nerd in River's Edge, Wild at Heartand Charlie's Angels. But that was just acting, wasn't it? We don't imagine that Robert Downey Jr keeps a super-charged metal suit in his basement. Bela Lugosi wasn't really a member of the undead.
Yet some of Crispin Glover's onscreen persona does seems to have seeped into his public life. Eccentric in interviews, swivel-eyed when presenting his slide show, Glover never seems able to fully shake off his Gloverishness.
"Well, well, well," he machine-guns. "Yeah, that's right. I am extremely aware of running the persona as a business. I don't mean to say persona as, er . . . um . . . I mean I am aware of myself. There is somebody called Crispin Glover. That's me!"
Well I'm in the right room then.
"Then I am aware of 'Crispin Glover' - the name I used for my acting career that I chose at 13. I use my full name, Crispin Hellion Glover, as a writer. Now, I am aware of the name and the images that 'Crispin Glover' puts forth in TV and film interviews. As a person - Crispin Glover - I can have influence on that, but I am also heavily aware that there is a discrepancy between that person and the private me. Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't anything about the public persona that reflects me."
So, who am I talking to now? Is he currently wearing inverted commas?
"I talk about things in a different way in interviews. Look, I am aware of the product - 'Crispin Glover' - I am selling. You talk differently when you are selling a product."
The raw materials for this product were born 44 years ago in New York City. Crispin Glover, named for the St Crispin's Day speech from Shakespeare's Henry V, is the son of Bruce Glover, a veteran character actor, and Marie, a former dancer. After the family moved to Los Angeles, Crispin spent time in a school for the gifted and began contemplating a life in the arts. Surprisingly for somebody so associated with the avant garde, he, once again, talks in coolly commercial terms about his early ambitions.
"I started realising that this would be a good business to be in," he says, flapping a hand at the interior of the Irish Film Institute. "This felt like something I could do. Initially, I just thought it might be neat if I could be in a TV show or something. But I think, from when I was 16 or so, I had a sophisticated taste in art. At that time, there were still serious, interesting films being made in Hollywood. Somewhere round about that point, that changed." There is, surely, something of an irony here. Fairly or unfairly, cinema analysts often attribute the advance of rampaging commercialism to the influence of movie brats such as Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis - respectively, the producer and director of Back to the Future.
"Exactly! It's a funny thing you should say that, because this was something I was highly conscious of," he says. "Look, in the US, Back to the Futureis a very beloved movie, and I don't think we have time in this short conversation to cover it. But in a strange way, What is It?is a response to all that. I am dealing with that in my films."
Wilfully eccentric even at the beginning of his career, Glover refused to take part in the sequels to Back to the Futureand sued Zemeckis when the director hired another actor to deliver a cameo eerily similar to Crispin's original creation.
Glover furrows his brow when I suggest the two men are pals again, but he admits that he enjoyed working on Zemeckis's recent adaptation of Beowulf. He is, moreover, happy to acknowledge the positive effect Back to the Futurehad on his career. Some of the people buying tickets for his own, frantically unconventional films will have been drawn to the auditorium by memories of George McFly.
"Sometimes those people like the films. But I have had people write to me or mail me - they are rarely brave enough to say it to my face - to say that they were fans of my acting work, but, having seen my own films, will never ever go and see anything I am involved with again." Crispin Glover - or, rather, the "Crispin Glover-brand" multimedia product - can afford a wry smile at such objections. A trawl on the internet discovers a clutch of pop-songs named for the actor, a herd of sites dedicated to his worship and a wealth of speculation as to what he should do next (many would like to see him play the Riddler in a Batman film). Glover, who spends half the year in the Czech Republic, may have patented his own, unique brand of all-purpose Weird, but he may be in danger of becoming an American institution.
"No, no, no," he says mildly, before spinning his mental steering wheel.
"Well, maybe yes. I suppose that's a good thing. There are good things that come with it. But, yes, I suppose that's a good thing." The head goes down and the gifted kid returns to his train set.
McFly to Grendel: the Glover highlight reel
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter(1984) Jimbo Anderson
Back to the Future(1985) George McFly At Close Range (1986) Lucas
River's Edge(1986) Layne
Wild at Heart(1990) Dell
The Doors(1991) Andy Warhol
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues(1993) Howard Barth
What's Eating Gilbert Grape(1993) Bobby McBurney
The People vs. Larry Flynt(1996) Arlo
Nurse Betty(2000) Roy Ostery
Charlie's Angels(2000) Thin Man
Bartleby(2001) Bartleby
Willard(2003) Willard Stiles
Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle(2003) Thin Man
Beowulf(2007) Grendel
