It’s midnight and I’m in the living room of a small suburban house. The TV is chattering away in the background, casting a harsh, bluish glow over a middle-aged couple that I’ve never seen before. They’re on the couch, unmoving, and the woman’s head is cocked at an odd angle. I glance down at the cool, heavy object resting in my palm – a 9mm Smith & Wesson – before I hear the voice behind me, annoyed, frustrated, and cold-blooded: “You picked the wrong house again, Aarons.” I turn slightly and see one of the most eccentric-looking men I’ve ever laid eyes on. At 6’4” and a hair shy of 140 lbs., Doug Jones resembles nothing more than one of Tolkien’s tree-like Ents made flesh and blood. He grins, but it isn’t an I’m-so-happy-to-see-you grin: he’s holding a gun to my head.

With a casual shrug, as if to say, “C’est la vie,” he pulls the trigger. POP POP goes the gun and I’m sailing through the air, my body slamming into the foot of an oversized armchair. It’s a spectacular death. The high-pitched giggles that follow a moment later only ruin it slightly. I turn over to see Jones, bent double, attempting to stifle another outburst. “I’m sorry, it’s just that this is all so mean. I can’t believe I’m killing all these nice people!” he says by way of apology, nodding to the couple on the couch who have just miraculously resurrected. “Cut!” yells the director. Along with the rest of the crew, he’s trying not to laugh himself.

We’re on the set of Greyscale, an independent film being shot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Jones is playing Jamison, a remorseless mob hitman. The scene in question is a botched assassination, and Aarons (played by yours truly) has just become the unlucky recipient of Jamison’s wrath.

The mob bagman with a wicked streak of black humor is one of the rare roles where audiences will actually see the 48-year-old actor’s face. That’s because Jones’ pencil-thin visage is usually obscured by pounds of makeup, rubber latex, and computer generated imagery. While you may recognize some of the characters Jones has brought to life – Abe Sapien, The Faun, or The Silver Surfer (from Hellboy I and II, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, respectively) – you probably wouldn’t recognize Jones himself.  “I’m not usually the guy who has people hiding in his bushes and saying, ‘Will you love me forever and ever?’”

No paparazzi are lurking in the shadows tonight, hunting for a superstar money shot, which is just as well; it’s late and Jones is tired from a full day of shooting. Exhaustion seems to have done little to curb his practically stubborn cheeriness, however. Between takes Jones hobnobs with the crew, his bright shock of red hair floating from one person to the next. First he’s giving a quick massage to the Assistant Director; next he’s complementing the set photographer on his work; and finally he’s whispering genuine advice to the behind-the-scenes videographer. Watching Jones bounce from one “puppy” to the next, (his affectionate nickname for “fresh faced, bright eyed twenty-somethings”) it’s difficult to imagine him as a heartless killer. “I’m a very happy-go-lucky lover of all mankind as a person in real life,” Jones says. “So when I play a darker character, I have to tap into something that isn’t my natural way, and what I found was that I think human beings have the potential for all of these emotions. We have the full paint palette within us and it just depends on what we dip our brush into that day. There are people out there who are in prison right now who have dipped into the colors that some of us don’t ever dip into, but we have them, and we have the potential to do that.”

Jones’ road to becoming Hollywood’s go-to guy for roles involving complex makeup and prosthetics work, many of which involve dipping into unfamiliar paints, began in the late ‘80s when he received “big break number one,” as he calls it. He was hired for McDonalds’ Mac Tonight campaign, a job that required him to wear a large crescent moon for head and jive around like an overzealous Burt Bacharach in front of a baby grand on top of a rotating Big Mac. “That was a job that marked me as a guy who can wear a big mechanical head, express [himself] physically, and – most importantly to the creature effects and makeup people – who doesn’t complain. And if you don’t complain they will tend to remember you.”

Jones’ can-do attitude and ability to emote underneath layers of latex caught the attention of director Guillermo del Toro in 1997 during the filming of Mimic, a sci-fi horror flick about man-eating insects that was the Mexican director’s first American studio picture. “I didn’t know it at the time, but that would be the biggest relational break of my career. I don’t know what I did, it was very simple what I had to do, but Guillermo del Toro remembered.” Five years later when del Toro was casting for his live action adaptation of Hellboy (based on a popular comic about a large red demon who regularly saves the world), Jones was at the top of the list. He was a perfect fit as Abe Sapien, a rail-thin, hyper-intelligent, telepathic fish-man who serves as Hellboy’s sidekick. While most actors primarily communicate using their eyes and facial expressions, the rigid blue mask enclosing Jones’ head made that impossible. Instead, Jones relied on body language and voice alone to craft the idiosyncratic, thoughtful character of Abe Sapien. Watching the performance, it’s amazing how much he is able to communicate with only his fingers.

For Jones, acting is a “head-to-toe experience,” and he’s a firm believer that when you’re hired to play a part, you’re hired to play the entire part – visually, audibly, everything. It was a rude awakening, then, when David Hyde Pierce was brought in to re-voice Abe Sapien in Hellboy. It wouldn’t be the first time, either, that part of Jones’ performance was replaced in post production by a studio. In 2007, despite having performed all of the Silver Surfer’s dialogue on camera, Laurence Fishburne was hired to dub over Jones.

When these instances are brought up, a quiet sadness enters Jones’ eyes; it’s easy to see this is a touchy subject for him. “I don’t believe any performance should be replaceable. When a studio makes a decision to replace part of [an actor’s] performance, be it visually with CG, or audibly with another actor’s voice, they might be doing a disservice to the part. I could be very one-sided in my belief, because it was very personal to me, but I’m an actor who doesn’t want to see part of his performance taken away from him. I don’t think any actor wants to see that.”

Although Sapien and the Surfer were featured prominently in the marketing materials for both films, Jones’ name was notably absent. “When I’m told by directors, producers, and castmates that the voice I’ve given for the character is perfect – ‘Oh, wow, I love what you’re doing with it!’ – and then I go to see the movie and a big name voice is coming out of me, that doesn’t feel good. Of course it doesn’t. If I had some horrible speech impediment or an accent that they couldn’t replace or whatever, then that would make sense, but in these instances that was not the case. When you have a baby in your hands, and someone’s ripping the legs off and putting different legs on, it’s like [Jones groans audibly], that was my baby a minute ago and now it looks different. But it made sense to them, they wanted different legs on there. But all of a sudden you have a Franken-baby.”

Jones is quick to point out that he’s not “a bitter actor who’s stomping his feet around. In film there’s a creative side to it and at the big studio level where they’re spending millions and millions of dollars on a film, there has to be marketing involved. I know these decisions get made for reasons, reasons that I don’t need to completely understand. But when a story like this gets better is when a situation like Hellboy II comes around.” In 2008, for del Toro’s second installment in the comic book franchise, Jones was finally given the opportunity to voice the character himself. In the credits his name appears third behind Ron Perlman and Selma Blair. “This is just like the evolution that happens with any actor’s career: with time and with reputation comes trust. And I think [the studio] finally does trust that they can keep my performance intact now.”

Seeing as Jones has become del Toro’s unofficial muse, will he be in the director’s next film, an adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit? “I have no definitive answer for you, but [Guillermo] was asked this very question on the red carpet of the Saturn Awards: [Jones lowers his voice and begins to, quite believably, impersonate del Toro] ‘Well, I’m sure I’ll be putting Doug through some sort of pain and torture. Let me say this: if I direct a hemorrhoid commercial, Doug Jones will be in it.’”

Jones, sharply dressed in a brown pinstripe suit, is slinking through an abandoned warehouse, enormous hunks of industrial machinery casting blocky shadows across the floor. It’s the film’s climax and Jamison is dragging a cruel-looking sledgehammer behind him as he hunts down the hero character, played by Ryan Dunlap (who is also Greyscale’s director). He sees movement in the corner of his eye and instinctively lashes out with the mallet. It misses Dunlap by a good two feet, but the momentum carries Jones around in an acrobatic arc that any professional dancer would be jealous of. CLANG goes the hammer as it shoots out of Jones’ hands. He lands on his rump with a dull thud, legs splayed out in a very un-threatening manner. “Dougie the Hammer!” shouts one of the crewmembers before the whole set bursts into laughter. Since arriving in Tulsa, Jones has systematically bestowed all of the crew with mafia-like nicknames (“The makeup artist is Five-Fingered Freddy, the videographer is Joey Knuckles…”), and they’ve been eager to return the favor. Jones’ graceful sledgehammer maneuver has given them their opening.

The nicknames are just one indicator of the affection that Jones has generated amongst Greyscale’s crew in the two short days that he’s been on set. He seems to have an almost magical ability to endear himself to the young students and volunteers that compose the independent film’s team. At any given moment, when he’s not tearing up the scenery on camera, Jones can be seen deep in conversation with this crewmember or that, genuinely interested in who they are and how they’re doing. At first it’s suspicious: why would a bona fide movie star used to multi-million dollar special effects blockbusters be so deeply attentive to a handful of college-age filmmakers in Oklahoma? But once you speak with him, you realize that it’s not an act: Jones genuinely cares for you, even if he barely knows you.

“My wife and I have never been able to have kids of our own. Physically, it’s impossible. The doctor checked. So we tend to unofficially adopt lots of twenty-somethings. I have a real soft spot in my heart for youth. It never seems like a mistake, it’s never forced, it’s never us out looking for them. They just show up in our lives and all of a sudden they’re sitting on our sofa and talking about life issues and dating and jobs and also about their faith in God and where is he and all of that. [It] gives us a sense of fulfillment and it really makes us think that maybe we were never meant to have our own kids. Maybe this is what God had in mind for us all along.”

Jones is confident about his faith, but not overbearing, more interested in forming personal relationships with those around him than proselytizing everything with a pulse. His attitude towards Hollywood is equally confident and stands in marked contrast to the opinions of many conservative Christian leaders, who often paint Hollywood as a modern-day Babylon. “Honestly, I have never felt shunned or been treated poorly because people found out that I was a Christian. I think that the key to all of this is not to come into the Hollywood workplace with any kind of agenda, to be either overt about your faith or covert about it. Overt being one who comes in with the agenda to change Hollywood overnight: ‘I’m going to witness to everyone; I’m gonna get on those movie productions and I’m gonna save everyone from Schwarzenegger to Julia Roberts.’ Coming in with that demeanor will make people recoil. It’s proven, they will. Then there’s the covert approach, which is, ‘I’ll [be silent] because I don’t want to be persecuted for my faith; I’ll start losing jobs.’ I think that if you’re just honest – if the subject matter comes up, speak about it freely. But if it doesn’t come up then maybe it’s not that time yet. Just be honest with the situation day by day.”

The final shot of the night, Jones’ last scene in Greyscale before he’ll pack up and fly home to L.A. tomorrow, is a complex setup involving a dolly track and a 360º camera move around Jamison as he threatens to light Dunlap’s character on fire. The only problem is that the shot takes place outside and a winter storm is rapidly approaching. A production snag holds things up, and within an hour the temperature has plummeted below freezing. The wind is vicious, slicing through coats and gloves like a knife, and just as the crew is getting ready to film, it begins to sleet. Dunlap, duct-taped to a chair in short sleeves and doused in gasoline for the scene, suffers the worst, but Jones is right there with him, delivering his lines with a measured professionalism even as he’s being whipped by the wind and pelted with chunks of ice.

Once Dunlap is pleased with the footage (it looks amazing – no one will believe that the sleet is actually real), everyone heads back inside for mugs of hot chocolate. Jones, visibly drained by the cold and wearing a blindingly shiny coat emblazoned with Fantastic Four on the breast, stands off to the side, head slumped slightly from an intense, 12 hour work day. Is he game for one last question? He looks up, smiles, and puts his arm around my shoulder. Of course he is.

What would you like to be remembered for?

“Of course, on the professional side, ‘He was an actor, he was in these various films and TV shows, etc.’ And film does make you immortal for a while; your image will live on. But I really want to be remembered as someone who had a light behind his eyes that made you ask why. And someone who, when they spent time with you, did you feel loved? I hope yes. Did you feel that you had my full attention? I hope yes. Did you leave my presence in better condition than when you entered it? And I hope yes.” Watching each crew member receive a warm goodbye and a final word of encouragement from the gentle, towering Jones, it’s easy to see he’s accomplished that a hundred times over.

Shane West as Darby Crash, in Rodger Grossman's

As a film critic, it’s beneficial to see things from the other side of the silver screen every now and then, to know that there are real people and real passions behind many of the films I nonchalantly bang out 600 words on. Granted, film criticism would die as an art if every critic took into account the blood that was shed for each film, but speaking with those doing the bleeding from time to time puts things in perspective.

And if anyone has ever shed blood for a film, it’s Rodger Grossman, director of the Darby Crash biopic What We Do Is Secret (you can find my review here). Extremely gracious with his time, I had the chance to speak with Rodger on the phone for over an hour about his labor of love, what the original band members’ reaction to it was, and whether or not he pays any attention to film critics. The edited transcript is below.

Evan Derrick: I’m always fascinated by complex or dramatic production stories, and I know that you had some real difficulties getting the film made. How long have you been working on it?

Rodger Grossman: Well, I’ve been working on this movie for about 15 years.

ED: That is a long time.

RG: It is a long time. If you want to pick a type of project that’s hard to make, I couldn’t imagine anything more difficult than this: it’s a biopic of someone who is not well known, there’s homosexuality, intravenous drug use, punk rock, a young cast that is not well known. There’s not really room for the type of main actors that fund this sort of movie, so it’s a miracle that it exists. And it really only exists for one reason: people were passionate for the subject matter and fought like hell to get it done. It’s really a tribute to people coming together and being persistent against all odds, and not because there was any big paycheck out there, because there certainly was never a promise of that with this film.

ED: Was there ever a moment where you wanted to give up or thought to yourself, “This film will never get made?”

RG: No. There were tons of moments where I should have thought that, and if I was thinking logically and not emotionally, I probably would have given up. But I was always dedicated to getting this film done whatever the cost and I never gave up on it.

ED: To take a notion from the film, what was the germ of that passion for you?

RG: I felt that there had never been a movie that had done punk rock justice and I was heavily influenced by The Germs and Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline of Western Civilization and by Darby. I wanted to do this story right and I wanted to do it justice and a lot of people put their faith in me and at a certain point I just couldn’t let them down and I couldn’t let myself down. I had put too much of my life into this to see it fail. There was a point of no return and I knew that I couldn’t live my life having failed at this because I would always look back and think, if only I had pushed harder or been more aggressive or tried this and I couldn’t live the rest of my life second guessing myself, thinking what if. Making movies is the only thing I’ve ever been truly passionate about and really wanted to do and I could never be more passionate than about this movie or invested myself more in it. I think the subject matter and Darby’s journey are pretty similar. He was on a one way course and I saw myself on kind of a similar journey, obviously not leading to suicide, but leading to the successful completion of my objective. And there was no way I could give up on it.

ED: I have to credit you for you tenacity.

RG: Thank you.

ED: Do you remember the first moment you heard The Germs?

RD: I do actually. I’m a photographer and I was in my darkroom printing photographs and at my parents house, and I think it was ‘81 or ‘82, and Rodney Bingenheimer played “My Tunnel” on his Sunday night radio show, and I used to tape the show. So I heard the song and I was blown away by it. So I went back and listened to it repeatedly and I felt like it was something very unique and dark and haunting. So I went and I bought my first punk rock record, which was called “What We Do Is Secret,” which is why the movie is called What We Do Is Secret.

ED: That’s another question I had. From a marketing standpoint, as generic and pedestrian as a title like “Darby Crash and the Germs” would be, it seems to make more sense.

RD: There was a producer who lobbied very hard to have the movie called “Darby Crash,” but I just stood my ground because the first punk rock record I ever bought was called “What We Do Is Secret” and I always called the movie that, from my first draft, and in my mind that’s what the movie has always been called.

ED: I know the surviving band members were intimately involved with the film, but what was it like showing it to Pat and Lorna and Don for the very first time?

RG: From my perspective?

ED: Yeah.

RG: It was terrifying, but there were different phases of that. During shooting, there was one scene right before they perform for The Decline of Western Civilization, where we recreated the “Manimal” performance, and Shane [Shane West, the actor playing Darby] is shooting dope and Rick Gonzalez [playing Pat Smear] says, “Is this what we’re all about? Do you need to do that?” And Shane tells him to go away. I turned around as I was shooting that and Pat, the real Pat Smear, was standing there. And he was just like, “F—!” and then he walked away. And I didn’t know what that meant. Was the scene too harsh? Did he not like the portrayal? So I finished the scene and I chased after him, and I found him out in the parking lot smoking a cigarette and asked him if he was cool, and he said, “Yeah, it was just so real, it freaked me out.”

ED: Wow.

RG: And there were other times, like when Paul Roessler from The Screamers was there and he just took me aside and gave me a big hug and said, “I feel, like being here on set, that you’ve brought my friend back to life, and I get to spend a little more time with him. Thank you so much for that.” That’s the deepest validation, to hear from The Germs or friends of Darby who say, “You brought my friend back to life for me.” Some of them couldn’t even watch the ending because they feel it’s too close to what actually happened. I’ve spent a lot of time with Lorna and Don, and they saw a lot of what happened in the film, because they were involved. We had script meetings and they were on set and I interviewed all of them. Our objective was always to make it as real as we could, and I feel like we really got there.

ED: Switching gears a little bit, one of the things that I really admired about the film was, obviously you had a very small budget, but it didn’t seem to be a liability. In many ways you really made it an asset. I didn’t notice any really big establishing shots that probably would have been harder and more expensive to pull off as vintage late 70s L.A., and you seemed to shoot a lot of close-ups and mediums, but it gave the film a kind of claustrophobic feeling which I think really helped. Were those conscious decisions, to really harness your low budget?

RG: Oh, sure. The budget of this movie affected our decision making process every step of the way. It’s a very astute observation that you made. The limitations became our partner in a certain sense, and it was always something we were mindful of, and it dictated so much of what we did. There’s one scene in there that speaks to this perhaps the most directly, the scene where Rob and Darby are sitting on the bed, and Darby shoots him up for the first time. In that scene we didn’t have enough money to build that set, I mean we had no money. And I asked the production designer, “What can you give me?” and he said, “Well, I can give you the bed. I can give you a wall. And that’s it.” And I asked for spraypaint and he gave me that, so we spraypainted the wall and I shot it really tight. Would I have shot it differently if I had had a full set? Probably. There’s all sorts of ways you can stage that scene. But that intimacy works, and I think it’s great. Another example, we had one big day, where we built 5 different stages and we did 6 different performances and we did MySpace blasts and we got people to come out for free. And we shot the bigger scenes at the beginning of the day as we had more extras, and the more intimate scenes as we kept going.

ED: As the free people left.

RG: Right, people would just start peeling off and that affected our coverage. The whole movie obviously had a plan, but we also had to create a B plan, a C plan, a D plan, because we had to keep factoring in all the different things that could screw up every plan. It was as challenging as any filmmaking experience that you could imagine because the plan was always changing, and budget did that to us. We had to work with given circumstances rather than what we created.

ED: Talking about the concerts, I loved how each of their gigs was titled very specifically. They weren’t generic shows, but specific places and dates and times, and it made them all feel like very unique events, as if each concert could be studied on its own in how it contributed to Darby’s evolution or the evolution to The Germs. What was your approach thematically and stylistically to the concerts?

RG: We did pick specific events and I structured the movie like a musical, in that there’s a very specific number of musicals, interspersed between narrative, but that the musical numbers drive narrative. So there’s really no way to remove a song or a performance from this film and have the film still make sense. In other words, all of the musical performances are weight bearing. So each one we approached differently, stylistically, according to what the meaning of that scene is. One little thing we did was we changed Darby and the band’s relationship to the camera as we moved through time, so at the beginning the camera looks down on them.

ED: Yeah, now that you say that, I remember that in the very first performance, where it’s like public access and they’re just terrible, the camera was much higher there.

RG: And then at the end, at the Starwood, we’re really looking up at The Germs. The coverage, the approach, everything that we did has a different meaning and resonance that is unique to that specific number.

ED: This is your first feature, right?

RG: Yes.

ED: Have you read any critical reactions to it?

RG: I have, yes.

ED: How does that affect you?

RG: It’s important to not get too high or too low. The response to this movie ranges all over the map…

ED: I noticed that.

RG: …and it’s been called the best musical biopic ever as well as the worst movie released this year. And I could really go crazy if I believed either of those. I always knew it was going to be a lightning rod for criticism, just as The Germs were lightning rods for criticism. I spoke with Lorna the other day and I said, “Does it surprise you that people are so vocal about this movie, both positive and negative?” and she’s like, “No, absolutely not, that’s exactly what it should be. When we were out there people loved us and people hated us, so this is perfect.” So I think all the debate is fantastic. Of course people are going to love the movie and of course people are going to hate it – it’s a Germs movie. Love it or hate it, it’s out there, which is the best thing possible. That, to me, is the greatest victory. There’s so much to be proud of here, so much great work in the movie by so many talented people. And I’m really grateful for the opportunity to have this film out there and for the hard work that everyone’s put into it.

ED: Has it opened up any opportunities for you?

RG: It has. I’m taking a bunch of meetings at some different companies.

ED: Do you have specific projects you’re working on and can you share?

RG: I have two scripts that I’m finishing up right now, and they’re both really exciting and hopefully I’ll have something to announce soon. That would be great.

Listen to selections from my interview with Rodger Grossman on Episode 6 of the MovieZeal Podcast.