Crispin Glover: ‘When you raise questions people say, ‘You’re crazy’’

It’s about 9am in Los Angeles when I speak to Crispin Glover, but it quickly becomes apparent that time doesn’t mean that much to the man, nor place neither. He expresses surprise at my reference to it being morning – “Oh, right!” – and, when I ask about LA, he quickly switches the subject to the Czech Republic, where he has a second home, or, as he puts it, “a chateau”.

It seems an unusual place for a New York-born, LA-raised actor-director to take up residence, and I casually wonder if he has family there. This then leads to a long disquisition on Glover’s family tree, prompting further thoughts on the country’s changing geography over the centuries.

“But none of that’s the reason I purchased in the Czech Republic,” he suddenly says brightly, after about 10 minutes of monologuing. Instead, he just needed somewhere vaguely affordable where he could build sets for his upcoming third film as a director, which he just wrapped. His previous two films, What Is It? and It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE focused, respectively, on a snail-obsessed little boy with a racist inner psyche and a psychosexual take on the life of Steven C Stewart, a writer with cerebral palsy. I make the mistake of describing his films as “experimental”, which then leads to a further 15-minute monologue about surrealism, Buñuel and the meaninglessness of labels: “Charlie’s Angels could be described as experimental!” he cries, which, were it true, would certainly prove his point.

As an actor, Glover has long been the fascinating answer to the rarely asked question: “What would Nicolas Cage’s weirder and more talented brother be like?” Like Cage, Glover has always refused to cut his decidedly eccentric acting style to the cloth of the film he’s in, whether it’s a quality teen movie (Back to the Future, River’s Edge), an arthouse gem (Dead Man), a big budget studio movie (Charlie’s Angels, Alice in Wonderland) or an easy comedy (Hot Tub Time Machine). Whether he’s excellent (his performance as George McFly remains one of my favourite film performances of all time) or hammy as hell, he’s always fascinating to watch as he out-acts everyone else on screen, much to their often visible bemusement. Michael J Fox and Lea Thompson, for example, look frequently and understandably baffled by Glover in Back to the Future, while he’s laughing like a cricket or contorting his body into physical expressions of awkwardness. Often, he appears to be in a completely different film from them.

While Glover has long been touted as one of the most interesting actors of his generation, within the film industry he has had another reputation that has lasted just as long: being a giant pain in the arse. Ever since his notorious 1987 appearance on Late Night with David Letterman to promote River’s Edge, for which he wore a wig and platform shoes and karate-kicked a clearly unamused Letterman, he has been known as something of an unreliable proposition. Glover himself would put it slightly differently – he says he just “has something to talk about”, namely very strong opinions about whether or not a movie is peddling propaganda, one of Glover’s longterm pet subjects. When he was approached to play the evil Thin Man in Charlie’s Angels, Glover went to the meeting and told them, in classic Glover-style, that he wouldn’t do it because the dialogue was terrible, but he had some ideas about how they should rewrite the character. “The dialogue was just expositional,” he recalls scornfully, as though exposition in a film is tantamount to pornography. He told the director, McG, that the character should be played as a mute and he, somewhat surprisingly, agreed and Glover ended up playing the villain silent, battling Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu and Cameron Diaz in order to fund his burgeoning film empire in the Czech Republic. That, if you’re Glover, is how show business works.

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“Subsequent to River’s Edge, I was trying to find things that interested me. But, for the most part, the films did not reflect what my psychological interests were, and a certain persona was etched out that is essentially still with me, which is OK,” he says, referring to his 90s career in which he appeared in, among others, The People vs Larry Flynt and The Doors. “But I recognized in 2000 and 2001 [during Charlie’s Angels] that I really needed to make as much money as I could in order to fund my own filmmaking. So I switched my psychological perspective on how I choose movies and I now see acting as my craft but my films are my art.” Just because a man’s eccentric doesn’t mean he can’t also be pragmatic.

Quite where his latest film, the cod-noirish The Carrier, fits into his career plan is anyone’s guess, given that it’s not going to make a dime and is utterly dire. But at least his presence in it makes vaguely more sense than that of his co-stars, John Cusak and Robert De Niro. Glover, rather sweetly, says he was persuaded to appear in it because the director, David Grovic, was just starting out and “he’s self-funded, which is something I could relate to, because I fund all my movies”. The film’s already gone through three titles – having previously been known as The Motel and The Bag Carrier – although it’s still lumbered with the stupidest poster tagline of all time (“Whatever you do, don’t open the bag!”) The New York Times reviewer described it as “a protracted and increasingly tedious cat-and-mouse game”, and only Glover got a positive write-up, with a nod to his “campy zest”.

Interviewing Glover is a little like watching him onscreen: he will take some unexpected detours, but he does eventually deliver the goods and then some. I suspected that he wouldn’t want to talk about Back to the Future, not least because his relationship with the movie has long been, shall we say, troubled. Glover refused to be in the sequel, partly for moral reasons, partly, he has said in the past, because the pay wasn’t right. So director Robert Zemeckis used footage of him from the first film and prosthetics simulating his face on another actor. Glover, horrified that audiences thought he was in the film, sued and the case was settled out of court. But in fact, Glover brings up the subject himself when discussing how he is writing what he describes as “a standard word book” about propaganda “in which I address the Back to the Future issue in great detail”.

This specific issue was Glover’s objection to the original film’s ending, which suggests that the reason the McFly parents are happy and in love is because they are now wealthy. When I interviewed Thompson about the film last year for a book I was writing about 80s films, she recalled how horrified Glover and Eric Stoltz – who was originally cast as Marty before being replaced by Michael J Fox – were by the inference that money equals happiness. When I mention this to Glover, he bristles at the idea that Stoltz raised objections: “I never saw him say anything about it, I tend to think that may not be accurate.” But he quickly focuses on the source of his real ire: the film’s writer and producer, Bob Gale.

“Me asking the questions that I asked [about the film’s ending] infuriated [the film-makers], and they were angry and they wanted to do something that was cruel, which they accomplished. Bob Gale then specifically lied, and said false things about me,” he says, getting audibly worked up.

Glover, however, never actually raised his objections with Gale, but rather brought them to the attention of Zemeckis, to whom he bears no apparent ill will.

“But I know Bob Gale was angry with me, and part of what I’ll be writing about is how it’s provable that he’s lied,” says Glover.

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I tried twice to contact Gale about Glover’s claims, but he was unavailable. However, I interviewed him last year for my book and he had nothing but kind words to say about Glover’s performance. He said that he and Zemeckis had originally envisaged George McFly as “a young Jimmy Stewart” but, to their enormous credit, they immediately recognised at Glover’s audition that he would “make the part so much his own that I can’t even recall what we were thinking when we wrote it”. I also asked him about the film’s equation between money and happiness: “The point was that self-confidence and the ability to stand up for yourself are qualities that lead to success. In a movie, you look for images to depict what you’re trying to say and this was a way to show that George had indeed become a better man,” he said.

Glover points out that Zemeckis and Gale happily recast the actor who played Marty’s girlfriend when Claudia Wells, who played her in the original film, couldn’t do the sequel. That they didn’t do the same for George McFly, he says, is proof that the filmmakers were trying to punish Glover for his belligerence. It strikes me, though, that it’s more likely to be an indication that they knew all too well how central Glover’s performance was to the appeal of the original film and were trying to work around his absence as best they could in the sequel.

Ultimately, Glover feels that the court case and his ensuing reputation haven’t really affected his career, and he’s probably right: an actor who writes screeds about propaganda was never going to be the next Leonardo DiCaprio anyway. These days, he spends about four months in Los Angeles, four in the Czech Republic and four touring his work around the world. For this reason, he says: “I’ve never been close to having children. I’m on the road so much, but if I had children it would be something that I’d want to be present for and I feel like I would not be present.” He has also, he clarifies, “never been close to getting married”. For the rest of the summer, his focus will be on editing his third film, touring his second and keeping an eye on his Czech Republic chateau.

“When you raise questions, people say: ‘You’re crazy, you’re weird,’ because you’re questioning the authority that people have been brought up to think is the only correct way to think,” he says. “But there are many correct ways to think.”