Interview with Paul Hogan

Paul Hogan in San Francisco

by Jeffrey M. Anderson

Paul Hogan has become an international superstar based on one character. It's true he's made other movies, like Flipper or Lightning Jack, but people only remember Crocodile Dundee. When the original movie was released in 1986, it caused a huge jump in Australian tourism, and it added a catchphrase, "that's not a knife!" to our language. Hogan was even nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

A sequel was quickly released in 1987, and though it was far inferior to the original, it had enough momentum that it earned a reasonable sum. Now Hogan and his team are gambling that the rugged Crocodile Dundee, still looking great in his early 60's, still has a draw 14 years later, with his new film Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles.

JA: Is it true that you've been in semi-retirement since your last movie Lightning Jack?

PH: I've been in semi-retirement since the first Crocodile Dundee. I do it every couple of years.

JA: You don't really consider this a job?

PH: Nah. It's a hobby.

JA: What do you do with your time when you're in semi-retirement?

PH: I have various business interests, and I ski and ride horses, ride my bike, go to the mountains, hike and travel. Made another baby. Bit busy in my real life.

JA: How many kids do you have?

PH: Six.

JA: How many with your current wife Linda?

PH: Only one. 2 and a half. This is my second time around.

JA: Congratulations!

PH: Thank you.

JA: Can you ski in Australia?

PH: No, I ski in Colorado. You can ski in Australia. A lot of good ski instructors come out of Australia. We only get about 3 inches of snow, so if you can ski there, you can ski anywhere. It's like: snow, ice, dirt, snow, grass, snow. They've got steel skis.

JA: Why was it you decided to go back to Crocodile Dundee?

PH: I was never going to. But after a few years of saying 'no, I don't want to do another one.' Because people ask me right up until this was made, 'you gonna do another one? Why not?' After living in L.A. for a couple of years, I left there three years ago, I was looking back at the lifestyle and I thought, 'I've gotta bring Mick Dundee to Los Angeles.' It's so much not his kind of place. L.A. is also the most publicly known culture capital of the world. Everyone knows about L.A. and L.A. style: Hollywood, music, entertainment, freeways, drive-by shootings, and muggings. It's covered every week in the world. It's no good me doing Crocodile Dundee in Tokyo or Bangkok, but L.A. everyone knows about. It's this eccentric sort of city. It was a natural for me.

And I didn't care. Film-wise, it's been ten years, but Crocodile Dundee was on television here within the last month, and probably for the fifth time this year. It's on every month in America. It's on now somewhere in the world. Might be on in India right now. But it's the most re-licensed movie of the last 20 years. It's not like everyone's forgotten the character. He's a bit older and more weather-beaten, but he was never young and cute anyway.

JA: You were about 45 when you began Crocodile Dundee?

PH: Yeah, about 45, 46.

JA: And the legend has it that you saw someone on TV named Rodney Ansell and you sort of spoofed him?

PH: That's the legend. That's the guy who died in the gunfight. He was the media invention. He became very much like Crocodile Dundee after the movie came out. I guess he was a type of Crocodile Dundee--he certainly lived in the outback--but he wasn't exactly known for his sense of humor.

But they still say, 'he was the original one.' I never met him or saw him. It was one of those myths that becomes a fact.

JA: And of course, he was mad because he didn't get any residuals.

PH: Well that's what they say, but he was mad anyway.

JA: Back to Los Angeles. You can't make a Los Angeles movie unless you have a cameo by George Hamilton.

PH: He was Mister Hollywood! He was perfect to represent this thing. George was my first and only choice. And he looks fabulous. He turned up in a three-piece suit and a tie, immaculate tan, and perfect hair. He's so much Mr. Hollywood. We didn't want anyone else. He was great.

JA: Did you tell him what his line was going to be?

PH: Oh, he knew what it was. Yeah. No sweat. He enjoyed it.

JA: You got Mike Tyson too! How did you get Mike Tyson?

PH: Asked him! He said, 'Sure! I'd love to!' And he was bright and early to the set and ready to go, and he was like a prince to work with. He was signing autographs for old ladies and little kids. If you saw him on the set, you would never believe any of the other stories you've ever heard about him. Sure, he's got a dark side. Everyone knows about that. It's the light side they don't know about. He was great.

JA: He was very good in a movie last year called Black and White.

PH: I wouldn't doubt it. He was very relaxed. And he ad-libbed half of his lines. It was just sort of, 'well that's alright. It's coming out natural... we'll go with it.'

JA: You have that same sort of quality.

PH: Yeah. It means I'm not a very good actor!

JA: Well, no. That has nothing to do with it. But it does mean that you get typecast easily.

PH: Oh yeah.

JA: Would you rather go the other way and not be typecast?

PH: No. I'd rather have been successful at what I did, which was a character that I created and owned, and set me up for retirement. I'm not that thrilled about being an actor... It's another thing, too. I'm typecast, but so was John Wayne and so was Clint Eastwood. And if they're not like that when you go to the movie, you're disappointed. You want to see that come through.

JA: I noticed you were driving your Subaru Outback in the movie.

PH: Yeah. Well, they didn't pay me to do that. And no one offered to pay me a lot more not to have it in there, so I thought ethically I should have it in there. And there's no close-ups of it and there's no brand showing. It would have been a talking point if he'd been in something else.

JA: Do you drive one in real life?

PH: Yeah. They give 'em to me. Makes 'em very attractive.

JA: Do you know Mel Gibson in real life?

PH: Oh yeah, I do know Mel Gibson. But it's not Mel Gibson in the movie, it's MAL Gibson. That's in there because I wrote in a cameo for Mel, hoping he would do it, but he was in Alaska or something when we shot the movie. I put the Mel Gibson-Mal Gibson joke in there when I couldn't get Mel. It was just him at the party and me not knowing who he was. There was a couple of gags, but they're not worth talking about because he's not there. But that's a very poor substitute. 'Well, I can't get Mel Gibson, so I'll talk about him.' That's sort of true to life because that happens all the time. People get that about me too. I run into people who know me and were in Germany, 'ah you're from Australia! You must know Paul Hogan!' Or Mel Gibson. Or Russell Crowe. It was funny when it happened to those people because they did know me. They said, 'yeah... we know him!' 'Oh, I thought you would.' There's only about twelve people down there.

JA: You've worked with your wife (Linda) on four movies now. How do you pull off such a good working relationship?

PH: Well, we met on a movie in the first place. And we have absolutely nothing in common. Which is true. Somehow we're very compatible. We have a sense of humor in common. But all our tastes are so different. It's good to work with her. She has a completely different background from me. She's Julliard, Theater-trained, Broadway, and I'm sort of from the streets. She looks at things from a different way and it gives me another perspective, particularly when I'm writing dialogue for other people. Otherwise everyone would end up talking like me. So she's a help that way. She's a very good actress too. She has a thankless part. She's like the straight man. Her job is to give out the information that tells the story. She had a couple of gags in there, and she did 'em real well, but they sort of didn't work. People aren't waiting for someone else to be funny, they're want Crocodile Dundee to be funny. She's sort of stuck with the straight girl role. And you've gotta have that. Two wacky people don't work. They just get silly. Someone's gotta be sensible and the other person's off the wall.

JA: You wrote the screenplay. Do you write from home? Does Linda help you out?

PH: I write at home and I write on the job, too. The colored pages arrive every day. Within the confines of the set and the cast.

JA: Is there a lot of improvisation? People making stuff up on the spot?

PH: No, you make it up before we get to the spot. You don't want other people to come to the set all on the different page. It's not fair to the actors. But if you give them a funnier line, they're always happy. But it's not a tight, plot-driven ship. It's a comedy. It's a knockaround Mick Dundee for an hour and half, basically. Looking at the world the way he does. That's sort of what the movies are about. The plots for the first two, I don't know, it wasn't hall-of-fame stuff. There's no holes in them. 'Where did they go? Why did she...' The butler didn't do it! There are no holes in them. But they're not plot-driven. They're not Mission: Impossible. You've gotta pay attention. If you missed a set you didn't know what was going on. You're outta the movie.

JA: Are there any ways in which you and Crocodile Dundee are alike?

PH: Sense of humor and probably outlook. I totally give him my sense of humor and my outlook. But in lifestyle, no. He's still a bushie. He's 50, he's out in the bush, and the world goes the way he sees it. Anyway, I've got a few primitive streaks, but no. I'm not about to go out in the bush and wrestle crocodiles and do any of that.

JA: Do you live in Australia?

PH: I live in Australia and Santa Barbara.

JA: Do you live anywhere near the outback?

PH: No, I live in Byron Bay, which is near the coast, but it's inland. It's on a farm. Well, I'm partly in the bush. I've got a couple hundred acres. I'm not in the city. I don't have any crocodiles, but it is snake-infested. But I do have kangaroos and scrub turkeys.

JA: Speaking of animals, there's a scene early in the movie where you do the eye thing with the boar. Was that a real boar or a computer boar?

PH: Nah, it was real. It looks funny because it was colored in with the computer. We just made it darker because it looked too much like a pig and not enough like a boar. They put more gray in it or something. So the computer enhanced it, but it's real. The lions are all real. The monkey's real. The skunk's real. There's very little in the way of special effects.

I'll tell you what we did do with special effects. This is really weird. The only really digital effect we did. When they go into the gay bar and the two bare-ass cowboys follow 'em in? Well, in America they've got pink underpants on and in the rest of the world, they've got bare ass. They had thongs on, but they said 'if you leave that in there, you can't get a PG.'

JA: You can do that on the street in San Francisco.

PH: I know! You can see it on any beach! But we had to put underpants on them. It's unbelievable! Only in America.

JA: How do you throw a shrimp on the barbie? Don't they fall through the slats?

PH: Well, they weren't shrimp really, they were king prawns. They're called shrimp as an oxymoron. If you throw shrimp on the barbie, they go straight through and they get burned.

JA: When the first movie came out, you were directly responsible for a huge influx of tourism in Australia. Is it still like that?

PH: Yeah. Tourism has just grown each year, steadily steadily stronger and stronger, until you couldn't get in. You couldn't get on a plane.

I did another one as Mick Dundee, a ten-second spot in Alaska, and that sort of worked to fill the planes back up again. We can't handle that many tourists!

JA: Is the Australian govt. happy about the new movie?

PH: Probably, although they publicly squirm. 'Oh we don't like that. We're much more civilized and switched-on and contemporary and city-dwelling. And I say, 'yeah but who wants to see a movie about that?' Of course, he's a made-up outback character. It's a movie!

JA: When tourists bump into you on the street, do they call you Crocodile Dundee?

PH: Oh yeah. Totally. Because they don't really expect to see me there!

JA: Nobody ever calls you Lightning Jack?

PH: No. (laughs)

JA: Before you became an actor, you were a truck driver and a painter?

PH: More than that! I think I did probably 40 different jobs, all in the blue collar industry. I worked for the Water Board, the Department of Roads, the railways, I was a swimming pool attendant. Mostly construction. I was working on the Sydney Harbor Bridge as a rigger when I went into television. I lived in the real world and had real jobs until I was about 31. It was part of a grounding. I didn't grow up wanting to do Hamlet, or whatever. I lived in the real world long enough to appreciate the real perks of the entertainment industry if you succeeded.

JA: Did you have any movie heroes growing up?

PH: Oh, you know. John Wayne, Clint Eastwood. Sir Laurence Olivier bored me to death. Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas! Westerns and popular mainstream movies. I never had a favorite comedian, except Richard Pryor. I love Richard Pryor. And Bob Newhart. The stuff they recorded in the 60's and 70's is still funny today. They were masters. But I never took notes or idolized them. I just thought they were funny and they made me laugh.

JA: Were you a class clown?

PH: No, I was a class smart-ass. I wasn't trying to get laughs. I often got them unintentionally.

JA: The original Crocodile Dundee movie had quotation marks around the word Crocodile, and now it doesn't.

PH: I'll tell you what that was. I came here with a movie we made in Australia, and it was a big success there and we brought it over here for distribution. We went to Paramount and they said, 'it's not a good idea to call it Crocodile Dundee. We've come up with a few titles.' They had From Down Under to Up Over or From Over There to Here. They had all these awful titles. I said, 'don't be stupid... it's Crocodile Dundee. What's wrong with that?' And they said, 'Well, it doesn't usually work to have the lead character's name in the title.' Their number one movie that was out at the moment was Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I said, 'oh, you mean like Ferris Bueller's Day Off? Or like Rambo or Rocky? Is that what you mean?' So they went and had another marketing conference and they came back and said, 'well put the quotations around 'Crocodile' and then people will know it's a nickname and it's not all about crocodiles.' We sort of went, 'Ok... whatever makes you happy.'

You noticed that? Now they figured, 'ah, it's Crocodile Dundee. We know it's a person.' And you wonder why I don't like working in the system.

April 6, 2001