What we learned from the documentary ‘Val’ by Val Kilmer

Val Kilmer fans know the actor as an arrogant Iceman in “Top Gun” and as a caped crusader in “Batman Forever”. He’s a masculine, charismatic spitfire with a reputation for being tough on the set.

But they’ll be shocked to see the former heart and action star today.

In the intimate and revealing new documentary “Val”, released Friday, we meet Kilmer, 61, after a throat cancer survivor. Although he denied being ill in 2016, the actor now lives with an ostomy – a hole in his throat used for breathing and speaking. Speaking for Kilmer today is difficult.

So, in the doc’s narrations, his son Jack speaks for him.

“My name is Val Kilmer. I am an actor, ”he begins. “I was recently diagnosed with throat cancer. Although I recovered quickly from radiation therapy and chemotherapy, what followed left my voice affected. I’m still recovering, and it’s hard to speak and be understood.

Besides his loving offspring, Kilmer has another amazing tool to tell the story of his four decades in Hollywood: a treasure trove of videotapes he has filmed since he was a little boy in the San Fernando Valley in France. California.

While some of the scenes are what you would expect – audition tapes, birthday parties, footage of his two children – the actor has also filmed some remarkably candid moments behind the scenes in all of his films. Young actors, like Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon, then unaccustomed to portable cameras, chat like no one else.

“It’s like I’ve lived my life, and it’s sort of in these boxes,” says Kilmer, looking at his warehouse of thousands of hours of tape.

He was bitten by the showbiz bug as a kid in California while creating short remakes of popular movies with his younger brother Wesley, who was directing them. Their films were particularly cinematic as they lived next door to the famous Roy Rogers Ranch, where many westerns were shot, and borrowed landscapes from another world.

Kilmer’s life was shattered when Wesley, just 15, died after suffering a seizure in the family pool. “No more home videos, no more makeshift coins,” says his narration. “My confidant had vanished into dust and my family was never the same again.”

The emptied actor moved to New York City, where he studied acting at the Juilliard School. In his bedroom, he hung up Wesley’s artwork as a reminder.

Kilmer got his big shot in the 1984 film “Top Secret!”, A WWII spy movie parody in which he played a rock ‘n’ roll singer. Coming from a rigorous stage background, he prepared diligently for the role, only to see his hopes dashed immediately.

“I spent four months learning to play the guitar,” he says. “When I got on set the director thought it would be funnier if I mime. They watched me bleed my fingers, just to see the look on my face when they said, ‘ We like it better when you can’t play. ‘ “

But “Top Secret!” opened the door to one of the greatest movies he ever made: “Top Gun” of 1986. The truth is, Kilmer didn’t care about the gig.

“Believe it or not, I didn’t want to do ‘Top Gun’ at first,” says the opinionated artist. “I thought the script was silly and I didn’t like hawkishness in movies. But I was under contract with the studio, so I didn’t really have a choice.

He played Iceman, the frosty-haired skilled pilot, opposite Tom Cruise’s Maverick, and he said the duo took their characters’ animosity away with them.

“I would play the rivalry between Tom’s character and mine on purpose as off-screen,” says Kilmer. “And what finally happened were the actors, like the method, divided into two distinct camps. You had Maverick and Goose on one side, Slider, Hollywood, Wolfman and me, Iceman on the other.

After “Top Gun”, its entire young cast experienced a meteoric rise to fame.

For his part, Kilmer dreamed of working with great directors and would shoot audition tapes developed for the occasion. When Stanley Kubrick launched “Full Metal Jacket,” Kilmer not only recorded his essay, but also traveled to London to personally deliver it. (He was not chosen in the movie.)

The strategy finally paid off when he was offered the role of Jim Morrison in “The Doors” by Oliver Stone.

Like the Juilliard student he was, Kilmer buried himself in the role of the famous leader. He constantly listened to and practiced the music of The Doors. He only wore tight-fitting leather pants, like Morrison, for an entire year.

But the kind of preparation he craved was missing for much of the rest of his career. “The kind of actor I’m really interested in, I haven’t done much in the movies,” he says. A low point was “Batman Forever”.

Kilmer was offered the role of comic book hero when he was in Africa on safari. Just days before he got the call, he wandered into a real bat cave and took it as a sign. But as soon as the filming of Joel Schumacher’s film started, the actor hated it.

“When you are in [the bat suit], you can barely move and people have to help you get up and sit down, ”he says. You don’t hear anything either and after a while people stop talking to you. It is very insulating.

“It was a struggle for me to get a performance beyond the costume, and it was frustrating until I realized my performance was just to show up and stand where I had been given it. said.”

Another actor who stood where he was told to, much to Kilmer’s disappointment, was his hero Marlon Brando when they flopped “Doctor Moreau’s Island” in 1996. Brando, indifferent and overweight, was depressed when the director refused to allow him creative input, so he backed down. At one point, Kilmer, the video camera in tow, approaches Brando, who is lounging on a hammock outside.

“What is your earliest childhood memory? Kilmer asks.

“Give me a push,” Brando replies, looking calm.

“Do you have any memories of before you could speak,” presses Kilmer.

“Big, big, big shove,” Brando repeats. Kilmer gives up and pushes his idol’s hammock.

Despite a series of failures that followed for Kilmer, he never lost his passion for artistic creation. In 2017, he toured the country playing Mark Twain in a one-man show called “Citizen Twain” which he also wrote. Kilmer was about to take the stage in Nashville, Tenn., When he lost his voice and started coughing up blood.

He hasn’t worked much since being diagnosed with cancer, but he has found joy in what he is able to do, like traveling America to meet the fans.

“I don’t look great and I’m basically selling my old self, my old career,” says Kilmer. “For a lot of people, it’s like the lowest thing you can do – talk about your old photos and sell photos from when you were Batman or the Terminator.

“But it allows me to meet my fans and what ends up happening is I really feel grateful rather than humbled because there are so many people there.”

“Val” hits theaters July 23 and airs August 6 on Amazon Prime.