Entering the Sainthood

Early in “The Saint,” which opens Friday, the young boy who will grow up to be the resourceful rogue of the title is seen emulating his heroes, the medieval Knights of Templar. Seeking to “rescue” the locked-down girls at his repressive Catholic orphanage in East Asia, he runs through the halls with a flag draped over his shoulders--a caped crusader, if you will.

“Oh!” exclaims Val Kilmer, the actor who plays the adult version of the character, when this is pointed out to him. “I never got that! I never thought of that. That’s funny!”

Kilmer’s eyes, caught by the bright sun on the patio of a Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow, reveal a mischievous glint as he contemplates the connection.

See, the 37-year-old San Fernando Valley native’s best-known role has been as a modern-era caped crusader--the Caped Crusader. He took over the high-profile role of Batman from Michael Keaton for the third installment of the series, 1995’s “Batman Forever.” It was the role he later abandoned in order to do “The Saint”--pulling (or being pushed, depending on who’s telling the story) out of the next Batman movie, “Batman and Robin,” just one week before it was set to begin filming.

Originally he wasn’t going to have to make a choice. “The Saint”--an action caper (with a romance thread involving co-star Elisabeth Shue) set largely in a post-Yeltsin Russia of the near future and slotting in tone somewhere between James Bond and “Mission: Impossible”--was an on-again, off-again project going back six years. Kilmer got involved three years ago, before he even did “Batman Forever.” The plan had been for him to be involved in both series. But when Paramount finally gave the go-ahead to “The Saint” last year, the timing made doing both impossible.

“Batman” offered more security; “The Saint”--created in 1928 by British writer Leslie Charteris and established through his books, a series of RKO films and, of course, the ‘60s TV series starring Roger Moore--offered more fun.

“With ‘Batman,’ the reason it’s so popular has nothing to do with me,” Kilmer says, using a pocket all-in-one tool to file a button-sized piece of broken ostrich egg into a moon face as a present for his 5-year-old daughter, Mercedes.

“And with respect to Mr. Clooney or Michael [Keaton] before us, it doesn’t have much to do with them, either. . . . One of the reasons it wasn’t such a lure to go back to do Batman is that they were so happy with the product. There was nothing stimulating to me in that in a personal way. There’s nothing wrong with success, and it’s hard to conceive that it wouldn’t be [successful] again. It’s just not stimulating.”

It wasn’t a parting that left everyone feeling warm and fuzzy. “Batman and Robin” producer Joel Schumacher, who had to hire George Clooney quickly to fill the Batsuit so that the production could proceed, said in interviews that Kilmer was “the most psychologically troubled human being I’ve ever worked with.”

“You know, the thing that Joel Schumacher said was so extreme,” Kilmer says, sounding both hurt and perplexed. “He’s accusing me of being a disturbed person. So why did he offer me the lead role in ‘A Time to Kill’? Why was he so upset? He can’t deny that he wanted me to do that job. So this is a guy that I had a very pleasant time working with’s form of grief about me not working with him any more.”

Still, on the heels of those unflattering reports came “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” the 1996 remake that generated tales of alleged tantrums on the South Seas location, reportedly leading co-star Marlon Brando--himself not alien to negative press--to take Kilmer aside for a talking-to. And Hollywood gossip-watchers already knew the supposed details of Kilmer’s messy breakup with wife Joanne Whalley during the making of “Batman Forever.” (In addition to their daughter, the two have a 1-year-old son, Jack.)

Though no such stories emerged from Africa during the shooting of lion thriller “The Ghost and the Darkness” (also released last year) or during filming in London and Moscow of “The Saint,” Kilmer was officially stamped difficult in Hollywood circles.

Kilmer is clearly uncomfortable addressing the subject. He wants to shrug it off but can’t quite manage it.

“People don’t go to movies for those reasons,” says Kilmer, who now lives on a ranch outside Santa Fe, N.M. “People in the business of making movies don’t hire people for those reasons. . . . I have no relationship to that stuff.”

He pauses.

“It doesn’t have any meaning.”

But Kilmer acknowledges that he was troubled by the stream of negative stories. He called leading Hollywood figures he considers friends--from studio heads to Robert De Niro, who produced the Kilmer vehicle “Thunderheart” and co-starred with him in “Heat”--for advice and support. He agreed to be more press-accessible for “The Saint” than he had for earlier pictures, rather than let stories run without his direct input.

“In the past, my style was just trying to do my best job every day and not let other things hang you up,” he says. “So I didn’t hire a publicist. I didn’t spend hours on the phone to try and tell my side. And I was naively disappointed [by the negative press].”

And, while not able to address the old stories, colleagues from “The Saint” are coming forward to his defense.

“I have no problem with what some people label as temperamental if there’s talent attached to it,” says Mace Neufeld, who had never met Kilmer before being brought in as co-producer of “The Saint” while the filming was already in process. “Val, [director] Phillip Noyce and I had a lengthy talk the first day about our working methods, and within two or three days we were working very hard together on this film. He’s the kind of actor I like to work with. We’re a very collaborative kind of filmmaking team.”

Kilmer, saying he was hurt and perplexed by Schumacher’s comments, adds he wishes nothing but the best for Clooney, as well as the many people remaining from the “Batman” team he worked with.

But when alerted to the image from “The Saint” suggesting that running around in a cape is kid’s stuff, he can’t resist taking a dig or two at the bat he left behind.

“Not to take anything away from [Batman creator] Bob Kane,” Kilmer says, “but you have a choice between a comic book and, with ‘The Saint,’ a literary figure that has inspired this whole espionage genre, this notion of the gentleman thief, surviving by his wits, notbrawn.”

And playing Simon Templar was an actor’s dream. While the character has little sense of who he is at heart, he can assume any guise, any persona needed to meet any situation.

The situations for these masquerades were in the original story by screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh. But the actual parts were written only sketchily, and Kilmer insisted that he be given the chance to create the actual characters. And he came up with some doozies--a nerdy reporter, a German fop, a Southern gentleman, a leather-pants-wearing artist (remarkably similar in appearance and manner to Kilmer’s other best-known role, Jim Morrison in “The Doors”).

“We needed him to do a lot of characters,” Neufeld says. “And we wanted him to do them with minimal makeup, use dialects and body language to get them across. While these scenes were blocked out in the original script, those blanks had to be filled and he gave us a choice of many characters, from which we chose seven, plus Simon himself. He created those characters and wasn’t afraid to do it, which is why he was perfectly suited for the role.”

Arguably, Kilmer has been auditioning for that kind of role since he first showed up on screen, as Tom Cruise’s rival pilot in “Top Gun.” In most of his parts, he has taken on a distinct persona to the point that it’s much harder to label him a “type” in the conventional Hollywood sense than most of his peers. His Jim Morrison from “The Doors,” for example, is a long way from his Doc Holliday in “Tombstone,” which is miles from his FBI agent in “Thunderheart.” It’s a part of his craft of which he is particularly proud, casually slipping into voices and characterizations during conversation, from De Niro to George Lucas to the sexy Morrison tones.

And while the prospect of continuing to be Batman held no appeal, the notion of being Simon Templar for years to come delights him.

“It would be most pleasurable, particularly because, if that’s its fate, the stories that can come from this character could be wonderful subjects that would be energizing to be involved with,” he says. “It’s the more sophisticated arena. It seems to me that audiences have become sated with the standard kind of action hero and all the bloodshed. What we have with the Saint is something that can remain an outstanding character, like James Bond.”

In the meantime, though, he’s busying himself with several other projects of completely different natures. He’s producing and serving as on-screen narrator of a documentary about cultural and natural resource management and eco-tourism in Africa, and he’s doing the voice of Moses in the DreamWorks animated production “The Prince of Egypt.”

But it’s the Simon Templar role that he’s most identifying with now, and as he discusses the transformation the Simon Templar character makes in the film, it’s hard not to wonder if he’s actually talking about his real-life image.

“Another thing about taking on the role that was very appealing to act is that it’s a real journey--he goes from sinner to saint,” he says. “Those opportunities don’t happen very often and they’re very fun to do.”

‘One of the reasons it wasn’t such a lure to go back to do Batman is that they were so happy with the product. There was nothing stimulating to me in that in a personal way.’

* HOW OTHERS WORE THE HALO

George Sanders and Roger Moore as the Saint on video. Page 46.