From Silvertone to Silver Screen

San Jose Mercury News
September 5, 1993
By Bob Frost

The movie career of Chris Isaak will finally get rolling in a serious way sometime in the next year, as soon as "Little Buddha," directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, finds a Hollywood distributor and hits the theaters. Isaak has a featured role in the film; he plays an American architect whose 7-year-old son is thought to be the reincarnation of a Buddhist holy man.

It's Isaak's first decent part in pictures. It comes almost 10 years after he missed out on what could have been a breakthrough role.

In the mid-1980s he auditioned for the bad guy part in "Something Wild," the Jonathan Demme film starring Melanie Griffith and Jeff Daniels. He did well in auditions and was offered the role of the ominous thug who beats up Daniels at the end of the picture.

But his record company, Warner Bros., reportedly insisted that he go into the studio and finish the album "Chris Isaak." Ray Liotta got the part of Ray Sinclair, made a vividly nasty impression and became a much sought-after actor, appearing in "GoodFellas" in 1990.

Isaak has been allowed to keep the other roles he's landed, but they haven't amounted to much in the way of screen time. In 1978, while in Japan, he acted very briefly in "Message From Space," a not-completely-awful science fiction flick. He appeared in the documentary "Let's Get Lost" (1989) and has had small roles in "Married to the Mob" (1988), "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991) and "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" (1992).

In "Little Buddha," he co-stars with Keanu Reeves, Bridget Fonda and Ying Ruocheng, with 9-year-old Alex Wiesendanger playing the 7-year-old holy boy. The film was shot in Nepal, Bhutan and Seattle.

Isaak's image on the silver screen evokes a "Gary Cooper kind of feeling," according to casting director Howard Feuer. And it's likely that he'll pursue more acting work. He has expressed admiration for Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra -- "who are able to do it all," moving back and forth between music and film. But music, it appears, will remain his first and strongest love. "I take acting very seriously when I'm doing it," he says. "They hire me and pay me money and it's a real job. But music is something where I get to control the whole process."

Wouldn't the next natural step be to make a great musical about an American rock 'n' roller?

''I don't know," he says. "It'd be hard to make a film that's kind of sweet and kind of naive like the Elvis movies. In those movies, they show somebody who gets up with his guitar, he hits a few notes, and everybody stands up and starts going, 'Yeah! Let's dance! We love it!' I think if you showed something like that nowadays, people would just laugh."

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