Paul Koslo

Interview by Justin Humphreys

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"Of course my dad and I never got along, unfortunately. We had a lot of problems. I guess, right from their soul, kids rebel a lot. It's been like that since the beginning of time, father rebelling against son. Just look at REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. It's inherent in all countries, especially this one. It's gotten big because of the media and the movie industry. We didn't see eye-to-eye and there were a lot of different reasons for it. In his upbringing, he never got along with his dad, so he didn't know how to act with me. So I left home when I was really, really young, when I was about twelve. I wound up working for my brother-in-law to-be. He married my sister a couple of years later and he was from Germany, too. He was building apartment kitchens in a big shop. I went to Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island and I worked for him for about a year. Then, that next summer, I went back to the mainland and I was traveling a little bit, just to see the country, and I got commandeered by the Mounties to fight a big forest fire and I did that for four months, all summer long. They paid me seventy-five cents an hour, twenty-four hours a day. I think I amassed about thirty-two hundred dollars, which was a fortune at that time. I took that money and I hitchhiked across North America twice. That was until I was about fifteen. I did that for over a year. Then I finished high school. As a matter of fact, I went back to West Vancouver High. They had what was called The Great Thirteen, which was like a first year junior college, but I'd been out in the world too much and just couldn't get back into the regimentation of it. I'd heard about this great acting school in Montreal, so I decided to audition. My parents didn't know where I was. My dad and I never got along. He never encouraged me at all. He kind of laughed at me when I told him I wanted to be an actor. I didn't have any support whatsoever, so there was a lot of negative feelings about that.

"After I did high school, I decided to go back east to Montreal to go to the National Theater School there, which was a sister school to the National Theater in London. I'd been doing a few little acting jobs on television, small parts, a couple of lines here and there. I did it just to see if I liked it. I LOVED IT. It drove me to keep on going, but I realized that I needed training. I auditioned for the National Theater School and I got in. And I got a Ford Foundation Scholarship. I studied in Montreal for a year. I was doing waiter jobs, working in gas stations in Vancouver and stuff in the interim. I was a year late in graduating from high school, so I was already nineteen instead of eighteen. I did a year at the Theater School and then I got kicked out. The first year there, you learn the technique of acting, you learn diction, interpretation, improvisation, voice, dance, music, broadswords, fencing with foils, rhythm, everything. And the third year, you study plays and put them on for the public. My thing was, again, I was sort of the two percent-er type. I was asking too many questions. I was saying, Well, it could be like this, couldn't it? I mean it doesn't have to be.

"We were in Stratford, Ontario, which is about five hundred miles from Montreal, where we'd go during the summer to put on plays. And that first summer after we had been at Stratford, the artistic director called me in and said, 'You may be really talented, but I don't want you back next year. You're outta here.' It was like a mule had kicked me in the head. I just turned around on my heel and I never said anything to him. I just walked out. Then the assistant artistic director called me and said, 'This is probably the best thing that could've happened to you, Paul, because you've got a lot of talent and you'll be out there learning what it's all about. Take your talent and go out there and get jobs. Get work and learn in the business. You don't have to do plays for two years.' I got out and about a month later, I was walking across the parking lot of CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Four guys, business-types, were walking across the parking lot the other way. As we passed each other, a guy says, 'HEY! You look Russian- can you act?' I said, 'Well, as a matter of fact, I just finished at Stratford this year.' He said, 'Oh, good, man. Come on up to my office. Here's my card. I'm casting the lead in this Festival Series, which is like a Kraft Playhouse for Canada.' I said, 'What is it about? Is it a good part?' He says, 'It's the LEAD, man. It's the part of Raskolnikov in CRIME AND PUNISHMENT by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.' FUCK!

So I went there about three months later. I didn't know anything about it. I didn't have enough time to get any information so I could be prepared somehow. But I didn't need to because they had everything there. Actually, Michael Sarrazin, Rudolf Nureyev, and all these other guys were up for the same part. (Note: the co-star was Genevieve Bujold). I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was made-for-TV. It played on PBS on the east coast outlet, because New York's not far from Montreal. Somebody from William Morris in New York saw it and they asked me if I wanted to be represented. I met the guy from the William Morris office and they signed me. By that time, after I did that show, I got another show out of that, about Dylan Thomas. I was living in Toronto and now I had the William Morris Agency behind me and they said, 'Listen, Paul, we want you to meet the guys on the west coast, too.' So I went there and I met them and I came back to Toronto. Then I decided to move to Hollywood in 1966."

Some Koslo filmographies include the Euro western DJANGO. "In '66, there was a Spanish film crew that came and did an interview on me and I was supposed to go do a spaghetti western. I don't know if that had anything to do with it." Koslo spent much of 1967 back east in NYC on stage in Hair. His feature film debut was playing a psycho in a movie known as FLUX, MANIAC, or THE ZODIAC KILLERS. It was made by Jack Starrett and Richard Compton, but was never released. "The first movie I did here, Jack Starrett directed, he did THE DION BROTHERS, CLEOPATRA JONES. He was an actor. He was Gabby Johnson in BLAZING SADDLES. He was a hell of a director. He was actually a really good director, but he was a real renegade. He didn't like the big studio system and he bucked them and they didn't like him for it. So he never really made it to be a big, major director." THE LOSERS (70) is a fun if ridiculous Nam biker cult film, later featured in PULP FICTION. "I had the chance, of course, to leave the country and go to Manila, to see part of the world I'd never been to. And that was really interesting for me. Jack cast me because I'd done the lead for him in THE ZODIAC KILLERS. And I realized that Jack had a lot of talent, because, man, this guy would shoot beautiful stuff! He was really a talented guy. William Smith and myself were sort of the leads. William Smith is the king of the biker movies. Actually I just saw him a while ago. He's a little crazy, but he's a good guy." Smith had already starred in Starrett's RUN, ANGEL, RUN (69).

" We got there (Manila). It was a long flight. I was about twenty-five. I'm feelin' pretty good- I love this part I'm playing, this guy Limpy. And, here we are, we're like five reprobates from California out in the middle of the jungle. And it's a ludicrous scenario of five Hell's Angels taking on the whole Red Chinese army, trying to rescue a CIA agent (laughs). We had a guy there, Gary McClarty, who's like the whiz of bike stunts and things. He's the best in the business. I rode the three-wheeler (bike), the others were like Yamahas. We converted them. Some of the movie plot was us reworking our bikes with machine guns on the handlebars... I reworked this three-wheeler, which was actually a Harley frame with a Volkswagon rear end and a roll cage. We had a big rocket launcher on top of the roll cage, then fifty-caliber machine guns on either side of that. And they actually worked. All I had to do was press a button and blanks would come out of there. So did the rocket launcher, it shot dummy rockets. All that stuff was really exciting to me. That was the first time I'd ever had to learn to ride a motorcycle. This guy, Gary McClarty, who's a legend in the business, taught me to ride. So I've got a lot of memories there. And, of course, the women were hot and heavy and the drinks were cold and strong, and we were stayin' there in the jungle. It was a six-week shoot and after the first three weeks, we found out that the producer of this show wasn't paying us back in Hollywood, so we went on strike. We made some calls from where we were staying, the Manila Hilton, and the agency got some money over there for everybody for the first three weeks (work). Bill (Smith) instigated that. He said, pardon my French, 'If that motherfucker comes around, I'll throttle his fucking neck! How dare he not fucking pay us!' But Bill is a very genteel guy, he really is. Did you know that he speaks seven languages fluently? He was an interpreter in part of the diplomatic corps in the Korean War. He's always been a dear friend and I'll always support him. He's got nineteen-and-a-half inch arms. A regular person's neck is only about fifteen-and-a-quarter or so. He's really lean, but he's all muscle.