William Petersen on making ‘To Live and Die in L.A.’ and ‘Manhunter’

Two of the most stylish crime thrillers of the 1980s, William Friedkin’s “To Live and Die in L.A.” and Michael Mann’s “Manhunter,” will both screen at the Egyptian Theatre on Saturday as part of Beyond Fest. Actor William Petersen, who starred in both projects in his first major film roles, will be there for a Q&A after each show.

In 1985’s “To Live and Die in L.A.,” Petersen plays Richard Chance, a Secret Service agent assigned to investigate a counterfeiting ring in Los Angeles. He finds himself in pursuit of Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe), an amoral artist who has turned his talents to forging money. With evocative cinematography by Robby Müller and music by Wang Chung, the film is a propulsive portrait of Los Angeles in the ’80s, featuring a thrilling foot chase through LAX and a now-iconic car chase going the wrong way on the Terminal Island Freeway around Long Beach.

For 1986’s “Manhunter,” Petersen is Will Graham, a former FBI criminal profiler with an uncommon ability to understand the mindset of serial killers. Though retired, Graham is drawn back in by a perplexing new case. An unsettling, meditative adaption of Thomas Harris’ 1981 novel “Red Dragon,” the film features Brian Cox in the role of Hannibal Lecktor (enigmatically spelled differently here) a full five years before Anthony Hopkins immortalized Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Petersen, 72, got on the phone earlier this week to talk about the experience of making these two movies within the span of one year, launching him into a career that would include a long run on the popular series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”

[The following interview contains spoilers.]

These two films in particular — Friedkin’s “To Live and Die in L.A.” and Mann’s “Manhunter” — now seem like essential crime thrillers, so it makes sense to show them together. How connected are they for you?

They’re really connected. I shot them both in the same year, and they were my first two pictures, really. That was at a seminal time for us actors from Chicago. We were all of a sudden branching out — I didn’t even have an agent for those first two pictures. I was making deals with my business manager from my theater company, who became my producing partner, because we were just theater actors. In fact, when Billy [Friedkin] offered me the role in “To Live and Die in L.A.” I had to call my friend John Malkovich, who had just made “The Killing Fields,” because I had no idea what I was supposed to ask for or get or anything. I had no idea if I was supposed to make five hundred dollars a week or five thousand.

It’d be one thing if I had started on some little indie someplace with some new director or whatever. I learned so much in that year from those two men and those projects. It was an incredible education for me. And I was able to continue to go back and do the theater. Because it was never my intention to make any movies, it wasn’t like I was seeking them out. They kind of just came and found me.

I’ve heard you say that before, that you feel like you learned so much in that year making those two movies. Can you boil that down a bit? What do you think you took away from those experiences?

They’re such different filmmakers. Billy was all: run, gun, improvise, steal shots, we’re not supposed to do this, let’s do it anyway. And so it was almost like a documentary. It was like we were really doing it. And then Michael is such a craftsman that every part of everything is studied and controlled and carefully attenuated. And to have them both happen in a 12-month period, back to back, it took me a long time to process all that. I didn’t know how much I was learning because I had no frame of reference for any of it.

With “To Live and Die in L.A.” in particular, there’s just so much energy in that movie. Where did that come from?

[Friedkin] wanted it. He wanted it to be like that. I think part of it was a callback to “The French Connection.” They were just trying to get shots and I think he felt that it really required an energy like that. I remember him telling Robby Müller, our d.p. — brilliant guy, wonderful man — he didn’t care whether we hit our marks. Robby had to just figure out how to capture this. Friedkin] said, “I just want them to react, I just want them to be.” A lot of it was kind of improvisational, both physically and textually.

Petersen, left, and John Pankow in the movie “To Live and Die in L.A..”

(Sunset Boulevard / Corbis via Getty Images)

There’s a moment in the movie where you have one of those metal briefcases and you start banging it against the wall over and over until it finally breaks open. That was improvised?

We didn’t think the scene was going to carry that far. It’s set up to be a certain thing, and then at some point we stop and we put the prop case in, which will open. And we started shooting that scene and we just kept in it. Billy never cut it. I didn’t stop until I heard cut. And Billy knew that. So I was banging on the thing, which is why [co-star John] Pankow half the time is just screaming, “What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?” Because we hadn’t gone that far in terms of prepping it. And the thing finally broke. And fortunately there was a phone book inside of it.

That’s just all real. It happened. And he never cut it. He just wanted to see what would happen. And I felt bad sometimes for the other actors, because of course, they weren’t there the whole time. And they didn’t know what I was going to do. Pankow was scared to death when I was driving the car: “You have no business doing this. My life is in jeopardy.” Screaming from the backseat.

That’s such a classic car chase now. What made you want to do your own driving? That seems like a big decision but also kind of crazy.

First of all, you’re young and you think you know what you’re doing. And I had that idea that I could be a stunt guy too. Why can’t I be a stunt guy? I didn’t even think I was going to be a movie actor. So all of a sudden I was in the thing and I would get upset if he thought that he couldn’t use me in a shot. I remember Buddy Joe Hooker, who was our stunt coordinator, and I were talking about all this stuff I could and couldn’t do. There were certain things they weren’t going to let me do. But by and large, I got to do a lot of what I wanted to do. What else am I going to do? Sit in a trailer? I wasn’t used to that anyways, that whole movie thing where you hurry up and wait.

So once Billy found out I was game, he always wanted me to be a part of it. Buddy Joe was really great. Dick Ziker was the guy who did whatever driving I didn’t do. The stunt guys were fabulous. He wouldn’t let me jump off the bridge. God bless — Dar Robinson did that.

I’m reluctant to spoil a 40-year-old movie, but I’ve seen it a number of times, and every time I am shocked that your character dies and that it happens so close to the end of the movie. Was that a shock to you when you first read the script?

I thought that was the best. I thought that was the key. At the end of the picture, I remember Billy coming out and us having a long afternoon talking. We were down by the beach, and he said, “They want me to shoot another ending.” I was like, “Billy, this is the whole reason we did this. The whole reason I could play the guy the way I played him was because he doesn’t get out of jail.” Otherwise, it’s the wrongs make the right. There was a morality to it, I felt. Chance, he pushed it too far. And it didn’t feel right to me to have them all of a sudden just walk away going, “Aren’t we cool Secret Service agents?”

That’s what made the movie, I thought. Now granted, did it cost them at the box office? I suppose. They certainly felt that it would. It is shocking. I’ve got a couple of 14-year-olds that haven’t seen the movie. They’re going to see it on Saturday. And there’s a debate as to whether to tell them what happens or not. And I haven’t even come to the conclusion. I got half my people telling me, “Hey, you gotta tell them.” And the other half going, “Don’t wreck it.” So the debate goes on, 40 years later, whether it’s the right thing to do. He did shoot an alternate ending. We had to come back to L.A. and shoot this silly thing where I was all bandaged up and we’re supposed to be up in Alaska someplace, at a remote Secret Service station. We shot in such a way that there was no way you could use it. It was just ridiculous. But see, Billy had big balls, man. He just did.

And then “Manhunter” is such a different vibe. It’s so methodical and there’s something really unnerving about it. What was it like to shift from one project right into the next?

They were completely opposite things. They both symbolize a kind of ’80s slick-cop genre thing, but it was such different material. The characters were so completely different as well. You had my character in “To Live and Die in L.A.” — he just wanted to jump off bridges, drive opposite ways on the freeway and shoot bad guys. The character in “Manhunter,” Graham, he didn’t want anything to do with any of it. He was reluctant to even answer the phone. The character in “To Live and Die in L.A.” was more like I was then, and the character in “Manhunter” is more like I am now. Stay home and forget about it.

“To Live and Die in L.A.” was not disturbing. I would go home after a day and drink a couple of beers and watch a football game. Whereas “Manhunter” was a much more difficult experience because of the material you’re dealing with during the day. And it wasn’t a Method thing. I wasn’t Daniel Day-Lewis.

Brian Cox as Hannibal Lecktor in the movie “Manhunter.”

(Rialto Pictures / Beyond Fest at American Cinematheque)

Serial killers, profilers, that’s such an accepted part of pop culture now. There are so many shows and movies and podcasts about them, but at the time it was still kind of new. It wasn’t something that everybody knew so much about.

One of the things I liked about “French Connection” was the heroin making and the counterfeiting. When you see the counterfeiting in “To Live and Die L.A.,” people were fascinated by that. And then we did “Manhunter,” and we were going to the FBI lab and using the stuff to lift latent prints — all the laboratory stuff. I found people were fascinated by that. And that’s why I sort of knew the “CSI” idea was the one to go with, to do, because people were fascinated with the whole “How do you do this stuff?”

I want to be sure to ask about your scene with Brian Cox, the Lecktor scene. To really settle in and do a long dialogue scene, that must have felt like doing a play in the middle of the movie.

Yeah, it was. Brian, of course, is a wonderful theater actor. We oddly played a couple of the same parts in the theater in different countries. I worked with him basically only for about two or three days. It took a long time because, of course, Michael was doing all this very interesting camera stuff with the bars, going back and forth. He wanted it a certain way and he got it. And so it took a long time because there were a lot of takes. I just remember it being wonderful because it was real tamped down. Brian was just brilliant and surprising as Lecktor. He’s my Lecktor. Anthony Hopkins is fine, but it’s just a completely different thing to me.