Empire Magazine, September 96

President Bill Pullman has just returned from a meeting with President Bill Clinton. The film was being screened to the White House staff and as the big man strolled in, a nasty case of the jitters broke out. Who was going to sit next to the leader of the western world? Roland Emmerich gave his star a push in the back... "It wasn't my idea," Pullman grins with embarrassment. "Roland was there going, 'You go, you go.' I said, 'Jesus, this is like trying to shoot baskets with Magic Johnson being next to you.' Once the movie started it was even weirder because there are a lot of ways in which the circumstances of the president - it's a fictional story, nothing is literal - but you think it's being percieved in that way. I was uncomfortable."

Despite stringent denial that the character was based on his real-life counterpart, it's a tad coincidental that Pullman's President Thomas J. Whitmore - young, good looking, indecisive - is suffering from a sudden loss of popularity. That is until the aliens turn up and change the playing field, actually they completely vaporised the playing field. As Dean Devlin tells it, initially they had seen Kevin Spacey as the boss.

"The idea with the president's part was at first to play it as a sleazy president, a manipulative president and later for him to emerge as a hero. As we were working on it we thought, 'Let's go for the guy you just like from the beginning,' and Bill Pullman is just incredibly likeable.

Ah yes, Bill Pullman, Captain Affable; in a way that Gary Oldman and Dennis Hopper encompass all that is criminally insane in the Hollywood movie, Pullman represents its niceness. And in person, he's, well, really nice. But don't try to raise the issue.

Are you the nicest man in Hollywood?

"Well, you know, errrrr," grumbles Pullman awkwardly on one of his frequent freefalls down a consonant, "it's weird the way people have this general idea of what you are all about. They change from time to time. Before While You Were Sleeping, at the time of Wyatt Earp, I didn't know who I was, I had done a of different things. But on the Internet it said I play this 'fatherly authoritative figure' and I was like, 'Where do they get this from?' I ended up fulfilling their dream of who I was."

Now, in contrast to Goldblum's lack of care, Pullman has broken free of type and has just completed David Lynch's new movie Lost Highway, as the could-be-murdering sax-playing husband of Patricia Arquette.

"For me, it's like it couldn't be more of a great bookend for everything. I get to be the guy who goes to the Venice Film Festival with Lynch," says Pullman, greedily.

The 41-year-old actor has come full circle with Independence Day. Go back to 1987 and he was sending up Han Solo as Spaceballs' buffooning hero Lone Starr ("I'm lucky I did it that way because you couldn't do the earnest thing and then the parody.") This time he has all the straight lines, including a riotous "stir 'em up" speech, before donning flight gear himself to fire a few missiles up alien butts from a supersonic jet. Cheese? Yeah, the kind that nets you $100 million in a week.

"Well, you know, errrrr," he stumbles, "it's the kind of thing that reads a little corny - 'We will not go quietly into the night' - and am I stealing this from somewhere? That's the challenge of this movie, all this generic stuff and trying to find a way of making it come alive."

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