My first impression of Michael Biehn and his wife and creative partner, Jennifer Blanc: They’re wild.
It’s not just Jennifer’s pouring blond hair and Michael’s feral spikes. It’s not his bold black garb and her coat straight out of a Hard Case Crime cover. It wasn’t even their ferocity in discussing their craft.
They really have gone wild: Blanc-Biehn Productions is going grindhouse.
Michael Biehn in "The Divide"
I sat down with them to discuss The Divide, Michael’s new starring role in a Xavier Gens post-apocalyptic horror film illustrating the plummet when civilization’s borders are past. They told me about a no-rules, no-holds-barred creative process under Gens.
More exciting yet, they revealed their own excursion into the wilderness — into Topanga Canyon park, to shoot The Victim, the first in their fresh foray into independent exploitation film.
No doubt some of their inspiration came from the unfettered approach to acting in The Divide.
“Usually you don’t want to get too aggressive with a director…Turned out, Xavier worked with the actors,” Michael said, “saying, you can improv, you can write scenes, you can take the characters anywhere you want them to go. And that’s what people started doing. And so my character, Mickey, does not resemble the character they’d wrote at all.”
Biehn brought more than improvisation to his screen presence. He also beat together a backstory for his character. In doing so, he created one of the most significant redemptive points of an otherwise threadbare plot.
“Mickey had been the antagonist throughout the entire movie,” Michael said. “So what I brought into it was the whole 9/11 past: That he was a first responder…He’d took his team into one of the buildings, the building went down, and he was the only thing left standing. And he couldn’t take it, ended up drinking, ended up losing his family, became a racist and built this bomb shelter.”
Jennifer contributed too, featuring in a sequence in The Divide wherein she plays his wife.
“We didn’t want [Mickey] to end up nasty,” Michael said. “He’s the one character who starts off nasty and finds his humanity.”
Other contributions stand out in so raw and complex a film as The Divide. “Michael Eklund, who played Bobby in the movie, you wouldn’t even have hardly known he was in the script. But since he’s so talented, he ended up developing this great role.”
Blanc-Biehn are a pair well-suited to these wild times. They get the potential of a starved Hollywood system and Do-It-Yourself technology.
“The Victim was a situation where, when I worked with Robert Rodriguez on the Grindhouse movies and saw all these movies that weren’t made with much money, I thought of directing,” Michael said. He cited Gens and Rebel Without a Crew [Rodriguez's book] as major influences.
“[The Victim is] about two naughty girls who get into trouble with some bad cops,” Jennifer described. “One of them gets hurt, the other one’s running for her life, and she runs into a dark, handsome loner who’s hiding out himself. And he spends the rest of the time trying to protect her.”
Their process is what you’d expect from a desperate and dynamic zeitgeist: Where there’s a will, there’s a way. In an era when access is easy and the keys to Tinseltown’s castle are hard to come by, you make up your mind and go with what you’ve got.
“I got it down in three weeks,” Michael says, “It wasn’t even finished. We had to shoot the love scene first, between me and her, because I was still finishing writing the movie.”
Doing it on your own doesn’t mean doing it alone, though — the independent film scene has almost as much community cohesion as it does energy. I was especially delighted to hear Danielle Harris’ name on the Blanc-Biehn roster.
Blanc and Harris in "The Victim" ---->
"Harris first came to my attention as the star of Adam Green’s indy horror hit, Hatchet 2. Her presence is more than just a quality actress accustomed to filling the role of a deadly knockout. It’s proof of the community spirit that infuses the independent scene — that you’ve got to band together to get things done.
“We had to do pre-production with everyone going, ‘Whoa, what’s going on’…then we had location scouting, and getting hooked up with the Screen Actors Guild. Beginning to end, it was five weeks.”
The style of The Victim was, it was noted, is very “21st century Roger Corman.”
Xavier Gens may have his name attached to future projects of Blanc-Biehn as well. Their suggestion is that the French splattercore director continue to clarify the image of an independent horror scene gaining gravity and momentum.
“We’re working on putting together a trilogy,” Jennifer said, “We’re working on it with Xavier Gens. Like, ‘Xavier Gens presents Michael Biehn in….’”
The Blanc-Biehn brand is contagiously wild. I hope their freshman effort proves it has as much quality as energy. Regardless, whenever the wilderness starts to roar down the civilized studio scene, it’s exciting times for film.
“I’ve had the opportunity to direct something, without anybody telling me what I could and couldn’t do,” Michael said. “And I would like to continue to do that.”
And as for that Biehn directorial style, Jennifer reveals, “He’s a tyrant. And he won’t stop cutting. But it’s a lot of fun.”
