A few months before shooting was to begin on Paramount's The Saint, the Aussie auteur Phillip Noyce went to visit the movie's star, who was on location in Australia for another film. When the actor didn't show up for their meeting, Noyce sighed and thought, "Well, this is Val Kilmer." That would be Val Kilmer the Hollywood bad boy, whose very name spurs some directors to spit venom. Noyce walked outside and into a dark street, then became aware of someone following him. "I stopped in a doorway and looked over my shoulder, but no one was there. Suddenly, Val materialized right behind me and whispered in my ear, 'Are you looking for someone?'"
That would be Val Kilmer the meticulous student of each role he plays, from randy Jim Morrison in The Doors to the courtly, consumptive Doc Holliday in Tombstone. On that night in Australia, says Noyce, "he was already acting the role of the Saint." Later Noyce and scriptwriter Wesley Strick trekked to South Africa, where Kilmer was shooting another film. "Let's go," the actor greeted them. He hopped into a Land Rover and, steering wheel in one hand, cigarette in the other, drove them madly across dirt roads to a distant campsite where he was living in a tent. Over a fire that evening Noyce asked Kilmer for his ideas about The Saint. "By the time he finished," Noyce recalls, "the sun had come up."
The sun keeps rising on Kilmer's career. Since his one-film reign as the Caped Crusader in the 1995 hit Batman Forever, the California-bred actor has built bridges and killed a lion in Ghost and the Darkness, played a thief with marital troubles in Heat, nearly outmannerismed Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau and provided the voice of Moses for next year's Prince of Egypt, the first DreamWorks cartoon feature.
Now, at 37, he has a potential franchise role in Paramount's revival of The Saint. This isn't the clarety Simon Templar that George Sanders played in three Saint films in the '40s or the capering Roger Moore of the '60s TV show. Kilmer's Simon is a man unsure of his own identity and compelled to wear disguises as if he were shopping for a new soul. Similarly, Noyce eschews the campy look of Bond or Batman. The movie, about a post-Soviet plutocrat (Rade Serbedzija) who tries to mastermind a new Russian revolution, is dark--almost drab--and broody. It seems deeply riven between its impulse to entertain and its aspirations to update both Freud and Le Carre.
For playing author Leslie Charteris' mysterious superhero, Kilmer got $8 million, a share of gross profits and the possibility of not only starring in but also helping produce a sequel. "I've tripled my price tag in the past two years," he says, "by being very fortunate in getting Batman, and then by just putting my head down and working a lot. I've moved into a league of the more proven."