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Three time World Heavyweight Champion. Fitness guru. Actor. For Diamond Dallas Page, nothing has come easy, and everything he has taken on has met with much success. After retiring from the ring in 2002, Page focused on new challenges. A role in Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects has started a career in horror that continues with his latest effort, Driftwood, the second feature film from 2001 Maniacs director Tim Sullivan. Page stars as Captain Doug Kennedy, the sadistic warden of a juvenile attitude adjustment camp that on the exterior poses a cocky bravado and a swagger, but on the inside lies a man using the benefit of lost parents to fulfill his own macho supremacy. On January 15th, Driftwood screened in New York City at the Two Boots Pioneer and in attendance were Page and writer/director Tim Sullivan. A week later I had an opportunity to speak with DDP on Driftwood, his YRG (Yoga for Regular Guys) workout, and his career as a world champion professional wrestler.
Colonel's Crypt: Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed for the Crypt. DIAMOND DALLAS PAGE: No problem bro. CC: You’re definitely getting a cult following with your role in The Devil’s Rejects and also with Driftwood, do you like the horror genre in particular? DDP: I wasn’t a fanatic about horror, I like everything, but there’s a few horror movies I’m a really big fan of. The Exorcist, when I saw that in the theater, that was the scariest thing I ever saw in my life. I love The Shining with Jack and I’ll watch that once every six months. I just love the whole scenario and I put myself in there. I find myself liking things that are really disturbing like Saw. Someone wrote a really good review about Driftwood where he said the real horror was that there are places just like Driftwood. Kids really do die and get the hell beat out of them because their parents are conned into thinking that this is a good place for them. The parents aren’t being parents and they’ve never known how to take care of their kids. CC: What I mainly liked about Driftwood is that while there is a supernatural element to it that’s not the horror of the story. DDP: No, not at all. That’s why I’m so proud of the film and my performance in it. This was something I worked really, really, really hard on and it paid off because I’ve watched that movie a hundred times and I enjoy the performances of everyone in that cast every time. CC: Explain a bit about your character in Driftwood. DDP: I never wanted to try and play this character, not that I didn’t think I could do it. I thought it was such a big role that I would never be lucky enough to get it. I went to meet Tim Sullivan and we watched (2001) MANIACS together and we started talking, get to know each other and I went on a whole different rant telling him about a book I had written, Positively Page, which I was giving him to read and my YRG workout, also the book I had also written Yoga For Regular Guys, which is at my website at www.diamonddallaspage.com or at www.yrgworkout.com. I was talking to him about all this stuff I was creating and (laughs) when I walked out of the room, Barry Levine, who was one of the producers, and I didn’t know this at the time, but Tim turned to Barry and said “Are you telling me I don’t need a name actor in this role?” and he said “No, it’s a character driven piece” and Tim goes “Well… he’s the captain!” He didn’t tell me until later after he read a lot of Positively Page and he called me from New Jersey, we’re both Jersey boys, and he said “I feel like I’m reading my story with all the adversities that you overcame to where you’ve gotten to is amazing” and then he tells me “Dallas I don’t see you as Norris the guard,” and I go “Oh man,” thinking that was it. So he goes “I’d like you to play the Captain.” I was like “Really” and he confirmed it. There were only 30 written pages at the time and the treatment and I already knew from that first scene that the Captain was going to have A LOT of dialogue and a lot of time appearing in that movie. I was “Are you sure I can do this” and Tim goes “There’s no question in my mind.” I go “You know what, let’s do it” and it was a little intimidating when I first got the finished script because I pulled out all the pages that had some kind of dialogue with the Captain and it was two-thirds of the script (laughs). CC: Wow (laughs). DDP: And I knew that we were only going to shoot for 15 days and the Captain was only gonna film for 11 days. CC: Not a lot of time there. DDP: Yeah, so thank god that I had a lot to do in terms of my opinions on who the Captain was cause you know, every actor takes what they are going to build into their character, and to really, as far as I’m concerned, to do it right, I learned from Howard Fine’s acting studio. I went there for three years and Howard Fine is the number one acting coach voted by the actors in LA. He really liked me and taught me, well he taught everybody, but I was that extra special student who wanted to stick around and learn more because I was starting so late. As a wrestler, I didn’t start until I was 35. I tore my rotator cuff at 36 so I technically became a wrestler at 37. And out of respect for Stone Cold Steve Austin, who I think is the greatest wrestler ever, he retired at 37. I did a little acting while wrestling but I really didn’t know what I was doing but I just went by natural charisma and instincts, so I did a few flicks. Now I wanted to learn to be an actor but I was 46 years old, almost 47. I didn’t get DRIFTWOOD until I was almost 50. I was 49 when I got that role. Almost everyone, going into something like that will think you can’t make it. I’ve been fortunate enough to do THE DEVIL’S REJECTS and Rob Zombie really gave me my first opportunity in LA. He gave it to me because he was doing YRG with DDP. He was doing my YRG workout and he wrote the forward to Yoga For Regular Guys. CC: Wasn’t the first thing Rob Zombie writes in it was “I hate fucking yoga?” DDP: Actually, what he said was “Yoga… give me a fucking break” (laughs). That was beautiful as far as I was concerned because that’s exactly how I felt about yoga when I started. And when I started, I did it because I was 42 years old and I ruptured my L4 and L5 vertebrae. My career didn’t take off until I was 39. At 40, it blew through the roof. I was on fire, and then I had it all taken away from me because of this injury. They told me my wrestling career was over. My doctors and my wife were telling me to take yoga to strengthen my back and I’m like “Yoga? I’m not taking this crap!” That was my mindset and my whole life I wouldn’t be caught dead doing yoga. Now I have a book on the subject (laughs). I modified it, I don’t call it yoga, I call it Y-R-G, which is so much more than just yoga. It’s yoga meets old school calestinics: push ups, squats, crunches, and it meets isometrics and isokinetic movement in which you engage your muscles as you move them. It jacks your heart rate up so you don’t have to do cardio anymore. You don’t have to use a treadmill or a stair master. Anyway, Tim Sullivan is offering me this role which I would’ve never have known how to play if I hadn’t had gone to Howard Fine’s acting studio. He taught us there how to create a back story, how when you’re not playing a character, you are playing a version of yourself if, and there’s no Diamond Dallas Page in that character at all. Did you think so? CC: I didn’t at all, being a wrestling fan and following your career. Talking about back stories, there is a scene early on in the film where you have all the kids in a church and you’re giving a speech about the Captain’s high school glory days. Was that written or improvised? DDP: No, that scene was written by Chris Kobin, who wrote Driftwood with Tim Sullivan. I just added a little salt and pepper to it. The first thing I ever did for Chris, when Sullivan told him he wanted me for the role, he said no and he wanted Ron Perlman from HELLBOY because they knew each other and Chris knew Ron would be good for the role. However Tim saw Ron do something similar to that recently and he didn’t want to use Ron. Ron’s a great actor but Tim didn’t want to use Ron in that spot. He really wanted to take a chance on me. Raviv (Ricky) Ullman was a safe choice because he’s smiling and happy, a handsome little sucker on the Disney Channel. This isn’t a comedy though you find yourself laughing at some of the things I say. The Captain is a pretty colorful character and you wonder what he’s gonna do next. That scene was the most fun playing him because when I was on set every day, and for a month straight I was the Captain, going into that role. It took me a while to get out of it. When someone got out of line… (goes into Captain’s southern drawl voice) I always talk like this. They say “Diamond, where are you from” and I’d say in my southern drawl “New Jersey.” Now I don’t normally talk like this, but I remember the church scene, the long scene where the Captain has a long rant about how my glory days as a football player. To the Captain, it’s his world. Everyone else just lives in it. He justifies everything he does including the killing of his nephew. It was his fault. That was one of my biggest compliments that came from Howard Fine. Howard, no matter what we would do at the end of the scene would always say what worked, what didn’t, and why, and he makes you figure out where you could’ve been better. He wants you, after the scene is done, to know where your strength and weaknesses were. When we did the church scene, that was on the third day of filming. Everyone was pretty much doing short little bits up until that point. Tim and Steve Adcock, the Director of Photography, were thinking “Man, this is gonna take forever.” The monologue was about a third longer than what was in the final cut. They had me with so much to say, and I nailed it the first time. There was dead silence. And then Tim yells out “That was fucking great!” CC: Do you think part of that had to do with your experience working with a live crowd as a professional wrestler? DDP: Maybe a little bit but not really because one of the things I focus on is how to set goals and how to reinvent yourself and how to live your dreams, which I put into an audio book called Own Your Life. I also have a section in that book on how you need to own your breath because there’s only two things in this world we control. One is how we think. In other words, how do we react to a situation for example when you find out your dog has cancer, and he’s going to die. OK, I’m not saying that you can’t be sad and hurt because you’re gonna be but do you stay there? Let’s say your girlfriend broke up with you, or you smacked up your car, or something as simple as someone cut you off on the highway. I mean, these are all examples of different levels of how you react to the situation. And I guarantee you that how you breathe has everything to do with how you react. So, I taught myself to breathe like a child again. When you inhale, you fill your belly full of air, and when you exhale, you pull your belly into your spine. I bet when you try it, you do the opposite, you breathe through your chest. That’s what happens when time goes on. We forget how to breathe like a child. See, a child doesn’t have a care in the world. We do. But it’s something that with a little bit of training, you can bring back that breath, and your breath is the most important thing we have. We take it so much for granted but take it away and it becomes pretty damn important. Take that air in the room and take that before you’re about to perform in front of 70 people. You have a four to five page monologue to push out. I practiced myself where I could hold my breath for three, five, ten. I can hold my breath for twenty seconds with a belly full of air and breathe for twenty seconds taking out the air. First time you do it it’s like your underwater and the moment you come out of the water, you just (inhales deeply) to get that breath. Now if you can learn how to breathe and breathe in slowly, it will calm you. It will give you focus. So all I ever did before Tim said “Action” was just sit in my chair, breathe, condition where I just was as the character, Captain Doug Kennedy, where am I right now, what am I gonna do right now, and where am I gonna go when this is over. In real life, Scott, I knew before I ever called you that I was gonna call you. I knew I was gonna talk to you, and I had an idea of what I was going to talk to you about. And when I get off the phone with you, I know exactly what I’m going to do. That’s called living in circumstance. That’s something I learned from Howard Fine. I do instinctively in wrestling, looking back at it, like there were times where I really got over and I probably have about three hours of footage of me being interviewed by everyone. I wish I had crystal clear stuff that I could put on Youtube and such, but in all of them, when I got over in 1997, they all said “You just came out of nowhere and what do you attribute it to,” and besides workout reps, I attribute it to when Page Joseph Falkinberg, which is my given name, stopped trying to be Diamond Dallas Page, that larger than life wrestling persona, and Diamond Dallas Page started to take the characteristics of Page Joseph Falkinberg, man my career took off like a rocket. It was amazing because I just started to say what Page would say. I didn’t put anything on it. When I got to the top, they said I would never be a top guy. They said I would never be a main eventer. They were wrong. That was so real and there were so many interviews I watched that were so dead on, and I remember the bookers, Ric Flair and Kevin Sullivan, they all tried to hold me down. They didn’t think I would be anybody. Looking at it from their point of view, why would they think so? I started at 37, my career really took off at 39, why would they think I would? Then when I did they were worried because they knew how much they tried to hold me down, and were sure I was going to screw them back, you know. But that’s not who I am. I honestly believe that I’m never going to change who I am just to have someone else react. I’m responsible for my own actions. CC: Let’s discuss your wrestling career. I was wondering when you were rising to the top, and that was a great time with the whole WCW/n.W.o storyline, what were some of your favorite moments from that time? DDP: My favorite? Well it’s my favorite but it’s also, what do you call that, uh bittersweet (laughs). My favoriteyet at that time really, really, really pissed me off was I came up with the idea of the n.W.o trying to bring me in, to be one of their guys. Originally it was going to be right after Hulk. I was gonna say no. That was what the plan was. And Kevin Sullivan, who was booking at the time, was like, when I said no, they were gonna continue to try and get me, and as the story went, when I finally put on the shirt, I was gonna hit them with a Diamond Cutter. Now nobody got to those guys, they were the top guys in the business at that time. Sullivan never wanted to see me get to those guys. But my career was just starting to take off, and what had happened was every week that we were going to do it, it was off the sheets. I mean, ten weeks in a row, it was up there to happen, and for some reason it didn’t. Finally we were in New Orleans, and we had twelve minutes of air time. It was definitely going to happen tonight. To me it was an I’m not gonna believe until I see it thing. The Superdome in New Orleans is huge, one of the biggest places I’ve ever been to. You had to take golf carts around to get to different areas because it was so big. We’re driving and I have my gear on, and I hear the guy with the headset going “Dallas, you don’t have twelve minutes anymore, you got eight.” I’m thinking “You sons of bitches man,” they’re already starting to screw with me. So I figure I can do everything in eight minutes. I get to where I’m about to go out and Jody Hamilton, who’s one of my mentors, he goes “Diamond, we’re running short on time, you got six minutes.” Now I’m so pissed. I feel they’re trying to ruin it, trying to ruin the deal so we rush through so people don’t care. Then I get to the curtain, and I’m looking for Kevin (Nash) and Scott (Hall) because they’re supposed to be around here too, and Mark Starr, who I’m supposed to wrestle that night. They play Mark’s music and he goes to the ring. Actually, he didn’t get any music, he just went out there. They just start to play my music and Terry Taylor goes to me “Diamond you have four minutes to get it all in.” I said “What?!” I flipped. Remember it’s all about how you control how you think, how you react, how you breathe, trust me I wasn’t doing any of that then. I snapped and right at that moment Nash came walking behind me with Scott Hall, who’s like Superman with his little curl across his face. I go “Kev, Kev, they cut us from twelve to eight to six to four minutes dude, four minutes.” He goes “Dally,” he always would call me Dally, he goes “What do you always tell me? Breathe. Take a couple of deep breaths, go out there and beat that guy.” It takes four minutes to get to the ring and it’s live! He goes “Don’t worry about it, take your time, get all your shit in.” I went out there, locked up with Mark Starr, gotta go home right now dude. Boom, stopped him, bang shot, threw him into the turnbuckle, caught him in the Diamond Cutter, roof blew off, and then, the n.W.o music starts, and those boys came down to the ring, they got in the ring. Kevin is one of my best friends since we started wrestling. We used to drive together all the time when we were the Vegas Connection, we were nobodies. Scott Hall who I created his entire gimmick from blond hair and big mustache to look like “The Bad Guy” that he became, I came up with all of that. These two guys are my brothers, you know. They wanted to reach out and help me step up cause they knew that if I dropped them, it was huge for me. They didn’t wanna do it for anyone else but me because they knew I deserved it and they knew I could draw money with them. So when I hugged Kevin, I put the T-shirt on and the people, you could feel the air come out of the building. So I put the T-shirt on, hug Kev, Kev turns his back. I shook Scotty’s hand and he went to pull away and I pulled him into a Diamond Cutter. That roof blew off! Kevin tried to attack me, he fell over the ropes and onto a table. I stood up on the ropes. At that time, I wasn’t doing the Diamond Cutter sign, I was just throwing my arms up in the air, and I took off through the crowd and people went insane! That was really the beginning of it and that’s what really started. If you want to take a step before that, it was my feud with Eddie Guerrero. Eddie allowed me to do things with him because he would do anything and we had phenomenal matches. Eddie really showed people what Diamond Dallas Page could do, so I always owe a huge, deep debt of gratitude to Eddie. And then Scott and Kev and then Macho Man was like “I wanna take the Diamond Cutter” and when I beat Macho, everything changed. CC: I was in college at the time with my friends and we thought that Savage-Page was the biggest thing. DDP: It was, it was the Feud of the Year in Pro Wrestling Illustrated. CC: One of my favorite moments was when you dressed as La Parka and hit Savage with the Diamond Cutter. DDP: That’s exactly what I was just going to say (laughs). Just to show you when I said those guys were trying to hold me down, I can back it up with proof. I’ll give you an example. If Stone Cold Steve Austin gives someone the Stone Cold Stunner and they’d replay it, how many times would you see Stone Cold do that to somebody? CC: Quite a few. DDP: About a hundred and twenty times right? CC: Yeah, give or take a few. DDP: You know how many times they replayed that angle of me dropping Scott and Kev during the show? CC: Not much. DDP: Not once. I mean, the two biggest guys in the business at the time, Hall and Nash, just dropped by Page, and they never replayed it (laughs). I was so mad I went to Bourbon Street and I got so drunk and you should never get drunk when you are mad. When you get a buzz at a party, be sure you’re in a good state of mind, cause alcohol’s a depressant to begin with. You don’t need to add to your depression with alcohol. But I did, and I’m not perfect. But bottom line is that I met those guys later that night and they were “Dally that was great man, it was incredible.” I was so pissed off I just wanted to rip somebody’s throat out. But all that stuff, it all happens for a reason. To me, it made me work harder, so it was all good. There’s nothing bad about it in the end. CC: I miss those days. DDP: You’re not the only one. So many fans stopped watching wrestling with the deal and what Vince did to the WCW guys, you know. The whole deal about throwing Eric Bischoff in the garbage can I mean, you know Vince is still paying him. He’s still paying him. You know what, if he ever did fire Eric Bischoff and he showed up in TNA and they went on a Monday night across from him, and TNA would let him run with the ball, it’s a whole different animal man. CC: I just got WWE 24/7 On Demand here and I was watching the Monday Night Wars program, and it was when Bischoff just joined the n.W.o and I think to myself “This is what wrestling should be now.” DDP: What do they charge for that? CC: Seven bucks a month. DDP: And you get the Monday Night Wars every night? CC: They play two shows a month, it’s one program where you watch a Monday Nitro in its entirety followed by the RAW that aired the same night in its entirety and it’s up to now November of 1996. DDP: Ah man, that was when my career was really starting to take off. CC: I know your acting career and your YRG program is taking off, and you briefly wrestled for TNA, but will we see Diamond Dallas Page return to the ring? DDP: Well, you know, it’s one of those deals where I’ve talked to both sides on different occasions about different situations. I don’t see it unless it gets to a point where it’s a really great storyline that would come in and benefit them but would also benefit me at the same time. It’s not about me but it showing that a 50 year old guy can still go. I mean Flair may be 58 years old but he looks 78. He’s done the same three to five moves for the last 22 years so I would be doing a lot more than that but it would only be for a short period of time. It’s more important for me to be… I wanna be in the next three to five years the cross breed between Tony Robbins and Jack LaLanne. My biggest jack to me is changing lives and helping people own their life. CC: Thanks so much for your time and for entering the Colonel’s Crypt. DDP: You got it bro, and everyone go check out Driftwood..
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