How I, a movie villain, taught my heavies what my nods mean
I am a successful movie villain with more than 34 theatrical releases to my name. I’ve worked with all the stars. John Cusack, Sharon Stone and Robert Redford are just three of the actors who are probably aware of this.
Because of my fame, people often ask me: what’s my secret? How have I stayed in the business for so long? “Richie,” they say in fan Q & As, “How is it that you are still working?” For me the answer couldn’t be more simple: the violent men I employ know exactly what my tiny nods mean.
I won’t pretend this has always been the case. In the early days it was like teaching chickens how to moonwalk. In those initial stages I was a laughing stock in the movie villain world. I would take one of my victims out to a pier in the middle of the night with a cement block attached to him — you know the drill. But, when I nodded to one of my guys, he would play one of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Mystery Sonatas to him on the violin. It is not clear to me how this specific mix-up could have occurred but it happened on more than occasion, and I have no one to blame but myself. You lose a lot of respect if it looks like you drove a guy out to the ocean just to have a large man play him some haunting violin music.
I remember another early slip-up in which a young man was pleading for his life and I solemnly nodded to one of my men, who promptly released a small frog from his pocket and started to stroke it, saying, “Now is the time for the froggy froggy.” Still no idea what he meant. We had never discussed this course of action. On another occasion I nodded to one of my heavies — a psychopathic man called Wandall— and he punched me in the face. I realised that if I was to become a respected movie villain I needed to up my game.
There are essentially only two messages a movie villain’s nod can convey to his goons. One is, ‘OK, stop what is currently happening from happening’ — deployed when your victim is, for example, being submerged in water. The second is, ‘OK, please do that thing we agreed on earlier’ — deployed when your hostage has crossed a line and needs to be shot. As you can see, it’s not clear how frogs or Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber can come into the equation but I don’t want to get dragged back into all that.
During a six-week training course in the forest I equipped my heavies with the tools they would need to quickly identify my nods. Using various animals as stand-ins for the movie hostages, we practised time and time again. That first fortnight is still seared into my memory. Despite my nods never changing, the men in my employ would see them variously as triggers to sprint away from the victim, start laboriously preparing a sandwich, or, on one occasion, scuttle around on all fours saying, “I’m a spider, these are my eggs.”
After painstaking weeks, however, I established that by nodding with my head tilted to my left I could convey ‘OK, stop what is currently happening from happening’ and by nodding while winking and ringing a bell I could convey ‘OK, please do that thing we agreed on earlier.’ I gradually phased out the bell during the second nod, fearing that it would prove problematic when I needed to nod on camera. But the wink remained. And, whenever you watch one of my films and you see me instruct a heavy to kill someone, remember that a wink has been painstakingly altered from my face using digital technology.
Soon I will retire, and I wanted to pass this knowledge on to the legions of aspiring movie villains out there. I consider it my duty. A movie bad guy is not a movie bad guy without his tiny nods. And, while my approach may be unorthodox, and may cause the VFX budget for any film featuring myself to leap up by about $60,000, would I have it any other way? Yes. Yes, I think I would.
