Vincent Spano looks scruffy and a bit tired, like he just rolled out of bed to make the interview. Despite his movie star looks, no heads turn when he walks into the trendy Melrose Avenue italian restaurant. He turns out to be anything but a showboat : He is understated, his manner, all quiet intensity. Spano worked steadily, as a young leading man in the early '80s, most notably in John Sayles' Baby It's You, Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish and The Black Stallion Returns, all released in 1983. By the end of the decade, we weren't seeing much of Spano, although he had the bad luck to reveal most of himself in Roger Vadim's awful And God Created Woman. In the past year or so, he's resurfaced in films like John Sayles' City of Hope and the HBO movie Afterburn. Alive, his latest fim, is out this month. This is our second try at an interview. The first one was canceled due to an accident. David Galligan : Tell me about your accident. Vincent Spano Pulling down his eyelid to reveal an angry red mark across the skin See? One of my cats spooked the other and the spooked one ran across my face and gashed me. I was half-asleep. I've done everything I'm suppposed to do. I had a tetanus shot, saw a surgeon. It was like being asleep and someone punches you in the face. DG : Did you drop out of the business for awhile? [Surprised] Drop out? DG : It seems that you were missing for several years. [Laughs] No, I went to Italy in 1984 to do Blood Ties --in Sicily. I liked Italy, so I decided to take four years out of my twenties and spend most of my time there, to fall out a little bit, here in America. Then I decided I wanted to get back in so I moved to Los Angeles in '89....And that was hard because I had been a New Yorker all my life. DG : Let's talk about Alive, that heart warming Dysney movie you recently completed about cannibalism. [Pissed off] It's not about cannibalism! DG : Doesn't it contain cannibalism? [Alive is based on the true story of a South American rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes mountains, and their bid for survival.] [Somewhat curtly] Cannibalism is a result of the survivors choosing to live instead of die -- deciding that God would want them to choose to survive, as opposed to not eating the flesh of the dead, and dying. DG : Do you have a favorite of the films you've done? We all go out there believing we're going to make something unique and special. One that I'll tell you that I did not like was And God Created Woman. It seemed to me that suddenly Vestron [the releasing company] decided to create some sensationalism about the sex scenes. They released it on videotape and called it "the uncensored version." I mean, what the fuck are they talking about? The only reason I did it was because it was 1987 --AIDS was about six years old, and it was becoming clear in the heterosexual community that it was time to chill out, make the relationship you have work--the party was over, babe. So when I read it, it was about a young guy who has a family, but his wife leaves him, and he is trying to be a mother and a father to his son. Then he meets this woman played by Rebecca DeMornay, and he starts caring for her and agrees to marry her. That issue was really important to me-- not how much nudity they could show. I got stuck because it shows on cable and it's on video and it doesn't go away. You do a movie and, hey, man, it's forever DG : Do you share your L.A. life with anyone? A girlfriend? Yes, Laura Dern. We started going out after we worked together in Afterburn.... Laura and I love eachother. I am definitly inspired by Laura--by her tenacity, by the way she deals socially with the people on the industry. But you have to realize, Laura was conceived on a movie set. DG : Literally? Literally. while her mother [Diane Ladd] and father[Bruce Dern] were working on a Roger Corman film 25 years ago. I, on the other hand, am this kid from New York who started high school with the idea of becoming a lawyer.... Laura and I come from different worlds, but we're in the same one now.

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