When it comes to Spokane cinema, it's hard to top Vision Quest. The 1985 film is one part coming-of-age high school flick, one part amateur wrestling sports movie and one part romantic drama.
It centers on Louden Swain (Matthew Modine, in his first starring role), a wildly driven high school wrestler who decides against everyone's advice that his goal for the year will be to change weight classes and take on the toughest, meanest grappler in the state. The only potential distraction is the arrival of Carla (Linda Fiorentino), a gorgeous down-on-her luck artist who Louden convinces his dad to let crash at their home until she's able to head to San Francisco. Along the journey of Louden's "vision quest," mistakes are made, love is found, and shoulders get pinned to the mats.
To celebrate Vision Quest's 40th anniversary, SpIFF is closing out its festivities with a screening of the film at the Fox on Sunday, March 9, with Modine doing a Q-and-A session with local author Jess Walter; the actor is also set to speak with area film students at Gonzaga on March 7. While Modine went on to such high-profile roles as Pvt. Joker in Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Martin Brenner in Stranger Things, and other roles in Oppenheimer, The Dark Knight Rises, Cutthroat Island and more, Vision Quest still holds a special place in his heart.
Before his visit, we caught up with Modine to go in depth about the lessons learned while shooting Vision Quest and the film's lasting legacy.
INLANDER: What memories first spring to mind when you think back to the making of Vision Quest?
MODINE: Well, first of all, I love Spokane. I had a great time there. I experienced the city in a way that maybe some of the people from Spokane don't even experience — just running around the entire city. Running across all the bridges, and going to [Rogers High School] and meeting all the kids from the school. The whole community was kind of involved with the making of Vision Quest. They were background performers. They were people in the audience during the wrestling matches. The other wrestlers in the film were all local kids. So my memories of Vision Quest are just absolutely positive and youthful.
Since you were also young when you made this movie, what were some of the things you learned while making Vision Quest that helped build a foundation for such a prolonged career as an actor?
I'd been in ensemble films, but this was the first real starring role that I had. What was the important thing to realize is that while you're the star of the film, you're not — if I can use this as a metaphor — the fabric. The fabric is made up of lots of threads, isn't it? So even though it appears that I'm the fabric, I'm really a thread in it. And that's when I really realized that everybody that's on the set is another thread of the fabric: the sound person, the camera operator, the cinematographer, the director, the other actors that you're working with, the production designer, the hair and makeup, the grip and electric, the best boy. When you watch a film and you see all those credits — those are all threads. And it only takes one or two threads to be weak, and the whole fabric comes apart.
And we had an incredible bunch of threads to make this film. Incredibly talented people, from the director Harold Becker to Owen Roizman, who was the cinematographer. You can look up his credits from The Exorcist to The French Connection.
Louden is a very unique character in that he's so relentlessly driven and positive in his belief that he will achieve his goals. As an actor, how did you tap into what makes that character special?
Well, Darryl Ponicsan, another really important thread in that fabric, who wrote The Last Detail amongst other things, he was the person who adapted the book by Terry Davis, who's a local there in Spokane. He asked me if I'd ever read Catcher in the Rye, because he felt that there was something that was very Holden Caulfield about Louden. And I had never read J.D. Salinger's book, so I did, and that was a really wonderful psychological background to give texture to who Louden Swain was.
I think what's really wonderful in this, as opposed to all the other movies that have been written and filmed about coming of age, is that Louden does and says things that are inappropriate. He does and says things today that would get him canceled. But the thing is, that's what young people do. They make mistakes. Like a child that's learning to walk, he falls down a lot, maybe thousands of times before he takes those first steps, before he learns to walk, before he learns to run. There's a lot of falling. And that's what we get to witness from Louden Swain — his miscues, his misunderstanding, his inappropriateness. And I think that we're all susceptible to doing and saying things that are inappropriate, but that's how we learn not to do those things. Today, it's refreshing to see somebody whose life isn't destroyed because they make mistakes.
Stranger Things and Vision Quest are the same era. I think that unconsciously, young people today are seeing the film and connecting to it and enjoying it because there is no social media, there's no phone, there's no texting, there are none of the pressures that young people are living with today. What you're seeing is people who, in order to be able to speak to one another, they have to meet one another. They have to go into a room and sit down and talk. They meet in a restaurant and learn about each other without the distraction of a phone, without the distraction like "let me take a picture of that!" I think that people are just desperate to have that kind of human connection again. Life is being so distorted by this device that I'm using right now to speak to you.
What are you looking forward to about coming back to Spokane to celebrate Vision Quest as part of SpIFF?
I'm just super excited about returning to Spokane and presenting the film at the Fox Theater. There's going to be some exciting surprise guests that are going to be there and participate. If you were in the movie, you know, a background performer, somebody that was in the stands, one of the guys on the wrestling team — however you were involved in the film — we're encouraging those people to come so that they can stand up and be recognized for their contribution to the film. So I hope there's a lot of people that worked on the film that come to the Fox Theater, which is a beautiful old girl, isn't she?
Do you feel like quality movies made in cinematically off-the-beaten-path places like Spokane allow them to resonate longer?
I think it was very important to Harold Becker to get off the beaten path, to immerse the characters into an environment that was different than anything that they may have been subjected to. I was living in New York City and still in acting school when I met Harold Becker the first time. He wanted to get away from that.
I think probably he went on a location scout with Owen Roizman, and they saw the metaphor [in the] bridges — of youth, of coming of age. There are all sorts of mystical and mythological stories about crossing bridges and crossing rivers on epic journeys where characters have to go out in order to be able to discover who they are. And I think that's why the film opens that way, with Louden crossing so many bridges.
One of the things that's helped Vision Quest stand the test of time is that it's still probably the most beloved amateur wrestling movie. It's a sport where there's a lot of passion, but while there are a million baseball and football movies, its big-screen representation is minimal.
More than any other movie, even Full Metal Jacket, people stop me to talk about Vision Quest. If I'm walking down the street in New York, people roll down their window and say, "You can't hold your mud! You're a bleeder!" "Hey Louden, you think you're going to make the weight?" They quote the movie, and, I mean, it's humbling and it gives you joy.
But this movie, more than any other film that I've worked on, I have been stopped by people in tears and because they said that they were lost, that they had no compass in their life, and Louden was that compass that gave them a direction. That they were alcoholics or drug addicts, and that by following Louden's — I don't know what you would call it — positivity and the pursuit of a goal, that it saved their life.
I was walking down the street in Venice Beach, and there's a guy passing in a car looking really hard at me. And then he got out while the car was still rolling, and it rolled and crashed into another car. And he had clearly just come from Gold's Gym — he was a huge man. He said, "You! You!" And then tears started running down his face. He said, "You saved my life!" And he gave me a big bear hug. And it was Louden Swain that saved his life. How wonderful is that?" ♦
