OUT HERE ON HIS OWN
Repo Man Emilio Estevez has his famous father's face, but not his name-and he likes it that way.

The face may be familiar, but the name-Emilio Estevez? Not your basic Hollywood Tim or Sean or Rob. It's so, well, ethnic. But that face, those familiar piercing eyes.
Right. Martin Sheen. Only younger, with fairer hair, and a little heavier. In truth, Estevez(accent on the second syllable) is, at twenty-two, the oldest son of Martin Sheen(Ramon Estevez). Until last year, however, his own credits were modest: supporting roles in Tex and The Outsiders, a television movie with his father called In the Custody of Strangers. Then came Repo Man.
This quirky film featured Estevez as a wide-eyed punker taking in the bizarre world of Los Angeles car repossession, not unlike the part Martin Sheen played in Apocalypse Now as the eyewitness to the horrors of Vietnam combat. Repo Man, a flop in its initial theatrical release, found a second life on videocassette and was then miraculously revived in theaters like New York's Eighth Street Playhouse, where it ran for months.
Nineteen eighty-five will see Estevez in three films, beginning this month with The Breakfast Club, John Hughe's affectionate look at a group of high school misfits serving a Saturday detention. Next will come another S.E> Hinton vehicle, That Was Then, This Is Now, for which Estevez wrote the screenplay and played the lead, a troubled high school senior. And finally there is St. Elmo's Fire about a bunch of university graduates tying to find themselves in the real world beyond the campus gates. (Two of Estevez's co-stars from The Breakfast Club, Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson, are also in St. Elmo's Fire).
This interview took place late last year, in Washington, during the filming of St. Elmo's Fire.

QUESTION: Has Repo Man changed your life?
EMILIO ESTEVEZ: It has. My brother used to be a punk rocker, he dyed his hair a bunch of different colors, and was into the leather. I was real down on it for a long time.

QUESTION: This is your brother Charlie?
ESTEVEZ: No, my brother Ramon. He's twenty now, but this was several years ago. I think I feared that whole movement because it was so dark. And then, I get this script for Repo Man, and the lead character is this punk. I was falling on my ass laughing; the script was just hysterical. I said I had to do this picture only I didn't really know anything about the punk movement. So I started listening to the music and going to the clubs and I began to understand what the punk movement is all about, and understanding where my brother was coming from at that point. So for me it was an important film on a personal level.

QUESTION: Did you hang around with any repo people?
ESTEVEZ: I went out a couple of times with a guy named Mark Lewis, who is a real repo man. But, as Harry Dean Stanton explains it, there are three types of repo men. There are the business guys in the suits and ties, and they send letters saying you are behind in your payments, and it's kind of soft-core threatening. And then there's the next stage of guys who knock on the doors. They are a little bit more assertive, I guess. They say, "You're behind and we would really like for you to pay your bill because you're going to have a lot of trouble." Then there's a third group. That's what we were in the film, Stage Three which are the barbarians. They wear bulletproof vests and carry guns; those guys get the real delinquents, the hard-core cases. They go in there and they get shot at. I think one reop man is killed a month in Los Angeles-or maybe that's nationwide.

QUESTION: Do you have a lot of people following you down the street calling you Otto?
ESTEVEZ: Repo Man.

QUESTION: Repo Man?
ESTEVEZ: Repo Man-people driving by, "Repo Man" My brother Charlie was just in New York, and he was walking down the street-he's got a buzz cut-and people were screaming at him "Yeah, Repo Man." He went to the Eighth Street Playhouse, and they gave him a bunch of shirts and said, "Hey, you know, tell your brother to come by." So I'd love to get up there.

QUESTION: When you decided to play Otto in Repo Man did you feel you were getting into the same old roles, the rebel kid you played in The Outsiders and Tex? Don't you feel that there's a certain point where you have to say no to that kind of part?
ESTEVEZ: Not at that point in my career. I didn't think I was perceived by the public as being a punk or a type. And I didn't feel that it would be detrimental in any way for me to be seen as such.

QUESTION: But when you first read the script for The Breakfast Club, weren't you interested in the Bender character?
ESTEVEZ: Right.

QUESTION: Because he was a rebel?
ESTEVEZ: He's the flashy rebel.

QUESTION: But you ended up playing the jock. How did that happen?
ESTEVEZ: I was asked to play him. I did a reading for John Hughes, and I said "Look, this is how I feel about the script. Bender is the one I feel closest to." A week later, I had another reading, and he said, "Look, you can do Bender. I know you can do Bender. And you can play it very well. But I can't find an Andy, and I need you to play Andy." So I said, "Yeah, let's do it."

QUESTION: The film suggests that adults stereotype kids and kids stereotype themselves, put themselves into categories they can't break out of-jock, rebel, nerd, whatever. It suggests that the kids have a lot more in common then they think they do.
ESTEVEZ: It does, it does. In the beginning, I think we are the stereotypical jock, rebel, brain, beauty, and recluse, as the trailer says, but as the film progresses and our defenses break down, we realize that we're all one and the same. And all very capable of communicating with one another. There's a lot in the film on peer pressure which is a killer to some of these kids. You read about these teen suicides.

QUESTION: In St. Elmo's Fire, you're playing a character your own age. Are you finished playing teenagers?
ESTEVEZ: Right, right. I think That Was Then was my swan song to high school films.

QUESTION: You wrote the screenplay for that film. Did you option the S.E. Hinton novel?
ESTEVEZ: I optioned the novel back in 1981. When I was doing Tex.

QUESTION: Now how many movies had you made at that point?
ESTEVEZ: The only picture I had done was Tex.

QUESTION: So how did you manage to option a novel like that?
ESTEVEZ: Well, as soon as I read the book I said to Hinton these are incredible characters, and if anyone is to make one of your books, it should be this one. She had been approached by ABC for one of these after school specials. But she didn't want to do it. She saw a much bigger scope for it.

QUESTION: Have you ever written a screenplay before?
ESTEVEZ: I had written a play when I was in high school about the Vietnam War and had it produced. And when I graduated from high school, I wrote a screenplay that I never let anyone see, about a boy searching for his father and I canned it right away. It was terrible. I think that if I wasn't a actor that I'd be a journalist., sometimes to do with writing.

QUESTION: Have you ever felt like you were betrayed by a film? Like, when you saw the finished product it looked so different from what you thought you had been doing?
ESTEVEZ: Only in a positive way.

QUESTION: You mean you were performing and thought-
ESTEVEZ: I thought, Oh, this is bullshit. I'm lying. What am I doing? And for a lot of Breakfast Club I was confused. I never really felt that I had a grasp on my character when in fact I did not realizing that I was confused myself because the character was confused. But the work was honest and I was pleasantly surprised.

QUESTION: St. Elmo's Fire seems to resemble The Breakfast Club. They're both ensemble pieces with some of the same actors.
ESTEVEZ: Yes, but the relationship that I have with this group is not as intense as was with The Breakfast Club. My story is kind of outside of the St. Elmo's Fire group. I'm chasing, actually pursuing the woman, Andie MacDowell, who you remember from Greystoke. In the first scene of the picture, my character spots her, he hasn't seen her for four years-he took her to a Woody Allen movie then, and he's been obsessed with her ever since. So my story is really about following this woman and it gets to the point where it is just ridiculous obsession.

QUESTION: Does talking about your career vis- a-vis your father's career concern you?
ESTEVEZ: It's a sore subject. Talking about him period is a sore subject. I mean, I'm not ashamed of him in any way. But a lot of times, for the most part, it's not Emilio Estevez without that identification following him, so they will think of me as Emilio Estevez.

QUESTION:You have done one film with him so there's not an estrangement or anything.
ESTEVEZ: No, not at all, not at all. There's incredible love and respect and I want to work with him again. I want to do The Subject was Roses with him in about ten years.

.QUESTION: Did you get a lot of help from your father on In the Custody of Strangers?
ESTEVEZ: He stayed out of my way.

OUESTION: And is that pretty much the way it's been in terms of your career?
ESTEVEZ: Yeah. He is there if I need to talk with him about a situation. He has been extremely supportive in all my decisions. He's been right three.

QUESTION: Do you feel that people treat you differently because you're his son?
ESTEVEZ: I wonder. I don't think it's helped me get any jobs; I know that for a fact. I think in some ways it has hurt me because they have expected, well, you know, let's see Martin Sheen now.

QUESTION: Obviously the name is a conscious decision to keep things separate.
ESTEVEZ: Yes, yes. I started going out on interviews when I was about sixteen years old, and I started out using Sheen. And then I did a play with him down at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater, Mister Roberts, when I was seventeen, and I changed the name to Estevez for the program. I saw it in print on the program, and I said, "This looks better." It looks better in print, and it also is the dividing line.

QUESTION: Do you have, in terms of your own career, a kind of long-range plan?
ESTEVEZ: Yes, absolutely. Longevity is in the stars for me. I'm not the kind of guy who's going to be in there for a couple shots; I don't want to be on one of those shows, "Whatever Happened to........?"

(Article by Thomas Wiener. Typed by Amy for Presenting...Emilio