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SCMP Reporter

It's not every day one is sent to interview a Lord - especially a Lord Of The Apes. The new Tarzan is none other than Casper Van Dien, the bloke who killed all the bugs in Starship Troopers.

  Van Dien is making a four-hour stopover in Hong Kong to promote his new film Tarzan And The Lost City.

 'It's kind of Indiana Jones meets Tarzan,' the athletic-looking actor says of the Jungle Lord's latest foray on to the big screen.

 'But it's actually based on events in the Edgar Rice Burroughs books.

 'Tarzan has lived in London and travelled all round the world by now, but decides to go back and fight for his homeland, which is being attacked.

 'The movie takes things from five Burroughs novels. It creates its own story, but it stays true to Burroughs.

 'Some of the novels have dinosaurs and weird creatures. Some of them were very science fiction - Tarzan goes to the centre of the Earth in one.

 'Ours isn't science fiction, but, like Burroughs, we have some amazing effects.'  Van Dien's break into movies - he formerly featured on TV's Beverly Hills 90210 - came with James Dean, Race With Destiny, when he played the rebellious movie icon.

 The new Tarzan - a 'Tarzan For The New Generation', according to the publicity blurb - is a family adventure shot in South Africa.

 It is the first film about Tarzan since Christopher Lambert got all mean and moody in Greystoke in 1984. This film, which has the same producer as Greystoke, began as a kind of sequel, but ended up being completely different.

   On the eve of his wedding to Jane, Tarzan gets a vision of Africa being looted by some unscrupulous Euro-trash.

 Tarzan is torn between staying with Jane - played by Jane Marsh, the former 'Sinner from Pinner' who starred in The Lover - or hot-footing it off to the Dark Continent to help save his land.

 Tarzan's love for his country wins out. Back in Africa, he finds a mean British adventurer razing the land in the quest for the Lost City Of Opar.

 With the help of assorted chimps and elephants, Tarzan attempts to save the African environment from destruction.

 Greystoke disappointed many fans because it featured more mooching about than swinging about. But Tarzan gets back to the vine in Lost City.

 Doing many of his own stunts - as he did in Starship Troopers - allowed Van Dien to get to grips with the character.

 'I do a lot of swinging around in the trees,' admits Van Dien. 'I do a lot of the stunts in this film. I also did all the fight scenes.

 'When you play Tarzan, you really get into the mood. You just let rip.

 'I'd be running around in a loincloth like I was someone else completely. I'd get cut up and I wouldn't notice. I couldn't slow down.'   Van Dien got so involved with the role of Tarzan, he objected when the producers made him do things that he felt were out of character.

 'There is a bit where he does a precision dive, which the producer loved. They got a stuntman to do it.

 'I was thinking, 'Whoa, Tarzan wouldn't do that'. Sure, it looked amazing. But I kept thinking Tarzan would just have jumped in. The dive was too flashy.'  When Van Dien was fighting giant bugs in Starship Troopers, he had nothing to act against - they were all computer-generated. But Tarzan features real animals, which are a little bit more difficult to control than special effects.

 'The beauty of working with animals is that they are unpredictable, no matter how well they are trained,' says Van Dien. Any problems with them? 'Well, I pushed a baby elephant's head and it charged me. That's the one thing you are not meant to do to a baby elephant. It thinks that you are trying to attack it.

 'It charged me and swung me four feet over its head. Luckily I grabbed on to the tusks and it lifted me on to a boulder.'  Tarzan has been filmed numerous times before; not all the Tarzans were in the best of shape as Van Dien found when he had to watch all of the movies to get ready for his role.

 'Some were so out of shape . . . they had to wear their loincloths above their love handles. That inspired me to get up at 2.30am and work out from 3-5am. People asked me why, and I said it was because I didn't want to look as bad as those other Tarzans!'   The energetic Van Dien enjoyed spending his time in Africa during the film's four and a half month location shoot. He even learnt some of the language.

 'I can speak conversational Zulu now,' he says.

 'I might have another film shooting in South Africa, so it could come in handy.'   Strangely, Van Dien says that Tarzan had to be cut to receive a family rating in the US. A whole 30 minutes were excised.

 'It's not the movie I made,' he laments. 'But you guys in Asia will be seeing the full, unedited version.' 



Tarzan swings back on to the big screen