On Fire’s Peter Facinelli Talks About Working With Lance Henriksen

Peter Facinelli not only starred in and co-directed On Fire, but had the opportunity to work with and direct legendary genre actor Lance Henriksen along the way. His perception of the actor was shaped in part by one big thing, though; he wasn’t directing when Henriksen was cast, and didn’t have a chance to meet him out of character. The first time Facinelli encountered Henriksen on the set of On Fire, the actor — who played Facinelli’s father — seemed a little unfocused and scatterbrained. Facinelli chalked it up to Henriksen’s age, but that wasn’t so much the case.

In fact, Henriksen was just allowing elements of his character to remain in place during a fairly short production window. As Facinelli explains it, this isn’t method acting, where Henriksen expected others to play along even while the cameras weren’t rolling. It was more like resource management, allowing him to stay more or less in character so that he didn’t have to “find” the performance whenever they were ready to start a new scene.

“I mean, he’s worked on so many, and he’s just such a legend,” Facinelli told ComicBook.com’s Chris Killian. “With Lance, it’s funny, because I remember meeting him, and his character is kind of…not senile, but he’ll go off on tangents. He’s talking something, and all of a sudden he goes off on a tangent. And so when I met him, he was doing that, and I thought, ‘Ah, poor Lance. He’s getting up there. Perfect for this character.’ And then when I met him after the movie, he was such a spring chicken and sharp as a tack, and I was like, ‘Oh, I see what he was doing. He’s carrying the part over,’ which is genius because he came in for five or six days and get all his stuff done in a week. A lot of times I’ve done that, and when you come in, you’re already on a moving train, so the shift from hi, I’m Peter, to my character, and then back to Peter…it’s not a method thing where it’s like, ‘you have to call me by my name,’ but if I’m paying clumsy, then all of a sudden it spills over and Ill be a little clumsier on set. There’s an energy your character might have that might spill over to between takes — a feeling. He was carrying that feeling over, of his character, and it was so good that I bought it.”

On Fire, which was co-written by Z Nation‘s Nick Lyon and was to be directed by Lyon, was made on the kind of budget that demanded a tight production window and as few disruptions and distractions as possible. Then, Lyon contracted COVID-19, and was unable to be on set for a while. Facinelli, the movie’s lead and a member of the Directors Guild of America, was tagged in, and finished principal photography of the film, then worked with Lyon on post-production.

“I never intended to take a director’s credit, but becuase of all the work we did together, I think Nick was like, ‘Hey, it doesn’t really feel like my movie or your movie anymore, so how about we take a co-director credit here?’” Facinelli added. “And it was a very beautiful thing for him to offer, and I accepted.”

On Fire is currently in select theaters.