…When I walk into a room, everyone immediately looks at me because I’m the tallest person they’ve ever seen. The conversations stop and all eyes turn on me. And the irony of the thing is that the shortest kid is infuriated because he has always dreamed of being the center of attention. I absolutely do not want to be the center of this attention, I want to blend into the crowd. For large individuals I see that there are two categories, the passive ones, because of everything that befalls them, and those who are aggressive. Those who are short need to surpass themselves and they’re angry at those who naturally attract attention because of their size. At school, I was constantly harassed by smaller kids.” – Ed Kemper (who stands at 6’9″)
Source : L’Ogre de Santa Cruz (Stéphane Bourgoin, 1998)
“As I explained to you, I don’t kill all the girls who get in my car. It’s a bit like playing Russian roulette, except that I’m not the one who risks death. I’m flirting with danger, I’m quite aware of it. I know that at any moment I can strike, and it’s something that excites me. As soon as I take out my gun, I have to go all the way, there’s no going back. I tell them that they’re mine, that I own them and that I will do what I want. If I take out my gun and let them go, I know very well that they will complain to the police and that time will be running out. I have a double murder on my record, and now I kidnap and threaten young women. What’s going to happen? They will not hesitate for one second to send me to jail for a million years. I regret that they didn’t do it.” – Ed Kemper about kidnapping co-eds
Source : L’Ogre de Santa Cruz (Stéphane Bourgoin, 1998)
“I imagine myself committing mass murders, where I gather a large number of pre-selected women in one place, killing them before passionately making love to them. Taking their life, possessing everything that belongs to them. All that would be mine. Absolutely everything.”
“I think I was the only murderer to leave Atascadero with a clean record – in fact, the psychiatrists did not want to release me – they were about to transfer me to Agnew State Hospital, where I would have been released after many years, and then closely monitored. Remember that I was not yet twenty-one, without any love or sexual experience, and that I had never worked in my life.
At Atascadero, I found myself, a minor, in a psychiatric hospital for hardened criminals. In 1964, the average age of prisoners was thirty-six. According to the law, I should have been sent to Napa State Hospital, an institution with minimal security, but the judge was so outraged by my crimes that he declared ‘not wanting to send this young man to Disneyland.’ That’s why I ended up in Atascadero, with people on average twenty years older than me. Believe me, I grew up very quickly.”
– Ed Kemper about his first incarceration at age 15 for the murder of his paternal grandparents in 1964.
Source : L’Ogre de Santa Cruz (Stéphane Bourgoin, 1998)
Actor Cameron Britton talks about the intense last scene from ‘Mindhunter’, from the last episode of Season 1, in this excerpt from his interview for the Hollywood Reporter:
Question: And then in the finale you actually get to strike. You get to move, you get to be physical. When you knew that you had that opportunity to actually embody the threat that this guy possesses, what did you want to make sure you conveyed above all else?
Britton: Once he’s up and cornered Holden, I wanted a level of clarity you hadn’t seen in that scene yet. He’s sort of semi out of it in that hospital scene, so when he jumps up I wanted you to see how clear his focus was. There was this really interesting line to sort of find of making the audience not sure if he’s making a point by intimidating Holden or if this is genuine. Is he actually considering taking this man’s life? That was really fun to play in the first few takes. Fincher would call “action” and I was just coming at him practically foaming at the mouth. And Fincher let me get a few takes out and then he came in and said, “Man, that’s too much. We can’t sync it with the rest of the performance that you’ve been doing. He’s too intense and animated.” But getting that out allowed me to then take it back and go back to the gathered calmness, but still the undertone that you can tell he’s excited, if you will. As long as you feel like, “Oh he’s in shall we call it, work-mode.” It’s the same guy, it’s the subtlest switch. He has the same sort of pace and demeanor but there’s just a little something extra that feels like, “Oh, this is him when he’s in hunt-mode.” And I love Mindhunter because as much as that’s terrifying, if you step back, you realize we just watched a ten-hour thriller that ends with a hug. And it’s still effective. That was sort of the hope for the show is that you can scare people without any gore, or any violence. I think all a serial killer needs is a camera and a chair and it’s gonna be unnerving.
It’s a show-changing character and a career-changing performance for Britton, making his first major TV role and earning his first career Emmy nomination. The actor talked with The Hollywood Reporter about his approach to the real-life killer, director David Fincher’s notoriously exacting standards and more. Here are a few excerpts:
Ed Kemper is a remarkably well documented figure. There’s a lot of stuff you can either read about him or watch of him. And since a lot of what was in the script was taken from actual video of Ed Kemper, is that a boon for you as an actor? Or does it run the risk of becoming too much of a reference point?
At a certain point you have to let it go. I think you set a base, you find different aspects of him. So you see the narcissist in him, so you see the pride in his work. That’s something I recognized from his interviews that’s he’s incredibly proud of his, at the very least, his knowledge on the subject. You then take that and you implement it into the scene and character work, but it may evolve into your version of pride, your version of arrogance, your version of narcissism. It’s more important that the aspects of who he is are in the scene, and not the actual impersonation. I’d find a couple vocal inflections that I found unique and interesting to him, his overall sort of energy and vibe. I felt like I wanted to capture that. But then after that it was, “Bring your inner serial killer out.” Sort of. I think Anthony Hopkins mentioned in Silence of the Lambs how instinctual of a process it was, developing him. And I felt the same. You just sort of trusted where the dark thoughts and elements took you.
So from a certain distance one can look and point out how your Ed Kemper is different from the real guy, and how Joe Penhall’s adaptation of Ed Kemper is different from the real guy?
Ed is a bit faster of a talker than the way I portrayed him. We just liked slowing him down. It just felt right. I liked the weight for him. He’s a little heavier than the real Kemper. There were more layers to him. I don’t know if there was a perversion because of his weight or if there was even a likeability from his weight, but I think it had a really interesting impact to what you see on the film.
There was more that I took than I left out, I think. There was his level of eye contact, his way of being ahead of you in the conversation, his way of saying something and making you think you thought it up. He’d phrase things in a certain way that make you think it was your idea. His point came from your end.
This seems like such a stupid thing for me to say, but I’m sort of going to float it out there. I talk to actors who play real people fairly frequently, and a thing you often hear is, “Oh I wanna honor the real person and the experience,” or, “Oh I wanna make sure I get it right so that I’ll honor life.” When you’re playing a guy who’s a serial killer and probably not all that honorable a person, does that thought go through your mind? That you’re trying to honor a real person? Still?
No, if I was trying to honor anybody it would be the victims, to give an accurate account of what they went through with this guy. I didn’t have any interest in meeting him. I didn’t want to go on a personal level. I just don’t want to meet someone who’s murdered a bunch of women. You know, I just would never want to meet someone like that. Perhaps he would enjoy if I came to meet him? Perhaps he would find that as a feather in a cap? And if that were the case, then I most certainly don’t want to meet him. Even in the auditions we discussed not focusing on doing an impression of him, not paying homage, because that’s not what this is about. I found a lot of letters written to him from, I guess you’d call them fans? All of his stuff, and all of this baffles me. It almost feels like a lot of folks are encouraging this kind of behavior.
Now this is a character who has a lot of bits of “business,” as it were. The shackles, the uniform, the mustache, those thick glasses. As you were getting into the external preparation of the character, was there something that allowed you to lock on and go, “Oh, OK this really helps me. I really have this guy, ’cause I have his mustache or his glasses,” or whatever.
Once they put me fully into the look, it was hard to look in the mirror. I didn’t realize how much I looked like him. I would get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and startle myself looking in the mirror. I just didn’t know who was in my bathroom with me for a moment there. If anything got me into character, it was the glasses to just put them a half-an-inch down the nose, there was a kind of stateliness. if you take your glasses and you just put them down a little bit and look up you almost feel sort of like a grandparent. And it gave this calm, sage, learned aspect to him that was really necessary. The more he was knowledgeable about himself and his crimes, the more you believe his side of the story. Yeah, I would just drop those glasses down a bit and I could feel myself slipping into the role whenever I did that.
Officer Conner spoke up on the extension, “All right. Just tell me where you are and we’ll have someone come and pick you up.”
“Yeah,” said Kemper. “That’s what I want.”
At Officer Conner’s suggestion, he left the telephone booth, walked to the curb, and checked street signs not far from where his car was parked.
“I’ll be at Twenty-first Street and Norwood Avenue in Pueblo,” he said. “I’m driving a car I rented in Reno.”
Officer Conner spoke up. “Hey, Ed. While we’re talking to you, we’re going to have somebody come over.”
“Yeah,” said Edmund Kemper, “I wish to shit you would, really, ‘cause I have over 200 rounds of ammo in the trunk and three guns. I don’t even want to go near it.”
He (Kemper) wanted to get it all out now – the waiting was coming to an end. But suddenly he broke off. “The man’s here. Whew! He’s got a gun on me!”
“Let me talk to him,” said Officer Conner.
Excerpts from The Co-ed Killer by Margaret Cheney and drawings by David Jouvent from his upcoming graphic novel about Ed Kemper.
Santa Cruz Superior Court Judge Harry Brauer sentenced convicted mass murderer Edmund Emil Kemper III to life imprisonment. He said the sentences on 8 counts of first-degree murder would run concurrently, a move that made the parole of 6-foot-9 Kemper a possibility.
Kemper had confessed the killing of six coeds, his own mother and her friend. He turned himself in to stop further killing and told officers he was sure if he were ever freed he would become a killer again. “I know you were not bragging, but you were speaking in anguish and remorse,” Judge Brauer said.
The tension in the courtroom came to a climax following Kemper’s sentencing when the judge commented: “May God have mercy on your soul, Mr. Kemper, but you understand I have to protect the rest of the people from people like you.”
Following the hearing, Kemper, restrained by foot shackles, made his way over to the prosecution counsel table and shook hands with District Attorney Chang. “Mr. Chang, I want to thank you for your restraint during this trial,” said Kemper.
Kemper also expressed his gratitude to the judge for allowing him to remain in court unshackled during the entire trial and for being fair. “I want to thank you for your help,” Kemper told the judge.
After court, Kemper appeared genuinely relieved that the whole thing was over and while walking from the courthouse, he nodded greetings to several officials he became acquainted with during his imprisonment and his trial.
– Ed Kemper discussing the murders of his first co-ed victims, Mary Anne Pesce and Anita Luchessa, as he tried to kill them by suffocating them with plastic bags over their heads.
Officer Conner spoke up on the extension, “All right. Just tell me where you are and we’ll have someone come and pick you up.”
