Recently, I had the great pleasure of talking with the legendary Ron Perlman, who has two movies open at the moment – Absolution with Liam Neeson and Day of the Fight, co-starring Michael Pitt and Joe Pesci (that one comes out soon, and we’ll have loads of interviews in the lead-up). While teasing his new films, Perlman, a great guy, was thrilled when I brought up the fact that, when I was in high school here in Montreal, our history teacher used to show us Quest for Fire to teach us about early man.

Made in 1981, this movie happened to be Perlman’s first, and in it he plays Amoukar, one of a tribe of cavemen sent to find fire, as they do not have the knowledge needed to create fire themselves. Shot entirely without conventional dialogue, Quest for Fire is an amazing movie that’s ripe for rediscovery, and Perlman was happy to give us a little insight in to the making of the film.

“What is extraordinary about the making of that film comes down to one human being, Jean- Jacques Annaud,” said Perlman, “who got the itch to identify what things might be like in this very pivotal moment of our evolution where the Cro-Magnon was turning into the Neanderthal, and it’s right at that at that juncture so that we are going from a kind of good luck situation where, you know,  thank God we have some fire to cook our food and keep us warm to like, oh, wow, we can now make fire.”

Perlman continues: “That was the juncture that he became obsessed with. And then once he decided that that was the story he wanted to tell, he assembled the greatest people on earth. People who were able to take the biggest guess as to what exactly behaviorally and humanly that might have looked like. So we had Desmond Morris, who is the number one anthropologist at the time we had Anthony Burgess, who was the number one linguist at the time, and we had an assemblage of really great minds.”

When I told him that I thought the film held up pretty brilliantly forty-three years later, he said “this is all completely due to Jean-Jacques and his approach to like, if I’m going to do this, I want to do this in a way that is as authentic as it can be given the information we have in hand.”

Quest for Fire is currently streaming on Prime Video. Absolution is now available on VOD (read our review and check out our Liam Neeson interview), and Day of the Fight hits theaters on December 6th. 

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