When you hear the name Lou Diamond Phillips, what iconic roles immediately come to mind?
Perhaps it’s his breakout one, playing Ritchie Valens in the 1987 hit “La Bamba.” Or could it be Chavez y Chavez in “Young Guns” and “Young Guns II”? You may just love him as the villain Monfriez in “Courage Under Fire.”
Whether you’ve watched him as Henry Standing Bear in “Longmire” or veteran NYPD detective Gil Arroyo in “Prodigal Son,” you probably don’t know that Phillips is not only an actor, but also a director and a writer — both of screenplays as well as novels.
And this love of writing began when he was in his early teens. His stepdad, George Phillips, asked Lou what he thought he might want to do for a living. “My answer was immediate! I said, ‘I want to be a writer.’”
George, a Navy man, replied, “You may want to think about something where you can make more money.”
A couple of years later, Phillips had changed his mind. But this time he told him, “I want to be an actor.”
“That’s not exactly what he had in mind,” Phillips recalls while laughing.
The Write Stuff
Although Phillips, 61, was acting while in high school, he was also writing. He admits, though, that it wasn’t his best work. “I wrote my first novel in high school. It was terrible! I hope whatever typewritten copy there was of it has long turned to dust. It was a bad Stephen King rip-off,” he admits.
Undaunted, Phillips wrote another novel — this time while he was in college, earning his BFA in drama from the University of Texas at Arlington. But when his acting career blew up, he turned to writing screenplays, including for the movies “Trespasses,” “Ambition” and “Dangerous Touch” (the film that he shares screenwriting credit with Kurt Voss, and which also marked Phillips’ directorial debut).
“What’s interesting is I had aspirations to be a writer very early on. The acting thing obviously took off, and then the focus of my writing became screenplays. I abandoned narrative writing,” says Phillips.
Luckily for readers, Phillips began writing books again.
Photos by Manfred Baumann
A Novel Idea
In 2020, “The Tinderbox: Soldier of Indira” by Phillips, with illustrations by his wife — artist Yvonne Phillips — was published by Aethon Books. The novel is based on “The Tinderbox,” a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen which tells the tale of a young soldier who gets offered money by a witch to climb into a tree and recover her magic tinderbox. He discovers that it will summon dogs to do his bidding.
“I created a mythology and a much bigger story around his original five-page short story, remaining faithful to the dogs, witch, tree and all of those things that were the touchstones of his story, and I turned them into something slightly sci-fi/fantasy,” says Phillips. Fans and readers have given the book many great reviews, and it’s got a 4.5-star rating on amazon.com.
Phillips recently turned in the manuscript for his second novel, also set to be published by Aethon Books — he hopes by early 2024. It’s a sequel to his first and is called “The Tinderbox: Underground Movement.”
When describing the plot, Phillips is a bit coy. “What is interesting about this book is that it is a completely original work based on the characters and the world created in the first book. This book is more of a mystery. There’s definitely a mystery aspect to it, with some real life-and-death issues at stake,” he says.
Once again, Yvonne will be creating illustrations to go along with the book. But she actually gets a story credit as well. “For a long time, I thought we might do a sequel, but didn’t know what the plot was going to be. I thought I might raid the fairy tale world again,” says Phillips. “Then Yvonne came up with this idea that was so out of left field. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it involves many of the favorites from the first book but introduces some new characters. There’s a little bit of a time jump. If the first book was a fairy tale and a Romeo and Juliet story, then the second book picks up with what if Romeo and Juliet had lived — and what their lives would be like as middle-aged people.”
Although Yvonne came up with the story idea, Lou fleshed it out and then wrote it.
Working with his wife, he says, is “pretty amazing. We have a joke that sometimes we unfortunately have morphed into one brain. It’s the old ‘finishing each other’s sentences’ kind of thing.”
Just like all married couples, they don’t always agree while working. “We agree on many things, and she is 100% my sounding board. I’ll float an idea, and 80% of the time, she’ll like it. Other times, she’ll be like, ‘No. I don’t think that’s right.’ I’ll agree and give it more thought,” he says. “If we agreed on everything, I think the work would suffer. Sometimes, we passionately disagree about some things.”
During our interview, Phillips said that he’s working on his third book. He shook the proverbial dust off the novel he wrote in college and realized that it has good bones. It’s quite different from his other two novels in that it’s not science fiction.
“It is whimsical. It’s a little more overtly philosophical. In many ways, it’s hugely inspired by Richard Bach [author of “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” among many others], who I was reading a lot in the ‘70s,” says Phillips. “The story is all there; I’ve just learned to edit now. I’m thrilled with how it’s going.”
Photo by Manfred Baumann
More Direction
Like many men, Phillips has had a number of mentors throughout his life, and he’s also been one as well.
As for his guides, the first was his stepdad, whom he describes as having had basic Gary Cooper values: “Look people in the eye, and tell them the truth. Your word is your bond. Your handshake is a bond. Actions speak louder than words,” says Phillips. “To this day, I have a lot of respect for his integrity.”
Another was his high school English teacher, Jerry Sexton. “He was such a good guy who really pushed me all the time to be better. When I asked him why he was giving me such a hard time when I was getting good grades he said, ‘Because you can do better.’”
The final he cites is the late Adam Roarke, who taught him at the Film Actors Lab in Dallas/Fort Worth. “When it came to acting, he was a fundamentals guy. Show up on time. Hit your marks. Learn your lines,” says Phillips. “All this showed me how to be a journeyman actor.”
Today, Phillips finds himself as the role model. Because of the nature of the entertainment business now, he says, he’s not only mentoring young actors, but also young writers and young directors. “I’ve noticed almost every time I’ve directed now, in most of the situations, someone is assigned to shadow me,” explains Phillips. It happened most recently when he was directing episodes of the TV series “Kung Fu” and “East New York.”
“There are a lot of times I literally have to articulate why I’m directing something a certain way or why I chose this shot or that shot, my thoughts on the script, and why I’ve asked for this change or that change,” he explains. “Whatever success I’ve had in any one of those fields — be it acting, writing or directing — I’m able to pass on a little bit of wisdom to those who are now coming up.”
There’s another way in which Phillips hopes he’s being a mentor — and that’s to his four daughters: Grace and Isabella, 25-year-old fraternal twins, Lili, 23, and Indigo, 15.
“I’d like to think I’m a good dad, and I certainly would like to think that I’m present. Logistically speaking, I wasn’t always able to be there physically for the older girls, but we now have a relationship that is very much our own — being what they need when they need it,” he says. “Throughout my life and career, I wanted to just be Dad with them and not ‘Lou Diamond Phillips,’ or somebody who other people might view in a heightened way. I always just wanted to be the dad who cooks dinner, takes out the trash, is there to listen to them and be their fan base — be their audience.”
And like everything else with his life — whether it’s as an actor, writer, director, mentor or father — Lou Diamond Phillips has proven himself to be revolutionary. O