Gunnar Hansen

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I was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, where I lived till I was five years old. Then my family moved to the US, to a small town on the coast of Maine, where I lived till I was eleven. From there, it was on to San Antonio, Texas, for a brief stay, and then Austin, Texas, where I went to high school and then the University of Texas. I started out at UT majoring in physics. (There's a certain thrill in studying quantum mechanics, as I'm sure you remember from your college days.) Somehow, though, I wised up and got my degree in English and mathematics. (Wanna know what Herman Melville did on any given day in 1850? No? Don't blame you.) Then it was on to graduate school, first in Scandinavian Studies and then back into the English Department. Somewhere in the middle of this I worked on the Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I hadn't started out with any intention of getting involved with films. Still, I was in a couple of student films (See that large guy hulking in the background? That's me.), and somehow even managed to get myself into a Mexican film. (See that large guy hulking in the foreground? That's me.) But back to my story. The summer of 1973, I was fresh out of graduate school, at least for the first time, and found out that some local Austin filmmakers were going to make a horror movie. (I won't tell you how I found out.) I was also told that they were looking for someone to play the killer. The movie was called Leatherface, though at the time there was some talk of changing the name to Headcheese. I had been in some plays in college, so I tried out and got the part, figuring it would be a much better summer job than tending bar or pounding nails. And, I figured, it would be something fun to have once done. I never thought the movie would amount to anything more than one more nasty little horror pic. Well, I was wrong. Like I said, acting had never been what I indended to do, so even though Chain Saw was an immeditate success, I did not move to Hollywood and I did not continue acting. (In fact, I turned down a chance to be in Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes.) Instead, in 1975, after more graduate school, I moved back to Maine and decided to get serious about writing. This had always been my main interest, something I had always wanted to focus my work on. I moved to a village on an island on the coast, where I figured I could hit those keys. I worked for many years writing (and occassionally editing) for magazines and from there moved to film and book writing. I now write and direct documentary films and have written several feature film scripts (and have discovered Option Hell). I also write books. The books include some local histories and a book of poems, Bear Dancing on the Hill, which are all out of print. My book Islands at the Edge of Time, nonfiction about the barrier islands on the US coast from Texas to North Carolina, was published by Island Press, Washington, DC. There are always more books in the works. Oh, yes, there are also the movies. Since 1987 I have become more active in acting in films again, and have performed in more than twenty films since Chainsaw. Luckily, a couple of them have never been released. Even more luckily, most of them have.