Cont.

Bill's been killed on screen by the likes of R.G. Armstrong, Yul Brynner, Gary Busey (twice) Ahna Capri, Dan Haggerty, Richard Harris, Gerald McRaney/Jameson Parker, Rowdy Roddy Piper, Burt Lancaster, Connie Stevens, Peter Strauss, Patrick Swayze, Edy Williams/Randy Boone, Fred Williamson (twice), Robert Z'Dar and various anonymous soldiers, bad guys, good guys and assassins.  Our first video clips were of some of his more memorable death throes. Conan the Barbarian - DOGS! Our NiteOwls video group has it's share of dog lovers.  Our favorite death scene involved those Rottweillers in leather armor who finished off Bill (as Conan's father) in Conan the Barbarian.  But first he got what looked like a death blow from a battle ax wielded by a warrior on horseback.

Question:  That fake ax looked pretty lethal by itself.  Weren't the dogs overkill?
Bill:  That wasn't a fake ax.  It was real.  I had a piece of balsa strapped to my back under the coat.
Q:  Wasn't it risky to have a guy coming full tilt on a horse hitting you with an ax hard enough to have the ax stick in the balsa?
Bill:  It took a lot of skill  I wouldn't have trusted just anyone.  The stunt man who handled the ax is a friend of mine.  I trusted him more than anyone; he knew exactly what he was doing.  More than I can say for the dog handler.
Q:  Let's get to that.  After we saw that scene, the dog lovers in our video group wanted  leather armor for their dogs.  But it sounds like something went wrong from your perspective.
Bill:  The male, he was just great.  He bit like this [demonstrating with his fingers on interviewer's arm -- very, very light pinches]  That female, she was trying to get my neck.

Interesting weapons of war -- armored dogs

The dog was better protected than Bill.

The bitch going for the throat

Some of the blood in this scene was real movie star blood.

Q:  With that full beard, long hair and bulky clothes it would have been easy to have a stunt double for that scene.
Bill:  We had the best stuntmen in the world working on that set and not one of them wanted to do that scene.  The dogs weren't supposed to bite.  But no one told me the female was pregnant.  She'd bitten her handler the night before.
Q:  Was what we saw on the screen the real deal then?
Bill:  They cut away before she dragged me about 60 feet by the arm.  Seems like they  might have used more since I gave blood for it.  [Baring his forearm to show the scar]
Q:  In light of that mishap, it's surprising you let yourself ever be attacked by a dog again.
Bill:  I don't think I did.
[Clip from the "Man Hunt" episode of the 1994-96 series Due South in which Constable Fraser's wolf Diefenbaker (played by a Siberian Husky) comes to the rescue of his owner.]

Bill:  Oh, that.  That was a real friendly dog.  He just had to jump up on me and knock me off the roof.  Didn't take me bite me or anything.  And he wasn't pregnant [smiles] and I made sure he hadn't bitten his handler that day.

Q:  Back to Conan.  We heard you did some rewriting on the speech in your first scene with Conan as a boy.
Bill:  I wrote the whole speech.  They hadn't written one.   Every now and then Milius would come to me and say, "I want something about fire and wind and steel."  The line he liked best was "For no one, no one in this world can you trust.  Not men, not women, not beasts.  This you can trust."  [recited in the same dramatic style he used in the movie]  He loved that line.
Q:  Didn't the review in Time magazine say something like the movie started going bad when you stopped talking?
Bill:  Something like that maybe.  [a little smile]

Q:  Didn't you use some lines from that speech years later in a straight-to-video movie called Merchant of Evil?
Bill:  They wanted me to keep talking in a scene and I didn't know what to say.  [laughs]  There never was a script for most of that movie.  In that scene I was supposed to be talking to myself.  That whole thing was ad libbed.  Nothing had been written out.  I usually do ad lib stuff really well.  I don't know why.  I guess I just have a lot of things running around in my head.
Q:  Trying to escape?
Bill:  Yeah.
Q:  Well, the character was supposed to be crazy so I guess it didn't matter if it made sense.
Bill:  Well, it didn't  [emphatically].
Q:  Ruth Ann Leslie who reviewed Merchant of Evil for our fansite recognized the Conan speech but wonders where you got another line about pallbearers and  counting cadence.
Bill:  Oh, I got that from the Army.  The real Army.  [Bill was in military intelligence, which was not an oxymoron as applied to him.]  "Six for pallbearers, two to blow taps and one to count cadence."  That's what they actually say.

Bill recycling his Conan speech into the
 psychotic ravings of an evil merchant.

Q:  Speaking of ad libbing, Joanne says you did a little ad libbing in this one:

The Young Riders "House Divided"

Bill:  I don't think so.  [Pause] Oh, she must have told you about the snoring.  Well, what did they expect?  I had to lie in that wagon under the blanket while everyone mourned my untimely demise.   Then it started raining really hard.  Everyone else went for shelter.  I just pulled the blanket over me and fell asleep.