Q 6

PLAYBOY: Your newest movie, Captured, is about religious cults and the deprograming process. The subject is both controversial and full of contradictions. What have you learned about cults from making the film? Do you see anything positive in them?

Karen Allen: In the film, the cult is a utopian kind of environment that's very modernistic and self-sufficient. Everyone in the community is chaste. There is no sexuality, to the extent that a lot of women have stopped having their periods and the men have stopped having to shave. The cult goes out into the world and tries to bring in the healthiest, most intelligent and most productive people in society. What makes these people vulnerable is that they've gotten to a point in their lives where they lack direction. And, strangely enough, it is usually the most intelligent people who join these things. There are 2,000,000 people in this country in religious cults and some are Harvard and Yale graduates. The film doesn't take sides. The cult is not portrayed as a horrible, weird place, and the parents are not portrayed as villains or good guys. And the deprogramer has an ironic point of view about what he's doing. There's a total lack of spirituality in this culture. Many of the people I met who had gone into these cults were normal. They came from both extremely wealthy homes and from the streets. And the one thing they in common was that the cult gave them a sense of spirituality. They had ecstatic spiritual experiences that didn't match anything they'd encountered. And even after they'd been deprogramed, it was the one thing that kept coming back to them.

Q 7

PLAYBOY: Cultists are also portrayed as fanatic. What are you fanatic about?

Karen Allen: Physical exercise. I'm very vulnerable to physical tension, and maybe it's because I have so many conflicts inside me all the time. Maybe it's just from living in New York. So I do as many physical things as I can, every day, whether it's running or playing tennis or working out in a gym. It's the only way I can feel relaxed.

Q 8

PLAYBOY: You had some real physical experiences doing Raiders, especially with snakes. Have you since learned to like them?

Karen Allen: I never hated them. The worst thing about it was how totally undressed I was in those scenes. I mean, I had nothing on my feet, and nothing on my legs, and this dress with no back on it. The first few days, the snakes did bother me a little, because there were so many of them and because they moved so quickly out of the shots, and so the people working with them had to throw them back into the shot--at me. So I would be standing there, getting hit by hundreds of snakes in order to get them around my feet and make the shot look scary. I actually started to like them and be able to pick them up. I only minded the ones that bit, but of all of them, we had only about 50 pythons. I never got used to them. The others were sort of cute.

Q 9

PLAYBOY: One thing Raiders did for you was increase your bank account. What do you spend your money on?

Karen Allen: Actually, I've been pretty restrained. Well, I produced a play in New York with my own money--actually coproduced it, so the money wasn't all mine. I guess I'd like a house in the country and horses; some place outside New York that's far enough to be away but from which I could still travel back and forth. Having money is still a little overwhelming to me. I sometimes think of myself as I did earlier in life, when I was on my own and had no money at all. It's a little incomprehensible that I don't have to worry about paying the rent. It's not a totally familiar state to me yet to think I have enough money to be extravagant.

Q 10

PLAYBOY: What do you do to blow off steam?

Karen Allen: I play music with a lot of friends. We get together and jam. I play the guitar a little and the piano, but lately I'm into the harmonica. I'm a pretty mad harmonica player, though I wouldn't say I excel. But it's become my fascination in the past couple of years. Besides, it makes me feel great. It gets me really high, like anything that makes you push your breathing to the extreme. And since I smoke, it's necessary that I have something to balance that out.

Q 11

PLAYBOY: We understand your father was in the FBI. What's it like to grow up with a G man for a dad?

Karen Allen: I always found it kind of intriguing. First of all, because I didn't really know what he did. He could never talk about his work. But I always thought that whatever he did, it must have been fascinating. It's like your father being a minister or something. There's a certain sense of responsibility you grow up with. You feel you have to live up to a certain standard. When I was 18, 19, 20, during the years when all the demonstrations were going on, it had its biggest effect on me. I figured that if I got myself in trouble, it would have some effect on him. The FBI is very tough about who it takes on. My dad was very hard-line FBI--though he's not with them anymore--and he thought the world of J. Edgar Hoover.

Q 12

PLAYBOY: What do you read or watch?

Karen Allen: I'm pretty seriously addicted to Time and Newsweek. As much as I like reading a newspaper, I just don't find the time to do it. Besides, those magazines also avoid going into all the gory things that go on in New York as some of the papers do. I don't like to read about murders and child abuse and all that. It really depresses me. It's not that I want to blind myself to what's going on, but you take in all that stuff and it tends to scare you. All of a sudden, you're afraid to go out by yourself.