Val Kilmer Has Turned 40 Years of Home Videos Into a Riveting New Documentary

Val Kilmer was one of the most popular, interesting actors of the late ’80s and early ’90s, starring in movies alongside the likes of Tom Cruise and Kevin Bacon. He may not have gone on to achieve the same kind of mainstream success as some of his peers, but he has continued to act consistently, and he is now seeing the last 40 years of his life and work culminate in perhaps his most ambitious project yet: a documentary where he is the subject.

A trailer for the film, entitled Val and due to be released both in theaters and on streaming via Amazon Prime, dropped this week. Compiled from thousands of hours’ worth of footage, the majority of which was shot on video camera by Kilmer himself, directors Ting Poo and Leo Scott help the 61-year-old actor tell his story. An avid filmmaker himself, Kilmer presented the documentarians with a wealth of material spanning his entire career, including the time he spent making some of his best-known movies, like Top Gun, Heat, Willow, Tombstone, The Doors, and Batman Forever.

The film also follows Kilmer’s recent journey with throat cancer, from which he is still in the process of recovering. After undergoing a tracheotomy as part of his treatment, Kilmer now speaks using a voice box, but explains in the trailer that he still has difficulty making himself understood—and that this has made him even more eager to share his story.

“I’ve lived a magical life,” he says in the clip above. “I have behaved poorly, I have behaved bravely, bizarrely to some… I see myself as a sensitive, intelligent human being, with the soul of a clown.”

Val comes on the heels of Kilmer’s memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry, which was published by Simon & Schuster last year.

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