Jackson speaks at the premier

By: Izumi Hasegawa

Izumi Hasegawa: Is this the first film you’ve sung in?

Samuel L. Jackson: I did a movie last year called Black Snake Moan.

IH: I didn’t see it.

SLJ: I know. [Laughs] I actually sang and played guitar in that movie.

IH: But is this the first time you’ve danced?

SLJ: Presentational, yeah. Danced like that? Yeah.

IH: Was that hard? You were cool.

SLJ: I’d done musicals in college in New York when I was doing theatre, so it was kind of like the same thing. Most black guys have their own Temptations, kind of fantasies, so we sang together in corners, we tried to dance and of all that stuff.

IH: Was it tougher than it looks — singing and dancing and get in the groove?

SLJ: Sure, we liked it. I did theatre, and Bernie Mac, microphone, audience — a match made in heaven, so we had our own crowds. The extras didn’t know what we were going to do, and the music comes on and we start singing — they’re all like shocked, and before you knew, it we got our own club, we got our own groove going…we were having a great time. My favorite moment is “Boogie Ain’t Nothing” in the country western bar, jumping out of the crowd doing some line-dancing. It was fun, it was totally cool — we had a great time.

IH: How did this all come about? Did you want to work together?

SLJ: We’ve been trying to find a project for a while, and people came up with different ideas. None of them actually worked or sounded like they made sense to us, and we didn’t want to be bothered with them. His manager, Stephen Graham, actually came up with this concept and we sat down with some writers and threw ideas at them, told them what we wanted: sort of grumpy old soul singers on the road to New York, my character doesn’t fly so we’ve got to drive, conflict in the group, why the group broke up, lead singer went off and became very successful, we had one hit, that whole thing, and one guy becomes sort of successful in the business world and the other guy kind of falls off…

IH: Like Dreamgirls…

SLJ: Dreamgirls were better.

IH: Did you have fun with Sharon [Leal]? Because she’s the girl in the back seat of this whole thing. Was she fun with you guys?

SLJ: Yeah, we had a great time. She was a little afraid of us at first, but she got used to us. I can be a high task master sometimes and I was barking a lot some days, trying to make things go, and Bernie’s Mr. Easygoing. He’s the peacemaker. But she was a little intimidated by us for a minute, and then we put her at ease and took care of her.

IH: It seems like a lot of it was adlibbed — was it?

SLJ: No, there is a script. Keeping Bernie to a script is somewhat difficult. When he goes outside my door, it’s impossible for anybody to write that. That’s not black, I guess, and these writers weren’t.  I’m the guy that’s kind of straight ahead and on the page and doing this thing, so Bernie and I have been friends for a very long time. We have conversations, so I know how he can just go off in this place and I have to bring him back, so it’s okay. And I said, “Okay, I’ve got to say this at this point so we can get to this point. Between that, you can do what you want, but just say these words so that I know it’s okay for me to say my line.” And he’d be, “Okay.”

IH: You said you were more of the taskmaster. How would that blend with Bernie’s style?

Jackson and Bernie Mac

SLJ: It was okay. Like I said, Bernie and I are friends so we know each other, and doing what Bernie does, Bernie is like Mr. Infectious. He comes on set, he’s talking to everybody, he’s doing this, he’s doing that –sometimes you’ve just got to get in focus, especially when we had crowd day and there’s a microphone. As you can see in the outtakes at the end, Bernie’s entertaining all the time. It’s kind of like [sigh]. You’ve got to get through the day. But it’s okay. Bernie and I had a great relationship, and I enjoy him as much as everybody else. It’s really a blessing that we had an opportunity to be there and watch him do what he does, and to have as much fun with him and see him having as much fun as he was having. I guess if you had to pick a perfect last film for somebody that an audience could watch and say, “This is the guy we had in our house every week that we loved and we laughed at and we adored,” this is the perfect film. Just to get to see him do stuff we hadn’t seen him do — we hadn’t seen him sing and dance. Actually, he had the responsibility of carrying the dramatic arc of the film, more so than I do. I’m just kind of Louis being Louis.

IH: Were you glad you were free to use whatever language was necessary for this, as opposed to having to clean it up for PG-13?

SLJ: It’s a profane comedy. These guys are guys from a certain era and they speak a certain way. I know, at a certain point, somebody somewhere is going to say something about the use of the word “nigger,” because we say it a lot and we say it to each other, and we just use it and throw it around. But that’s our era. These guys are over 60 and it’s a term of endearment, it’s a descriptive, it’s a whole lot of things. And they’re entertainers — they are on the road, they had a certain kind of lifestyle, they did things and they lived a life, so they speak, a certain way, and we were comfortable doing it and, believe it or not, when we went in to do the voice over stuff, we took another third of the stuff out. It’s not often you go see a movie where somebody says “boy pussy,” because we were all shocked. We were like, “I’ve never heard that before.”

IH: Was there a scene where you could hardly get through it? I can’t imagine doing the scene in the piano-shaped coffin. How hard that was to do?

SLJ: Yeah, straight-faced kind of thing. It’s one of those things where, when we were trying to figure out what was going to happen at the end… In the black community, there’s this interesting phenomenon. You can look in sometimes and there’s like a funeral, and there’s a guy in a Rolls Royce-shaped coffin. I said, “Well, it is a musician — we can have a big grand piano-shaped coffin so it’s big enough for all three of us to be in, so that when it comes out, that’s where we were hiding from the police,” and they were all like, “What?” “Believe me, it will work. It’ll be funny.” So we knew it was going to happen. Sometimes we didn’t know what was going to happen inside it when we were talking, because I had no idea Bernie was going to choke the dummy. We got in there and this started happening. “Stop.” It’s kind of like what our relationship always was, so it’s a real microcosm of who these guys were from the time they were kids — that Floyd always picked on Marcus because he always wanted to be Marcus. That was this huge speech we had in the car, at one point, that’s not in the movie anymore, where I actually tell him how he always wanted to be Marcus, but maybe he was just born to be a Pip. “I’m not a Pip.” “You’re a background singer. That’s who you are. Marcus was the cute guy who was in front who got all the girls, so he got to pick first. I was the best dancer in the group, I got to pick second. You got to pick last. You always hated that, because you’re a Pip.”

IH: Why was that cut out?

SLJ: I have no idea. It’s one of those reasons that, when you’re an actor and you’re doing a movie, you go, “I don’t think I’m going to do that your way because I don’t get to go to the editing room.”

IH: You said you were a longtime friend of Bernie’s. Do you recall the first time you met him?

Jackson with Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes

SLJ: We became friends because I used to have this golf tournament in Bermuda and I had a comedy night, and Bernie was the host of my comedy night. Somebody introduced me to him and said, “This guy’s a comic and he’s going to be big one of these days, and he plays golf.” We hooked up and we played some golf, and I talked to him about my tournament and he said, “Yeah, I’d be glad to come down there.” So he would come to Bermuda and bring some other comics and do this big comedy night for me. We did that for about three years, and that’s how we were friends. When I was in Chicago shooting The Negotiator, we played golf together, I ate dinner at his house, we hung out together, he showed me Chicago, took care of me while I was there, then all of a sudden it was like, boom, Kings of Comedy hit, Bernie was Bernie Mac, got this big show, and he was here doing his show, and then I didn’t see him anymore because he was too busy. But we kept in contact. We’d see each other at parties or at award shows, and then we were talking about trying to get this thing together, and people started trying to put concepts together for us to do. But we met initially on a golf course, playing golf, and hanging out at my golf tournament. He actually blames me for him smoking cigars. I used to have this really great cigar night down there because we could smoked Cuban cigars because we weren’t in the country.

IH: What year?

SLJ: Probably around ‘93, ‘94.

IH: You said this was the first time you’d worked together. No one had thought of this before?

SLJ: They thought of us working together, but some of the concepts people threw at us were like guys who were rivals at a barbeque contest — rival car salesmen on opposite corners from each other. But this was the concept that we gravitated to and liked, but people would throw stuff at the wall and it just never stuck.

IH: In the movie, your character isn’t allowed to check in to the hotel because of things you did in your youth. Being where you are now, do you ever think back and say, “Man, I can’t believe back in the day I used to do these things”?

SLJ: Do what things?

IH: When people become superstars…

SLJ: You see, it happened for me. I was grown when it happened. I was old. I had already done all the things I was going to do. I was in New York and I had been through my drug and alcohol days and been to rehab and done everything else, so by the time…after Jungle Fever, the world opened up to me in this particular way. I was done doing that. So I never had that issue. I could imagine what it would be for a 19-year-old kid — all of a sudden people are telling him how great you are, and you’re getting paid millions of dollars to do… It’s like NBA or football players or baseball players — movie stardom is even different. People don’t know. It’s kind of funny ’cause of the pecking order in the world that’s so strange. It’s like when you’re hanging out with athletes, athletes always tell you how much they loved your movies because that’s what they do all day — they watch a movie, they watch a video, then they go to movies. But when you go to a club and it’s movie star, athlete, musician, the movie star gets to pick first, then the rock star gets to pick, then the athlete gets to pick, so it’s kind of a pecking order in the world, and it can mess you up — people telling you how great you are and you believing it, and you get access to things that you never had access to before. You get to go to the front of the line, you don’t have to wait, all kinds of things… It’s something that can screw you up, and if you don’t have a good foundation or people around you that keep you grounded, and you have a entourage like a lot of guys have, those guys want to have fun too. It’s kind of like watching Entourage – you see what happens there, the access of all the other guys — the other guys get you in more trouble than you get in yourself because they need you to do something so that they’ll have access to it, and that’s how it works.

IH: Were you surprised when you heard of his passing? He’d been ill over different periods of time, but he always seemed to rebound, and he was still a young guy.

SLJ: Fiftys young. I’m going to be 60 this year, so it’s a little more scary for me. My daughter, with her interesting kind of sense of humor — he passed and then Isaac [Hayes] passed the next day. It was kind of like, “We need to get you to a safe house.” “No, I’m alright.” Her sense of humor is like mine, because I was thinking that very same thing.

IH: My mother was ill this summer. When she came out of it, she became a different person and she felt like she needed to do stuff that she…

SLJ: Yeah, because you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. The next day is not promised to you. So yeah, I was shocked but, like I said, it bothers me more that Bernie didn’t get to see the movie than he passed, because he did this film and he did a great job, and it’s an amazing tribute to what he is and who he’s been, and I think it’s the best work he ever did. People are going to remember him in this film when they see it. But life is fragile. There are perfectly healthy people that drop over every day for no good reason, so we try to do the best we can — we take care of ourselves, we eat well, we live right. I’m having a procedure tomorrow just to check — the regular colonoscopy — because I’m over 50, so you do what you do to make sure you’re okay, and that’s what hopefully I’ll be able to do. We took as good care as we could of Bernie on the set, but Bernie’s Bernie. He’s the guy — the show must go on. He’s a perfect example of that.

IH: Are you in Iron Man 2?

SLJ: Really? They made enough money off that movie that they’re going to make another one?

IH: Are we going to see more of Nick Fury in Iron Man 2? And when do we hear…

SLJ: I saw Jon Favreau last night and he told me we were. I was trying to stand around talking to George Lucas, and he walked out and said, “Hey, hope you’re making your deal.” I was like, “Really?”

IH: With Don Cheadle coming up…?

SLJ: Yeah, man, I love Don. Don and I are good friends. I love Don and I think it’s going to be an exciting difference. We’ll see what happens. It’s kind of amazing that that happens. Wow, what happened? He [Terrence Howard] didn’t like the movie? Okay, fine. Move on. Yeah, I’ll be around.

IH: And The Spirit…

SLJ: Yeah, I’ll see you guys in like a month.