Samuel Jackson | Mouths are unobstructed by preachers
Samuel L. Jackson
Q&A: (ESQ = Esquire S.J.= Samuel L. Jackson)
ESQ: No matter how inconspicuous the previous role is, you can maximize its weight. How did you do it?
S. J. You have to find presence. For example, many years ago in Journey to America I played a small role (actually a robber with only a few shots). I thought, well, I've got to make this guy stand out. He can't be a jerk with a shotgun in. It had to make him look desperate. He has to look serious, serious, and dangerous enough in this comedy.
ESQ: In the film Black Academy, you also played a small role, an outlier from outside the traditional black university gates.
S.J.: It's particularly interesting that the street outliers are the same bunch of people I used to hang out with since I got to Morehouse College. On the day of school, my mom dropped me off near the school, and I happened to see a street basketball court across the road. So I stopped at the beer store next door, bought a liter of beer, then crossed the street and asked whose turn was on the field below. After that I played with them and hung out all night, until they didn't know I ended up walking into Morehouse College until one time they saw me dancing at the academy.
ESQ: I heard you say you became quite radical at Morehouse College.
S. J.: Our class, Grade 66, was famously the first class to allow street. So often will be with people like Stockley Carmichael (founder of the "Black Power Organization"). The group deals with people like the well-known black organization that fights for rights by violent means, with the black fist as the organization's iconic symbol, and he goes in and out of your side and never sits idle. So all sorts of positions have made me radical. Whether it is the group of "black power" blacks represented by Stockley, or the group of Rapp Brown, the Vietnam War veterans... I also have an English professor who rides in Ken's magic bus (in 1964, the American novelist Ken Kexi, the original author of Flying Over the Madhouse), organized a group of hippies with novel royalties and drove from California to New York on a school bus called "Forward" sprayed with brilliant colors. During this "roadshow," they take hallucinogens in search of a state of spiritual bliss and call themselves "happy pranksters." The event was one of the hallmarks of the American hippie era) and was sent to Morehouse College. So it was then that I also started to "drip acid". After mingling with him, I learned about the world of white people. Before my world was "pure black". I had no white teachers before I went to Morehouse College.
ESQ: You grew up under real apartheid.
S. J. Segregation was the norm. That was the way the world worked at the time. I live in a black world. My teachers were black, my classmates were black, and I only had the opportunity to have relationships with white people when I followed my grandfather to work. He was working for white people at the time.
ESQ: What's going on?
S. J. He always felt terrible because I was the kind of kid who dared to look at white people. I never look down. My grandfather would say, "Okay, this kid has a bit of a hard bone." "The only other chance to see white people is when they go into town. Or so it seems. In Chattanooga, we have our own Shady Shadow Theater: the Liberty Theater and the Chattanooga Theater.
ESQ: Remember what it was like to watch a movie?
S. J. I usually go to the movies on Saturday mornings and watch cartoons for about an hour first. Then they'll put on a series of movies like Buck Rogers, followed by Francis the Mule Chewing Tongue and other tattered children's films, followed by serious movies. I always don't understand the movies played by Sidney Porthier because the characters he plays are always killed. So I asked my mom, "Why?" I thought, "What the hell is this?" ”
ESQ: Did you ever think about acting in movies at that time?
S. J. Every time we watched a movie, we had to imitate the plot of the movie when we came home. What was played in that day's movie, we pretended to be what we were. But I wanted to be a marine biologist.
ESQ: I wanted to be a marine biologist as a kid too!
S.J.: I wanted to be Jacques Cousteau among the Negroes (French naval officer, explorer, fellow of the Académie française, filmmaker of the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or-winning film The Quiet World). Because I love "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea".
ESQ: I also think those guys are super cool, just going out to sea, breathtaking scenes, seeing starfish and other messy things in the sea.
S.J.: So I love all the pirate movies. I also want to be on a pirate ship floating in the ocean. I've always found the depths of the ocean much more interesting than outer space.
ESQ: I often ask my family this question: Does growing up under apartheid make you feel angry?
S.J.: I don't think I've ever been angry about this life experience. But I'm a little angrier now, just because looking at these guys now, I know they're the same guys under apartheid: Trump, and all that crap, Mickey McConnell. They are all a virtue. I listen to them in the same tone. In their tone, they don't call you bluntly. They call you "old black" and "old blacks.". What position they hold is obvious. You can never be equal to them, and they'll do everything they can to make you unable to get the crap they have. They are also anxious about the virginity of white women, anxious about interracial marriage, anxious about not having enough people like them, and anxious about having more people like us than people like them.
ESQ: Your first film was Jazz Age in 1981. How was it filmed?
S. J. : Exceptional. The situation was, going to London, that was my first trip to Europe. A very different atmosphere, go outside and see the whole world. We used to sit down at lunch and talk to James Cagney. That was the last movie he made. A particularly important life experience has taught me that the world is not what I thought it was. I often look at Britain, a void in my perception, and realize that there is a West Indies culture in their culture that I don't understand. Through them, I became associated with the African culture there and realized, "Oh, hell. This black culture has had its own place for a long time. ”
ESQ: So in a sense, it's looking at the history of blood and tears in black migration from a higher perspective.
S. J. That's right. And you're a part of it.
ESQ: You came back to New York and completely quit abusing drugs. Why quit?
S.J.: I'm tired of the feeling of physical depletion after the "hi" has passed. It was at Ruben Sandia's farewell bachelor party, and I drank tequila all day. On the way home I decided, "Bump a little so I can stand on my own." "I passed by and got a little bit of it, and when I got home, I started straightening out, and before I could suck it, I fainted and got drunk. When my wife and daughter found out, I was lying on the floor. She called my best friend, a pharmacologist. The next day I went to quit. I didn't know if I was ready, but I found out afterwards that I was.
ESQ: That was shortly before the 1989 jungle fever, right?
S.J.: Jungle Fever was the first film I made after I didn't have a drug in my body.
ESQ: That's kind of ironic, right?
S. J.: Yes, because at the abstinence center, the guys who work there say, "You can't go make this movie because it's going to induce relapse." I was like,, okay, if nothing else, first of all, for the next 6 weeks, where are you going to get $40,000? Secondly, I definitely won't relapse anymore because I don't want to see any of these bastards again. "I hate them. Of course, that's their job. Later, in retrospect, I also felt very emotional, when the "alligator" was killed at the end of the movie, I always felt that my ... Physical addiction also dies together.
ESQ: Is the performance actually an inner monologue of the true self?
S. J. : Yeah, of course. Until then, my wife had always criticized my performance for being too cold-blooded. She said at the time, "You're smart, you know the right facial expressions, the tone of your voice. You know everything. But you don't know how to feel your heart. ”
ESQ: Do you think she was right?
S. J. She was absolutely right because I used to watch the audience react during a live performance.
ESQ: Acting is more important than acting.
S.J.: I have a deep understanding of what it means for an addict to harm everyone around him and mess everything up. The character of the "alligator" could be anyone's son, nephew, brother or daughter. This kind of bastard who enters the door and then steals and somehow breaks the heart of the family may be in anyone's house.
ESQ: After that movie, you went into a period of high productivity that sometimes made 7 movies a year. A lot of actors don't work that hard.
S. J. I don't understand the "two movies a year is enough" set. In other words, don't you like the profession of actor? I think I should go to the show every day as long as I can get up. In everyone's life, the possibilities of performance are also limited. So I want to maximize my.
ESQ: A lot of actors are particularly concerned about making quality movies.
S. J. What is a quality movie? What the hell is that?
ESQ: Tell me anyway.
S.J.: For me, a "quality movie" is the kind of movie that makes me happy and I'm sure to go to see it. I don't deliberately make the audience cry, nor do I pretend to be deep to tell the story, it's just entertainment. I used to go to the movies just to forget that I was haunted by those unfortunate things, to entertain myself, to free myself from the unfortunate life of being cut off from people of another color, to see what the world really was like, to travel around. I want the audience to smile and laugh when they watch the movie, and maybe just say, "Dude, this movie is awesome." "Even a movie like Killing Hour. The theme of that film is very serious, but I want to express something through performance, and this film is the way to make that expression. But this movie and what I wanted to make are actually two completely different movies.
ESQ: How is it completely different?
S.J.: Well, (my character) Carl Lee kills someone in the movie because he has to kill those two bastards for his daughter so she can understand, "This world is safe for you." If anyone else dares to hurt you, I will kill them too. Just because I'm your guardian. I'll do anything to make sure you're okay. "As a result, in the post-editing of the film, all my performances expressing this logic were edited, and the logic of the film became: I killed two bastard white people and managed to escape the law. So later when I watched the film, I was sitting there like, "Oh, this..." That's not my control. That's the director's means of control. They can make a movie different according to their own ideas. That incident still affects me, so if the bastards on set say, "Can we try this shot?" Sometimes I say, "No. ”
ESQ: That's why you don't shoot multiple shots over and over again.
S.J.: I wouldn't repeat more than three shots. I didn't go into the post-editing room, but the director did. And then you randomly choreographed the shots I wanted to shoot according to your own likes and dislikes? So if I don't shoot, I don't have to worry about you spoiling my performance.
ESQ: I haven't seen all of your movies. I mean, no one has time to watch every samuel Jackson movie, but ...
S. J. I have.
ESQ: What roles do you like to play yourself?
S.J.: I love Mickey Hennessy in Agent Flowers. He was another man who took a professional attitude towards the profession he had to pursue. "I'm not really a detective, but if you hire me..." I just love the sincerity of the guy, who instead becomes brave in the face of the trash he doesn't even talk about. I also liked the teacher in 187 American Social Archives because the character was like my aunt. I know how hard it is for teachers to do this job. Also, believe it or not, I love the bunny cub in Django Rescued– Steven.
ESQ: Why?
S. J.: I mean, that guy is in charge of that damn slave farm. "Candy Paradise" this damn slave farm belongs to him. Candy, a farmer played by DiCaprio, beats up black people outside, runs strip clubs, and does all the bad things while Stephen does the accounting in the house.
He wanted to make sure the harvest of the crops on the farm, and he wanted to make sure that the slave trade went smoothly. He actually runs the farm. He grew up on the farm, working as a slave farm steward that his father and grandfather had worked as, and mistakenly transferred his love to Candy and the slave farm, because Candy was brought up by him. In his opinion, Candy was his child. And "Candy Paradise" is his whole world. He knew that outside of Candy Paradise, he was nothing more than a on another slave farm.
ESQ: What do you think about the controversy surrounding Quentin Tarantino's use of the title in that film?
S.J.: The discussion is all nonsense.
ESQ: Is it all?
S. J. Of course it's all nonsense. When I made Pulp Fiction, I kept reminding Quentin not to use the phrase the warehouse of the dead. I said, "Don't say 'Nigger Warehouse.'" He said, "No, I'll have to say that." "So we tried to replace quentin's character's wife with a black actor, which wasn't originally written... But you can't teach a screenwriter how to write a screenplay, and you can't make people in the play speak in ways that contradict their racial identity. You can't do that, and if you do, everything will not be true, and you will not be honest, it will be dishonest. On the other hand, there are many other ways. For example, based on Quentin's original script, I probably added to my lines at least 5 times, because that was my line. I mean, the line I said to Chris Tucker in Dangerous Relationships: "I hate being the kind of 'nigger' who does a favor and then asks to beat up this 'nigger' in return, but I can only be this 'nigger.'" "Just a word, but full of tension. Shouldn't that be spat out of Odell's mouth?
ESQ: Absolutely. But this brings me to another question: How do you reconcile the following two identities? You, who were once very radical and even hoarded weapons to fight a race war, and you now live a life of playing on a golf course and shooting commercials for capital One Group.
S. J. I am still me. My political stance has not changed, and I still maintain my anger. But I can't control the banks, and I can't liberate them. I can't do either of these things. This amount of income is not small, and with this income, we can make our names engraved on the damn wall of the National African History and Culture Museum. Only then can we fund the Black Child Protection Fund. Only then can we dig a well in Africa. But I don't go around the crew and say, "Let them know what I'm doing." "I'll do what I have to do. That's not about saving a lot of money in response to what's about to happen. Maybe tomorrow they'll wake up and realize that it's not a question of money at all. So what's the problem? You work for people, why can't you sit down with them and eat steak? This is especially true in the industry in which we operate. It is no longer the era of film workshops, and now it is the era of intensive and large-scale production of movies. Of course all these bastards have their own problems, but we can only do what we can do. We know what our responsibilities are, we know where our original intentions come from the black rights movement, we know how the world is changing, we know how we can make the world a better place, or for a particular group of people, what we can do to make it a better place the way they need it to be.
ESQ: You've been talking about Trump outspokenly. A lot of people have their own opinions, but they're careful when talking about it because they don't want their careers to be jeopardized.
S.J.: I think we're actually experiencing what it's like to hate people in the Obama administration. So they're going to do something so disgusting. They posted the "P-chart" of vilifying Michelle Obama to the Internet. We're feeling how they feel about Obama becoming president in the same way, even though Obama actually helped them improve their lives, not destroy them. The bastard was destroying the planet and doing a lot of hysterical things. Those people think it's OK. That's fuck not OK at all! In such a case, if you say nothing, you are a de facto accomplice. If I were a garbage worker, have a Twitter account, and of course I didn't care, I would just push these words out. When I tear each other apart online, I don't still think about who I am and what my job is.
ESQ: You're not worried about losing powder?
S.J.: I know there are a lot of bastards who hate me. They'll say, "I'm never going to see Samuel Jackson's movies again." , you think I care? If you never go to see a movie I made before, I won't be even a dime short. I had already cashed the check for the previous remuneration. Roll on! Burn my videotapes, and I don't care. "You're an actor. It should focus on the performance. "No, stupid! I am a human being with seven passions and six desires. "But some of the garbage did have an impact on me, because if we didn't have a health care system, our relatives would come to eat me when they were sick." I want them to have health insurance. I want them to take care of themselves. That's how I feel. In fact, a few times I did count from 1 to 100 before clicking "Post" to make myself think about the cause and effect, because I knew what a garbage consequence that would be for me.
ESQ: Are you really 70 years old?
S. J. ：嗯哼……
ESQ: In what ways have you gotten better with age?
S. J. I feel like I'm more open. I talked more about my wife and daughter than I had before. I'm more concerned about the troubles and problems they have, because those are all my problems and problems at the end of the day. I'm better at caring about their lives, what they're doing, and how they feel.
ESQ: What made you change these times?
S. J. I guess it's age, and now it's no better than before, always gathering less and leaving more. For example, my wife, who is going to stay in New York for a year, is on Broadway in "To Kill a Mockingbird." So when I wanted to talk to her, she couldn't come over and stay with me right away.
ESQ: How long do you plan to make another movie?
S. J. : Until I couldn't shoot. Michael Kane is still making movies, remember exactly? That's the show. I'm not digging sewers. I got on set, shot for a while, then went back to my trailer and sat for two hours, had a sandwich, read a book, and then went back on set for ten minutes, and then went back to sit for a while. So, yes, acting is a really great profession.
ESQ: After so many years of acting career, in what ways do you feel like you've mastered it?
S.J.: Relax and get into the scene, don't get nervous on set, don't feel uncomfortable in a big scene. In addition, I have become patient with the people behind the camera.
ESQ: I've heard a couple of stories.
S.J.: Really? Yes, well... My agents and agents told me that my biggest problem was always wanting everyone to be in a tight position at all times like me. I really am. We came here just because we wanted to do something. So let's do it.
ESQ: What is your favorite segment?
S.J.: I guess that's the ultimate part of what everybody later finds out they're all in love with, and that's the restaurant scene in Pulp Fiction. Originally, many people liked those killing scenes, but the restaurant scene was indeed too informative. John Travolta and I sat there, having a conversation before everything that happened next, about the bullets that didn't kill us, and then Jules decided to go "wandering around" just to prove the so-called "revelation." So when Tim Rose came out, I had the opportunity to preach again—the same sermon I usually do when I kill people, and let that preaching in another way make people understand what the movie is about, and it's the most powerful, the most powerful threat you've ever heard in your life. Then Jules sat there and explained like a priest who he was, his relationship to the world, and what his true self really was. And he said, "I'd love to be the priest who guards you through the Dark Canyon, and that's amazing." They said they didn't know how to end the movie until I finished filming the restaurant scene. And it wasn't until I said that that that they didn't know what the film was saying.
ESQ: My eyes were a little wet when I saw that section, because that's what the restaurant section is all about. Until that big line of yours is spoken, everyone — including the audience, the people in the movie, all the people who don't know what the movie really means.
S. J. That's not wrong at all.
ESQ: Why didn't those bullets hit you?
S.J.: It was all arranged by God. Also, that stupid guy's marksmanship is so bad.
ESQ: What else are you going to do for the rest of the day?
S.J.: First go to Pilates, then go to acupuncture.
ESQ: Life in Los Angeles, man.
S.J.: It's not just life in Los Angeles, it's also my life. I had to get my body to move more.