tf interview: Kurt Russ ell
The name’s Plissken! Kurt reminisces. A dude.
He’s a cult icon and he’s making a comeback with the Fast & Furious franchise and westerns Bone Tomahawk and The Hateful Eight. “I’m really proud,” says Kurt Russell “I’m drawn to these ‘Whoa, what the f**k am I seeing?!’ movies. You get a pretty sweet boxset out of me.”
Had he been born in an earlier era, Kurt Russell might have been a star of westerns, his stocky build, craggy face and mane of hair – to say nothing of his air of authority – suggesting a line of sheriffs, ranchers and lone gunslingers would have come his way.
As it is, he’s done well by the genre, landing gigs in ’60s TV shows Sugarfoot, Gunsmoke and The
Travels of Jaimie McPheeters as a kid, and starring as legendary lawman Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, one of the most high-profile oaters of the ’90s. (It was also whispered that Russell ghost-directed
Tombstone, a rumour he confirmed after credited helmer George P. Cosmatos died in 2005.)
Quentin Tarantino, of course, has seen all of the above. He can quote passages from Russell’s TV shows. And so it was that QT turned to his
Death Proof star to play John ‘The Hangman’ Ruth in his ninth movie (and second western – or first if we obey QT’s bidding and consider Django
Unchained a ‘Southern’) The Hateful Eight, the litf-use tale of an octet of danger-strangers holed up in an isolated cabin in post-Civil War Wyoming.
“Quentin’s a spectacular human being and a spectacular director and writer and filmmaker,” says Russell, calling Total Film from his home in Los Angeles, where he lives with his partner of 32 years, Goldie Hawn. “He’s just a savant who’s a blast to work with and he was absolutely at the pinnacle of his abilities – a master in his prime.”
But don’t let the blizzard of excitement surrounding The Hateful Eight distract you from another fine Russell western that’s galloping into UK cinemas. Bone Tomahawk, by debut writer/ director S. Craig Zahler, is the tale of a female doctor (Lili Simmons) kidnapped by a tribe of ‘Troglodytes’ and pursued by four men – Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Russell), Deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), moustachioed gunslinger John Brooder (Matthew Fox) and husband Arthur O’ Dwyer (Patrick Wilson) – whose quest leads them to unspeakable horrors. Featuring evocative, circuitous dialogue, parched landscapes and a final-act left turn that would have turned John Wayne’s hair white, it’s The Searchers reimagined by the Coens before stumbling into the charnel house of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Bone Tomahawk is a remarkable genre movie in a career full of them. After being the Disney kid in the ’70s, Russell found his niche teaming with John Carpenter (himself a huge fan of westerns) in five movies that include cult classics Escape
From New York, The Thing and Big Trouble In Little China. He excelled at playing blue-collar, no-bullshit, take-no-crap men’s men, and variations on the same theme saw him threaten to become an A-list star in the late ’80s and early ’90s, headlining such films as Tango & Cash, Backdraft, Tombstone and Stargate. And while his career has soared and plummeted and each reminder of just how good he is – Breakdown (1997), Dark Blue (2002), the aforementioned Death Proof (2007) – failed to see him then parlay it into a purple patch, he now feels hungrier for work than he has for a while.
Russell weighs his words, a rarity for the 64-year-old actor who’s as garrulous as Snake Plissken is terse. “Fast & Furious 7, Bone Tomahawk, The Hateful Eight, Fast & Furious 8 [ due to start shooting in March],” he says, savouring each title. “I consider that a comeback.”
Bone Tomahawk successfully melds the western with the horror movie... I refer to this as a graphic western [ laughs]. It gets graphic and it gives me a feeling of
Deliverance. I never heard anybody try to refer to Deliverance as a horror film. What I’m finding is it doesn’t have a category. And I love that. That’s what I realised when I read it. I thought: this is different; I really want to see this. When you go to the video store, as it were, and you see all your different sections of adventure and romance and comedy-romance and horror and science fiction and westerns... over in the corner, you’ve got one card up there that has a big question mark and exclamation point, and underneath it is one film: Bone Tomahawk.
quentin has invested himself seriously in this. There’s more here than first meets the eye
What made you trust in Craig, a first-time director? You don’t trust. You hope. Look, the guy wrote it; you believe he can do it. You talk to him. I’ve done this a few times. Certainly I’ve done it before. I did it – and was happy to do it – on Tombstone, and it went south. I had to take the movie over. We were in real dire straits there. But I was responsible for the money. On this one, it was like, if I said, “OK, let’s do this,” then the movie was going to get made. So it’s a different kind of responsibility. It must have been a tough shoot, out on those barren locations... I’ll be honest with you – once we started rehearsing and talking about it, there were some pretty tough conversations. The other actors and I made some pretty important points to Craig, because he was going to do some things a different way than we saw it, from what we’d read. And what we all bought into was what we read. I said, “Hey man, if you’re not going to do what we read, we’re going to have some problems here.” It worked out. Did you fully support Craig in how he wished to portray the extraordinary violence?
Anybody who sees the killing of [ spoiler] is not going to forget it. And it’s what makes the movie different. For instance, to have done that with him fully clothed would have been a joke. It would have been bad. And it would have ruined it. We prevailed, and we were able to get it done. I’m just proud of Craig for being a first-time director who got it made, who stuck with it. I think that a lot of his approach to it was really good. The movie has a nice, quiet – what do you call it? – sparse feel to it. It gives a sense of authenticity. And if you don’t go into the last, say, 40 minutes with authenticity, the movie doesn’t matter. But if you do go in there with authenticity… The movie just goes into hyper-violence. Like, “What the fuck are we watching?” But that’s what’s happening to the people in the movie. They’re literally going, “What the fuck is this?” Was the precision of the dialogue challenging? You’ve said before acting is 90 per cent just hitting your mark and saying your line. Yeah. Listen, unfortunately my sense of humour gets misconstrued sometimes and they take what I have to say seriously. Acting’s a lot more than hitting marks and saying lines. I thought it was fantastic dialogue. I thought it could have tremendous impact. You’ve got another little western coming up that’s sure to make an impact... It was coincidence. For a couple of years we were trying to get Bone Tomahawk made, and then sometimes Richard Jenkins wasn’t available, and then I think Matthew Fox at one time couldn’t do it, there were a couple of times when I was, “Whoops, I’m not going to be available.” It just so happened we started just before rehearsals for Quentin’s movie. In what ways is The Hateful Eight a typical Tarantino movie, and in what ways is it different? He was a man on a mission. He’s invested himself more seriously in this. There’s a lot more here than at first meets the eye. You’ve got to watch closely on this one. I love what he has to say, how he says it. This is a western. Not a ‘southern’, a straight western. He has things he wants to say in his movie, which is set after the Civil War, about the whole situation. There are two genres, I think, that allow us to ask the big questions and talk about them and debate them: science fiction and westerns. You know a thing or two about science fiction, having starred in The Thing... If you do science fiction really well, it allows you to do things. It allows you to say, “Well, what would happen if something from another planet buried itself in the ice 100,000 years ago and then it gets out? What would happen if it could imitate man or anything that lives?” Then you can tell a story about paranoia. Interestingly enough, Quentin wanted us all to see The Thing before we started
The Hateful Eight because there were things he wanted us to recognise. The Hateful Eight is eight people trapped in an environment and they’ve got to get along. They’ve got to co-exist.
Surely Quentin didn’t make you watch it again? Yeah, he didn’t spare me that [ laughs]. He makes you stand there and take your medicine! But, of course, he thinks – it’s so sweet – he’s bragging
on you. It was the best experience I’ve ever had on a movie set. A one-off. We all, at the end of it, said, ‘This will never happen again.’ Some claim given you’ve been working 50 years. You’re one of the few child stars who made it as an adult actor… I got discovered by Walt Disney three years after I had been doing a television series. It was interesting because I had to show I could do the light comedy stuff. Those [ Disney movies] were very successful. I never looked at acting as doing it as a kid, or as a teenager, or as an adult. I just looked at it as: Who’s the character? Try to do a good job. And I wasn’t focused on acting – I was just getting ready to play ball [ Russell played Minor League baseball until a shoulder injury in 1973]. I was happy to be even making money. I had a real workman’s attitude about it. When I was working at Disney, I worked outside of Disney as well. I did a movie with Jimmy Stewart in 1971, at Columbia, called Fools’ Parade. It was a really different character. A guy was getting out of prison. Falls in love with a prostitute. I was never kept from doing things I wanted to do. I got lucky. When I got hurt out of baseball at 23 years old, I looked at acting seriously and said, “Well, I guess I am going to be doing this.” And might it all culminate in your first Oscar nomination for The Hateful Eight? Tarantino has built up a track record of directing actors to awards... This is a great group of actors who are all on top of their game. But you absolutely don’t think about that because there’s no point in it. It has nothing to do with the process of what we’re in. Listen, I don’t know what that gains you, so I’ve got no interest in it. It would be a dangerous, horrible expectation game to play that you’re probably only going to be disappointed in. I’m satisfied with the fact that the audience sees my movies and loves them, truly loves them to a cult status. That’s a great thing to have – the people who really get it, really get it. Do you prefer being a cult icon to being a mainstream hero? Listen, I’m not going to say I set out to do that, because I didn’t. But it’s what’s turned out. I’ve done a lot of them. I’m drawn to them. There’s no question: I’m drawn to things that I don’t think studios know how to promote, that I don’t think the audience is necessarily ready for at that time. Big Trouble In Little China. Escape From New York. Tombstone. Used Cars. Overboard with Goldie. These movies found their life, their – what do you call it? – afterlife – on video. Captain Ron, for Christ’s sake! It opened up great but the life it had afterwards was 10 times what it was [ in cinemas]. I’m really proud. You get a pretty sweet boxset out of Kurt Russell! At least three of the movies in that boxset would be directed by John Carpenter. What made you guys click? John and I started together. We did Elvis first. I was 28, and he was about 30. It was just right after he’d done Halloween. We were really young guys. We were on an airplane one time. We were talking about this and that, having an interesting conversation. He either said to me or I said to him, “The phrase ‘no man is an island’ – do you buy that?” Whoever asked the question, the answer from both of us was, “No, I don’t believe that no man is an island. I think you can be an island. You can be an island for a long, wonderful time.” I think we connected on that level. To me, that said a lot. He’s comfortable in that way, I’m comfortable in that way. Snake Plissken is an island. Did you ever think he’d become an icon while making Escape From
New York? No. I’d done a lot with the costume myself. John had turned a lot over to me in terms of that stuff. But there was one big part of Snake that I didn’t have – his sound. I was just looking at Snake in terms of it being a futuristic movie. I was a little inspired in my head by Kraftwerk at the time. I don’t know. And then we did the first scene and I knew what I was going to do. Lee Van Cleef had been cast as Hauk, and I thought, ‘OK, I’ve got this now.’ I never said anything to John. So, it’s the first take and I think my line was, “Congratulations, you’re a millionaire.” I told the soundman, “You’re gonna need to get in real tight because I’m going to be very, very hard to hear.” So I did the line: [ In a Plissken hiss] “Congratulations, you’re a millionaire.” And cut. John came up to me and said, “This is going to be fucking great. This guy is going to be fucking great.” [ laughs]
You came up with the eye patch, right? I said to John, “I’d love to wear an eye patch.” He said, “Get it! It’s a cool idea.” I said, “Yeah, something happened to him in Siberia, man [ laughs]. He’s always in pain in his eye. He’s got radiation in there or something. Or maybe he can see out of that eye. Who knows?” But John liked that. Then the studio was a little freaked out. They said, “Wait a minute, the lead guy’s going to cover half his face?” [ laughs]
big trouble’s style, its kind of irreverent humour, was embraced by a generation
What’s your opinion on the planned remakes of Escape From New York and Big Trouble In
Little China, and the prequel of The Thing?
John and I did a remake of The Thing. I don’t think there’s anything that’s sacred. The reason John wanted to do The Thing was he felt The
Thing that had been made in 1951 was one version that you could do that was based on a book called Who Goes There? He said, “That’s not what I’m doing. My movie’s about paranoia.” Granted, the monster was horrific – that’s the genre – but the story’s great because it’s literally about how screwed up in your mind can you get? Can you get to the point where you’ve asked yourself, “Are you, you? Am I me?” That’s the reason, to me, to make a remake. I can’t speak for whoever’s going to make the remakes but the directors have got their hands full. John
and I did some pretty different stuff.
Like The Thing, Big Trouble In Little China flopped but became a classic on video...
That was a very different movie for its time. There was not that sense of humour out there. They’d never seen a movie where a guy kisses a girl and when he comes back, he’s got lipstick on – he’s the lead guy and he doesn’t know! You’d never seen a lead guy who just doesn’t know he’s not very good at stuff, and actually the sidekick is the lead. John had great karate stuff in it, very beautiful, many years before
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or whatever [ laughs]. It was a look that was in John’s mind, and since then, it’s been embraced by many filmmakers. That style, that kind of irreverent humour, it was embraced by an entire generation. Anyway, my point is, hey, good luck with the remake; hope you come up with something great.
Looking to your own future, can we expect to see you in Fast & Furious 8?
They’re talking about getting going in March. The last time I talked to Vin, he was excited about it, excited about me being a part of it. So I’ll get involved and we’ll see what happens. Yeah, I mean, it’s a great outfit. It was a really sad thing to see Paul go. He was a terrific guy. I was with him four days before it happened. It was sad, sad, sad. But they really did honour him. That was the right thing to do. They’re a fun bunch and a good bunch. So we’ll see where that goes.
It’s just been announced that it will be set in New York.
Yeah? That’s interesting to me because Vin did talk to me about some of the things he wanted to do, and hearing you say that – which is, by the way, the first I’ve heard – actually clues me in to some of what we might be doing.
Your career has had ups and downs. But with Fast & Furious 7, Bone Tomahawk and The
Hateful Eight, you’re on a hot streak...
Yeah. [ Before those movies] I basically took some time off. I didn’t care for what I was reading and my wine was doing great. GoGi Wines is a brand that I’ve been making for eight years now. It’s not a hobby. I’m very serious about it. It’s starting to connect at all the Disney venues. In Adventureland at Disney, they have an al fresco lounge where my wine is with a bunch of seven or eight other Disney people who have made wine. Good restaurants, and the same thing in Disney World. So, a couple of projects I kind of went, “Meh, OK, whatever.” And then I started reading things that I did like. Did I want to go to work again or did I want to stick my head back in the hole? I thought, ‘What the hell. I’m making a full swing.’ Though I only do things with a number in it – Fast & Furious 7, The Hateful Eight, Fast & Furious 8!
Which leads us to the million-dollar question: will we ever see Overboard 2?
[ Laughs] That’s one of those movies they’ve talked about and said, “What would it be 25 years later? What would they be doing? What did their lives turn into?” The discussion has happened many times. Goldie said the other day, “Oh, I don’t think I’m quite done yet. I think I might do some other stuff in the movie business.” So she’s drifting back into that world, and I’ve come back head-first. I’m not going to be the one to sit down and write it! But if I read it and go, “Hey, that’s funny...”
The Hateful Eight opens on 8 January. Bone Tomahawk opens in January (TBC).