Jackson sticking with action
Samuel L Jackson tells Stephanie Bunbury he’d rather make people laugh than win an Oscar.
There’s something about Samuel L Jackson that makes people grin when you mention his name. Whether it’s the Kangol beret he always wears, that big laugh or the fact that his character in Pulp
Fiction is still regularly quoted, threatening to ‘‘go medieval on your ass’’, he has an affable, don’t care cool that could be the envy of grime DJs a third of his age.
Even when he says disagreeable things – that he doesn’t believe in gun control, or that black British actors are taking jobs from ‘‘the brothers’’ – people quickly paper over the crack and carry on.
Some of this is down to familiarity. Jackson makes a lot of films. Specifically, he makes a lot of films in which he plays a wisecracking, bad-ass criminal. The
Hitman’s Bodyguard, out this week, is another chip off that block.
Taking the oft-copied formula perfected in Midnight Run, it pairs Jackson’s invincible hitman with Ryan Reynolds as the bodyguard taking him across country to testify at a hearing against an evil Belarusian dictator – with whom he has had a hitman’s dealings – at The Hague.
Some kind of incomprehensible caveat says that if they don’t make it by 5pm on a certain day, the case will be thrown out. Since a lot of people are trying to stop them getting there, hitman and bodyguard must join forces to see justice done. In the process, they create a lot of corpses.
Nothing about this is even momentarily believable, but the banter’s good. That’s what Jackson likes doing.
‘‘I watched Ryan for a good while,’’ he says. ‘‘I know he has this quick wit, so when the idea was tossed to me and they said it was Ryan I thought, well, this should be great. I tend to try to bring a lot of humour to what I do just because of what I think about movies and what they should be.’’
Jackson’s thoughts about movies and what they should be amount to a veritable manifesto, which he delivers in the rich cadences of a Southern preacher. ‘‘I think making people laugh is the essence of what people want to go to the movies for, to escape the humdrum or depression of their lives, whatever,’’ he begins. ‘‘When you go to the movies, you kind of want to leave with a smile on your face.’’
He likes funny, but not stupid; if people think he’s wasting his time when does a movie like Snakes on
a Plane, that’s their problem; he absolutely isn’t interested in Oscar bait. ‘‘I would rather do a crime movie or an adventure than a story based on two people breaking up and hashing it out on screen. That is not entertaining. It’s stressful,’’ he says.
Theatre, where he worked for 10 years before he stepped in front of a movie camera (he still does repertory seasons when opportunity knocks), is the place for that.
‘‘Theatre is a whole ‘nother kind of thing where you are allowed to explore the human condition in a whole different way and its specific audience chooses to go and see that,’’ he says.
‘‘When I think of going to the movies, I like mysteries more than I like to see people bopping heads in some sort of relationship issue. I’ve been married for 37 years, I know what that is.’’
Anyway, why do highbrow films for the sake of a prize? The average person behind a tub of popcorn, he reasons, probably thinks he has an Oscar already.
Jackson grew up in Tennessee; his mother was a factory worker and his absent father an alcoholic he would get to see only twice in his life. He was born in 1948, when racial segregation was in full force. They had guns in the house, he has said, because when President Kennedy was assassinated, they were convinced the white
supremacists would treat the occasion as open season on black folks.
‘‘I went to the movies to see a different world that was not mine, where I could let my mind go and be part of a western scenario or even a war scenario or a comedy scenario or a horror scenario.’’
He often chooses films, he says, that he thinks he would have wanted to see as a kid. Hence
Snakes on a Plane; hence Kong: Skull Island.
‘‘When they told me there was going to be a King Kong movie and they wanted me to be in it, I said, ‘Where do I sign up?’ I’ve been running from King Kong since I was a kid. We pretended King Kong was chasing us!’’
That said, he was a serious young person. He went to a black college intending to study marine biology, but became increasingly involved in the civil rights struggle, got suspended and spent a year with the Black Panthers. When he returned to university, he studied drama. It seems a slightly perverse choice, given he had a pronounced stammer. He can still stumble over particular words.
‘‘But when you are portraying a character who doesn’t stutter, he doesn’t stutter. I don’t know what that is.’’
I observe that he isn’t stuttering now. ‘‘That’s because I’m being that person you interview that doesn’t stutter!’’
We both laugh at that; this is just another of his thousands of performances.
It wasn’t that language itself was a struggle; he relishes words. One of the things that appealed to him in The Hitman’s Bodyguard is that he and Reynolds talk all the time. Now, he rails against the loss of language, the poverty of textspeak, ‘‘language like Donald Trump uses, without complex words’’. He’s back in his pulpit.
‘‘Complexity or nimbleness, being able to turn a phrase, is very important to being a great conversationalist or even a great humourist.’’ He laments the want of wit in modern movies. ‘‘They don’t want to lose an audience. I want an audience to be challenged, but to laugh at the same time. To say, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t have thought of saying that.’’’
Jackson has made more than 100 films. He was already up to No. 30 when he made Pulp
Fiction. At 68, he has no plans to slow down. ‘‘You like writing so you get up and write. Painters get up and paint. So why wouldn’t an actor get up and act? People say why do you work so much? And I say, when I was a young actor in the theatre I was always doing a play, auditioning for a play and rehearsing a play. I was used to working all the time. It just so happens that I now know what my next three jobs are – and I try to keep it that way.’’
The great advantage of movies, he says, is that he can watch them himself.
‘‘I used to wish I could see this play that I’m in with me in it, but I was too busy doing it. Now I can do something and then I can watch it as many times as I want.’’
He takes a moment to pour scorn on actors who say they can’t bear watching themselves. That has never troubled Samuel L Jackson. ‘‘What is that, you know? Come on! This is the look-at-me business! If you don’t want to look at you, I don’t want to look at you either. That’s bulls...’’
He roars with laughter again; in a minute I will leave, just as he wanted, with a smile on my face. – Fairfax
The Hitman’s Bodyguard (R16) is out on Thursday.
"I tend to try to bring a lot of humour to what I do just because of what I think about movies and what they should be."
Samuel L Jackson