Movie star and self-styled rock legend Jack Black takes Blockbuster.co.uk' behind the scenes of his latest movie, Be Kind Rewind.
From the fevered imagination of Academy Award-winning writer/director
Michel Gondry,
Be Kind Rewind is a surreal comedy about two best friends, one electromagnetic field and every movie you've ever loved.
When Jerry (
Black) becomes magnetized while trying to sabotage the power plant he believes is melting his brain, he accidentally erases all the tapes in the old-fashioned video store run by best friend Mike (
Mos Def). To keep the few customers happy, Jerry and Mike decide to remake one of the erased movies in Jerry's junkyard. To their astonishment, their unique version of the movie is a hit. Mike, Jerry, and soon friends from the neighbourhood are in full-time production, re-making movies from
Ghostbusters to
Driving Miss Daisy, and in the end revitalize not only the business but the entire community.
Dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, his hair cropped with bleached blonde highlights and dark roots, Black happily chatted about
Be Kind Rewind, available now to add to your list.
"I had taken a meeting or two with
Michel Gondry before he talked about
Be Kind Rewind," he begins, "because I wanted to tell him how big a fan I was and that I really wanted to work with him on something. Then he called me and said he had an idea for a movie. I went over to his hotel and he had made a homemade comic book with crayon drawings of the characters and the video store and he had written a few lines of dialogue and the basic story. It looked like really good fun. So I did not have a script - I just said yes to his comic book. No one had ever presented a movie to me like that before, it was very original. But he could've presented me with a turd on a stick and I would have said, 'let's make that into a movie', because I am such an admirer of his work."
When exactly did he become a fan, then? "I got turned onto Michel through his music videos," reveals Black, "and then of course the film that really blew my mind,
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It was one of the best movies I had ever seen, I guess because it resonated on a different level. It gave me the feeling that we are all dust in the wind. That life is fragile and always slipping away, like sand in an hourglass. No one had captured that idea so beautifully before."
What, then, is this new movie all about, and what is it trying to say? "For me," replies Black, "it's just a celebration of creativity, and if it is saying something, it's that anyone can make a movie. Even though movies seem brilliant often when you watch them, it's not impossible to make them yourself. You think, 'it's too late for me to make movies,' or 'I can't do that I don't have the money'. But you can make films for almost no budget, and anyone can do it anywhere in the world. Anyone, anywhere, anytime."
From the brilliance of his writer/director to the talents of his co-stars, Black happily spreads the praise around. "(
Mos Def was great to work with," he begins. "We shared a sense of humour and a passion for music. He is a fellow musician and works at his own pace - no one is going to rush him into a characterization. He lets the character breathe and is very real. I learned a lot from him. He's a 'method actor' - he wants it all to be grounded and that was good for me since I am so crazy with explosive energy. I think we complimented each other nicely. I am kind of surprised we never wrote any songs together or anything, that's my only regret, that we didn't have more time to jam, as it would have been cool if we had started a band."
As for co-star
Mia Farrow, Jack enthuses, "Well she's legendary. She told us so many great stories and was so free talking about her life. I never felt weird or strange asking questions, because she was happy to talk. She had great stories about
Frank Sinatra and Salvador Dali - what a crazy life she's had. I kept thinking 'are you lying? Are you fibbing?' But I don't think she was."
As a kid, did Black ever attempt to make his own homemade - or sweded - versions of his favourite films? "I never had a video camera growing up," he says. "In my mind I was pretending to be the bionic man, or various monsters, and if there had been a camera rolling I would have made some very funny short films I think. I wasn't thinking about shots or angles or anything, but my characters were really entertaining, at least they were for me - entertaining monsters."
Black clearly had and still has a very active, vivid imagination. "I sweded The Six Mission Dollar Man endlessly," he admits. "I was bionic all the time. I put wires up my sleeve and I wanted the wires just to peek out a little bit so that if any kids noticed my wires I would say, 'it's nothing, it's nothing'. They would think I was bionic, because my logic was that I was trying to hide my bionics from them. All kids love to pretend to be different characters and recreate scenes from comic books and movies and TV so that's a natural thing. The only thing was, I didn't have a camera, so I didn't videotape myself doing anything."
Fortunately for Black and his
Be Kind Rewind co-stars, Gondry brought a camera to their modern sweding sessions. "It was really good fun recreating them because Michel asked us not to re-watch any of the old films. I had not seen some of them at all. I said 'I have to watch Driving Miss Daisy once so I can recreate it.' He said, 'No, you have seen zee commercials, you know basically what eet eez'. That is not a very good imitation of him. But he was right, I kinda knew that
Jessica Tandy was a grumpy bitch and
Morgan Freeman was teaching her lessons somehow, so we just winged it and Michel liked that. That way our foggy memories of the films helped us make something fresh, which is a lot more interesting than just recreating a movie, shot for shot. The characters didn't have time to go back and research so why would we?"
Was working with Gondry as great as Black imagined? What was he like as a director? "He's pretty loose," replies the star. "It seemed like some of the time he was the only one who knew what he wanted to do that day, he would come in with new ideas and it was kind of like a playground in a lot of ways, and he was the ringleader. Just in terms of dialogue, he was open to improv, but not in regard to which films we were making, or the structure of the story or anything like that. Michel would get really passionate and a little hot under the collar if people didn't understand what he was saying, but his accent is very thick, so sometimes it's hard to understand what the hell he's talking about. 'You're ruining my moooveee' he would say, but it's hard to take him seriously when he's screaming at you, because he's like a little kid. He's the most childish director in a way and definitely the most inventive. I think if he wasn't a film director he would be inventing gadgets and cool little working pieces of art."
On the challenge of tearing around town, sweding like crazy, Black says, "It was a lot of activity because we were working on a tighter schedule than most movies. We did it in eight or nine weeks at the most, and usually it takes three or four months to make a movie. It wasn't hard in that Michel is so creative with all his shots so we weren't doing the traditional 'over the shoulder, over the other guy's shoulder, close up, master'. He would get some cool shots and then we were done and we would go on to the next one, so we didn't have the tediousness or boredom factor. It was exciting moving on to another film."
Of his favourite sweded film in the movie, Black says, "I loved doing
RoboCop. That was a dream come true for me. As a kid I always loved those sci fi action movies." Did Black or his co-stars ever consider sweding one of their own movies for Be kind Rewind? "We did a version of the
old King Kong, but that doesn't really count. It would have been strange to do my movies. A joke within a joke. So no. It would have taken people out of the movie and been distracting. That's why we didn't do
Lethal Weapon, as
Danny Glover is also in the movie."
Have Black's movie choices changed since becoming a dad? "I was gonna make Babykiller 5000," he says with admirably straight face. "It's a futuristic robot holocaust film! No, seriously, nothing has changed. Not at all. If I were a tough action dude like
Steven Seagal, then it would be a dilemma, if I was working on a movie where I had to break someone's arm. backwards. If that's what I did for a living then maybe I would have to rethink my career. But luckily I don't."
Is he enjoying fatherhood, then? "Yeah it has been really fun," replies Black, who since the interview has helped to bring a second son into the world. "My son gets up so early though, he wakes up at five in the morning. Right now my wife is mad because I got up at 5am today and handed her our son and said, 'I gotta work today, you take your son and I'll make it up to you tomorrow', and then I went back to sleep. And that doesn't go over well. I have to do better, but the problem is I love to play video games late at night and I stay up too late in general. I've been playing this game, Mass Effect Sex, because I'm starting a new movie - The Year One - next week, and then there will be no more staying up late as I've got to wake up at 5 am to go to work. So I am cramming in my video games now. Anyway my boy is very, very cute. And it's not just because he's my son that I'm saying it."
What, besides movies and videogames, does Jack like to do with his spare time? Any hobbies? "Not really," answers the star, "but I've got a ukulele. I like to play that and I like dancing - but not real dancing - dancing with my son. He loves to dance. I like watching cartoons with my son too. We watch old Disney Rarities, a DVD collection of old cartoons. There's one called Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom, which is all about the history of music. It starts off with cavemen and it breaks down all musical instruments: a toot is like a horn, a whistle is like a flute, plunk is any string, a boom is a drum and my son loves it."
Finally, can fans of Tenacious D expect anything new from Black's band in the future? "We're going to do more," he promises, rising to leave. "We have been trying to write, but the songs are so stupid. We're not ready. We need a couple more years I think. I'm thinking that 2012 will be the year when we release of our next album. We've got one good song, that's it. and I'm not gonna tell you what it's about because I'm afraid someone's gonna steal it."