Be Kind, Rewind: The JB Interview

What looks to be one of the most creative and funniest movies of 2008, Be Kind Rewind is getting our stamp of approval. IGN does a great interview with Jack Black to discuss the his work with Mos Def and Ms. Ripley herself, Sigourney Weaver. Full Interview after the jump….

IGN.com Writes:

Working with Mos Def, what was it like, and how do you pronounce it properly?

Black: I believe its ‘Mose’ , as in if you’re going to say “most
definitely” and then take away the ‘t’ and the ‘efinately’ - and you
get ‘Mos Def’ - I’m pretty sure that’s the origin of that name.

You two spend a lot of time together - did you have a rapport with him and had you seen what he’d done before?

Black: I had seen his work, and I would say we did. Right off
the bat, there was chemistry, a chemical reaction in the room, and
everyone was like ‘whoa: what just happened?’ I don’t know, but it felt
pretty good, and in the rehearsal we gelled pretty well.

I was wondering how Sigourney Weaver got on board, was there ever
any discussion she’d play herself and did she get to see your version
of Ghostbusters?

Black: I don’t know if she ever did see our version, Michel
might have given her a private screening, she got involved, uh, good
question, I don’t know, Michel just probably called her up and she,
like I did, jumped at the chance of working with the ‘boy genius’. But
she was never going to play herself, she was always going to be the
studio executive - the soulless bitch - and she did it very well…

Sigourney Weaver apart, I was wondering if there was any thought of
remaking one of the films which the cast had starred in, I’m thinking
Danny Glover and Lethal Weapon or yourself in the elder version of King Kong? Was that ever discussed?

Black: Was it ever discussed to do a crossover? No, he (Gondry) tried to avoid that thing. We didn’t re-do High Fidelity because that would have been the thing where there’s a tear in the time
space continuum… and we didn’t want that to happen; taking you to the
movie within the movie. That’s why we avoided Lethal Weapon 2 as well and did Rush Hour 2 instead.

Who was it who decided which movies you should do?

Black: That was Michel. I tried to get my ideas in… I was saying: ‘let’s do Road Warrior‘
and he said (he puts on a ridiculous French accent) ‘no, no…!’ He
wanted to do the movies that struck a chord with him, except for Driving Miss Daisy I think, which he did because of his friendship with Dave Chapelle. He… did you see that concert he did - Dave Chappelle’s Block Party,
where he said he hates that movie and thinks its racist and horrible?
Michel was giving him a little shout out there. But the rest of the
movies were movies that inspired him… and Road Warrior didn’t make the list!

Presumably you had to get clearances to remake the films, were there
any you didn’t get, and of the ones you did, did you go much further
than you see in the movie?

Black: Yeah we did have to get clearances for the movies that we sweded - that’s what Michel calls it - and we were unable to get Back to the Future.
I don’t know if it was Robert Zemeckis or someone else, but they said
‘no!’ and I think its because they were planning a musical version of
the movie on Broadway, something like that… what a ridiculous reason!
It was like, our take-off on it would have hurt their Broadway
run…wait… is that true? I don’t know if it was that or they were
doing a Back to the Future TV series… but it was ridiculous. You missed out because it was pretty darn good in rehearsal.

You were the Christopher Lloyd character?

Black: Yeah of course; the crazy scientist. It would have been fun, but what was the other part of the question?

Was there more stuff we didn’t get to see, and was there the
possibility that you might be limiting future work prospects by taking
the piss out of these films?

Black: Oh no, I wasn’t worried about that, I mean every movie I
do I always worry its going to be my last movie because I’m going to
suck so bad, but there was no special worry on this one. You know,
would Spielberg be pissed off that I made fun of one of his movies?
No… They’ll be flattered. I mean I’m doing a movie with Jackie Chan
and he didn’t seem angry… wait, maybe he doesn’t know… of course he
doesn’t know it’s not out yet… s**t.

That’s King Fu Panda right?

Black: Yeah, does that count? It doesn’t really does it? As an
actor you don’t go “oh, his greatest work was that cartoon”, it’s only
half of a job.

Did you as a kid ever fool around with a camera as a kid?

Black: I didn’t, I was more of a tape recorder kid, and I did
funny voices and things like that on the tape recorder. What I did do
was that I liked to take all the cushions from the chairs and couches
in the house and build a maze and force my dog to run through the maze.
And I would take a sleeping bag and slide down the stairs. Those are
some of the experiments I remember. Also I put Coco Puffs - you have
them here? - in my butt… for comedy. Actually it was for
experimentation, I was a bit of a scientist…

And what did you discover?

Black:That you can put a lot in there… in your butt.

What is Michel [Gondry] like to work with? Does he give you lots of direction or the freedom to improvise?

Black: He’s one of those that’ll tell you just enough but not
much because he wants you to be surprised by what happens during the
scene, and that was pretty fun but also sometimes makes you crazy. It’s
like: ‘why didn’t you tell me you were going to do that? (French
accent) ‘Because yeeu will ave expected it and it will not ave been as
good!’.

Is it a glorification of independent film-making?

Black: Is it ideas against big corporate film-making? Umm, yeah,
Michel might disagree with anything I’m about to say, but the feeling I
got from it was that even in the most depressed run-down parts of the
world and parts of town where you wouldn’t expect beautiful, creative
stuff to happen, these are the places where they most likely will
happen, because people are relying on their imaginations. Not very well
said but it was a good question - for Michel - where is Michel anyway?
Why does he send me out here all by myself, he’s the smart one!

How much of the character is you?

Black: Yeah, there’s a lot of me in the character, I’ve never
worked in a junk yard but I definitely feel a kinship to the kind of
haphazard life that that guy lives, and I feel sometimes when I’m in
this industry making movies that I don’t really belong there because
I’m kind of a pig pen kid… but I don’t know if he wrote it for me.

Did you input a lot into the script?

Black: Yeah I did just in terms of little dialogue things
because I don’t think that Michelle had any help translating his stuff,
so a lot of the script was a mystery. I had to go: ‘I think what he
meant to say was this!’

Is it true you’re thinking of doing a film with Edgar Wright?

Black: Yeah, we’re developing something…

Because now you’ve worked with Gondry, Richard Linklaker and Peter
Jackson as well; do you deliberately seek out interesting directors?

Black: I do look for good directors mainly, because if you do
enough of these movies, where there’s not a real creative vision behind
it, you start to turn into a robot, and you want to jump of a bridge.
So yeah, I was looking for a fresh perspective. I mean its fun to tell
stories if it feels original and new in some way.

Are there any films you did that you felt were better than the actual films?

Black: Oh! Well the truth is I never saw Rush Hour 2 , so I don’t know if ours is better than that one. I told Michel if I should watch Rush Hour 2 to get ready for that scene, and he said ‘no, don’t do eet!’ and I said
‘but I don’t know what I’m recreating’, he said ‘it does not matteuur,
it is better this way, do eeet, from what yeuu think it weeuld be, from
the comercieeuls that yeeu ave seen’, and I was like ‘oh, oh right’. So
we didn’t re-watch any of the films so I can’t really remember if they
were better!