Samuel L. Jackson

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

He literally burst on the scene as a psychotic robber with a shotgun in what is inarguably one of the most memorable small parts in Hollywood film history in 1988's Coming To America. And ever since, Samuel L. Jackson has continuously wowed audiences with incredible performances, regardless of how small or large the roles may be.

From a crack addict in Jungle Fever to a temperamental, yet philosophical contract killer in his Oscar-nominated breakthrough film Pulp Fiction to an outraged father avenging the murder of his daughter in A Time To Kill to even a wise and powerful Jedi Knight in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Jackson's charismatic personality and always electric performances has long endeared him to his fans and critics alike as Hollywood's ultimate bad-ass motherf***er.

Now he has returned once again to his perennial bad-ass mofo roots as the unusually glamorous villain The Octopus. Sam stars alongside Scarlett Johannson, Eva Mendes, and Gabriel Macht in Frank Miller's film adaptation of Will Eisner's 1940's comic strip The Spirit.

The now 59 year-old actor and longtime comic book fan first described to us why he was so enthusiastic about doing The Spirit in particular, as well as the kind of comics Sam himself enjoyed reading when he was young.

'I was familiar with The Spirit,' Jackson says, 'I've read comic books since I was a very small child. I mean, I even convinced Scarlet she read comic books when she was a kid. Because it was OK to read Archie and Veronica, because I did. I read Archie and Veronica and Jughead. It was OK. They were good. They were funny books. Then, you have other kinds of comics, so I've read comics all my life and I was familiar with The Spirit also. '

'One of my favorite characters because he didn't have no superpowers, come on,' he continues, 'Everybody wanted to be fast like The Flash or strong like Superman or me, I wanted to become like Aquaman because he swam. I swam a lot. I was in the water a lot for some reason. So I was familiar with it. I was reintroduced when I found out Frank was doing this project. And Frank was kind enough to send us every copy of the Spirit ever made, so I started looking at it and listened to The Octopus's voice and figured it out more.'

Jackson also shared with us the rather playful experience he had bonding with and learning the process of both his character and the graphic novel artist turned filmmaker.

'Frank and I would meet and have lunch at The W, and be very distracted by the girls at the pool, and talk about The Octopus,' he recounts, 'And he had his own reality, which we decided to kind of put out there everyday in a different costume.'

'When he woke up everyday, he woke up in whatever fantasy he wanted to live in, and that's how he dressed in that particular day,' Sam adds, 'And he'd send over a costume to Silken's room and he'd dress up and we'd hang out all day long and that's what we did. And as we got to that place, we realized the genius and the dementia.'

Sam was also apt to share with us what he enjoyed most about doing The Spirit.

'The one great thing about this film is as crazy and as mean and as wild as we get, there's not a real mean-spirited moment in the film,' he says, 'That's why we wear Nazi uniforms for when we do it. We've killed a cat with SS uniforms on, but other than that, there's not one mean-spirited moment in the film.'

'We're having fun,' Jackson adds, 'I don't perceive that as a mean-spirited moment. It's an example of what we do. You know, that's one of those things that happens, but having fun and creating a spirit of adventure in the middle of what we finally discover was a romantic comedy was kind of great.'

Another thing Jackson says he enjoyed in particular about doing The Spirit was the incredible amount of latitude afforded to him by Frank Miller with The Octopus. First was how he should perform the character.

'It's quite an honor to be able to walk into a situation of putting flesh and blood into a character that's only been a pair of gloves forever,' Sam says, 'And I thank Frank for that opportunity and he gave me license to pretty much be as demented and as genius and as funny as I wanted to be.'

'So I kind of took that as my license to do all the things that I wanted to do in a film and chew as much scenery as I felt like chewing and not be cheated for it,' he adds, 'You got that. Now, having said that, I'll be looking for you, OK''

Second is the one of the film's highlights, the outlandish mix of post-modern and 1940's-style costumes many of the characters sport, including Sam's own Octopus.

'Well, I had a great time,' he shares, 'The Nazi outfit goes back to the Third Reich thing that's in the comic books. You never read the original comics, did you' You're not a comic book person, I know that. But, right, yeah, there's a Third Reich element in the comics, so we used that as an element in the film. That works very well. The Germans loved it. Germans in Berlin, they were so hot for that scene. They thought [Scarlett Johannson's] the poster girl for this year. But, yeah, we talked about the costumes and as we did things and we started discussing my killing of the clones is when we got to the samurai outfits and all this other stuff and this is when we started talking about the Erman and all the other things.'

'But the big discovery was Scarlett and I shared a makeup trailer,' Jackson continues, 'So when I'd be going in the morning, they'd be making her up. And I'd be looking at her and they had these beautiful colors on, eye shadow on her, and go, wow, I should try some of that! So I got my makeup artist to start experimenting with eye shadow and I would put it on and I would run in there and say, 'Frank!' And he would go, 'I love it.' And I would go back to my trailer and go, if I'm wearing a Nazi outfit, I should have lightning bolt eyebrows. And I'd go, 'Frank!' and he'd go, 'I love it.' From that point on, it was just a matter of running in there and doing as much to myself, even down to those Erman eyebrows, which I thought were hot. I felt it everyday.'

Like Miller's first film effort Sin City, The Spirit is an ultra-stylized film noir world. We asked the actor whether or not any classic film noir helped give him inspiration in his performance as The Octopus.

'No, actually, I don't,' Sam answers, 'I was just so glad to be on that set and wearing those costumes and hanging around and kind of hanging out and being around Frank and Scarlett and Gabriel and the gang there everyday. Scarlet was always somewhere. She was always with the second unit all the time. We only worked together two days. I was so used to her anyway.'

Citing the interview with co-star Johannson for this film, we asked Sam whether his snarky and obviously jokey remarks about his co-star was due to insinuations she alleges of his getting his butt kicked by her.

'True that,' he simply replies.

We quickly learned Jackson also had some equally witty, yet jokey and snarky remarks, for co-star Gabriel Macht, who plays the film's titular character.

'If you see the making of on the DVD of this particular movie,' he claims, 'There's a segment when they are interviewing Gabriel in his trailer, his walls are papered with The Spirit, I mean, everywhere, not just photos of himself.'

'But the comic, Frank's drawings, drawings that he made of himself, even as an infant child making drawings of The Spirit, they're everywhere,' Sam continues, 'But his trailer was covered with Spirit-phernalia, you know, so he was dealing with his identity crisis all the time. He has a picture of that baby from Halloween and that baby with the Spirit mask.'