[IMG:L]Death Proof director Quentin Tarantino’s been responsible for reviving more than one career of a 1970s-era actor who provided some of the best bits of the era’s B-movies before slipping off the Hollywood radar for a while. But Kurt Russell‘s one actor who’s been in the game since the Me Decade who doesn’t need a comeback – he never went anywhere.
Russell tells Hollywood.com how close he came to starring in a few real Grindhouse flicks, the close calls that could’ve happened when he was really behind the wheel as Stuntman Mike, and just how close he keeps Snake Plisskin in his heart.
Hollywood.com: Did you ever do Grindhouse-style movies back in the day, and do you remember going to watch them?
Kurt Russell: Well, I never did one. I used to go in on interviews on them, and I used to go to the theaters and we’d always see a double feature. That was just sort of the main staple of our movie diet, but I never did end up doing one that was for sure in that world. We would go on the interviews and a lot of the actors, we’d sort of run into each other all the time at interviews. There are about 25 or 50 guys that worked. So if you were going on those interviews you would eventually run into three or four guys that you knew every time. I remember Ronnie Howard and I were talking about this recently: we used to see each other. “Hey, Ronnie, how are you doing?” “Hey, Kurt.” “So, if you get this are you going to actually do it?” “I don’t know, man.” [Laughs] So I never had to cross that bridge because I never did do one, but I saw a lot of them when I was going to the movies back then. What I loved about them always was that they were quite often just two different movies. They were like Planet Terror and Death Proof. The beginning of Death Proof, the idea is like, “Why would they put this movie with that one?” But by the end of it you understand why. That was like a very detailed reality to the Grindhouse movies. That’s what I remember about them.
HW: How did you get onboard for Death Proof?
KR: I got a call from Quentin and I returned it. Freddy Rodriguez had told me that I was probably going to get the call here, and we had worked together before on Poseidon and on Dreamer and I was on vacation and he said “I think that Quentin is going to ask you to do this movie.” I said, “Great—What’s it about?” He kind of told me the scoop, and then Quentin called me and we sort of missed each other and played a little phone tag. I got the script and read it and said “Yeah, I get it. I know what you want me to do.” I actually didn’t know how I was going to play the part until we did a bunch of rehearsals with all the girls and everything, and I tried all different kinds of ways and I never really did settle in on anything, as a matter of fact. I kind of settled in on the idea that Stuntman Mike is a crazy psycho who isn’t one thing. He’s not one character all the way through. He’s one person, but he’s got issues, and he’s got issues with pain…There isn’t just one way a person behaves. People behave in all different kinds of ways and situations. [Mike was] a character that I had never seen. I had never seen those characters played out those ways.
HW: Did you use anything from any of the stunt guys that you’ve known over the years?
KR: There is one guy that I know that is kind of weird [Laughs].
HW: Is part of the quid pro quo with Tarantino and Rodriguez that you’ll get a great role in a cool movie, but they’re going to pick your brain over every movie you’ve ever made?
KR: I think that is fair to say, but in all honesty, as you would expect, it’s very flattering and it’s very kind and makes you feel very appreciated.
[IMG:R]HW: What was the weirdest film in your resume that they wanted to know a lot about?
KR: Quentin can shock you because you think that Quentin knows a lot, but he isn’t going to know about that episode of Man from U.N.C.L.E.I did. Then when you say something, and he goes, “Oh, yeah, and then that character says this!” Then he does the whole scene that you did and then you realize that you cannot possibly keep up. Never ever get him in the game of movie trivia. There is no one that can beat him. I will bet a million dollars on him. You can come up with someone who can study it and they would have to be, number one, like he is, having grown up with it, having done it like he did and number, and number two, they have to be something else which is a savant. He is a total savant.
HW: You work with a large cast of women in Death Proof.
KR: Ah, they were really cute. I mean, they were cute. They were talking one day and I happened to walk on some conversation. I knew it was something that I wasn’t supposed to be hearing. They were all talking and I said, ‘What are you guys talking about?’ Jordy Ladd said, “Nothing.” I said, “Nah, you’re doing something.” She said, “We’re just talking about our Daddy crushes.” [Laughs] They all looked at me and smiled. I said, “You guys are sweet.”
HW: You did a lot of your own driving in this film.
KR: Yeah, we did about 98 percent of it. I didn’t turn it over and flip it and crash it and I didn’t do the big jump…The only problem here is that you’re on the wrong side of the road and you’re going to bump and bump and back off and then come over here and do the same thing. There was a lot of dialogue there that’s not used and some different attitudes. So when you’re doing that at 90, 100 miles an hour on a two-lane road, you’re sort of like flying in formation. You can’t look ahead. You have to look at the car because the camera is out here. I’m trying to balance and get the camera in the right position. The camera car is running fast ahead with the arm out and that arm is going to swing back and forth and we’ve got it timed out and she’s going to kind of stay in the middle and when she sees me come over she’s going to back off. The timing is very critical. The problem is that when the camera car is over here, the other car is over here and you’re here in the wrong lane doing 100 miles an hour. You have to trust very much that a cow won’t run onto the road; a dog, a coyote or another car will somehow slip by one of the roads that theoretically they told you are shut off. Some kid just happens to do this—“Whoa, hey, you’re not supposed to go out there!”—and the next thing I know I would’ve never seen the guy because I’m focused over here doing this. I would’ve hit this guy doing 100 miles an hour when they would’ve been doing 50, which is a 150-miles-an-hour crash. I don’t care what you’re strapped into, you’re not coming away from that. To put that out of your head and play the character while you’re doing it, that’s what you get paid to do in that situation, aside from drive the car good…To go to work every day, you do say “I hope I come back today.”
HW: In a lot of ways Rodriguez‘s Planet Terror is a love letter to John Carpenter and his films. Having made five films with Carpenter, what did you think when you saw that?
KR: Well, it’s like taking some of John‘s movies that he did that were in that vein, like Thing and portions of Escape from New York and then putting them into the Grindhouse thing, but when we did Escape from New York, that doesn’t qualify really as Grindhouse. That was just a quirky, weird movie at the time, but their reverence for John Carpenter—both his and Quentin‘s—is enormous. We spent many, many hours talking about different things, movies that John and I had done, all of them.
HW: Rodriguez even used a music cue from Escape in ‘Planet Terror.’
KR: Yeah. He used a lot of stuff. It’s a lot of that. It’s just nice to see that there were, from a couple of filmmakers, levels of appreciation for things that John and I used to talk about. Before we were doing them, we’d be getting ready to do a scene and we would talk about what to do and then sometimes we’d say, “Well, we should probably do this.” Then we would look at each other and say, “Well, let’s do what we want to do, because it might be 10 or 15 years before anyone can kind of watch it. But there will be someone out there who says, ‘Yeah, there you go. That’s the way to do it.’” And I loved John for always wanting to do that, to do the right thing for a movie that we thought would hold together for 25 years or more. It’s great fun for me to get to work with two guys who appreciate that.
HW: Have you and John chatted about the Escape from New York remake?
KR: No, I haven’t talked to John for a long time. We’re great friends, but we haven’t talked in a while. I haven’t talked to him about Grindhouse. I just heard about the remake, and you have to understand that some Disney movies that I’ve done have been done in remakes, Stargate was turned into a television show that was very successful, and Backdraft was turned into two television shows that were on TV and did well, I guess. They’re going to remake The Thing. They’re going to remake Escape from New York. I created the character of Snake [Plisskin] and so I have a little bit of a different feeling about that, and my feeling about that is, and I’ve joked about this all day, very simply, “Wait until Stuntman Mike hears about this. It’s really going to set him off.” [Laughs] So it’s 2007. I’m working on Grindhouse and am trying to create something that an audience can have fun with today.
HW: Would you consider doing a role in that remake?
KR: F*ck no. That would be ridiculous. That would be like Sean Connery doing something in Roger Moore‘s 007. It would be like, “What?” Please. No. Go off on your own. Good luck…Here’s the thing: I know this, any time that you’re going to do something that someone else created, an iconic character that they make figurines of, they have to accept that they’re taking that role on. That’s a given. I created that. I’ll never not have created that. That’s just the way it is.
HW: You’ve generally avoided sequels throughout your career.
KR: I did one: I did Escape from L.A. and I did it for a number of reasons. Mainly, I wanted to work for John one more time and I wanted to play Snake again, but I don’t do sequels. I haven’t done them. I signed up for movies that if they were going to do more of them I thought that it was okay. I would’ve done them and would in the future, but sequels for the most part for me have always been uninteresting and I think that you make a movie as that experience. An audience should feel as if they were having that experience. Now, Sky High is a kind of fun thing that if they wanted to make more movies about those kids and I have a character in that, I don’t have a problem with that. But do I want to do Big Trouble in Little China IV or do I want to do The ThingIII? Listen, I was asked about all of those movies. I had a chance to make a lot of money, and I chose to have a different career. I just didn’t do that and I’m really glad that I didn’t. I think that I would’ve quit a long time ago. I would’ve said “No.”
