Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I almost missed my chance to interview Jack Black and Michel Gondry here at Sundance. The bus from the press screening room back to Main Street took a while and then they bumped up my interview time by 15 minutes.

Ultimately, the idea was hatched that I would conduct the interview in the car taking Michel and Jack back to their hotel. The only thing that I didn’t like about it was that it ultimately cut my 15 minute interview down to about 8 minutes, but I’ll take what I can get.

Like many of my interviews here at Sundance, I talked to Jack and Michel before seeing the movie. So that’s where we start. Kraken took some pics of the BE KIND House on Park Ave and I’ll sprinkle those in since we didn’t get any photos in the car.

We go over a lot of things, but seem to focus on the BACK TO THE FUTURE remake they rehearsed with and then ultimately couldn’t use due to rights issues... and an interesting bit of news about a musical version of one of our favorite movies. Enjoy!

Quint: Hey there, Michel. I interviewed you once over the phone for SIENCE OF SLEEP a long long time ago, but it’s weird that they have me coming and talking to you guys, because I haven’t seen the flick yet, so I don’t know… I am limited and my mental capacity isn’t strong enough to overcome, but I’ll try.

Jack Black: We’ll take over.

Quint: Well the first thing I want to bring up is if you guy’s knew of the RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK remake that a bunch of kids did in the eighties that took eight years and they then remade RAIDERS, very much in this…

Michel Gondry: Well I got the concept and I didn’t know it. I had heard of it as I was saying “Oh, I’m going to do this movie,” and people would be like “Oh, have you heard of that movie?” I don’t want people to just go and think “Oh, he’s just copying that movie.”

Jack Black: Nooooo…

Quint: Yeah no, we don’t think that.

Michel Gondry: So yeah, I was aware of it, but I had had the concept in the bag.

Quint: Have you guys gotten a chance to see it?

Michel Gondry: No, but I want to see it.

Quint: It’s really good. It’s really funny.

Jack Black: It’s a shot for shot, right?

Quint: It’s shot for shot and then because it took around eight years to do, Indy changes from being eleven years old to seventeen from scene to scene and stuff like the nazi monkey, from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK… They didn’t have a monkey, of course, so they just have the kid’s dog and they tie a string around his foot to make the sieg heil thing, but it’s really awesome.

Jack Black: (laughs) How did they make the faces melt? It’s my favorite part of the movie.

Michel Gondry: I think that’s something they couldn’t do.

Jack Black: No?

Michel Gondry: I think I read that that particular scene…

Quint: Yeah, I don’t remember.

Jack Black: Isn’t it just stop-motion photography?

Michel Grondry: Yeah, it was.

Jack Black: It’s too bad I wasn’t there. I coulda told them what to do.

Quint: Yeah, it was wax. I know that at the beginning, I read a very early draft of the script and you had more remakes, but when we talked you said that you were running into some rights issues. Do you know what made the cut?

Michel Gondry: No, the only thing we couldn’t remake was BACK TO THE FUTURE. We even started to rehearse…

Jack Black: It was good! I want to know why we couldn’t.

Michel Gondry: Because they are planning to make a musical and they said it was “against interest.”

Jack Black: Okay… BUT… isn’t there a rule about parody?

Michel Gondry: Yeah, but we needed to show the artwork, especially for this movie because you know the thing how you show the box. It was very important, this concept, that you show the box.

Jack Black: Yeah and also you probably didn’t want to do it without their blessing.

Michel Gondry: Yeah.

Jack Black: I’m going to go to their opening night of their Broadway show and “boo” and make noises… make fart noises every time they make a dance move.

[Everyone laughs]

Michel Gondry: That’s horrible.

Jack Black: “Sorry, [makes a fart noise]”

Quint: So what was yours like?

Jack Black: Our BACKTO THE FUTURE?

Quint: Yeah.

CLICK IT HERE TO READ ALONG WITH THE NEXT BIT IN AMAZING SOUND-O-TEXT!!

Jack Black: Well, even though we didn’t do it in the movie, it was an important rehearsal, because we were rehearsing one scene and…

Michel Gondry: Yeah, you played Doc.

Jack Black: Yeah, I played Doc and I was freaking about the gigawatts or something and then we rehearsed it and you said “Let’s do it again and this time don’t pretend to be a bad actor. Do it as well as you can. Be the best Doc that your acting can do.”

Because we’re playing these non-actors that are doing it and so the tendency is to dumb it down a little bit or just stiffen it up a little bit… do a little porno acting… and you said that you hate it when… Now I’m just talking for you.

Michel Gondry: No, but you are right.

Jack Black: Tell them why. Why do you hate that?

Michel Gondry: Because I think you would underestimate people… I think overly doing the bad acting is very difficult. It’s like asking somebody that knows how to sing to sing out of tune. They would have the tendency to over do it and make it a caricature. I think there are so many reasons… if you try to do it right, it’s going to go wrong anyways and not necessarily by your performance, but by the camera work, the set, the costumes… that it’s going to look amateurish. If on top of that you have the will to make it more clumsy, it’s going to feel more acted and I don’t like that. I like to be as natural as possible.

Jack Black: Well, I’m not going to get you in trouble, but he did mention one specific actor who had acted in a role where they had to pretend to be a non-actor acting and this is one of the greatest actors of all time who we are talking about here and this actor did the bad acting and you hated it, because you thought they were giving themselves too much credit.

Michel Gondry: Well it seems like… to see this person doing such a bad job. It’s like “I’m such a good actor, therefore if I was not an actor, I would be so terrible in comparison.” That to me is something very pretentious.

Jack Black: There is a conceit there and it’s true and when we really put all of our rocket sauce into our acting into the remake of the BACK TO THE FUTURE, the scene came alive for us.

Quint: Well one thing that you mentioned that I really liked about your approach was that you said that you specifically didn’t go back and re-watch these movies and that you kind of wrote the scenes from memory, because that’s how the characters would have had to do it if they were in that situation.

Michel Gondry: I don’t think you’ve ever seen DRIVING MISS DAISY.

Jack Black: I have never seen DRIVING McDaisy.

Michel Gondry: I think that I…

Jack Black: Did I just say “DRIVING McDaisy?” I’m so out of it because of the…

Quint: Altitude?

Jack Black: Yeah, altitude. Well, I had never watched it and I said “Can I watch it?” and you said “No!”

Michel Gondry: It’s so funny, because you are not even trying to reproduce what she was doing, but making it up from scratch and I said that’s what…

Jack Black: Well, I saw the trailers. I saw the movie through the trailers, so I knew basically that it was this old lady who was really mean to Morgan Freeman.

CLICK IT HERE TO READ ALONG WITH THE NEXT BIT IN AMAZING SOUND-O-TEXT!!

Michel Grondry: There was this sense of collective memories, which is interesting how when an ensemble of person who have different perspectives from their different memories and because you work from your personal memory, it says who you are. If you remember a specific aspect of a film, it’s because you felt strongly about this aspect and it would be different for each person, so that becomes a collection of individualities which is very much what this movie is about.

There was this scene in BACK TO THE FUTURE that I would have liked to do and I always got bugged, because in the movie Michael J. Fox is teaching a black dude how to play rock-and-roll and it’s like “Come on how rude is that?” So I wanted to have Mos being Michael J. Fox teaching the white dude how to play rock-and-roll.

Quint: That would have been awesome.

Michel Gondry: It always bugged me a little I have to say.

Quint: Well, it looks like we are here, but can I have one more question just about what you guys are up to next? I know you have got YEAR ONE.

Michel Gondry: We are going to make the sequel.

Quint: You’re going to make a sequel?

Jack Black: It’s already in the pipe. We are going to do it for half of the budget, but twice the political resignation.

Michel Gondry: Yeah, it’s going to be deadly.

Quint: Is that going to be the subtitle?

[Everyone laughs]

Jack Black: “Silent, but deadly.”

Quint: What about you, after the sequel of course?

Michel Gondry: I’m doing a Japanese movie with Japanese people in Japanese, so I don’t know exactly what it’s about.

[Everyone laughs]

Michel Gondry: No, I’m joking.

Quint: That would be awesome.

Michel Gondry: It’s about Tokyo.

Quint: Alright cool and thanks for letting me join you on the ride up here.

Jack Black: Thank you.

Quint: Appreciate it.

Short, but sweet.

Okay, back to Sundancing. I just interviewed Brian Cox today and I have Sam Rockwell locked and loaded tomorrow. Life ain’t too shabby.

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com