The director who drove Kurt Russell to hallucination: “Like drug-induced insanity”
Even though it’s a pitfall countless child stars have found themselves unable to avoid, Kurt Russell didn’t struggle with alcohol or drugs when he was one of the industry’s most ubiquitous young actors. When his star continued to rise throughout the hedonistic ‘New Hollywood’ era, he was never in the headlines for the wrong reasons.
That professionalism and avoidance of the traps so many of his contemporaries fell into probably goes a long way to explaining his longevity. Russell has been working solidly for over 60 years, and he’s managed to do so without any scandals, arrests, trips to rehab, or any of the other publicised vices that have tripped up so many performers, filmmakers, and fallen stars.
He’s not a method actor either, but he did find himself in an unusual position where he was so immersed in the authenticity of a performance that he accidentally slipped into a state of hallucination. He doesn’t go method, he doesn’t do drugs, he only drinks socially, and he’s even quit smoking, but Quentin Tarantino still managed to send him on a one-way trip to psychedelia.
It sounds strange, and the circumstances reinforce it. When shooting The Hateful Eight, Tarantino intentionally kept the set of Minnie’s Haberdashery as cold as possible. Part of his reasoning was that it made him work faster if he was freezing his arse off, but another was that if the characters in his movie were supposed to be cold, then he’d ensure they were genuinely shivering.
“It was just hours upon hours in this room,” Walton Goggins recalled on Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco podcast. “Quentin had the set to a certain temperature because he didn’t want to manufacture these breaths; he wanted them to be real. He said, ‘I made the room really cold, so I would work faster,’ but he just kept wearing bigger jackets.” Actors should be used to working in conditions designed to best serve the story they’re telling, but it would appear that Russell struggled more than the rest.
“There was one moment where we would all kind of sit and huddle in a corner, and all of us would just confer in this one part of the bar,” Goggins continued. “But there was one moment one night where everyone was so tired, and Kurt was just like, I say seeing things because we all saw things being up that late, and I saw him having a conversation with a chair.”
Curious about what the dialogue would entail, he sought Samuel L Jackson’s opinion. “I said, ‘Look at him, man, what do you think he’s saying to that chair right now?’ It was like this drug-induced insanity.” Russell has never been the type to snort lines or guzzle down pills, but it turns out that he can be pushed so hard by a director that he’ll end up losing his grip on sanity and conversing with a piece of furniture.
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.