The role Jack Black didn’t need any convincing to take: “He could’ve presented me with a turd on a stick”
Have you ever wanted a job so badly that you’d have taken any role offered to you – no matter how small or non-glamorous? Well, that’s precisely how Jack Black felt about working on one of his most beloved movies. You see, he was such a megafan of the director that – as he so eloquently put it: “He could’ve presented me with a turd on a stick, and I would have said, ‘Let’s make that into a movie!'”
Back in 2007, Black had established himself as one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising comedy stars with movies like Shallow Hal, The Holiday, and his magnum opus School of Rock. He’d also shown a willingness to explore more dramatic territory in Peter Jackson’s King Kong and embraced the absurd in Jared Hess’ Mexican wrestling tale Nacho Libre. Add to that his status as the world’s premier comedy rock star in Tenacious D, and it was obvious the portly funnyman had a full plate.
Despite being so busy during this period, though, Black still found the time to meet with maverick French director Michel Gondry a couple of times. Gondry had broken into mainstream Hollywood with 2004’s incredible Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a quirky sci-fi romance starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, and Black liked what he saw. He revealed to Movies: “I wanted to tell him how big a fan I was and that I really wanted to work with him on something.”
Eventually, Black revealed: “He called me and said he had an idea for a movie. I went over to his hotel, and he had made a homemade comic book with crayon drawings of the characters and the video store, and he had written a few lines of dialogue and the basic story.” Gondry’s idea saw two video store employees forced to get creative when all the tapes in their shop were erased. They decided to record their own homemade versions of each movie—and hilarity ensued.
Naturally, Black was charmed by the idea, and by Gondry’s unique childlike creativity. He said: “It looked like really good fun. So I did not have a script – I just said yes to his comic book! No one had ever presented a movie to me like that before, it was very original.” Black then gave his colourfully gross admission that Gondry “could’ve presented me with a turd on a stick, and I would have said ‘Let’s make that into a movie,’ because I am such an admirer of his work.”
Black actually saw an important theme underpinning Gondry’s idea for what would become 2008’s Be Kind Rewind. He mused, “For me, this is just a celebration of creativity. If it is saying something about the industry, it’s that anyone can make a movie.”
“Even though movies seem brilliant often when you watch them,” Black explained, “It’s not impossible to make them yourself. You think, ‘It’s too late for me to make movies, or I can’t do that, I don’t have the money.’ But you can make films for almost no budget, and anyone can do it anywhere in the world. Anyone, anywhere, anytime.”
In many ways, this puts Be Kind Rewind at least a decade ahead of its time – because these days, technology has totally democratised filmmaking. Thanks to iPhone cameras and cheap computer editing equipment, anyone truly can be a filmmaker – and that can only be a boon for the movie industry.
