The Samuel L Jackson role Quentin Tarantino wrote for himself: “The hardest part to give up”
Most cinephiles are familiar with the notion that there are many different ways for an actor to craft a performance. Some actors simply learn their lines, show up, say them, and leave. Others adopt a method-acting approach, where they try to inhabit the character’s body and soul, often living like them and acting like them off-set. However, most people won’t know that the same thing can apply to screenwriting – and Quentin Tarantino has admitted on several occasions that he is a method writer.
In fact, he once wrote a role for himself and lived it as much as he could, eventually becoming so attached to it that he struggled to hand it over to the star he’d hired to play the part: Samuel L Jackson.
Tarantino has always been known for his incredibly unique writing. After all, before he made his directorial debut with Reservoir Dogs, he had already sold the scripts for True Romance, Natural Born Killers, and From Dusk Till Dawn. He’s also been open about his somewhat unusual writing process. For instance, in his early days, he wrote entire scripts longhand, with his friend and co-worker Roger Avary typing True Romance up for him.
Easily Tarantino’s most unusual writing quirk, though, is how he finds himself “living” as some of the characters in any script he writes. In 2003, he told Playboy magazine, “I’m a method writer. I become one or two characters when I’m writing.” He then gave the example of The Bride in Kill Bill – a character that saw him unconsciously embracing his feminine side.
“People noticed that when I was writing, I was getting much more feminine in my outlook,” revealed Tarantino. “All of a sudden I was buying things for my apartment or house…I’d buy flowers for the house and start arranging them. I don’t normally wear jewellery, and suddenly I’m wearing jewellery.” He called it “assimilating” the character, but his friends described it as “nesting, adorning yourself.”
When Tarantino was writing his 1997 blaxploitation-inspired classic Jackie Brown, the character he became was Ordell, a Kangol hat-wearing small-time gun runner eventually played by Jackson. He explained, “I walked around like Ordell that whole year. I’d leave the house as Ordell.”
Fascinatingly, though, Ordell wasn’t simply a way for the writer/director to cosplay as a smart-talking tough guy. In ’97, he told The New York Times that Ordell might have been the most personal character he’d ever written up to that point. He explained, “Ordell was all my mentors as a young man growing up. Ordell was who I could have been.”
In truth, Tarantino felt like Ordell was the version of him that didn’t have artistic ambitions as a filmmaker. He believed this fierce drive to make movies was what kept him out of trouble, and if he hadn’t had that, he may have become a criminal like Ordell. He confessed, “I wouldn’t have been a postman or worked at the phone company or been a salesman or a guy selling gold by the inch. I would have been involved with one scam after another. I would have done something that I would have gone to jail for.”
As is often the case with creative people, though, Tarantino was able to take these dark aspects of his personality and imbue them into his characters. This made the process of writing Ordell a particular joy, but it also made him an incredibly hard character to hand over to someone else.
Indeed, when Tarantino hired Jackson – an actor he’d already worked magic with on Pulp Fiction – to play the character, he knew in his head that Jackson was perfect for the part. Unfortunately, his heart struggled to accept that Ordell wasn’t his anymore, and he admitted, “I had to really work hard in letting go of Ordell, and letting Sam play him and not being a jerk about stuff.”
Ultimately, Jackson played Ordell perfectly and even landed a Golden Globe nomination for his performance. It was still slightly bittersweet for Tarantino, though, who mused, “Sam was him for 10 weeks; I was Ordell for 52 weeks.”
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