| By Fred Topel
In Theaters February 17
|
Samuel L. Jackson is so versatile that it would be hard to think of a type of role he has not yet played. So I won’t try. Why should I if he’s not? He knows that Freedomland’s Lorenzo Council is somewhat familiar to him, so he drew on some of the personal elements to which he related in playing him. Council’s beat includes housing projects in New Jersey where a child kidnapping fuels racial tensions.
“Movies fall into certain categories and so if it's a crime drama and I've done enough of those guys you are either the good guy or the bad guy,” Jackson said. “I've consequently played a lot of different cops from a lot of different kinds of law enforcement agencies. Having a cop like Lorenzo who is a twenty year vet who has a very real connection to this housing project. To my mind, or in my backstory he grew up in those projects and so he knows all of those people and has been in their houses and grown up with some of their kids. He's arrested some of them and kept some of them from going to jail. So he has that very real connection and he has a real connection to his job because he's been on it for years. And all of a sudden he's put into this position where they are asking him that question, 'Are you going to be black or blue?' People over here at putting pressure on him, and the people over there are putting pressure on him, and he discovers this person on the inside of it that's a real victim that he has to handle in a very specific kind of way to get to the truth of what's going on. In prior derivations of the script Lorenzo didn't have all of those things to do. So all of a sudden it seemed like a very sort of appealing challenge for me the actor to kind of get into.”
Though author Richard Price adapted his own book into the screenplay for Freedomland, Jackson drew less on the author’s work than on the real life cop who advised the film. “I read that book like six years ago and I kind of forgot about it. I read the book the first time that the script came around. It was a lot more helpful to actually have Calvin, the cop who was kind of like my template to call upon. He was actually the technical advisor on Shaft. This time I got to go to Jersey City with him and hang around and watch him interact with other cops and people in the community, people in the projects, and see what it means to be what he is. He is kind of like that guy. People call him Big Daddy and he's like this larger than life hero to a lot of people.”
When the tensions culminate, the ensuing violence resembles scenes we still remember from recent history. Jackson couldn’t help but recall the futility of the L.A. riots as the film crew staged a scene where the residents riot on their own neighborhood. “That's one of those kinds of things when the riots happened in L.A. they didn't go to Beverly Hills to trash Rodeo Drive. They trashed their own neighborhoods. It's one of those tragedies that we always see in riot situations where the only thing that they can lash out against is the stuff that's right there in their own communities. Even though they think that there are businesses that are white owned or whatever, it's still things that help them survive in that particular community that they destroy. They don't go out and destroy other stuff. They destroy what's closest to them like I said to the kid. 'That's your fridge that's going in you house at some point and you're standing there trying to burn it up?' So there is a level of futility there, and you're looking at kids with pretty dead eyes.”
Filming the sequence was less tense and more technical, as extras had to be taught to mime their screams, since the lead actors had to perform a clean soundtrack. “A lot of extras weren't actors, but people that lived in the projects. So it's like, 'We're going to pretend that we're fighting. Alright?' And a lot of times the guys were yelling, 'You people have to mime.' So when you're standing there going like this, and they were kind of like, 'Do what?' because we had dialogue to do over it and you end up going back into the studio and doing it anyway, but it was an interesting kind of scenario.”
We see Jackson in three or four movies a year, be they social dramas, sci-fi epics or action comedies. He just likes to keep working. “I like my job. I'm an actor and I always think that actors should act. You go to work as often as you possibly can. If I had my way I would do film, television, theater, whatever. It just so happens that my agents and managers seem to think that I should continue to do film and that's just a finite time that you have to do this. Eventually the phone stops ringing and the next new guy comes along in some way. Hopefully I'll be like Michael Caine and I'll find roles that will fit what I can do in my age range and I'll still be able to do them. I actually grew up though in a house full of people who went to work everyday. So when I was a kid someone in my house was going to work everyday and I think that's what adults do. Adults go to work, and I happen to have a very kind of cool job. I can actually go to work and go back to bed and no one cares. I have a bed in my dressing room. 'Where's Sam?' 'He's asleep.' 'Oh, that's great.'”
After more than 30 years of steady work, Jackson finally got immortalized in cement at the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Though he never courted awards or such recognition, the hand and footprint ceremony was a childhood dream. “You saw the kind of people who were putting their hands and feet in cement that represented specifically what Hollywood was and the largeness of your popularity and the kind of people that represent Hollywood stardom. It's a more elite kind of club than I think the Academy Award club is. It gave me a great sense of pride and sort of a speechlessness to know that there was I was doing something that I watched James Cagney and people that are Hollywood icons do. It kind of makes you admit to yourself, 'Okay, maybe I am a movie star.' I was just kind of awed by the whole sort of process because you're there and putting your hands down and you can see the names of other people in front of you and around as you're doing it. It's kind of like, 'Man, I'm getting ready to be with all of these people.' You put your name in it and you stand up and put your feet in it and you're still standing there looking at all the other hands around you, and you know that there are only like 230 people there, and even more interesting than that I think that I'm like the seventh African American to do it. So it's pretty important to me.”
Freedomland opens February 17. |
