When Samuel L. Jackson speaks his words rage like a river. You don’t interview
him, you listen to him. You can submerge an idea for him to flow around, and
you can nudge him this way and that. You can build the odd flimsy dam, but
mainly you have to sit back and soak.
“I grew up in the segregated South,” he tells me, leaning forward on the sofa,
nostrils flaring. “Fact. There were ‘whites only’ signs and all this other
stuff. And people said to me: ‘You know, you live in America. If you study
hard, you can be anything you want to be. You could grow up to be president!’
“And that’s just bulls***. Because I can’t. The president is a ‘whites only’
job. I can’t do that.”
He is saying this a few weeks before the US election, obviously. We’re in the
middle of those few curious days during which John McCain and Sarah Palin
are suddenly resurgent in the polls, and Jackson is spewing forth torrents
of righteous indignation. It’s powerful stuff, even if it ultimately turns
out to be dead wrong. The day after Barack Obama’s election the actor will
be sounding suitably astonished. “That’s something I never thought I’d see
in my lifetime,” he will tell Jay Leno on The Tonight Show.
Back in September, though, we’re in a hotel room in London to talk about his
latest film, Lakeview Terrace. It is the end of a full day of
interviews and Team Jackson is jet lagged. One young male assistant sleeps
under a nearby desk, and a woman nods on a chair behind. Their boss is
wide-eyed and wired and has just been told that he isn’t getting his lunch
yet. His big, shiny, bald head reflects the light above, and he leans back
expansively on a sofa, owning the room with his fury. It’s a friendly sort
of fury, though. That’s Sam’s thing.
Lakeview Terrace is a taut, timely, upsetting little thriller. A young
inter-racially married couple (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) moves in
next door to a policeman, and he hates them. In tone and pace, the film
(directed by Neil LaBute) reminded me of Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear,
but it’s also an examination of race and racism, and the way that the latter
has changed.
Jackson plays the policeman, Abel Turner. His dislike of his new neighbours
isn’t based on race alone (it doesn’t help that they have housewarming sex
in their swimming pool while his children watch through the blinds) but the
race aspect is there, and he indulges it. Much of the drama happens in his
eyes, as he stares down Wilson’s tortured white liberal and challenges him
to cry bigot. Turner is the white man’s nightmare, and it’s a role that
Jackson seems to relish just a little bit too much for comfort.
“What did I draw on?” he says. “I drew on cops in my life who are like Abel. I
have been pulled over legitimately because I was doing something wrong, and
I been pulled over because I was black in the wrong place and my car was too
nice. I have been pulled over in Mississippi; that was frightening. But the
guy was like, ‘Hey Mr Jackson, sorry’.
“I have been pulled out and spread out in the middle of the street and laid
face down. Even in LA. Cops looking at me going: ‘You look familiar.’ And
you just gotta say ‘Oh, OK’. Because you don't know if he’s talking about a
wanted poster that he saw today or he actually saw a movie of mine and can’t
quite put that together. I’ve had guns pulled on me. Of course I have. It’s
America. People pull guns on you in America. So you use all that.”
If the film has a flaw it is that Turner’s racism is excused, almost, via the
plot. Even Jackson points out that Turner is a cop first and foremost
(“Being blue is more important to him than being black”), and that he seems
to have no trouble with some other neighbours who are Hispanic.
“Cinematically it is unfamiliar,” Jackson says. “That kind of insidious,
honest, stalker-type racism we don’t often see on screen from black people.
Maybe because, most times, they aren’t in a position of power.”
Jackson was born in Washington DC in 1948 and grew up in Tennessee. “As a
child I was told that I had to be three times smarter and three times better
than the person who’s holding me down.” At Riverside High in Chattanooga,
Tennessee, and then at Moorehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, he wanted to
be a marine biologist. He took a speaking class for an extra college credit
and ended up with a role in The Threepenny Opera. “It was the first
time I found something that made me want to get up every day and go to
class. I heard my first applause and all this other stuff and it was like .
. . wow.”
By the mid1970s the stage had called him to New York. “There was this huge
wellspring of black playwrights,” he says. “Charles Fuller and August Wilson
were writing plays, Pulitzer prize-winning plays. Black playwrights. And I
was doing them. There was that whole community, with Morgan [Freeman] and
Denzel [Washington] and Alfre Woodard, just so many people. Laurence
Fishburne was a child, but he was working, and then Spike Lee came in and
started doing films, and all these things started to happen.”
More than anything, Jackson recalls, the theatre suddenly felt like a viable
career for a black man. More viable, he says, than just seeing Sidney
Poitier occasionally on screen; more viable, even, than Blaxploitation
films. Theatre in New York was there, and lasting. “We were learning,” he
says. “We were becoming very crafty actors. So when people started to leave,
they were good.”
Morgan Freeman was one of the first to go, appearing in Street Smart
(1987) with Christopher Reeve. “You saw Christopher marvelling at this guy,”
Jackson says, not quite saying, but implying, that Freeman blew Reeve off
the screen. “ ‘Who is this guy? And what do I do?’ ” If
Jackson’s Hollywood career was slower to take off than those of his peers
this was probably down to crack. His big break happened in 1991, when he
cleaned up and, paradoxically, played the crack addict Gator in Jungle
Fever “after I had smoked enough crack to do all the research. And then
I won the New York Film Critics’ Award and suddenly Hollywood’s going,
‘Who’s that?’ And I get invited to lunch.”
Initially, Jackson thinks, producers just wanted to check that this guy who
had played such an eerily convincing crack addict wasn’t just a crack addict
who had been given some crack. After that, he remembers lunch with Harrison
Ford, when Ford had cast approval for Patriot Games (1992). “So I
know,” he says, “that if I don’t get the job it’s because Harrison Ford
doesn’t like the way I use my fork.”
At first, he says, all the roles he was offered “had Denzel or Fish’s
finger-prints all over them”. Today, Jackson is probably the world’s
highest-grossing screen actor, in that his films have taken in more money
than anyone else’s. More than anything else, this is a testament to the
sheer volume of his work. The Internet Movie Database puts him in more than
100 films. Some might be small roles, but he’s there in Coming to
America (1998), GoodFellas (1990) and Jurassic Park (1993).
In Die Hard 3 (1995), True Romance (1993) and The Phantom
Menace (1999).
So he has certainly worked three times harder. As to whether he has been three
times better, that is another matter. It could just be that one gets lost in
the oceanic depths of his oeuvre, but it is hard to look back at his career
and see his own equivalent of Malcolm X (Washington) or his Amistad
(Freeman). There have been supporting roles in the odd race-issue drama,
but for somebody so furiously political his best work is remarkably light on
message. Even in Pulp Fiction, the source of his Oscar nomination, he
plays a white man’s vision of a black man.
This could be why his role in Lakeview Terrace makes for such an
arresting performance. This is the inner angry Jackson we never get to see.
Has he finally got serious? “You can’t think like that,” he says. “I mean, I
know actors who read scripts, and they only want to do an Academy Award. But
any agent presents it to you like that, you gotta laugh. I don’t expect this
film to change the world. I do expect people to sit there, and feel kinda
creepy, and question their values in a specific way.”
And is that important to him? He shrugs. “That’s just this film. I mean, I
didn’t do Snakes on a Plane to engender a conversation, you
know?”
Lakeview Terrace is released on Dec 5 2008
