Film Icons: Spike Lee / Samuel L. Jackson
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Today we wrap up our series Classic Films and Movie Icons with writer and director Spike Lee and with actor Samuel L. Jackson, who's appeared in several Spike Lee films, including Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Mo' Better Blues, and School Days.

We'll start with Spike Lee. His first feature was the now classic 1986 film She's Gotta Have It, which earned him a place as a central figure in independent cinema and in black cinema. Thirty-some years later, he adapted the film into an expanded 10-part series of the same name, which is still available on Netflix. That was the occasion of my most recent interview with Spike Lee, which we recorded in 2017.

The central character in She's Gotta Have It is Nola Darling, a young artist who loves sex but isn't interested in a committed relationship. She's seeing three men, each a different type, but each wants her to himself. In the 1986 original, Spike Lee played one of Nola Darling's boyfriends, the b-boy Mars Blackman, who's deep into hip-hop culture. I asked Spike Lee to describe the character.

Well, Mars Blackman is the original B-boy, the original sneakerhead. He wears a chain around his neck that says Mars. He was wearing the fresh Ed Jordans. We call them FOBs, fresh out the box. I mean, Mars is just crazy. I got the name. It's funny. I asked my grandmother. I didn't have a name for this character. And I asked my grandmother, who lived to be 100 years old. My grandmother put me through Morehouse.

And NYU and gave me the seed money for she's gonna have it not that she was rich She just saved the Social Security checks for 50 years She taught art and I was the first grandchild, but I need I said your name She said a crazy uncle named Mars said I said bang. All right, that's wasn't be his name is Mars so the only reason why I played in the film is because we didn't have any money and

to pay for an actor to play Mars. So my whole life changed after that, not just because of the film, but because two individuals, Jim Riswell and Bill Davenport at the Wyden and Kennedy Advertising Agency, their client was Nike. They saw the film and got the idea to pair my character, Mars Black, with Michael Jordan. That changed the world. So I get the impression from this that you never planned on acting? Nope.

I don't even like it, really, to tell you the truth. I don't even do it anymore. Why don't you like it? Because I'm not an actor. Okay. But Mars Blackman became so popular that people wanted me to see other stuff. So I played Half-Pinted Shorty. My best performance, if I may say, of my limited acting skills is Mookin' Do the Right Thing. I was good in that one.

So I want to play a scene with you in it from the original 1986, She's Gotta Have It. And this is a scene where it's the first time Nola invites your character, Mars, up to her apartment. And Mars is surprised at how spacious and nice it is and how much of her artwork is around. So here's the scene. Dad! Dad!

You know, Nola, it took you long enough to invite me up here. I don't let just anybody up here. Am I supposed to be anybody? You're not anyone. That's why you're here. Yeah, it took long enough. That's nice. Thank you. My birthday's May 19th. You know what that is? The 19th of May? Am I supposed to know? You're supposed to know. I'm supposed to know. Yes. Why? It was Malcolm's birthday. The 19th? Uh-huh. Of May? Mm-hmm. Yeah? Yeah. That's cool. He was down by law.

This whole place is yours, huh? Whole place. I likes, I likes. What's the rent? It's cheap. Yeah? Yeah. You know, we could put a divider right here and you'll have a roommate and me. You'll never know I'm here. You're right, I'll never know. How come every time I let a guy up here, the first thing they want to do is move in? Well, you work, you got a nice career, and you're fine. What makes you think I want somebody to take care of? I didn't say that. You know, I didn't say that. I pay my own way. And I look for no meal ticket. Hmm.

So what do you do? What's your job? I'm a layout and paste-up artist. I do mechanics for magazines. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what that is. There's something about you. About me? Uh-huh. Good or bad? I haven't figured it out yet. You'll let me know, right? You'll be the first to know. You'll let me know? You'll let me know? Yeah, sure. You'll let me know? Yeah. Good.

Spike Lee as Morris Blackman in Do the Right Thing. So your character, as we heard in that scene, repeats certain lines over and over, most famously, please, baby, please. How did you come up with that kind of repetition for your character? I can remember what the next line was. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Oh, seriously? True. I kid you not. Oh, so that's where you kept repeating it? I couldn't remember what the next line was, so I was going to keep repeating the line, I'm on. That's hilarious, because it's such a kind of quirky, funny characteristic, so it really works. Well, it's an accident.

So Brooklyn is so important in your life and in your movies and on your hats. Oh, can I just say something real quick? Yeah. It's the republic of— Okay. The republic. You know, it's so funny. The republic. I grew up in Brooklyn, and it was so— Sheepshead Bay. Did you go to high school in Brooklyn? Yes. Where? Sheepshead Bay. I went to John Dewey. Where was John Dewey?

Coney Island. Oh, I used to go to Coney Island a lot. Yeah, yeah. You went to Nathan's? Oh, absolutely. You went on a cyclone? Yeah, but not a lot. It was a little much for me. Yeah, the Wonder Wheel. The Wonder Wheel. And then all the bumper cars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So anyways, Brooklyn was not – no one was claiming that Brooklyn was kind of hip or cool or a republic that I was aware of when I was growing up. Mm-hmm.

And so it's just interesting to see what Brooklyn has come to signify. So that's quite a change. So when you were young, before you lived in Fort Greene, you lived in another neighborhood, right? Cobble Hill? Yes, Cobble Hill. The Lees were the first black family to move into Cobble Hill. Cobble Hill up that point had been historically a town American working class neighborhood. And what did your parents move there, knowing they'd be the only—

African-Americans. Oh, it was a, my mother, you know, who was running things said, you know, we need to get it. My mother always wanted a brownstone. So we rented two floors and a brownstone, Warren Street between Henry Street and Clinton Street in Cabo Hill. And then my mother said, you know, we got to buy a brownstone. So we bought our brownstone on Washington Park between Myrtle and Willoughby in 1968.

Eight for like $45,000. Back then, the realtors wouldn't even use the name Fort Greene. They would just say downtown vicinity. So when you were probably very young, when your parents moved to Cobble Hill and it was an Italian-American neighborhood, what was that like for you as a young African-American boy? Well, we got called the N-word for like two weeks. And then when it finally dawned on them they were not going to be

hundreds of black families filing leaves and the neighbors are going to go black all overnight, then we were just like any other kid. Two weeks after that, the N-word started. We were just, a lot of my friends today are these guys I grew up, you know, in Cobble Hill at a very young age, especially the Tucci's. Louie and Joe Tucci, shout out. So what was the school like? Was the school mostly white? I went to public school, PS29.

After a couple of years, you know, some Puerto Ricans moved in, into the neighborhood. But it was, I had a great, wonderful childhood. And I'm sorry. I'm glad I was a child. I mean, we forget these video games. We played street games. We weren't.

doing just sitting in front of television. We were playing stickball, stoopball, softball, two-hand touch, Johnny on the Pony, Ringo Livio, Down the Sewer. I mean, we just played. Down on the Sewer? Was that the last one? It was a top game. You know, spinning tops? Yeah. Well, the sewers had a hole in it, and the goal was to knock the other guy's top down the sewer. I mean, we were imaginative. We never played that one.

It was creative. We made up games. We played on the streets. We were running around. There was physicality. I mean, running bases. I mean, we had fun. And the summertime was the best because it wouldn't get dark till like 930. So you didn't have to come home till it got dark. So you leave the house in the morning.

And you didn't have to show up until it got dark. Oh, it was joy. And your father was an artist, a jazz musician, bass player, composer, also plays some piano. So what did you learn about what it means to be an artist and try to support a family from watching your father? Oh, well, I learned that there's nothing poetic about being a starving artist. I knew that, and I knew that...

I wanted to, as the user, one of the greatest lines from The Godfather, I wanted to wet my beak. If my films made money, I wanted to be able to get my fair share of the money that's being made for my artwork. I just knew that I just saw my father struggle. Great, great, great musician. There's nothing cute about being, you know, poor. At one time, my father was a leading musician.

Jazz bassists, jazz folk bassists played Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, that's my father on Peter Paul and Mary's, Puff the Magic Dragon, Theo Brickell, Odetta, all those things. And when Bob Dylan decided that he wanted to go electric, everybody else in the folk world did too. And so my father to this day has never played one Fender bass or one electric instrument ever before.

And up to that point, my mother didn't have to work because my father was in demand. But when he made the decision that he was not going to play electric bass, my mother had to become a teacher. And, you know, in a lot of ways, I looked at my father's integrity. But on the other hand, he had five kids. But to him, it didn't matter.

He wasn't going to play electric bass. Did you resent that? Did you want him to play electric bass so that the family would have more money? And I'm just very fortunate that I was able to use the great talents of my father. He scored all my films in NYU film school. He did the score for She's Gonna Have It. School days, a great, great, great score for Do the Right Thing, Momentum Blue. So I was...

Very happy that it came around so I was able to employ my father. What kind of music did your father introduce you to? Jazz. And you have shout-outs to jazz in the series. I mean, here's the thing, though. Growing up in my house, we had to sneak to listen to Motown and the Beatles. My father would hear that and say, turn that bad music off. It was jazz. Only music could be played out loud. When he was in the house, it was jazz.

And if it wasn't jazz, you had to turn that mess off, as he would say. Turn that mess off! Did he introduce you to Johnny Hartman, who I think I heard in the new version? Oh, yes. My father, I mean, he didn't play with him, but he knew everybody. Everybody knew him. I mean, I'll give an example. Late in his life, I did a video for Miles Davis. It was called Tutu. Oh, you did the video for Tutu. Oh, yeah. Yes. And the first thing, he said, Spike...

I know your father. I love your father's work, so I'm not going to curse you out. First of all, it would have been an honor for Miles Davis to call me MF-er. That was his favorite word. So I wish he would have called me MF-er. But he said, you know what? I know your father's ability, great musician, great composer, so I'm going to leave you alone. True story. I still think about that today. So when your family moved to Fort Greene, you were probably, what, around 10? Yeah.

Eleven. Eleven. Okay. So what was it like for you to move to a predominantly African-American neighborhood after living in Cabo Del? It was great. Fort Greene was black and Puerto Rican. It was great because we were living, we weren't renting anymore. We had a big old house right across the street from Fort Greene Park.

Did you ever take piano lessons since your father had a piano and played? Eh, for a minute. The one that was a really good pianist was my brother David. And his piano teacher was in Harlem. So since I'm the oldest, I had to drag his ass on the subway every Saturday and take him for piano lessons. Boy, did I hate doing that. Do I have to do it? Yes, you do. You're the oldest. Back in the day...

When your parents told you to do something, you had to do it. There's no negotiating, none of this stuff. You had to do it. Have you been that way as a father? Nope. I mean, nowadays, I be sent to jail. What do you mean? If you hit a kid, you go to jail. Oh, oh, oh. Did your parents hit you? Oh, yeah. I mean, it wasn't murder, but if you said something...

My mother said, I'll slap the black off you. And it was worse because like many black families in the North, when summertime came, your parents shipped your black ass down South to get a break. So you would spend the summer down South with your grandparents. And down South, they don't play. They get the switch. You know what a switch is? It was brutal because they make you choose the switch you get beat with.

And if you choose a too little switch, they'll pick their own switch with three times the length of the small one you picked. Woo, boy! What earned you getting hit with a switch? Oh, it didn't matter. They didn't like something. Go get that switch, son. It's what I do! Was that an effective form of punishment for you, or did it just really make you angry and want to rebel more?

No, no, that switch hurt. Woo, Lord. And it would be so hot, and there was no air conditioning, and those mosquitoes would eat you alive. Oh, my God. And then the area made fun of us because we talked different, and we couldn't understand what people were saying. I remember one summer we came down south with afros because afros took a while. Everything takes a while to get down south. Yeah.

And when they saw us with Afro, they looked at us like we were three-headed Martians. Were there things you were told you couldn't do in Alabama because of racism? Was the line different than it was in Brooklyn? See, there weren't any white people in snow in Alabama. So it was not like we were in Selma or Montgomery or Birmingham. We went snow. We were in the sticks. So we rarely ever saw white folks when we went down south.

So people might call me Mr. Brooklyn, but my parents are from the South. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia. Spent many summers there and also went to college in Atlanta. In Morehouse. Yeah, my father went to Morehouse. My grandfather went to Morehouse. And my mother and grandmother went to Spelman. These are two historic black schools. They're across the street from each other. In fact, my grandmother lived to be 100 years old. I know I said that before. I mean, redundant. But her grandmother was a slave. Yet she had a college degree.

So I come from a long line of educated black folks. Were your parents always stressing the importance of education when you were growing up? Yes, educators. Educators. So what did they do to make sure that you got a good education? Well, the best thing my parents did, not just for me, but my siblings, they exposed us to so much stuff. And it paid off. My mother was dragging me down.

The Broadway plays, all Broadway plays, museums. Man, I didn't want to go to that stuff. I wanted to run them down the streets. But every time my mother would take me and my siblings, I mean, she was dragging us while we were screaming. But every time we came home on the subway, we would say, you know what, that was good. What's one of the shows that you saw that you really loved? Oh, one thing was memorable. My mother took me to see Bye Bye Birdie.

At Radio City Music Hall Easter show. So this is the movie. The movie. And the reason why the opening credit sequence of Do the Right Thing with Rosie Perez is dancing, that came from Ann-Margaret dancing in the beginning of Bye Bye Birdie. Oh, that's great. But here's the thing. My mother was, so my love of cinema came from my mother. My father hated movies. And so since I was the oldest, I was my mother's movie date.

My mother's the one who introduced me to Martin Scorsese. She took me to see Mean Streets when that film came out. What impact did that have on you? I said, Mom, this movie's crazy. If somebody could Google what year Mean Streets came out, I was definitely underage to see that film. And I've told Martin Scorsese that story many times, and he laughs.

Spike Lee, it's been great to talk with you. Thank you so much. Well, thank you so much. And again, I'm a fan. Oh, thank you. And it's been a minute, so let's do it every time I have a project, all right? Let's do it again. Absolutely. My interview with Spike Lee was recorded in 2017. Coming up, we conclude our series, Classic Films and Movie Icons, with actor Samuel L. Jackson, who's been in several of Spike Lee's movies. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.

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That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y dot com slash podcast. Easier said, done. This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Oh, I'm sorry. Did I break your concentration? I didn't mean to do that. Please, continue.

Okay, it's easy for Samuel L. Jackson to capture your attention. It's not just the gun that gets you, it's his charisma. We just heard a clip from the Quentin Tarantino film, Pulp Fiction. Jackson has been in several other Tarantino films, including Jackie Brown and Django Unchained. He's made big-budget action films as well as low-budget independent films. He's been in several Spike Lee movies, including Jungle Fever, for which he was given a special award at the Cannes Film Festival.

I spoke with Samuel L. Jackson in 2000. Well, I love the way you speak and the way you do your lines in film, so I thought I would play one of your great monologues. This is a scene from Pulp Fiction where you and John Travolta played hitmen, and toward the end of the movie, at the very end, well, toward the very end, you have a religious awakening because you believe that only the intervention of God could explain why you weren't killed in the shootout.

So at the very end, you're at a diner with John Travolta when two crazy people pull out their guns and demand that everyone hand over their money. So you get the gun away from the guy and quote the passage from the Bible to him that you used to quote before killing somebody. So let's play that scene. This is Samuel L. Jackson. You read the Bible, Ringo? Not regularly, no. Well, there's this passage I got memorized. Ezekiel 25, 17 says,

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and goodwill shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.

I've been saying that s*** for years. And if you heard it, that meant your ass. I never gave much thought to what it meant. I just thought it was some cold-blooded s*** to say to a mother****** before I popped a cap in his ass. I saw some s*** this morning made me think twice. See, now I'm thinking, maybe it means you're the evil man and I'm the righteous man. And Mr. Nine Millimeter here, he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the Valley of Darkness. Or it could mean

You're the righteous man, and I'm the shepherd. And it's the world that's evil and selfish. Now, I'd like that, but that ain't the truth. The truth is, you're the weak, and I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm trying, Ringo. I'm trying real hard to be the shepherd.

That is such a great scene. And you have such an interesting contrast there between the Bible reading and then all the slangy stuff that you're saying. Can you talk a little bit about your line readings there of the Bible and of the more colloquial lines as well? I don't know if you actually kind of decide in advance where you're going to breathe and which words you're going to emphasize or whether you just kind of do it in a more improvisational way. Well,

I do a lot of things. I break down scripts into beats, dramatic beats, in the context of a scene. What one particular thing is trying to do, what the next thing is trying to do, and what explains what and why, which leads me to...

things that have to be together that don't have a breath and things that can be breathed between. Uh, it's not a science, but it's, it's just good old fashioned theater training where you learn to understand the purpose of each particular scene and what a sentence does in terms of moving that scene along or defining what came before it or what's, excuse me, what's going to come after it. Um,

And doing something textual, like a Bible verse, you want to do it as straight as you possibly can to make sure that the quotation marks are there. And after that, the explanation of what it may mean in this way or it may mean in that way until you get to the definitive moment of what it really means is, which is the most serious element of it, you know, but the truth is, you know.

You're the weak, and I'm the tyranny of evil men, which is like the, oh, my God, is he going to kill him? You have to have that suspense right there in that moment. And then, you know, he shows that he's kind of been redeemed by letting him go. But you just build tension by doing those things. It's kind of hard to explain, even in a, I guess—

I was actually talking to somebody yesterday who told me they had taken a film class last year, and all they studied was Pulp Fiction. And for the last two weeks, they tried to break down the diner scene. I don't know how you could dissect that movie in one particular way because it's just impossible to do. Well, one of the things you do so effectively is use pauses. Well, yeah. Quentin's one of the few guys on screen that allows you to do stuff like that because I was actually passing by Jackie Brown the other day.

Passing by a screening of Jackie Brown? Uh-huh. Huh? Passing by a screening of Jackie Brown? No, I was passing by it on television. Oh, oh, oh. Channel surfing. Okay. And Jackie Brown was on television. And, um...

I was at the scene in the van with De Niro when we discovered the money has been gone and I see there's a number of books in there and I stopped to think about what happened. When we were doing that scene, I would look in the bag, think for a second, and then say, it's Jackie Brown. But Quentin would say, no, take your time.

And I do it again. I count to like five. And he said, no, no, no. I mean, you know, go through the whole thing and think about, you know, how these books got here, what was going on in that place, and realize it's Jackie Brown. Take as much time as you want, which consequently led me to that almost, you know, 20-second pause in that film that he left in it. And I just think that's amazing that, you know, he trusts Jackie.

The fact that an audience is going to stay with you and start going through the process with you that long, because a lot of times people don't want dead air in a film like that, especially a thought process. They want to, you know, feed the audience the idea, feed the audience the answer really quick before they get, you know, before they lose their concentration. But Quentin trusts audiences like I do.

We're listening to the interview I recorded with Samuel L. Jackson in 2000. We'll hear more of it as we conclude our series Classic Films and Movie Icons. This is Fresh Air. This message comes from Apple Card. If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It comes with the privacy and security you expect from Apple. Plus, you earn up to 3% daily cash back on every purchase, which can automatically earn interest when you open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card.

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Call, click Grainger.com or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. Now that you're a movie star, you have to use a gun a lot in your films. You were very briefly a security guard when you were a lot younger. I'm wondering two things. One, did you have a gun? And two, were you in any real life action scenes and were you able to use the kind of bravado that you can use in movies? Did you ever try that in real life?

Well, I didn't have a gun when I was a security guard. I just had a nightstick, which I really didn't want either because I didn't want to pose a threat to anyone. I was out there. As I told them, I was a reporter. If I saw something happening, I would call them on a walkie talkie and tell them it was happening or probably would wait until it was over and then tell them what had happened because I didn't want to walk up on anybody doing anything. It was just a security job. Yeah.

I don't try and be the characters that I am on screen in real life because I'm not that person. Yeah, I will defend my house and my family and my friends in specific kinds of ways, and I've been in confrontations with people because of that. But I don't walk around looking for trouble or...

I will walk away from trouble before I'll stand up and let something escalate to that point the way it does in movies. Life's a little bit too volatile and people are a little too crazy out here now. And I guess...

I used to wonder why Bruce and Sylvester and guys like that had bodyguards. But they had bodyguards because people watched them in movies being tough guys, and sometimes a drunk or some guy somewhere out of his mind wants to find out if they really are John McClane or if they're Rocky, and they want to test themselves in that specific way. So you have somebody else to diffuse that situation. Hopefully I won't have to be bothered with any of that.

Now, something happened to you in real life that a stuntman might have done if it was a movie. This happened in 1988. You were standing on, I guess you were entering a train in New York City. I was getting off, actually. You were getting off, and your leg got caught in the closing door? Yeah, my ankle was, the door closed on my ankle, and the train took off, yeah.

So you were dragged across the platform? The length of the platform. I was in the middle door of the last car and was dragged to within a car length and a half of the tunnel.

What went through your mind as you were getting...

I was trying to find some way to figure out how I could grab hold of something on the train and get as close to the train as I possibly could as the wall approached swiftly. And then, you know, it was kind of like, okay, this is it. I'm not going to make it. And I just kind of...

Just kind of started thinking about how sad it was going to be, you know, who was going to call my house and tell them what had happened or whatever. And my life never flashed before my eyes, so I guess I should have known I wasn't going to die, as people always tell you. Oh, your life flashes before your eyes. Well, none of that happened. But I was actually thinking of ways to survive. So the train stopped in the nick of time. Yes, someone pulled the emergency cord.

And you won a lawsuit in 1996. You won about a half a million dollars. Yeah. Were you hurt? Yeah. I had to have my right knee surgically repaired. I mean, it tore all the ligaments in my right knee. I had a complete ACL tear, partial tear of the meniscus, all kinds of cartilage damage. So they had to do a lot of work to fix my knee. I was on crutches for 10 months and went to rehab for like a year and a half. Wow. Wow.

Now, is there anything that you remember from that experience that you've been able to draw on in a movie? Like what real terror is, what real fear is that you are about to die? Well, no, I don't get that much thought because I never felt terrorized, actually.

It was a very calming kind of slow motion kind of thing. It's almost like people describing car accidents where everything kind of goes very slowly until, you know, it's over and then boom, everything comes back to real life. So I never had that element of terror. I've had, you know, some fearful moments in my life, you know, being in a car or...

Geez, being on a plane, I guess maybe when a plane drops enormously while you're riding hits an air pocket or being disturbed in a storm like that. But I don't terrorize very easily. When I hear more about your life, you were born in 1949 in Washington, D.C. Your parents divorced when you were how old?

Um, geez, I don't know. Maybe some months, maybe less than a year old. Oh, okay. And then you went to live with your grandparents in Chattanooga where your mother eventually joined you. What was it like moving from the north to the south or were you too young to notice the difference? I never even noticed. I was already there when I woke up and realized I was in the south. Right, right, right. I was an infant, so I don't know. Were your parents, grandparents or your mother strict with you?

Yeah, everybody was. I had a lot of restrictions. I had to be at home at a certain time. I had to make certain grades. I had to treat people with respect. I was expected to achieve certain things, and I was a lot more afraid of them than I was of the peer pressure. So I kind of did what they wanted me to do and not what everybody else wanted me to do.

When you say you were afraid of your grandparents and your mother, was that fear of their disapproval or was there a more physical kind of punishment? I didn't want to embarrass or disappoint them. And I actually grew up in the age of corporal punishment. There's something about getting, you know, hit with switches or whatever that kind of makes, you know, pain a motivator, especially when you're small. Yeah.

The interesting thing about that is people always say, you know, corporal punishment is bad or it's not good or whatever. For every spanking I got, there was a hug that came along with it that explained to me, you know, how much they loved me and they were sorry they had to do that. But sometimes discipline comes in that form. I would much rather have been whipped and gotten it over with than go through some of those punishment phases, you know, where you can't go here, you can't use a phone for a month, you can't, you know, when you're restricted. It's a lot easier to just do it and get it over with.

Now, I think I've made it clear that I love the way you speak. Did your family ever, like, try to correct your enunciation? Or did you ever have a teacher who gave you a sense of diction? Or is that something that you just had? Or maybe you got it in the theater? Maybe you were just that way? My aunt was a schoolteacher. She taught fourth grade basically English and performing arts. So when I was very small...

A lot of things were ingrained into me, especially, you know, grammatic things. Learning how to conjugate. We all listen to television. We listen to people talk and we kind of go, oh, my God.

I know I do. Maybe we all don't, but I do sometimes. Or, you know, when people say, well, that's what he should have did. No, no, no. It's very simple. It's very simple. You know, so I was taught at a very early age how to speak, how to conjugate. And I guess learning the diagram sentences in that particular era was difficult.

great way of teaching people grammar. I don't even know if they still do it. I mean, my daughter couldn't do it when I was asking her about, you know, sentence structures. She's like, what are you talking about? So I don't know if it's even still taught. But yeah, English was a very huge part of my school training. When you were growing up in Tennessee, did you see movies in segregated theaters?

Yeah. We had two theaters, the Liberty and the Grand, that were maybe a block from each other, where we went to the movies. We weren't allowed to go downtown to the theater, so I didn't even bother. I just always was going to my theaters. It was fine. Were there movies you couldn't see because they didn't come to the black theaters?

No, there were movies that were edited in specific ways for the whole South. I mean, they didn't just not show them in the black community. They didn't show them that, that way in the white communities either. Um, what is that? Uh, drums of the South with Sidney Poitier and Rhonda Fleming, when he was this slave who goes to the North and comes back as a union officer, that was a point in that movie where he slaps her because she's like passing for white. And that was a point in the movie where he slaps her. They,

They didn't show that at the white theater, and they definitely didn't show it at the black theater because they just weren't going to show black people hitting white people in the movies. We're listening to the interview I recorded with Samuel Jackson in 2000. We'll hear more of it after a break. This is Fresh Air.

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Support for this podcast comes from the Neubauer Family Foundation, supporting WHYY's Fresh Air and its commitment to sharing ideas and encouraging meaningful conversation. Let's get back to the interview I recorded with Samuel L. Jackson as we conclude our series, Classic Films and Movie Icons.

When I spoke with him in 2000, Jackson talked about his obsessive personality, which didn't help when he began to develop a heavy cocaine habit in the 1980s, a habit he was able to kick after going to rehab. It's easy for me to understand who I am or to...

To know what the message was people were trying to get to me when I got to rehab about me and understanding my personality. I mean, all the men in my family basically have died from alcoholism or some form of it.

And that means that, yeah, it is a family disease and I could possibly have that. And I probably did because like all of them, if I bought a six pack of beer, I drank six beers. I didn't drink one and put the other five up. I drank all six of them. I never, you know, saved anything for the next day. That's my personality. Do you think that that obsessive quality, you know, of like you have one, then you have six,

Also has a positive side through your acting. I mean, are you obsessive about learning parts and, you know, learning them and doing the line readings just the way you want to do them? Yeah, I'm as aggressive about my job and golf as I was about, you know, getting high and having the kind of fun that I used to have.

I'm having a lot more fun now because I can remember what fun I had. And I can talk to people about it. And nobody's calling me to say, do you really feel that way about me? What? What are you talking about? So it's better. When I used to wonder how I would live without that.

It was mind-boggling to me. Will I be as much fun? Will I be able to laugh? Will I even be able to act? All those questions got answered, and I'm enjoying my life a lot more. And the interesting thing for me is I was a fine actor, I was a good actor, and I could do things when I was using things.

But when I stopped using, I became a much better actor and a lot more successful actor. I don't think that if I went back to using, I would be as successful or everything I have now would find a way to go away because that's not what God intended for me or what my public wants from me in terms of what I give them when they come to see me work.

My guest is Samuel Jackson. Let's listen to a clip from the 1991 film Jungle Fever, in which Jackson played a crack addict named Gator. He's pleading for money from his family, money they don't want to give him because they know how he'll use it. Here he is trying to wear them down. Look at here. I'm a little light. Help me.

What, you didn't get your check from Soul Train yet? You know, Don lost my address. Come on, hit me. Some cash in my hand.

Now, you had a special award at the Cannes Film Festival for your performance in Jungle Fever, in which you played a crack addict. Having been a cocaine user, were there things that you felt you really understood firsthand about someone who uses drugs that you could use in that role? Oh, definitely. I understood that it was easy to play the effects of being high.

and just do that on the surface of what's going on with Gator. But I also knew that the family dynamic and how people ruin their relationships with people in their drug use was the important element of doing that particular role of alienating everybody around him to the point where when he dies, everybody kind of understands it and knows what his father did

was going through and how he just collapsed every bridge that he had to humanity by doing that because we all did it. Were you close to doing that or just burning a lot of bridges? Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, I had used up everybody's friendship when I said, you know, oh, man, I broke so-and-so and so-and-so and I need some money to do this. People knew that, okay, he's going to buy some drugs with that.

Or I had alienated everybody in my house, you know, was scared to talk to me. The few friends that I knew or the few friends I used with, we were all kind of looking at each other strange, too, because we were using each other. So it's a it was really important to me to show that this guy was.

He used his connections to people to use them, to abuse those friendships, so that in the end he was alone. So by the time he died, his death meant something to the people around him. It was not so much a tragedy as a relief. And a lot of people that I met or ran into after seeing that film, you know, described Gator as their brother, their husband, their sons,

somebody close to them, any family member, because they've all been abused that way. You're kind of a sex symbol now. No kidding. And I'm wondering if, like, you see your own body in a different way, you know, now that so many people, like, would desire you. Do you know what I mean? Now that there's so many people who are, you know, imagining you. I don't have to keep going, do I? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me. So do you see yourself differently?

Um, no. I see myself as the same guy I always was. Do you ever sit home alone and bored for a few minutes thinking, well, I may be bored now, but I know a lot of people are probably really thinking about me? No. But, you know, to be honest, I actually do some days walk the street and I wonder how many people are going to recognize me today.

Or I walk through crowds of people sometimes to see who will notice that I walk through that crowd. I do that. I mean, I'm not, you know, crazy enough to think that people aren't going to notice me. Or I'm not so confident or bored by the attention or bothered by the attention sometimes that I try to avoid it. Sometimes I'm like, you know, just walking around just trying to see what will happen if somebody sees me.

My interview with Samuel Jackson was recorded in 2000, and that concludes our archive series, Classic Films and Movie Icons.

Tomorrow, we're back to new interviews. If Kamala Harris wins the election, she'll be our second biracial president. What it means to be biracial, the meaning of race itself and how that keeps changing, is the theme of the novels and the memoir by tomorrow's guest, Danzi Sena. Her mother is white and comes from an eminent Boston family. Her father is black and grew up in an orphanage in Alabama.

Danzi Sena was born in 1968, a year after the Supreme Court overturned all the state laws that outlawed interracial marriage. Her new novel is called Colored Television. I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. ♪

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Louise Boldenado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Leah Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Joel Wolfram. Special thanks to NPR Plus producer Nick Anderson. Our digital media producers are Molly C.V. Nesper and Sabrina Seaworth.

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That's why, with a dedicated Merrill advisor, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward. Go to ml.com slash bullish to learn more. Merrill, a Bank of America company. What would you like the power to do? Investing involves risk. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated, registered broker-dealer, registered investment advisor, member SIPC.