Samuel L. Jackson Talks “Soul Men,” Bernie Mac and Why Preparation Trumps Improv

“Star Jones called and told us that Bernie passed, and then the next day Isaac passed, and folks started calling wanting to know if they should put me in a safe house somewhere. The next day is not promised to any of us.”

Soul Men [watch the trailer] has become a surreal sort of movie. It’s the story of Louis Hinds (Samuel L. Jackson) and Floyd Henderson (Bernie Mac), who were once a part of the classic soul group The Real Deal, which fell apart when their lead singer Marcus Hooks (John Legend) left them to become a massive superstar. What might’ve been a light and breezy comedy about two broken-down old soul singers on a road trip to a comeback show has become a heavier, more emotional piece of work with the loss of one of its leads, the great Bernie Mac, and then that of the legendary Isaac Hayes, who had a cameo - both of whom died on the same weekend. This leaves Samuel L. Jackson shouldering the bulk of the promotional duties for the film, and he spoke on Sunday about his friend, the singing and dancing, professionalism and the spectre of mortality.

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Were you happy with your dance steps?
Samuel L. Jackson: Yeah! In my mind, the group goes like this. When Marcus was with us, Marcus was the cute guy that the girls dug because he had that voice, and so he gets to pick the girls first. I was the guy who could dance the best, and girls like guys who could dance, so I get to pick second. Floyd was the guy who thought he should’ve been Marcus, so he was always mad because he wasn’t the lead singer, so he always had to pick third.

How’d you like the country line dancing?
SLJ: I don’t line dance unless I’m at a wedding. That’s the sort of thing that only breaks out when somebody puts on The Electric Slide or the Chop-Chop Boogie, so you don’t do it that often, but I had a great time. That’s my favorite song in the movie, when we’re doing it. Those people had no idea what was going to happen. They were hired to do it, and they were learning their little line dance, and me and Bernie showed up. They turned the music on, and when we actually started singing, they were shocked. Then when I jumped down in the middle of the crowed and started dancing with ‘em, they were totally freaked out. It was one of those great days when we just partied all day long. It was awesome.

Did you have any problems with singing on screen? Do you think you’re a good singer?
SLJ: Sam? No. Louis? He’s all right. I’ve done enough musicals in college and in theater in New York, I can carry a tune, I can learn choreography. I can sing and dance if I have to. I’m not looking for a record deal, but I can support somebody.

How do you like doing comedy?
SLJ: I like to think that a lot of my characters have a strange sense of humor. Even Abel Turner in Lakeview Terrace had a sense of humor. Warped, but a sense of humor. I enjoy doing comedy. I know when I’m doing comedy with guys who are known for doing comedy - like when I was doingThe Man with Eugene Levy or a movie like this with Bernie - I know that those guys have an affinity for doing something that I’m theoretically not part of doing, so I kinda watch ‘em and let ‘em do it. The thing you have to be very careful about when you’re doing comedy that I’ve discovered is people on the outside saying ‘we could make it funnier.’ Well, no. It’s either funny or it’s not. Especially if you got Bernie doing it, you don’t need to help him make it funnier. He’s got that. Just turn the camera on, stay out of the way, and I guarantee you that you’re gonna have something you can put in the movie.

Where were you when you heard about Bernie and Isaac’s passing?
SLJ: I was in New York, doing press for Lakeview Terrace. Star Jones called and told us that Bernie passed, and then the next day Isaac passed, and folks started calling wanting to know if they should put me in a safe house somewhere. It was one of those… surprise, but not shock. My first thought was ‘wow, Bernie didn’t see the movie. He’s not going to see it.’ But the next day is not promised to any of us. Bernie’s the kind of guy that showed up and no matter how he felt, you wouldn’t know unless you knew him. He was one of those trooper guys. ‘The show must go on.’ On those days when there was a microphone, an audience and Bernie - a marriage made in heaven. Forget it - he’s just out there doing his thing. The fact that this film is as good as it is, in my estimation, is one of those things that, when audiences see it, they’ll see the guy that they knew, loved, invited into their homes every weekend; the guy that made them laugh ’til they peed in Kings of Comedy. They’ll discover he can sing, dance and do some stuff dramatically that they’ve never seen him do. So it’s a fitting last picture to give his fans and say ‘look, this is the guy that you guys love.’ It’s his little love note.

Mortality is a theme in the film, which was made stronger given the circumstances. How did that resonate for you during the filming or afterwards?
SLJ: When we showed up at the memorial for Bernie in Chicago, I saw a lot of people that I’d worked with and a lot of people that worked with him in various places - all the Kings of Comedy guys were there. Everybody has a sense of their mortality in a very real and distinct sort of way. As you get older, you get more and more sense of it. I’ll be 60 in December. I look in the mirror and I still don’t look like I thought I’d look at 60. When I looked at my grandfather and his brothers and all those guys at 60, they didn’t look like this, but through modern technology and diet and and working out and taking care of yourself in a different way - plus my family has a pretty deep gene pool. People live until their late 80s and 90s. I’m going to be around for a while. I might not be sitting here talking to you, but I’ll be around. I think about it. If you have a different ache or pain when you get up in the morning - I used to watch my grandparents wondering ‘how can you hurt right there? Why do you grunt when you get up? Why can’t you just get up?” Now, I grunt when I get up sometimes. I get it. My knee’s a little stiffer, I get a little ache here, I sleep a certain way and I get up and go ‘damn, what’d I do?’ Things happen, but you can’t think about that. Just be glad when you do wake up the next day that there’s some light out there. Wow, get up and do the best you can with that day. Can’t worry about it.

Did you always have good chemistry with Bernie?
SLJ: I first met Bernie 15 years ago or so. He used to do the comedy night at my golf tournament in Bermuda. Somebody introduced me to him and said ‘this guy is gonna be a great comic.’ He became one of the Kings of Comedy, blew up and came out here to LA. I didn’t see him as much, but when I was in Chicago shooting The Negotiator, he took care of me. Took me around, fed me at his house, showed me Chicago, hit me in the back with a golf ball. We’d known each other for a very long time. We were good friends.

People had been trying to find a project for us to do for a long time. People threw concepts at us that we just didn’t like and finally, his manager came up with this concept of grumpy old soul men on the road to New York that just worked for us. We know these guys in a very real and honest way. We both know entertainers that used to be famous, ain’t so famous anymore and wish they were still famous, and we know guys who were famous, did some drugs and went to jail. Same kind of way as these two characters. There are guys of a certain age who have a certain relationship who grew up together. If they spent the first 25 or 30 years of their lives together, then they’re apart for 30 years, they can come right back together and it’s like they saw each other yesterday, because they know that much about each other. They were kids performing in a group. Groups break up for different reasons. Sometimes it’s money, in this case it was a woman.

Have you ever been bitten by the directing bug?
SLJ: No. Too lazy. My job is cool. I get to go to work, sit in my trailer, watch Judge Judy, they call me, I go work for ten minutes, I go back to my trailer. Those guys, they gotta stay out there, get a shot, got to talk to people about sets, they gotta go visit the next location, they gotta get a shot list, then they gotta spend the next six months in the editing room looking at little pieces of the movie and putting it together. I don’t like puzzles that much, plus I like to move onto the next thing. Directors don’t get paid anywhere near as much as we do. For a year and a half of their life? Uh-uh. No.

Are you ever completely happy with your work?
SLJ: Yeah. The majority of them. There are only a few movies that I look at and say ‘I’d like to fix that.’ There are movies when I had bad experiences shooting them. They weren’t the happiest days, but I can’t let my animosity towards the people that I’m working with cloud what I have to do on screen, or interfere with the story, because I’m there to service the story and the audience. The audience deserves the best of me they can get. There’s always plenty of time for me to say ‘fuck you’ to the people I’m working with.

You’re known for being very prepared on movie sets. Does working with people who specialize in improv make you uncomfortable?
SLJ: People who don’t do the same thing from one take to the next? It can be a little disturbing. But that’s not my problem, that’s the director’s problem. They gotta go into the editing room and try to figure out how to cut that scene where they did something else on the other side of the room together with one where we were over here. I just try to be as consistent as I possibly can. I guess I have a reputation for being sort of a hard taskmaster, but I unreasonably think that everybody that comes to work every day should be as prepared to work as I am. Sometimes that’s the case, sometimes it’s not.

They’ll say it’s about freshness and spontaneity in the moment, yeah, but it’s not about that. It’s about controlled spontaneity, which means you do what’s on the page as spontaneously as you can. You listen to what I say to you like you’ve never heard it before, and you respond to it like we’re having a conversation. You don’t make up some new shit just because you heard me say that shit before and you don’t want to say the same thing again. That’s not the answer. The editor’s going crazy, because they want consistency, too. You can’t pick up the glass three pages later, and you can’t smoke a cigarette in this scene when you didn’t smoke one in the last scene. Come on. When you rehearse, you rehearse it. This is what we’re gonna do. The camera’s gotta know where you’re gonna be, the person acting opposite you has gotta know what you’re gonna say so they know when to say their line, the lighting people need you to be in the place that you went to because that’s where the fuckin’ light is. You can’t just be that crazy when you’re working, and if that’s the case, then you need to be in another medium.

How do you feel about the people who do you, like Dave Chappelle’s Sam Jackson beer?
SLJ: I have a bottle of that beer at my house. I have no problem with that. Parody is flattery, it’s fine. There are people who go through their whole careers and nobody remembers one thing they said in a movie. I have so many things and so many people like the things that I’ve done. There are people that yell at me ‘you know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese in France!’ on the street every day. Or ‘yes, they deserved to die and I hope they burn in hell!’ Every day there’s something, and it’s fine. It’s wonderful. I’m just glad I got to say ‘may the Force be with you.’