This weekend I had the good fortune to see Nancy Meyer’s latest rom-com The Holiday starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Jack Black and in an interview with Black he talked about his upcoming comedy with Michel Gondry and also about the possibility of a sequel to Nacho Libre!
First he talked about the Gondry picture, Be Kind Rewind, a film in which Black stars as Jerry, a junkyard worker who attempts to sabotage a power plant that he believes is melting his brain. But when his plan goes awry, the magnetic field that he creates accidentally erases all of the videotapes in a local video store where his best friend Mike works. Fearing that the mishap will cost Mike his job, the two friends team up to keep the store’s only loyal customer  a little old lady with a tenuous grasp on reality  from realizing what has happened by recreating and re-filming every movie that she decides to rent.
Yeah, sounds great, but Black tells us even more, “[Michel Gondry] is a very spontaneous director and super creative on every level. He designed and made these homemade props and costumes himself that were unbelieveable and a lot of the time I felt like nobody knew what was going on except for him, by design. I think he likes to create a little bit of chaos on the set and then at the last moment, focus and yell out at people and there is a crazy activity and everybody is running around and it creates a really amazing energy. It was pretty fun.”
When it came to research for the film there was virtually none, “We were under strict orders not to watch any of the movies again, not to rewatch anything, and if we had not seen it, don’t see it. Just do what you think it is based on the commercials that you had seen of the movie because he wanted it to look that way, because there was no time in the movie for us to do any research so he wanted to keep that consistent with us as actors to not have time to research the movies we were remaking.”
As for which one was the most fun he said, “Ghostbusters was pretty fun, that one we really went into. We did a little King Kong too, it was cool, and it was pretty low budget, so he makes up for it with pretty incredible tricks and stuff and depth perception camera tricks.”
Speaking on what else was on the horizon he seemed excited at the idea of a sequel to Nacho Libre, “I sure hope so, I love working with Jared [Hess]. I think it’s a good bet that we’ll collaborate on something again. Mike [White] had an idea that it would be Nacho goes to Japan, we’ll see though.”
Finally he made mention of a film that is not exactly a sure thing yet, “I am loosely signed on to something else, verbally. I don’t know if I am allowed to say… there’s talk of a Robert Altman thing. It’s a big cast and semi-improvisational.”
Stay tuned for the rest of my interview with Jack Black, and for more on The Holiday click here.
