I'm a character actor and that's what I do. All the roles that I've had have been mainly support roles, because character actors don't usually get the lead in movies. It rarely happens.
Samuel L. JacksonI did play a dentist in Waiting for Guffman. I wrote the speech at the conference. In the original script, when it got to that scene, it was, 'Thank you very much. Good night.' Literally. I just thought, 'He keeps talking about this speech. The keynote address is the big thing in his life and this is too important to say, "Thank you. Good night." I think we have to see and hear him doing what he does.' So I got together with my dentist and we worked through a few things.
Samuel L. JacksonThose are the rules. To improvise in a movie with other people, when they're following a script, everybody has to know what's going on. I think a line or two we might change. Certainly, I do. But I wouldn't call it improvising. I'd call it fudging the lines.
Samuel L. JacksonThe [Oregon] Journal in its head and heart will stand for the people, be truly Democratic and free from political entanglements and machinations, believing in the principles that promise the greatest good to the greatest number-to ALL MEN, regardless of race, creed or previous condition of servitude... It will be a fair newspaper, not a dull and selfish sheet.
Samuel L. JacksonQuentin Tarantino was talking about Ordell a little bit, and I was like, "I'm sure Ordell is one of those people who thought Superfly was the greatest movie ever made." So he cuts his hair and straightens it, but he never has enough money to maintain it perfectly. So it's kind of nappy around the edges, straight and kind of puffed up. That's why he'd always keep it in a ponytail or a braid. We were just having fun and creating a distinctive character.
Samuel L. JacksonI was Gator in Jungle Fever, and Chris Rock played Pookie, and those showed two very different dynamics of what crackheads were. Mine was more about the family relationships. So when people sat there and got that, they can sit there and say, "Oh, man, that's my friend." Or "That's my brother." Or cousin or somebody. They empathize, or they had something that they could latch onto, in that particular movie, of my story, and go with it.
Samuel L. Jackson