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Don’t get Samuel Jackson ‘Twisted’

by Kam Williams

After an admittedly rocky start in life, Samuel L. Jackson has gone on to enjoy a very celebrated movie career. In addition to his Academy Award nomination for his role in Pulp Fiction in 1995, the hard-working actor has acted in over 70 feature films since his career began in 1972.
His big break came in 1991 as ‘Gator’ in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever; since then, some of his memorable films include A Time to Kill (1995), Eve's Bayou (1997), Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), Shaft (2000), and his current release, Twisted.
Jackson already has new films in production including Country of My Skull, Coach Carter, Kill Bill 2, and The Incredibles. No stranger to controversy and known for freely speaking his mind, here, he shares his thoughts on his latest endeavor and on South Africa, where he shot his upcoming film.

In Twisted, you play a police commissioner who lets a cop continue to handle a case where all the victims are men she has slept with. Do you think that would be allowed in real life?
I guess if somebody is that close to a case, or they tend to have a relationship with every victim, I wouldn’t think you would leave them on the case that long. But that was the convention of this story, so I guess they ran with it.

Where did you find your motivation as to how Commissioner Mills should be played?
I was trying to figure out why my character would end up doing what he did. And because nobody could give me any clear reasons, and everybody was kind of shying away from it, I just said, ‘If she was doing all the things that she was doing, then why couldn’t my character be in love with her, too.' Because of the times, and being in San Francisco, it’s free love, people do all kinds of stuff. She was sleeping with all these other people, so it’s quite possible that she slept with him, and that he was the kind of guy who didn't accept that it was just one of those passing things. He wanted it to be more, she was just experimenting with sex. He wanted to be in love and went on that whole rampage of killing the people that she slept with. He was obsessed with her, that was his dementia. I used that element to drive myself.

You play Ashley Judd’s surrogate father, who raised her after her dad, your ex-partner, died. Why didn’t they just have you be her father?
I wanted to do that, but they wouldn't fly with that. It was something about the audience not wanting Ashley to be an octoroon. I didn't care. But that's just me. I thought it would have been interesting, but nobody wanted to touch that.

Your next movie, Country of My Skull, is set in South Africa and is about that country’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee hearings which granted amnesty to any perpetrators of crimes against humanity who confessed and atoned publicly. Do you think the United States needs to go through the same sort of process, since we seem to be plagued, if not defined, by unresolved racial tensions?
I’m not real sure. Interestingly enough, being there and talking to people who went through it, I see that it gives you a certain kind of closure, but I don’t know that it’s a real healing kind of process. It’s an assurance that the things you know, deep inside, happened to your loved ones, really happened. It gives you a sense of closure to when it’s confirmed that these particular things were being done in the name of the government. But I don't know that it brings the people closer together.

Now the healing can start.
Just because they confessed, they get to walk away and now they're part of greater society. Yet, they have this blood on their hands. It’s kind of difficult to know that those kind of people are still walking around, because they have the same kind of attitudes that they had before.

But South Africa must be different since independence?
It’s an interesting place. It’s changing. It’s maybe two generations away from being what this country is. There will always be racism there, I guess, because of the way the country's set up. There are the haves and the have-nots, with very few middle-class. And there’s the ‘Coloreds,’ a whole group that kind of has no place. They have no sense that they’re really black people. They look down on the black people, even though they’re not quite white, because they didn’t have ID cards and weren’t controlled the way the blacks were. So, they felt they were better off, but they weren’t, in a way. Now, they’re in the middle, and they have a serious drug problem and a whole other set of issues to deal with. The country’s in flux but it’s a great place to be.

Do the whites feel that way, too?
It’s very funny. You still run into Afrikaners who will tell you, ‘Well, we lost all of our white rights.’

Did you remind them of who they were talking to?
They don’t care, they just want you to know.
 

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