Jack Black goes from slob to snob in Be Kind Rewind

LOS ANGELES—Up close, Jack Black looks like someone who might have problems with technology. He has perfected an on-screen image as a slob in most of his recent films, and he doesn’t look much different in person. So when director Michel Gondry sought an actor who could play a slacker who might be hanging out at a Passaic, New Jersey, video store and who hates DVDs, Black was an easy choice. Black played a similar character—a record-store employee who hates CDs and loves vinyl—in his first major role, in 2000’s High Fidelity.

In an L.A. hotel, Black says that there is a key difference in the two films’ approaches to new technologies, but he is happy to have personally progressed from owning low-tech videos to the best home-entertainment systems available. “The difference is that vinyl records sounded better than CDs. Videotape does not look better than DVD,” Black says. “In fact, I am a high-definition snob. I can’t watch anything unless it is HD. Is that wrong?”

In Be Kind Rewind, Black plays Jerry, whose friend Mike (Mos Def) is put in charge of the video store when the owner (Danny Glover) leaves town. The only order he gives Mike upon leaving is to keep Jerry away from the store. However, when Jerry gets zapped by electrical wires, Mike lets him inside. Both soon discover that Jerry has somehow fried all the videos just by walking through the store. Left with hundreds of blank videos, Jerry and Mike decide to reenact the movies, record them, and transfer them to videotape. The movie opens on Friday (February 22) in Vancouver.

Black says that although he would never rent a video now, he was a big fan before DVDs came along and he still has quite a few at home, mostly because he never got around to returning them. “I rented a lot of videos back in the day,” he says. “I always rewound, but I did have a problem returning them. I ended up paying for a lot of movies. I bought them and they cost so much more if you don’t return them. And they are used and crappy, which is not the way you want to own.”

Much of the movie involves Jerry and Mike remaking old movies, a process the characters call “sweding”. Gondry told his actors that they were going to be called upon to reenact films that could be found in a video store, including Ghostbusters, Robocop, and Driving Miss Daisy. He also told them it would be funnier if they could refrain from watching the videos, because he wanted them to do the job without trying to stay close to the originals. Black says he and Mos Def did as they were told, although he admits he was tempted to watch them.

“I told Michel that since I had never seen Driving Miss Daisy I should watch it once to re-create it, and he said, ‘No, it is better if you don’t know anything.’ I had seen the commercial, so he felt I knew the basic gist and he liked it better when it was half-assed and not close to the original. The point was we were remaking them but they had to look quite different in our versions.

“I did like doing Robocop because I love the sci-fi/action genre the most,” Black continues. “I would have done more of those movies if I had been allowed. I would have wanted to do The Terminator as the naked [Arnold] Schwarzenegger. I would have liked to have done The Road Warrior and The Shining. I also like all the old [Jack] Nicholson movies, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Overall, though, I just liked the whole idea of escaping from the real world. The movies we chose were escapist, because why spend a lot of time trying to re-create what the real world is like? It would get a little boring.”

Black’s schedule isn’t boring, with a 20-month-old son and his wife, Tanya Haden, expecting another baby later this year. He has three more movies scheduled to come out this year, and he says he will be going on tour with his two-member band, Tenacious D, as soon as they complete their latest album. However, he says that process is taking a while.

“We have one great song for our next album, which we are calling Death Star,” he says. “We still need to surround it with 13 equally powerful songs, so it could be about 2012 before you see another album. But I have heard that the future might be just singles and no more albums. That would make things easier, but I would hate it. It would be like directors releasing scenes rather than full movies.”