Without question, there isn’t another person quite like Quentin Tarantino. The filmmaker, who is likely going to see his latest film, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” earn some Oscars next weekend, not only makes films that are his own style, but he approaches almost everything regarding the craft in a completely unique way. That means that the way he casts films probably isn’t the most conventional way, either, as we learned in the recent Ringer podcast.
The filmmaker took time out of the discussion of the film “King of New York” to talk about how he cast one of the most famous roles in his film “Jackie Brown.” The role in question is that of the character Max Cherry. And according to Tarantino, there could have been at least two big names that might have been cast in the role, if not for a last-minute viewing of a forgotten ’80s film.
“I wrote the part, thinking of who I was going to cast in it. I had four names that I think would be terrific Max’s at the time,” Tarantino said. “I thought Paul Newman at the time, would’ve been a great Max. I thought Gene Hackman at that time would’ve been a great Max—but that’s almost too dead-on casting, cause that’s exactly the kind of roles [Hackman] played and that he is that character. I thought [Robert] Forster would be a great Max Cherry and I thought John Saxon. Those were kind of my four guys.”
“I’m going one way with two guys, Tarantino said, talking about the legends, Newman and Hackman, “and I’m going one way with the other two guys,” he said of the character actors (Saxon was known for a lot of Western, horror and kung-fu films in the 1960s and ’70s, and co-starred with Bruce Lee in the 1973’s “Enter the Dragon“).
However, it was when he watched an unlikely film, that he finally made his choice on who Max Cherry should be played by.
“[And] after I watched ‘Alligator‘ [1980] again [starring Forster], I was like, this is just not—this is the character, this is Max Cherry, 17 years earlier,” said the filmmaker.
Once he landed on Forster for the role, Tarantino had to begin the challenge of getting him to sign on for “Jackie Brown.” However, that proved to be a pretty simple endeavor after a chance meeting between the two men.
“And then I happenstance bumped into Robert Forster in a restaurant and then I just decided to give him the role,” he explained. “I gave him the role then before we even opened up offices because I knew that bigger names were gonna really want to play the role, but if I had already given it to him and given him my word, then there would be nothing I could do about it. ‘I’m sorry guys, I’ve already given it away.'”
As for Pam Grier, the star of the movie, Tarantino says no, she was the entire point of the movie, “Pam was baked into the cake.”
Tarantino then quickly segues to the story of Michael Madsen originally playing the role of Vincent Vega in “Pulp Fiction“—obviously, John Travolta got the role—but it’s likely not something you haven’t heard before and not much of a story beyond that Madsen passed and Travolta said yes. What Tarantino does add to the story is that he originally thought Travolta would’ve been good in the Eric Stoltz role of a heroin drug dealer, but met him, liked him, and suddenly thought he might be a good fit for Vincent in the movie. And when then Madsen passed… “Well, I have a back up in case things didn’t work out with Michael and things didn’t work out with Michael…” The rest is history.
