Quentin Tarantino casting veteran actor Pam Grier in Jackie Brown was somewhat inspired casting by the director. Tarantino believed hiring Grier for his film would influence his movie the way John Wayne influenced his Westerns.
Why Quentin Tarantino ended up casting Pam Grier in ‘Jackie Brown’
Tarantino’s original aim in Jackie Brown was to do the work of its source material as much justice as he could. Jackie Brown was adapted from the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch. But in adapting Rum Punch, there were certain liberties Tarantino had to take with the material. The titular character, for instance, was a white character in Leonard’s famous novel. But Tarantino had trouble finding other white actors who fit his vision of Jackie.
“I started to think who could be Jackie Brown, knowing the attributes she had to have; she had to be 44 but look like she was 34; she had to look great, and she had to look like she could handle anything. Writing down different white actresses because it was a white character in the novel, some of the people I thought could be good were too young,” Tarantino once told The Guardian. “That is standard operating procedure; they would make her 35. I didn’t like that at all.”
But it was Tarantino’s brain-storming that led him to Grier.
“I thought Pam is perfect for the role,” he said. “She is the exact age right now. She looks younger, and she looks like she can handle anything. By doing that, it turned it into a Pam Grier movie. Nothing wrong with that.”
Tarantino felt that making Jackie Grier would only help the film in the long run.
Quentin Tarantino compared casting Pam Grier to casting John Wayne
Tarantino stood by his casting of Grier, who he believed was every bit as iconic as another well-known actor. Tarantino felt Grier could make the impact in his film that John Wayne did in his Westerns.
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“To one degree or another, it is like casting John Wayne in a movie,” he said of choosing Grier. “You cast John Wayne in a Western, you are not just dealing with this unknown figure walking in there that you have got to learn about. For some audiences that will be the case, but that is not where I am coming from. John Wayne has got a whole past behind him, and his past is built up from these other movies.”
Tarantino considered the kind of history Wayne brought to his film roles baggage. But baggage wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it’s something that Grier also added to Jackie Brown.
“Some baggage can be very, very good. By casting Pam, I did term this in my mind to a Pam Grier movie, but it was a Pam Grier movie with its feet on the ground more,” he explained.
Quentin Tarantino forced Pam Grier to slow down her dialogue significantly for ‘Jackie Brown’
Grier had more than a pleasant experience working alongside Tarantino. But as Tarantino is known to do with his actors, the filmmaker helped push Grier past her comfort zone as a performer. The director insisted that Grier spoke his dialogue in a certain way for narrative purposes. Something Tarantino felt Grier might have trouble with.
“Quentin told me that [Samuel L. Jackson] had a metronome-like quality that’s really fast, but that I’d have to slow down for Robert [Forster],” she said in a recent interview with Yahoo. “He warned me that not all actors can do that, so I had to learn.”
Grier admitted this was a bit draining, but was glad for the experience nonetheless.
“Quentin said to slow my pace down to avoid revealing that I’m planning a scheme,” she continued. “Max knows people inside and out, and knows when they’re fooling him — he can smell me if I’m lying. But I also need him, so it’s not cut-and-dried. That’s why you’re exhausted when you work with Quentin Tarantino and his characters!”
