In his upcoming movie, "Be Kind Rewind," Jack Black gets to remake all of our ’80s favorites. He plays a video store clerk who accidentally erases all the tapes, and has to replace all the videos by filming them himself.
"We did a lot of movies," said Black. "We did ‘When We Were Kings,’ the documentary about Muhammad Ali. I play Muhammad Ali, strangely. We did ‘Superman.’ Actually, I shouldn’t say that, we had to change the name to something else. Incredible Flying Man I think we changed it to. We did ‘Ghostbusters.’ That was a masterpiece. We did ‘Robocop,’ we did ‘Driving Miss Daisy,’ just to name a few. There were tons of movies that we did."
Director Michel Gondry brought his "Eternal Sunshine"/"Science of Sleep" sensibility to the film, ordering Black not to research the films within the film. "We were under strict orders not to watch any of the movies again, not to re-watch anything again and if we hadn’t seen it, don’t see it. Just do what you think it is based on the commercials you had seen of the movie because he wanted it to look that way; because there isn’t any time in the movie for us to do any research. So he wanted to keep that consistent as actors not to research any of the movies we were remaking."
They even remake one of Black’s own movies. "We did a little ‘King Kong,’ too. It was cool. And it was pretty low-budg, the movie but he makes up for it with incredible tricks and stuff, and depth perception, and camera tricks. Like, let’s say I’m King Kong, and that over there is Roz, but you’re the camera, and if I do that and hold her like that, it looks like I’m a giant. It’s hard to explain. In the mind of Michel Gondry it makes sense."
Unfortunately, there was one key ’80s movie that the crew could not remake. "We did not do ‘Back to the Future.’ We did not get permission."
"Be Kind Rewind" opens in 2007.
