Kurt Russell Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters

You don't look at 'em as iconic characters.

I mean, they refer to them as that if they become that,

you're just doing a day, you're on a day to day running it,

having a good time and trying to make it work.

[upbeat music]

Well, I like a lot about Snake.

He's an escape artist, is really what he is.

And he's doomed to never be able

to escape the one thing he wants to escape from,

and that's himself.

I'm not a fool, Plissken. Call me Snake.

He's got this equal amount of psychosis and survivability.

They go together.

I like that about Snake,

or at least I felt that that was true about him.

We started out doing some stuff

that ended up not being in the movie.

There was a train station sequence,

sort of establishing the character of Snake.

And he had a partner and got shot

and Snake actually ran back to help him.

They caught them.

It was a redeeming quality is what we were showing there.

John Carpenter decided correctly so

that Snake didn't have any redeeming qualities, so. [laughs]

I only cared about, you know, pleasing John

and hopefully trying to capture something, you know,

that was gonna fit into his vision.

We had done Elvis together

and we just automatically sort of had a quick

language amongst ourselves.

John said, you know, go, you know, see what you come up.

In thinking about that character, it was futuristic stuff,

you know, the black and white was much more interesting

than green fatigues, as if the war had taken place

in a sort of burnt out winter area.

So it was all black and white.

But then I gotta thinking about the snake

and I thought it was, you know, a cobra

with its tail going down his,

'cause there was gonna be this one scene

where he's gonna be in the arena fighting.

I thought it was appropriate

to put the tattoo right on him right up front.

Just took the tail and let it go south. [laughs]

After we did a couple of takes of the first,

and that train sequence, he came over.

He came over, he whispered in my ear,

he says, This fuckin' character's great. [laughs]

And it was like, yeah, 'cause I hadn't really,

didn't really know how I was gonna sound.

I kind of got look and feel and be,

but the sound of Snake.

You, me, and Fresno Bob, you know what they did to Bob?

Hmm?

You wanna see him sprayed all over that map, baby?

Where's the president?

I mean, there was Lee Van Cleef

was playing the role of Hauk and so because of that,

for me, I guess it just kicked off that sort of hole.

Lee Van Cleef, Clint Eastwood, Western world.

I just always felt Snake was only talking to himself.

He was never really talking to anybody.

You're gonna kill me now, Snake.

I'm too tired.

Maybe later.

[Producer] There's a video game series

called Metal Gear Solid.

It was rumored that there's a character in the game

that's inspired by Snake Plissken

and they asked you to do the voiceover.

Well, it's like, look, you know,

I'm pretty lazy by nature. [chuckles]

Remember, there have been many different times

when people, you know, wanted to do something.

I don't know, I'm a movie guy.

You got to understand that from my point of view,

and whether it's Elvis or Snake Plissken or Jack Burton

or RJ McCready, that was that project.

That was that thing, you get into that mindset.

You create that you want to make that world happen.

Just like I used to do interviews when Elvis was coming out

and they would say, come on, do a little Elvis for us.

You know, it's like, it doesn't work that way.

You don't just slide in and out of Elvis.

You go to work on it, you refine it,

and then you do it and you get paid for that.

I come from a different era and I wasn't interested in

expanding financially off of something that we had created

or that I had created in terms of a character.

And I get business people, sure,

well, we could do this with that.

We could do this with that,

or we could do this with that, you know?

And then I look at it and go, that's not written by John.

That doesn't smell right.

John's not here to do this with, why am I?

I'm not gonna do that.

Let's go do something new, let's go do something fresh.

Let's go create another iconic character.

Rather than saying,

what can we bleed off of this iconic character?

You know, you don't look at 'em as iconic characters.

I mean, they refer to them as that if they become that.

You're just doing a day, you're on a day to day running it,

having a good time and trying to make it work.

[upbeat music]

[door thuds]

Anyone messes with me and the whole camp goes.

Come on, Childs, burn me.

John and I had been talking, sometimes we'd talk about

what he was doing next or what I was doing next, whatever.

We gotta talking about what he was doing next.

This project called The Thing.

He was trying to figure out who to cast

in the character of McCready.

We, you know, once in a while, hey, how about so and so?

And he'd go, well, yeah, maybe no, you know.

My best friend and brother-in-Law at the time, Larry Franco,

was producing it with John.

And then finally one day, I think Larry said it to me first

'cause it was sort of like a hint, like a warning.

I think John wants, is maybe gonna talk to you

about playing that part.

So I said, I don't know, is it a monster movie

or what, is it a horror film, what is it?

John said, No, this is from the book, Who Goes there?

He said, yeah, The Thing, it was a movie 20 years,

what, 30 years ago, but I'm not doing that.

He said, no, I'm doing a movie about paranoia.

I know I'm human.

And if you were all these things

then you just attack me right now,

so some of you are still human.

But we were in two places,

primarily we were in Hyder, Alaska,

right across the street from Stewart, British Columbia.

So we were working up on a glacier,

26 miles up, pretty exciting.

You could look down 3,000 feet

and see a bunch of trucks down there.

So just going to work was kind of fun.

We were in Universal Studios on the refrigerated set.

They wanted snow, of course on the set.

If you went above 28, 29 degrees inside,

it would start to kind of melt.

And we didn't want that.

We all just sort of lived in this thing.

Basically Monday through Saturday.

Kind of reminded me of the set of Backdraft

where we were in these fires, these manmade fires, you know.

But we got so used to the cold when you went inside,

you'd take your jackets off and stuff,

and you were in your T-shirt and it was 28 degrees in there

and you were, you know, you're coming inside to warm up,

you know, it was a pretty cold environment.

[tense music]

[door thuds]

I went into wardrobe and, you know,

'cause of the other things we've done,

I sort of did it with myself,

just sort of came up with stuff and then show it to John.

You like it, you know?

And when I was in there, I noticed. [chuckles]

sitting over on this chair by itself

was this enormous sombrero.

And finally at some point I said to the wardrobe person,

what's the deal with sombrero?

And they said, Oh, that's your hat.

I said, I'm not wearing that hat, it's insane.

I'm like, What are you talking about?

No. [laughs]

And they said, Well,

John's already been shooting some stuff with it.

I said, What?

He said, Yeah, it's established.

I said, That hat is established with what?

You're flying the helicopters,

they've already got some helicopter shots.

But I went, Oh, come on.

I need a character to actually hang my hat on,

and I said, And that's the hat.

I never loved the sombrero. You still don't like it?

No, no, no, I think it's perfect, I think it's perfect.

There's a lot of things sometimes

that somebody else sees that you don't see.

You have to be open for these things, you know?

That one's a tough one because that's, you know, it's just,

it's just you wearing this big ass goofy thing on your head.

But you see, that's where John had no fear

because he knew how he was gonna shoot it.

And I started laughing at it and saying,

Yeah, he's a drunk, he doesn't give a shit.

So he's got that sombrero on.

[tense music]

John was never quite satisfied with the last scene.

His main thing was he didn't wanna do two hours,

take the audience on a ride for two hours

and bring 'em back to square one.

When you're doing a movie, you don't know what you got.

You kind of in general know what you got,

but you don't know exactly how this is gonna go together

and what's gonna come out of it.

And of course John did almost all the time,

'cause you gotta understand, you know,

he's unlike most guys, he's doing the music too.

Interestingly enough, The Thing was the first time

he didn't do the music, all the music,

and he had Ennio Morricone do it.

Many, many years later

if you watch the two movies back to back,

Quentin Tarantino had Ennio do his music

for Hateful Eight right off of The Thing.

But the last scene, what we talked about a lot,

we'd write out little different versions of it.

What do you think of that, what do you think of that?

Go back and forth.

And we finally discuss, I said John,

I dunno, I know you don't wanna come back to square one

but it's kind of what it is.

We don't even know if we're real,

we don't even know, we don't know, we don't know.

I don't think the audience can figure it out.

I think that's what makes The Thing great,

is you don't know.

What if this already happened?

Are you you?

How would you know?

And it all led itself down to what I finally,

and he said, go ahead, it was the last line,

I just said, I think it's just like,

why don't we just sit here for a while,

See what happens.

They could figure a way to kill each other

at exactly the same time

I think maybe that's the next step there.

I forget who it was I was talking to just the other day.

He and his brother, when the moment's right,

Where were you, Childs? Where were you, Childs?

[laughs] I like that.

That's iconic, to have somebody

be able to hold onto that for all these years

and that just speaks to me in 100 different ways.

That to me was John at maybe his

absolute peak as a director.

That's really good filmmaking.

[upbeat music]

[tense music]

Oh my God.

Tombstone is about a family, you know,

a family of people that lived during a time

when organized crime was being formed in the United States

and it happened to be in the West,

and it happened to be those group of cowboys.

Coming from Illinois, coming from the east,

sort of a Quaker world.

That's why they looked the way they looked,

wore the clothes they wore, the hats especially.

Tombstone in terms of Westerns really

was really exciting and different.

Wonderful script written by Kevin Jarre.

He drew most of what he wrote from periodicals

and magazines and stuff, I talked to him a lot about it.

He had this great way of understanding

how these people spoke and lived,

which I'd never seen before in a Western.

Reading Tombstone, the first page said,

forget everything you have ever read or seen

about Westerns, it's untrue.

And then afterwards, you know,

it continued to show you that.

These people in Tombstone were dressed to the nines.

They showed their wealth.

Coming into a new town,

they needed to know you were a man of substance,

a good businessman, a good entrepreneur,

someone they could depend on, someone who was successful.

It was these things that I found in Tombstone to be

the things that you wanted to learn about,

from the audience's point of view.

How they spoke and why they spoke that way.

One of my favorite things about Tombstone when I read it,

and I said, man, this is a really great screenplay.

During the middle of the conversation, they all,

everybody stopped and they looked up

and they started to applaud.

And that's what people used to do when it was a full moon.

They'd look up and see a beautiful full moon

and they just, [claps], applaud in the street.

That was their entertainment.

Men of that time were completely different people than now,

American men.

And those American men were coming from Europe

and places from all over the world.

And here was this group of men

who were figuring some things out and saying,

Hey, if we get this together, we can run this show.

And there's not much anybody can do about it.

Well, well.

How the hell are you?

Wyatt, I am rolling.

Now it's being considered

one of the great Westerns ever made,

so I'm happy about that.

[Producer] A lot of people say

that its the number one Western.

I can't say that, but I like hearing that,

and more and more people are saying that now.

The impact of the movie, well, I give that to one story,

and I don't mean to say this as in any way, a put down,

although there were certain people involved.

Kevin Costner not being one of them, Kevin being a good guy.

There were other people involved with that

that were not good guys to me.

Once I said, Hey, how about if we do this and that

and maybe we could do some things together.

I said, I could kill you and yours

and you could kill me and mine.

This one individual said,

Oh, we're gonna kill a lot of people in 'Wyatt Earp.'

And there were some people standing around me

and it was just such a slap in the face

and I thought, Fuck you, buddy,

I'm gonna take you on full force,

full frontal nudity, let's go.

You're now gonna run into Wyatt Earp.

Those two movies came out fairly close to each other,

Wyatt Earp and Tombstone.

Great things about both.

But there's one undeniable thing.

You name me another Western where you can recall

as much of the dialogue

as people can recall from Tombstone.

It's not even close.

Much more so than any other Western, that's undeniable.

I didn't think you had it in you.

I'm your Huckleberry.

If you're asking me

if it was great working with Val Kilmer,

who played Doc Holiday on Tombstone,

the answer is absolutely.

In those days, especially, you know,

when you were working with people, you'd get them,

sometimes at the end of the show you get gifts

or trade gifts, it's not mandatory,

It's not something that, you know, you've gotta do

or that they've gotta do.

And so I asked my driver to see if he could get ahold of

Val's holster and gun and hat

and chair with his name on the back, take a picture.

And then in that picture, I wanted to have this thing.

It's the end of the show and it's been a battle

and we've all, you know, gotten through it very well.

And I give Val this present and he looks at me

and he turns to his driver and he says, give it to me.

Because what I had gotten Val was a plot at Boot Hill.

What Val had gotten me

was an acre of land overlooking Boot Hill.

Doc Holiday is all about death, [chuckles]

but Wyatt's all about life.

It's in that last scene, just looked at each other

and went, well, [chuckles].

I guess that pretty much says it all.

[somber music]

Thanks for always being there, Doc.

There's been a lot of things written about Tombstone

that are just so, even books that I just look at 'em

and people have no concept.

Even people who are working on the show don't even know

and they never will.

Every movie, every show is difficult to do.

It's generally gonna be a collaboration.

Trust is gonna be either earned or found or not.

And like any other movie, it's a miracle that it gets made.

Finding solutions to problems was a constant on Tombstone.

The difficulties that we were able

to figure out solutions to.

You know, all that matters is that it got done

and that the impact that the original screenplay promised,

yeah, we got about 90% of that.

[upbeat music]

Fair Lady, you're chariot awaits.

You've been eavesdropping?

[chuckles] Eavesdropping and can't help but hear,

I think I belong in the latter category.

Quentin's funny, I like his way

and I've had fun every time we've worked together.

And I appreciate every time he wants me to work with him

and he's completely unique.

One of the reasons Quentin Tarantino got into making movies

is 'cause of John Carpenter.

I mean, I know that from the horse's mouth.

John's more reserved in his humor and in his style.

Quentin is very, very outgoing.

But there's a lot of similarities too

in what's driving their mojo on making a movie.

It's not like a director

who's searching for a vision. [chuckles]

They've got it in their head

and it's just a matter of them having the freedom to say,

I like that, I like that, like that,

don't like that, don't like, you know, it's easy for them.

I remember something Quentin said one time,

which was really cool.

Jennifer, Jason Lee, and I were giving him an award

for a costume, costume design.

And he came up and he said, You know, it's funny,

for all the, how I'm known for the style of my movies

and what it looks like, he said,

Not not one of my movies has ever garnered

a nomination for costume.

And he lean in and he said,

But we fuckin' own Halloween. [laughs]

You're not gonna have a more fun time

than you have on a Tarantino show.

That's a wild ass circus.

[engines revving]

[Stuntman Mike laughs]

We finished the show in Austin,

we'd been working for three months,

four months, I don't know.

And the next thing I know,

he wants to do like three weeks of this car stuff.

And he didn't want to do any CGI or anything,

so it's gonna be old school.

I've driven cars all my life.

As a kid, I won a world championship in a race car.

I can do anything you want in a car.

It was a month maybe, we were up there

and Zoe Bell's on the hood of the car at one point.

You know, we're doing 80, 90 miles an hour

and you're on this little two lane highway, whoopty dos.

So the camera car is here.

I can't be behind the camera car,

I gotta be over here for the shot.

So I'm now in the oncoming lane.

So you're closing off all entrances for a,

let's say a three, four mile run.

And one day I get the okay, you know,

okay Kurt, bring in the hill, let's go.

And I said, Everything's shut off.

Yeah, everything's shut off.

We come down the road and I don't know what happened,

I can't remember what happened.

I either saw something or felt something, boom.

I just, boy man, I just slammed the brakes on and came,

vroom, guy goes by about 50 miles an hour the other way

in the lane I was in.

And we just pulled over.

I was just sitting there for a second.

Took the keys out of the car, see you tomorrow.

[upbeat music]

[soft guitar music]

Gimme that guitar.

Music time's over.

What? [guitar thuds]

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!

John the hangman Ruth, there's a cool doll on him.

Quentin had written something

that he wanted to do a reading of.

Sure, that'd be a fun day.

We do that.

But the next thing I know is like, kinda like the whole day

and it's feels more like a rehearsal than a read through.

And I was like, okay.

Well, we're gonna do it again tomorrow.

I got nothing to do, sure.

And now we're halfway through the second day

and then I begin to hear the boom, boom, boom.

And wait a minute, what did you just say?

And I'm talking, I think it was Walton Goggins,

he goes, Yeah, we're gonna do a reading

in front of some people.

I said, Oh, oh, okay.

He probably wants to see, has somebody,

he wants to have somebody see this and say, you know.

And then the next day we show up and it's at the,

I think it's called the Ace Theater or something,

it's like 1,200 people.

So it's the reading in front of this fuckikn' audience.

And he said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So then I just said, okay, so this is now a play.

So I said, so bring it all down about a third.

And he said, just about a third, yeah.

I said, got it, and I said, when he is dead,

I said, what I just, I'll lay on the floor or something.

But that was where it started

and then a couple months later, I guess,

I didn't know, I thought that was just something

he wanted to do to, maybe he wanted to do it as a play.

Then we got to do the movie and then, okay.

And he wanted me to play the part.

So I said, okay, great.

Wouldn't transporting her be easier if she were dead?

Well, no one said the job was supposed to be easy.

And why is her hanging proper so important to you?

Let's just say I don't like cheating the hangman,

he gotta make a living too.

I got bored with myself

in a take one day on Death Proof.

I'm reading this soliloquy of some kind to this girl.

I started feeling like doing it like John Wayne,

sort of a bad John Wayne.

In my book that's no good.

I figured he was just gonna start,

all right, got it, shut up, I can't take it.

I said, yeah, that's the way I was hoping.

And he said, Okay, great, now stay right there

and go back to the beginning.

And he wanted, and I did the whole thing like that.

Then he said, now just take the first third of it.

And they said, We're outta film.

He said, Throw some film in the camera.

And that's sort of what it's like working with him.

And so this character, John Ruth,

sort of had some of that to him.

In the reading I had done some of that.

Then when it came time to do it, he said,

Okay, now drop that and just do your thing.

Lucky Devil.

[John spits]

Christ, that's awful!

Interesting bravado.

But he was a very, you know, the character was very tired.

He's been up and he was on edge.

He should have listened to himself even more than he did.

Both Hateful Eight, I think, and Death Proof

are gonna be movies that are some of the ones

that are more looked at 20 years from now.

[upbeat music]

I got a four man team here, Rick.

If I need more than that, I gotta get it approved.

And you know, I, I, I gotta look after my dudes.

Hey, hey.

I did have the great pleasure of,

he called up, he said, I want you to read something.

And I went over and read Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,

sitting there in his Hollywood lair.

He just loves the history of everything in Hollywood.

And I looked at him and I said,

I don't know if there's anybody left alive

who can appreciate this as much as me.

And he said, I know.

As he wrote in his dedication in the book,

it was a lot of drawn from some conversations

that we'd had about my relationship with my stuntman,

and in one in particular,

there was a relationship my dad had with a stuntman,

Irwin Neal.

A lot of true things there and those shows that I'd done,

my dad had done and stuff that Quentin gets a kick out of.

He just, what he's able to do,

take things and turn 'em on their head.

And then as the night, you know,

we had a couple drinks and night went on.

I think DiCaprio came over that night and maybe Brad Pitt

and probably three, four o'clock in the morning,

All right, good night, I gotta go.

And on the way out he says,

Oh yeah, and I want you to play Randy.

I said, Randy, who's Randy?

He said, The stunt coordinator.

I said, I never even saw that,

okay, I'll be there for Randy.

He needs something else.

[upbeat music]

You said you loved my mother.

And that I did.

My river lily, who knew all the words

to every song that came over the radio.

I mean, look, when I saw Ego the Living Planet, I said,

Well, that's gonna be tough to say no to.

I didn't wanna wreck what was gonna be a franchise.

I'd done things at Disney's where I'd done, you know,

as it were, part one, part two, part three.

They had done real well in the first one.

I said, I don't wanna come in here

and put an end to this thing.

You know, you wanna make it go.

[upbeat music]

Larry, you drove your Porsche here tonight, didn't you?

Yeah. Now,

how would you like to trade that Porsche

for a mint condition 1952 Mickey Mantle, rookie card.

I know you've always wanted one.

Is this thing real. Oh yes.

It's a deal.

Its a deal. I thought so.

Santa Claus is one of my favorite characters ever.

It was so big in our household,

my father's presentation of it as a mystery.

I infused that greatly with Chris Columbus,

who is an absolutely fabulous guy.

I'm very, very proud of that Santa Claus.

You know, I read some things about it that were,

you know, a nice pat on the back.

Is Kurt Russell the best Santa Claus ever on film?

And I thought, yeah, he is. [laughs]

You wanna see Santa Claus?

That's the real Santa Claus.

There's no bullshit to it, he was a real person.

He was a saint, he was a real man.

There's a certain amount of respect and fear

that children automatically have of him.

It's so fascinating to put on his in full regalia there.

And some kids would once in a while come by

and from a distance they're staring at you

and I say, come on up, right?

As they got closer they.

Do that.

It's like, yeah, when Santa Claus comes around,

drops off presents, your ass better be in bed asleep.

So I felt like this is a great character to play,

a great sweet, wonderful saint of a man

who is a real person.

It's not a comic book character.

He's been around longer than anything.

[upbeat music]

Why do you know more than the finest physicists,

geologists, and zoologists on earth

Don't know more.

But I got a good idea about what's going on.

I didn't do enough about that when I had the chance.

Figure I'm making up for that now.

Or die in the trying

The show is about the people that are having to now

deal with the fact that there are these monsters.

It's happening, it's happening.

And you go back in the history of the lore of Godzilla,

Mothra, King Kong, this is much more

about dealing with the people

who are generationally connected.

And it was a casting idea which was,

never before had two known actors, father and son,

played the same person.

They approached Wyatt and myself.

Once we clicked to the casting idea and we said,

Okay, let's talk about it.

Then it became the heavy lifting of what do you,

okay, what are we gonna do with him?

That's what you see is this unfolding mystery of this guy

who should be 93, 94, 95 years old.

What happened here?

And now we're answering that question.

This is about the people that are, you know,

living with the aftermath, living with what's next.

We thought, yeah, you know, look,

can we make this world a good adventure drama?

And can this character be a good strong part of that?

So we chase Godzilla, then what?

More people die?

We can't stop him.

Stop him?

Jesus, Kate, I'm trying to help him.

Because we're playing the same person

we never worked together.

So I had a day off.

I was thinking about going, hitting golf balls or something.

I thought, well, yeah, you know what,

I'll go see what Wyatt's doing.

So I went down there and it was a fight sequence.

And I'm suddenly realizing, yeah, this is the execution.

This is where the rubber's hitting the road.

This is what the audience is gonna see.

And I need to see this, I need to see what he's doing.

Whatever he sets in motion, I'm gonna have to continue.

If he decides to start playing things like that.

Okay, well later on in life, maybe it's not that much,

maybe it's not that big,

but I'm gonna have to do a little of it too.

But I found myself watching this actor instead of my son

and saying, this guy's good man, this guy's really good.

It reminded me of what we had to constantly be aware of,

which is, this is not father son, this is the same person.

And it wasn't until recently somebody said,

you know, we've looked around

and that's never been done before.

For us, that was the fun that we had with it.

You know, it's real easy with Wyatt.

It's just fun and it's easy.

Thanks for watching this for however long you did

and I hope you check out Monarch.

I think it's worth checking out on Apple Plus.

Guys, out, out, out, out, out.