Samuel L Jackson is barely recognizable - even his trademark voice is altered - in the dramatic film Resurrecting the Champ. Directed by Rod Lurie, co-starring Josh Hartnett, and based on a series of articles by journalist J R Moehringer, Resurrecting the Champ features Jackson as a once-great boxer who missed a shot at the title and now lives on the streets.
Knowledge of the Story: “I was aware of the magazine article, yeah, but the rest of it, no,” explained Jackson. “It's kind of amazing sometimes when you get involved with something, how you just start accidentally running into people. My wife was somewhere. She accidentally ran into some of Bob Satterfield's family. They were all going, ‘Yeah, I had heard your husband's doing a movie about our brother, da da da da da.’ She's like, ‘What are you talking about?’ Because she didn't know. We very seldom talk about what I'm going to do, amazingly. Most people find that kind of strange. ‘So your wife doesn't know what movie you're doing next?’ ‘No, she doesn't pick scripts for me.’ She ran into them and she started talking to me about it, and then she's run into other members of their family since then. I've run into some of them too.”
On Getting Into Character: “When I read the script or when I got the job, I started to do all the stuff on the inside of it that creates the emotional baggage and that gives me the leeway to create the layers of this person.”
The Appeal of Resurrecting the Champ: “I just liked the fact that this guy had come from a very high place and is living in a very low place,” said Jackson. “How he exists in that particular space and still sort of has a level of fame in that world also still. He also seems to be able to maintain being outside of the realm of most people's existence. Depending on the percentage of how he was feeling that day, his mental state was different from day to day.”
Boxing Skills and Striving for Realism: Asked how difficult it was to apply his boxing skills but keep it realistic to his character’s age, Jackson replied, “Well, everybody has a lot of different jobs sometimes in their lifetimes. His specific glory point is when he was a fighter or a boxer or this person that he says he was. He has his own level of fame in terms of being a champion Golden Gloves boxer. Everything about him says I used to be this particular thing. He has gloves on, the hooded shirt that's kind of like a robe and his trenchcoat, and he runs. He [jabs] like he's doing [ropework]. So he's in pretty good shape for an old guy. He's not as, I guess, formidable as he once was but we do see that when he's cornered, there is something inside him that comes out. He can be dangerous in that particular way. So you carry that with you and most fighters I know, good fighters, have a really gentle soul somewhere inside of them. It's a sport. It's not something they need to do, hurt people.”
Finding the Right Voice: Jackson said the voice he uses in the film is actually based on how his grandfather sounded toward the end of his life. “He had this kind of high pitch whisper that would always make you kind of go, ‘What'd you say?’ So I kind of wanted to fold people in around me when I talk to them or make people pay attention to Champ in another kind of way, so it makes you sit up and listen. It was kind of challenging to hold onto it the whole movie so it was something else to keep me focused in the character.”
Jackson said it’s not that difficult for him to transform his own distinctive voice. “It's not often that I have an opportunity to do some of the things that I used to do on stage, so this was kind of like one of those. I'd look in the mirror and I don't see myself. I can fix my body so I don’t carry myself the way people always say I carry myself so regally, or have this very distinctive walk. So I got rid of that and I figured I could get rid of my voice too, so it was a very cool immersion for me.”
The Champ’s Appearance: Jackson had a lot of input into his character’s appearance. “Every character, or every time I get a script that I think allows me to do specific things to change me physically, I always give it to my makeup artist and I always give it to my hairdresser. I let them independently say what they think he looks like, and I tell them what I think he looks like.
Al, my makeup artist, has created a program on his computer that just has my blank face on it. And he can put my blank face up on it and then we'll start going through magazines looking at hairstyles. We'll lift a hairstyle off a picture and put it on my head. We'll start putting stuff on my face, change the size of my nose or putting scars on my in different places. So this one, Al actually had a chance to wrinkle my skin. There's this rubberized stuff that they pulled my skin back every day. I reached the point where I could just go in there and go to sleep and they could do this stuff to me while I sleep. Three hours later I'd wake up and I'd be all pruny.”
