CraveOnline: Did you see Geena Davis’s speech about how to change that in Hollywood, by changing a percentage of characters to female?
Pam Grier: I follow her, I love her work. I thought them working in that film together, The Long Kiss Goodnight, was brilliant. I love her in that. But will people go see her in that role three or four times? I don’t know. You have to have a franchise that’s so unique and vivid to bring it, because guys take girls on dates to see movies. Rarely do women go to see movies on their own, so they usually have to see what the guys want to see. Action, Transformers, the dynamic of the audience is completely different.
Or The Avengers or hopefully someday Wonder Woman.
Yeah, but it still will be different. It’s going to be very, very different, an audience that goes to see Wonder Woman because they’ve already seen Wonder Woman in her natural form.
Do you think it will take more than changing characters in scripts to women, as Geena Davis suggested?
It’s the story. It’s the story that’s going to resonate with people and I don’t know if it will be their costume, how skimpy, how many stuns and CGI special effects? You don’t know. You don’t know what it’s going to be until it’s done really. We didn’t think Jackie Brown would have any people come to see her. There’s no action, there’s no guns. She’s just using her brain, her mind, her intelligence. We didn’t know if anyone was going to see her.
You didn’t think after Pulp Fiction, you might have a lock?
No, not at all. I don’t do a film for the adulation.
One of the great things about your movies in the ‘70s was those movies went to theaters. A lot of action, fighting and Kung Fu movies only go to video now. Why do you think that is and is it a problem that people aren’t enjoying those physical performances in theaters?
It has to do with if you keep repeating, then you bore the audience. I happened to come out at a time when it was unique and different. Each film was different, each one is much more intense and aggressive than the next. Then finally I just stopped because now I’m boring the audience. You can’t do that, even with a franchise. I wasn’t going to do Coffy 1, 2 and 3 and Foxy Brown 1, 2 and 3 and then Foxy Brown later. I remember at one point Halle Berry had optioned Foxy Brown right before she did Catwoman. It would’ve been interesting to see it as a contemporary piece, but she didn’t do it. She ended up doing Catwoman but it would’ve been interesting to see what she would’ve done in an urban climate, dark, seedy, 40 years later with CGI.
See, I didn’t even have a stunt person when I starred in Coffy, Foxy Brown and the films prior to that. What would frustrate me is that you’d see stunts and things that were being executed and you’d see a miss. You’ll see it weak and not executed as well as I would like, and I said, “I don’t have control of this. This is lame for me.” I don’t like the lame aspect of cheating your audience. I want to give the audience the maximum performance and execution.
For Tarantino’s next movie after Jackie Brown, he had Uma Thurman train for months in Kung Fu. In your movies would you have liked to do a full training?
I already knew quite a bit of Kung Fu, Quigong White Tiger and Karate. I already knew some martial arts but I didn’t have people to actually spar with on set. No stunt person knew any martial arts.
Would you have liked those movies to have like Yuen Woo-ping choreography?
Later have done it? Yes, it would’ve been great because some of my favorite movies I used to see was all the Jackie Chan movies before he became very popular, Bride with White Hair, Drunken Master I and II. I used to see all those movies with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and all the Bruce Lee movies way back in the day before they were popular.
