By Gill Pringle
“Jack Black takes good care of us,” young actress, Odeya Rush, tells FilmInk of her famous Goosebumps co-star. “Jack is always like, ‘Are we okay with that take?’ He’s always taking care of us. When someone hurts their hand or something, he’s the first person to call the medic. It’s nice because he’s really protecting us. You feel like you don’t have to worry too much. He’s really fun too. He just loves to hang out and play basketball and video games and talk. And play the guitar. He’s very musical. We play the guitar sometimes. I’m learning. I know a few chords now. [Co-star] Dylan [Minnette] taught me. I’m gonna surprise him!”
In the new film, Goosebumps, musician, actor, funny man, and Tenacious D frontman, Jack Black, doesn’t strap on his axe, instead getting decidedly more literary. In a meta twist, this adaptation of the eponymous popular series of kids’ horror and thriller books sees Black playing a version of their real life author, R.L. Stine, the highly prolific Ohio-born scribe often referred to as “the Stephen King of children’s literature.” In this appropriately twisted take on the famously scary-funny source material (which was adapted for TV in the mid-nineties) from director, Rob Letterman (who previously directed Jack Black in Gulliver’s Travels), and screenwriters, Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, Big Eyes) and Darren Lemke (Jack The Giant Slayer), the one and only R.L. Stine himself has to team up with his daughter (Odeya Rush) and their young neighbour (Dylan Minnette) when the monsters in his books literally jump off the page and terrorise their small town home. “I did meet Bob, as I’m allowed to call him,” Jack Black says of R.L. Stine. “We just talked about the project, and I got his blessing. He’s a really nice guy, a sweet guy. He’s got a good sense of humour. I’m not doing an impersonation of him at all. I’m just doing what is best for the piece. Obviously, this isn’t autobiographical. We don’t have to get his persona down exactly, because none of this happened to him in reality. None of his creatures came to life. None of this is a part of his history…that we know of! I’ve certainly taken liberties with the character.”
Tonally, Goosebumps takes more than a few leaves out of the Gremlins and Goonies playbooks, mixing scares with laughs, and keeping it safe for the kids. “First and foremost, it’s just going to be really scary and really funny at the same time,” Jack Black told FilmInk on the Goosebumps set. “And that’s a tricky little combination. At the heart of it though, there’s a story about coming out of one’s shell. R.L. Stine has cut himself off from the real world because he had a tough childhood. There were a lot of bullies in his life, and he wasn’t the popular kid in school, so he creates this world of monsters and demons and then he imagines them terrorizing the town as an act of revenge on all the kids who didn’t play with him and like him. I wasn’t the popular kid at school either. I made people laugh, but it was kind of a defence mechanism. So I can relate to that a little bit…creating worlds to defend one self.”
Demons, monsters, and the creation of bizarre new worlds is nothing new to Jack Black. With his comedy rock band, Tenacious D, he and musical partner, Kyle Gass, surround themselves with demonic imagery and heavy metal-inspired madness, best distilled in their riotous 2006 movie, Tenacious D And The Pick Of Destiny. “We have a fascination with eighties heavy metal music, where The Devil was always front and centre for the big rock acts,” Black smiles. “It was kind of used as a promotional tool for all those bands. We just think that’s funny now in retrospect. That’s such a big joke; if you weren’t selling enough records, you’d put The Devil on the cover of your new album, and start rumours that you’d sold your soul to The Devil; suddenly, the sales were through the roof and you’d have a packed house. It was almost like a requirement. If you were in a band in the eighties, there had to be a demon of some description in there. I was a sucker for that stuff. There was something cool about monsters and demons and devils. I could see the allure.”
Despite the demons, Jack Black is still happy to be king of the kids, with some of his family friendly flicks – Kung Fu Panda, The School Of Rock, Nacho Libre – rating amongst the actor’s most popular. “I don’t approach those movies any differently than I do with my others,” Black says of his kids’ flicks. “But the challenge is always to be funny without using bad language. I found that to be a great exercise in performance, because that can really be a crutch. I’ve been guilty of overusing the F-bombs in my other projects. But my best film to date, in my opinion, is The School Of Rock, and that had zero profanities. It was the same with Nacho Libre. Kids like funny things in the same way that adults do. That’s a common mistake that people make with kids’ movies. They’ll try to dumb down the comedy to bring it down to the apparently ‘low IQ’ of children. That’s a mistake. Children laugh at funny things.”
And Jack Black, meanwhile, isn’t averse to shedding a few tears. “I cry a lot with movies,” the actor admits. “I don’t find it very easy to cry in real life or on film. But when I see something in a movie – it doesn’t even have to be that sad – I just burst into tears. Whenever I see heroism, for instance, I start crying. In Captain America: The First Avenger, when the young scrawny Captain America – before he gets the serum to make him super – is in boot camp and someone throws a fake grenade out and he jumps on top, a couple of tears squeezed out of my eyes. It’s very embarrassing.”
And finally, with Goosebumps, were there any actual unexplained scary happenings on the set? “Of course,” Jack Black smiles mischievously. “There were all sorts of unexplained happenings. There were books flying off shelves…lots of scary stuff. That’s what you have to say on any scary movie to generate bogus buzz, right? I’m sorry that I didn’t prepare my bogus haunting stories,” Black laughs.
Goosebumps is available on DVD, Blu-ray, and Digital now.
