IN THE PICK OF DESTINY
Q&A with Jack Black and Kyle Gass
|
|
|
|||
| TENACIOUS D IN THE PICK OF DESTINY Q&A with Jack Black and Kyle Gass |
Search all of phase9.tv | |||
|
Movie interview by Siobhan Daly The great pretenders to the throne of rock superstardom, Tenacious D, rolled into London appropriately on Halloween to promote their debut film, TENACIOUS D IN THE PICK OF DESTINY. Comprising of Jack Black, doyen of Hollywood's comedy scene who came to the public's attention with memorable performances in HIGH FIDELITY, SCHOOL OF ROCK, KING KONG and more recently Jared Hess's NACHO LIBRE, and his friend Kyle Gass, the self-proclaimed Greatest Band on Earth are bringing their brand of high energy classic rock to the silver screen near you. Gentlemen, I understand that a movie has been mooted... JACK BLACK: Mooted? Is that what you said? The movie's been mooted? Yes, mooted is a good word... JACK BLACK: Mooted? KYLE GASS: I don't know what that means.... A movie has been in the works... JACK BLACK: Hmmm...it has been mooted... So why has it taken so long to reach the point where a movie has been made? JACK BLACK: Is that word like in the.....I'm sure it's in the Oxford dictionary... KYLE GASS: Yeah JACK BLACK: But probably not in the other one.....that we use.... KYLE GASS: Well, we will serve no-D-one before it's D time JACK BLACK: Why did it take so long to be mooted out? Erm....yep....it just had to be perfect, the planets had to align, we didn't want to roll out a stinker, we didn't have a time limit and this was our masterworks so we took our sweet ass time about it Did it go through many incarnations before you got at this story? KYLE GASS: It did. We thought we could get away with not writing it. We tried. JACK BLACK: We hired some top writers, some top thunder squad bringers but they squared up something that was not hot. It's not that. It was very good.... KYLE GASS: It was a pretty good movie for someone else. JACK BLACK: Yeah, it was Tenacious D saves the city of Atlantis and the devil was there.... KYLE GASS:... and overlords and... JACK BLACK:...and there was a hot Ninja girl we were fighting over... KYLE GASS: Yeah, it sounds pretty good. Could be the sequel. JACK BLACK: At the time we read it and said, "Oh God, this isn't really quite our sense of humour. We need to get our nose to the 'grindscone'." KYLE GASS: Grindscone? JACK BLACK: Yeah! Nose to the grindscone! And we sat down for five years and didn't do any writing and then in the last three weeks, we wrote it. Liam Lynch was the catalyst really, a friend that's a talented composer and filmmaker. And the writing process itself, how is that? Do you bat ideas back and forward? Does one work on structure? Is it similar to the way in which you write your music? JACK BLACK: Well, me and Kyle will fight a lot about the little details and sometimes I think he's fighting me just because he wants to win something. KYLE GASS: Have you ever tried to have an orgasm without friction? JACK BLACK: Yeah, yeah. KYLE GASS: It won't work. JACK BLACK: Exactly. In the great masterworks, if you look back, there's probably a lot of friction that led to it. You know all those Shakespeare plays, he probably had to fight his silent partner. KYLE GASS: Larry? [Laughs] JACK BLACK: Yeah, Larry [laughs]. But what’s the process like? Well you know, we started with a sentence. This was a breakthrough. It took so long to think, "Wait a second, we just have to tell the true tale of The D. It's the origin episode. We'll start before there was The D, you'll see us form the band and then you'll see us go on our first epic quest to become the greatest band on earth", so that was first. Once we'd got that, everything else just fell into place. KYLE GASS: We probably haven't been in an interview where someone hasn't asked us "How did you guys get together?" So we thought you know what - put it in the movie, answer the question forever. JACK BLACK: I have the feeling that someone's going to ask that. I can feel it coming. How would you describe the music of the band and would you own up about who you ripped off? JACK BLACK: Ooooh, that's an incendiary question. Ripped off means something different here. KYLE GASS: Not so nice where we come from. JACK BLACK: We have been called the Heavy Metal Simon and Garfunkel, but who do we rip off? I've ripped off a little Meat Loaf, his theatricality, probably some Zeppelin in there. KYLE GASS: Probably most of the big dinosaurs of rock. I mean it's impossible....a lot of the chords I use have been used before, so you know, if you start playing an A and a D, you're just going to run into some songs. JACK BLACK: Yeah. How do you see your music? JACK BLACK: Well it's not parody, like we don't rip off other bands' exact songs and put new funny lyrics to them. We have our own music. KYLE GASS: We try to write like the best songs ever and then they come out kinda funny. We do a lot of improv, we'll turn on the tape and I'll kinda riff around and Jack improvs. JACK BLACK: I don't turn on the tape actually until I have the subject matter and then I press record. KYLE GASS: But sometimes you miss something and then you're upset about it.... JACK BLACK: [sarcastically] Really, really.... For all of those rock gods who inspired you clearly, they obviously appreciate the gesture because many have given approvals for the film and some are actually in the film. JACK BLACK: Yeah, we've got three rock gods. That's not too bad. We've got Satan, Sasquatch and Meat Loaf. What else we got? Dave Grohl and Ronnie James Dio. Dave Grohl played Satan. I don't think he wanted us to say though, he wanted it to be a secret. Too late. I leaked it. I leaked it to the press. Continued on page 2 |
|||
|
© 2010 PHASE9 ENTERTAINMENT |
||||
Subscribe to the free PHASE9 Entertainment
newsletter
|
||||
| PHASE9
ENTERTAINMENT - HOME MOVIES MUSIC DVD GAMES COMPETITIONS HOT PHOTOS VIDEO STREAMS |
||||