Talking With…Michael Jai White

The co-writer and star of the blaxploitation spoof Black Dynamite discusses movies, martial arts and making people laugh.

GIANT: You’ve said that the character Black Dynamite is modeled after football player, blaxploitation star and your personal idol Jim Brown.
Michael Jai White: Yes, I met him some years ago and became involved with his organization called The Amer-I-Can Program, but I felt a real kinship with Jim before even meeting him. He’d been a big inspiration for me ever since I was a kid.  I do motivational speaking in between acting projects and we worked closely with his foundations where I would speak to children.  One day I was over at his house and I found a box of the clothes he wore in his movies, so a lot of the stuff I wore are based on those outfits.  I always said that I wanted to look like that when I grow up and with Black Dynamite I got that chance.

GIANT: You spoof the genre as a whole in the film, but was there one specific movie you had in mind while writing it?
White: The biggest one was Three the Hard Way, which starred three icons of the genre-Jim Brown, Fred Williamson and Jim Kelly.  That would be like if you were to put Sly Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis in the same movie.  The plot for Black Dynamite was borrowed from Three the Hard Way: the white man’s plot for how to destroy black people.  They took it seriously back then, now it’s a commentary for what things were like in the ’70s.

GIANT: There have been several movies that have spoofed the blaxploitation genre over the years, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka and Undercover Brother.  Did you find those films funny?
White: I have issues with them; I don’t feel they could possibly be spoofs because they don’t even occur in the ’70s.  They’re some kind of strange hybrid that robs folks of what made the ’70s special.  It’s funny when you do a period piece, because there are conventions that they took seriously then that make for great comedy today.

GIANT: Black Dynamite is definitely as un-PC as a lot of those ’70s movies.
White: A lot of comedies that come from studios today are safe comedies.  I don’t think studios are keeping up with how sophisticated the average audience is now.  In this movie there’s a lot that’s commentary and poking fun at the movie industry as a whole and not just blaxploitation.  It was interesting to look at a time that was sexually charged and awake with the garishness of music and fashion.  These days, political correctness looms over our heads like a cloud.  I think I’m rebelling against the corporate nature of entertainment and I absolutely cherished being politically incorrect.

GIANT: You’re an actor, writer and martial arts choreographer.  What’s your favorite aspect of the filmmaking process?
White: I enjoy the whole process because I’m a very eclectic person by nature.  Unfortunately as a black actor, people are used to putting you on a specific shelf.  If there’s a movie that has a number of black people in it, it’s considered an urban movie, which I think is asinine.  I’ve written a comedy-it wasn’t made for one type of people, just like Borat was just made for white people.  I’ve been writing scripts for years and I have things under different names, because people aren’t always ready to believe that I can be an accomplished writer.  Even my own manager will read a script that came from me and will have no idea that I wrote it.

GIANT: Since comic-book movies are so huge right now, do you ever think about suiting up as Spawn again?
White: I hear that question ten times a day.  [Laughs]  There’s a hunger for Spawn 2, but I know there’s a political battle between Todd and the studio.  They need to resolve that because a non-warm and fuzzy superhero is exactly what’s needed right now.  Darker has worked better in the cases of Spider-Man and Batman and here’s a character that’s written dark.  It should be an R-rated movie and it should do what the comic book did.  I do have to say that being in that suit was probably the most miserable working experience I’ve had in my life being in that suit, but I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.  I owe it to the fans because they’re responsible for getting me to where I am today.  The first movie was the introduction of Spawn; in the second you can start with who he is and he can be ripping out spinal cords.

GIANT: Have you forgiven Quentin Tarantino for cutting your big fight scene out of Kill Bill, Vol. 2?
White: That was originally a much longer sequence that he wound up omitting.  But he still wants me to do something with the character.  We’re big fans of the kung-fu genre and a lot of times when we’re in the same room together, we’re speaking a language other people don’t know.  We watched the same exact movies growing up.

GIANT: How has your extensive martial arts background helped you as an actor?
White: I practice and teach a style called kyokushin.  It’s the most popular style of karate in the world.  The cornerstone of martial arts is that it teaches you discipline.  The body gets conditioned as a result of what your mind is doing.  When you build that discipline and focus, you can shut out anything that you need to.  And acting is also all about discipline.  With discipline, you can accomplish anything.

GIANT: You’re primarily an action guy, but are there any other roles you’d like to take on?
White: I would love to one play the captain of a starship.  I’ve done Shakespeare in the past and I think it would be a great fit for me.  I’d love to do romantic comedies as well.  But the action market is completely under-served these days and I want to exploit that.  I’m very pro American and you look around today and you see that all of our action heroes are imports.  There’s Hugh Jackman, Gerard Butler-it keeps going.  Our manly men are imports.  Where are the new American action heroes coming from?

Black Dynamite opens in limited release on Friday.  Visit the film’s official website to find out when it opens in your town.