When choosing his follow-up to the cultural shockwave that was Pulp Fiction in 1994, acclaimed director Quentin Tarantino smartly decided to look to another writer as a source. He chose Rum Punch, the then-recent hard-boiled crime thriller by Elmore Leonard. However, as casting questions started to arise during the writing process, he realised he may have to deviate from his originally faithful adaptation.
The following brainstorming would eventually lead Tarantino to make a radical decision that would not only drastically alter the fabric of Leonard’s novel but put him in contact with an actor he’d later come to describe as similar to western legend John Wayne – despite being female. “I started to think who could be Jackie Brown, knowing the attributes she had to have; she had to be 44 but look like she was 34.”
Tarantino continued, “She had to look great, and she had to look like she could handle anything. Writing down different white actresses because it was a white character in the novel, some of the people I thought could be good were too young,” Tarantino explained to The Guardian. “That is standard operating procedure; they would make her 35. I didn’t like that at all.” Then it came to him, and everything clicked: blaxploitation star Pam Grier.
“I thought Pam is perfect for the role,” he said. “She is the exact age right now. She looks younger, and she looks like she can handle anything. By doing that, it turned it into a Pam Grier movie. Nothing wrong with that.” If you could call it that, the only issue was that she brought a distinct association with the blaxploitation genre. “To one degree or another, it is like casting John Wayne in a movie. John Wayne has got a whole past behind him, and his past is built up from these other movies.”
However, as it turned out, this association would become a huge advantage, giving Tarantino the aesthetic and genre twist on Rum Punch that it needed to be more of a Tarantino film than simply a Leonard adaptation – and yielding one of the director’s best films. “Some baggage can be very, very good,” the director explained. “By casting Pam, I did term this in my mind to a Pam Grier movie, but it was a Pam Grier movie with its feet on the ground more.”
As for Grier, having her career revived 20 years later was a godsend – however, Tarantino’s notoriously specific direction was a challenge. “Quentin told me that [Samuel L. Jackson] had a metronome-like quality that’s really fast, but that I’d have to slow down for Robert [Forster],” Grier told Yahoo. “He warned me that not all actors can do that, so I had to learn.”
“Quentin said to slow my pace down to avoid revealing that I’m planning a scheme,” she continued. “Max knows people inside and out and knows when they’re fooling him — he can smell me if I’m lying. But I also need him, so it’s not cut-and-dried. That’s why you’re exhausted when you work with Quentin Tarantino and his characters!”
