Kurt Russell: Major Player

Q: What's your take on the NRA?

A: I really detest their attitude and what they do, but not what they say. They wanted to pay me to be a spokesman because I had this great plan on using the meal to feed the homeless.

Q: You're talking about those controversial celebrity shoot-outs, aren't you?

A: I created two shoot-outs, in Colorado in 1988 and in Hawaii in 1989. What I wanted to do was show hunting for what it should be shown for, which is providing food. At the shoot-out in Hawaii there were 24 hunters who paid $10,000 each. It was a one-of-a-kind hunt. It was like people who pay to play in pro-am games; these guys paid money to play with celebrities--actors, singers, sports figures. I asked my hunters to give up half their meat and they ended up gladly donating all of it, If I were able to hunt as much as I wanted to. I could never eat all that meat, but there are people who do need that meat and I'd like to get it to them.

Anyway, they hunted for seven days and the meat taken from those 24 hunters was chopped up and put into stews. I went around and got grocery stores to donate potatoes and vegetables needed to make a really good stew. And from that we got 40,000 meals that fed the homeless in Hawaii for almost six months. A guy came to me one day and said that I was being considered for a Nobel Prize. You feed 40,000 people with 24 guys, I think you've proven a point.

Q: Why did you stop the shoot-outs?

A: It was becoming my life--the phone was always ringing. They were trying to work out a thing where I could talk to President Bush about this program that I had developed. But after the last hunt, a couple of people complained about a couple of things and I said, "You know what? It ain't me. I've laid it out there, you've seen how it can work, take it or leave it, I don't care." What I found was, quite a few of the people who were involved didn't want to hunt, they wanted to kill! The animal rights people were absolutely right about them. What I found about the animal rights people was, the hunters were absolutely right about them--they were fucking idiots who didn't know anything about animals! Nothing!

Things have changed now, both sides have gotten a little more educated, but at that time I said to myself, what am I doing? I just want to hunt. By myself or with my brother-in-law or with my dad. That's it. But I'll tell you, few things in my life have given me as much satisfaction as the night I went to Denver to feed these homeless guys. It was cold, it was Christmas Eve, and these guys were lined up. Two or three hundred of them, and they had a look in their eyes that was the real thing. They said, "Man, I'm hungry. Thank you." It kind of put everything in the proper perspective for me.

Q: There were ads in the entertainment trade papers against your shoot-outs, denouncing your hunts as crimes against humanity.

A: Have you ever seen an ad that was more condemning to anybody in a business than that ad? It was Hollywood saying, "Blackball this guy." No other actor has ever had ads taken out in both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter calling for people to not ever work with me again. I was being ostracized, flatout, in black-and-white print.

Even Fatty Arbuckle did what he did with that Coke bottle, and he wasn't ostracized from his community. Not even Michael Jackson received the treatment I did. Never was there an ad in The Hollywood Reporter that said. "Michael Jackson was accused of molesting a minor--he should never work in this town again." That only happened with me. Poor old little me. I went hunting. Which is a legal thing to do. And I fed homeless people. It was a joke! All I can say about this is [laughs loudly and with deep, ironic satisfaction] that after that, my career took off.

Q: Have there been any conversations in the past decade that have changed your life?

A: A year-and-a-half ago, Goldie and my two youngest sisters and their husbands talked to me about my behavior. I was behaving badly, not good to be around, because I was too extreme in my reactions. I wasn't telling people how I really felt at the time, I'd just let it build up inside me, then, in my mind, I'd feel justified to really blow. More than I even knew, I was progressively getting more in the neighborhood of not thinking I had to control myself in any way, in terms of exploding. I didn't have a mother or a father telling me, "Hey, you can't behave that way" -- I was 43, hadn't been parented for 25 years, and I needed a little parenting. I needed to be told, "You can't do that, say that." Well, I can--and have--made those changes. That was the last time I had a conversation that was life-changing.

Q: Is there anything you still want that you don't have yet?

A: Hell. Yeah, It would be fun to have enough money to have a small restaurant where you could have your eclectic group of friends come in and get a good meal and be able to scream and holler, about politics, about anything--and you could be able to afford to lose $200,000 a year on it and it wouldn't make a difference. I'd like to have a jet airplane that I could fly, which would get me back and forth to Aspen inside of two hours, so that Aspen could become a weekend place. I'd like to have enough money to be able to afford some things for my family that I know they could use. Then, too, you know, certain humanitarian things--like, financing a school which could make a difference.

___________________________________________

Lawrence Grobel interviewed Pierce Brosnan for the November 1995 issue of Movieline.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5