The great James Earl Jones talks about how he created the best-known voice in the history of film--Darth Vader's--and describes a life in which this accomplishment reverberates with one irony after another.
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It's impossible to tell whether the incredibly successful Star Wars trilogy would have captured the imagination of the world the way it did if Luke Skywalker or Han Solo or Princess Leia had been played by actors other than Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford or Carrie Fisher. But it seems almost certain that if the voice of Darth Vader, the evil core of the trilogy, hadn't been as rich, ominous, spooky or penetrating as it was, the power of the film would have been diminished. That voice was priceless. Invaluable. And since it only cost $7,000, it ranks as one of the greatest bargains in the history of cinema.
As if that irony were not enough, add to it the fact that the voice belongs to James Earl Jones, one of Americas truly great cultural treasures. In the theater, Jones has mesmerized audiences in plays like Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones and The Iceman Cometh, Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope, Shakespeare's King Lear, Macbeth and Othello, and August Wilson's Fences (for which he won the Tony for Outstanding Actor). On-screen he's appeared in nearly 60 films, from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb to The Great White Hope, from Field of Dreams and Patriot Games to Cry, the Beloved Country. He's also done extraordinary work on television, in Roots: The Next Generation, Gabriel's Fire and Paul Robeson. But none of this great work is what he will be best remembered for; Darth Vader is.
There's another irony in the fact that the man who created Darth Vader's commanding voice suffered from a monumental stutter as a child. Jones's childhood as a whole is a painful, triumphant story that began in 1931 in Arkabutla, Mississippi, when he was born to a 20-year-old woman and a father who had already left. Jones was raised on a farm by his grandparents, who moved him with them to Michigan. The geographical displacement was a shock for the young James Earl, and soon after, he began to stutter. In high school, when he was forced to recite a poem he'd written, he did so without faltering, and that, plus the experience of hearing Paul Robeson sing, turned Jones toward a life of acting. Married to actress Cecilia Hart since 1982, Jones has a 16-year-old son and lives in upstate New York.
LAWRENCE GROBEL: How did George Lucas choose you for the voice of Darth Vader? JAMES EARL JONES: He knew he wanted Darth Vader to have a bass voice. He was right--with that great entrance, Darth Vader coming out of the smoke, you had to have a voice to go with it. Well, how many bass voices are there? There was Orson Welles, and the rumor is that he considered Welles, but decided that voice might be too recognizable, so he called my agent and asked, "Would Jim like a day's work?"
Q: Didn't you originally deny being the voice of Darth Vader?
A: When Mercedes McCambridge did the voice for the "possessed" Linda Blair in The Exorcist, I was on the Board of Directors of the Academy and the debate was: should Mercedes be a co-nominee for the Oscar? I thought it was a silly argument. When will people just accept that they are special effects? So when it came to the voice of Darth Vader, I said, "I don't want credit." You have to understand, at that time I didn't know we had anything. Even Lucas didn't know what he had. I declined credit for number one and number two. Only when I knew that Darth was going to die in number three I said, "OK, let's give myself credit."
Q: Did you net any royalties from the first Star Wars?
A: No, I got a flat fee, $7,000. Lucas, out of his own graciousness, gave me an equal amount for a Christmas bonus that year. But there's no way that I could have become as wealthy as people assume I did.
Q: Do you regret the way your contract was negotiated?
A: Everybody wishes they could have won the lottery, but you can't sit around and have regrets about it. I'm a realist.
Q: What was your first meeting with George Lucas like?
A: I'll tell you about two directors who, from the outside, seem very unassuming. Stanley Kubrick, who directed the first movie I was in, Dr. Strangelove, chewed gum and was casual. But you learned later that he was totally fascinated by the use and abuse of power, as a filmmaker as well as a person. Lucas, on the other hand, is genuinely unassuming. When he chews gum or buys a bag of popcorn it's not an act. He relaxes you. You don't feel that he's going to kick your ass. And he's got a good mind.
Q: Did Lucas "explain" Darth Vader to you?
A: No, I heard very little about the movie. It was filmed mostly in England. He had a tradition of keeping everything quiet.
Q: But didn't he give you the background of the character, to help you figure him out?
A: He said it wasn't a matter of the actor making the character more interesting--it was exactly the opposite. Darth doesn't have inflection. He speaks from a very narrow band, or else he sounds too human. Darth's more than human. The difficulty for the second and third movies was how to keep that narrow band of inflection. For The Empire Strikes Back, [director] Irvin Kershner put down his own track for Darth Vader to give me an idea of where he wanted to go with it. He had a great, squeaky, cracky voice. And it worked unusually well--it's even scarier, because you don't expect it.
Q: Were you involved with Vader's heavy breathing?
A: No. I don't know who added the sound of breathing. It was bionic breathing, not related to speech at all.
Q: Do you feel frustrated or amused at getting so much attention for a part you never played?
A: I'm just glad I was a part of it.
Q: What did you think of Star Wars when you saw it?
A: Before I understood the mythic element, I thought it was simplistic. When my boy was three I watched it on video with him. He looked at Darth Vader and he looked at me, and he just hated that I was the bad guy. Darth Vader scared him very, very deeply. So I was affected by that.
Q: When did you become aware of the myths and legends it borrowed from?
A: Raymond St. Jacques was the first black person to voice the question, "What's going on here? You look up and in these other galaxies there are no black people. The only one who seems black is Darth Vader, because he sounds like James Earl Jones. Does that imply that the only blacks in the galaxy are evil forces?" I'd always said that black actors should exploit mat: we should play Mephistopheles, we should take advantage of all that mythology that black is evil. It wouldn't be too healthy, I suppose, but it made me start to examine it from a mythic point of view.
Q: What, if anything, did you learn from those films?
A: You should be able to boil any good story down to its mythic elements. That's what makes it universal.
Q: How learned in the Force are you?
A: I never bought Darth reaching out and, without making contact, making a guy choke. But what I learned then about mysterious forces was confirmed later in Field of Dreams. When you're dealing with a mysterious force, don't try to explain it. That's what Lucas knew--it was a mysterious force, you just let it be.
Q: Could you appreciate any of the performances in the Star Wars trilogy or did the technology overwhelm the individual characters?
A: [Laughs] I love Chewbacca. He was my favorite.
Q: Are you allowed to use Vader's voice on your own?
A: No, I really can't. Nor can they use it arbitrarily without my permission. I've taken on a speaking career, where I go to colleges around the country. I get invited because I've been Darth Vader and Mufasa [The Lion King]. The first time I gave a speech was at Yale, where I compared the rightwing militia to the left-wing radical groups of the '60s. I thought I did a good job. But they didn't give a shit. It was the Yale forum, where after your speech, two sides debate, and they wanted me to do it as Darth Vader. Really!
Q: Of the first three films, which did you like best?
A: The first one. And I'm looking forward to the new one. All I had to do was see a picture of little Natalie Portman with that makeup and it made me feel, aaahhhh! I love when the imagination just explodes. See, I was also in Conan the Barbarian, which dealt with another time and place far, far away. I love that stuff of dreams.
Q: Do you think that by the third prequel, Anakin Skywalker will have become Darth Vader and your services will be needed again?
A: I asked George Lucas: do I get to work? He said, "Yeah. In the third one, when Anakin becomes bionic, he'll sound like you." That might only be the last five minutes of the movie, but it's fine with me.
Q: When you first saw Star Wars were you as impressed with how you sounded as the rest of us were?
A: I've only been impressed with my voice work in an animation called The Flight of the Dragons, about 20 years ago, where I played two dragons. I'm not impressed with Darth Vader or the CNN thing.
Q: Some say this voice made you more famous than anything else you've done--do you see this as ironic?
A: Oh yeah, it's full of irony. And the fact that I once was mute.
Q: You developed a stutter when you moved with your grandparents to Michigan, didn't you?
A: I attribute it to that, and an incident with my Uncle Randy, who had epilepsy. He would pass out and go rigid on the floor. Once while he was passed out, my grandmother told me to go to the store, about a mile away, to get a doctor. There'd been a blizzard the night before and all the roads were closed with five feet of snow, and when I got to the store I was overwhelmed and couldn't get anything out to the storekeeper.
Q: How bad did your stuttering get?
A: There were times when I just went totally mute. Randy, you see, besides having epilepsy, also was a stutterer and I used to mock him. So I felt maybe the law of retribution happened. But I accept the fact that I will always be a stutterer. A lot of stuttering rights organizations say that stutterers shouldn't be made fun of. I don't agree. Stuttering is funny.
Q: How did you deal with racism as a child?
A: I did not want to be a victim of paranoia. I knew very early, from my indoctrination with my grandma, that that was no way to live. I wanted to be a realist.
Q: Did anyone ever make you feel inferior?
A: No. To feel inferior, you've got to be pretty jerked around in all kinds of ways for that. Racism is a form of profound insanity. And any excessive racial consciousness is also the same breed of insanity. "Black is Beautiful" is insane.
Q: You didn't meet your father until you were 21, but you knew that he was a boxer and an actor?
A: Oh yeah, I knew. You couldn't talk about boxing or acting around my grandma. But I kept abreast of his life.
Q: And then, while you're studying premed, you see an issue of Look magazine with your father in it and you decide to become an actor?
A: There he was, an actor, and making a living at it, I thought--which was not true. The Korean War was staring me in the face and I thought I'd be dead by the fall of '53 anyway, so why not do something I would enjoy? I dropped out of premed and spent my last two years in the drama department. But I had no intentions of following through to becoming an actor.
Q: When you left the army and saw the civil unrest among blacks, did you think you'd become a radical?
A: I fully expected there would be a race war, and I expected to use my military training to help defend people. But Jesus, I wouldn't dirty my hands with politics.
Q: It was around this time when you met your father for the first time. What was that like?
A: It was weird. There was an embrace, but it was very awkward. Later on when I hung out with him in New York City, this embracing thing was all over the place. I never saw so much hugging and kissing as I did among the theater world.
Q: How did you feel about your father seeing you act?
A: That was one of the two things that intruded on my work. The other was reviews. When I got over the fear of reviews I stopped reading them, around the same time I got over the fear of my father being in the audience.
Q: Ever give him money after you became successful?
A: He's asked for it. He claimed to me recently that he and I had promised each other that whoever made it first would take care of the other. I said to him, "I don't remember making that promise, but if I did, I take it back as of now because I've got a family to raise." He's sly, but he's not very clever.
Q: When you first started acting in summer theater, you fell in love with a white woman who was...
A: I fell in love with an actress. Why say white? We know she was white, but why say it?
Q: Because at that time there were interracial problems.
A: My main job is to try to keep my head above the race bullshit without losing my sense of reality. Racism is not politics, it's very personal. Whenever I list my genetic heritage I use all three anthropological words: Negroid, Caucasoid and Mongoloid.
Q: What about the Othello rumor--that every time you played Othello you slept with your Desdemona? Is that something you'd like to put to rest?
A: I don't know. [Big smile] I might want to perpetuate it.
Q: Two of your Desdemonas were Jane Alexander and Jill Clayburgh.
A: I think Jane was having a thing with the director and it was just coincidental that I was on the stage with her in those love scenes. Jill Clayburgh had just broken up with Al Pacino and she was very vulnerable. She and I never so much as kissed offstage.
Q: In 1964, though, you did break up a marriage when you fell for your Desdemona, Julienne Marie.
A: She wasn't just a good actress, she was also a vivacious actress. We all fell in love with her, and none of us knew that she was attracted to any of us.
Q: Your relationship lasted about eight years. Had she been able to give you a child, would you have stayed with her?
A: I'm sure, yeah. I had a strong need to be a father. I would meet somebody and pretty much say, "Hi, my name is James, can you have a baby?"
Q: By 1979, you were engaged to be married again, but then you became involved with Cecilia Hart.
A: The more we worked together the more I realized I was attracted to her. I said to my betrothed, "I don't think I should be marrying you, because I'm really attracted to somebody else."
Q: How well do you know your wife?
A: I'll never understand her. And that's part of my loving her.
Q: She does, on the other hand, feel she knows you?
A: I'm afraid so. I'm afraid she's deluding herself that she's got my number, but I'll never have her number.
Q: Has your attitude about women changed over the years?
A: I think we're coming out of a lot of confusion with feminism. Earlier, on a movie set, 10 people would have somebody's phone number quickly, looking forward to the flirtations, maybe some hugs, maybe some would get laid. Now, between AIDS and the feminist movement, no one knows what to do. I hope that if there's something women want they'll let us know, because we don't dare ask anymore!
Q: You said you'd never dirty yourself with politics, including black politics. Is that what you think Spike Lee is doing?
A: Oh yeah, master gamesman. I think he says all that bullshit just because he knows it gets in the press. It's irrelevant. It's like he's reinventing everything--like there was no Paul Robeson, no Malcolm X, no generation of directors or actors before him. No racism before he acknowledged it. This stuff has been dealt with ad nauseam.
Q: Spike's not going to be happy to hear that.
A: The people I come to loggerheads with, like Bryant Gumble or Spike Lee, I'm usually talking blind. I'm so busy seeing what a jerk they are, I forget what a jerk I'm being. I was asked whether Spike Lee should direct Malcolm X when I didn't even know it was a proposal. I thought it was just a random question. I said, "Well, I think the story of Malcolm requires somebody who has a lot more experience in life than Spike has."
Q: What were your feelings about Malcolm X?
A: When he stopped playing Elijah Muhammad's bullshit, which was "let's go out and carve out a separate nation," then he was saying very much the truth. The real dream was for people to get their act together.
Q: Let's talk about some of your movies. You weren't very happy with the film version of The Great White Hope, were you?
A: No. I'm not happy with any film I've done. When I got the final script, all the poetic elements were taken out. And the director, Marty Ritt, was too reverent of the play. I didn't know how to do film acting, so I said to him, "How should I prepare?" He said, "Just give me your stage performance and I'll modulate it." I was lost. Only Jane Alexander discovered a film performance that was right for her character.
Q: And yet you were nominated for an Oscar.
A: The Oscar has nothing to with your talent at all. Sidney Poitier won his not for the performance where he showed his most talent The Defiant Ones, but where he showed the most syrup Lilies of the Field.
Q: What's your opinion of Dr. Strangelove now?
A: Puerile. It has a juvenile sense of humor. I think Paths of Glory was, Kubrick's best film.
Q: In the last five years you've appeared in at least 10 films, including Clear and Present Danger, The Lion King, Jefferson in Paris, Cry, the Beloved Country, A Family Thing _and Al Pacino's _Looking for Richard.
A: Often they've been cameo roles. The only one I'd like to have up there in round letters is Cry, the Beloved Country.
Q: What films of yours do you feel speak for you?
A: Rather than focus on them individually, there's a category of film that I accept as my legacy. That is, simple stories, simply told: Field of Dreams, Matewan, The Man, Claudine. And a TV movie, The UFO Incident.
Q: Where do you place films like Sneakers, The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Sommersby?.
A: I put them in Cameo Roles Where I Get to Act With All the Stars in One Scene and Go Home.
Q: You have some specific beliefs about electrical fields and about holistic medicine, and aren't you also a long-time believer in primal scream therapy?
A: [Years ago] I took a primal scream therapy class to tap into my emotional life and to get my perception back. I had begun to attract crazy people around me. Suddenly, being a star, you're supposed to be available to everybody, and Hollywood is just rife with snakes. Every child knows a snake when he sees one, but what happened to me was I could no longer sense the presence of evil.
Q: You took on Paul Robeson's family and several influential African Americans like Coretta King, Maya Angelou and James Baldwin to make the TV movie Paul Robeson. Did it make you think twice?
A: No, not at all.
Q: Did it annoy you that so many people jumped on this bandwagon to oppose you?
A: More than annoyed, it deeply bothered me.
Q: What was your impression of Robeson?
A: What was significant was meeting the man himself, hearing him sing, being in his presence, being affected on a magnetic level. I don't know anybody more committed. Gandhi maybe, but Gandhi was low-key. Robeson was out there. He gave up fame, fortune and peace within his own life.
Q: There's a warrior in you--where do you think that comes from?
A: Africa. The last few times I've been to South and East Africa I've always gone to a shaman. The two things that I'm in quest of are, one, the identity of my spiritual totem, and two, the regions from which my ancestors came. In all cases they've been able to tell me three different tribes, two in Zimbabwe and one in Kenya. My father is from the spiritual totem of the lion and my mother the Rhesus monkey.
Q: Is it OK to have it on your tombstone that you were the voice of Darth Vader?
A: You mean have that there and not King Lear? Yeah, fine, cool, I don't care--even though I'm proud of my King Lear.
Q: Is there one line of Darth's that sticks with you?
A: The only one I know is: "I have you now." When kids ask me to do Darth Vader, I say, "You know all the lines, I know none of them. You feed me, I'll say them back at you."
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Lawrence Grobel interviewed Sandra Bullock for the April 99 issue of Movieline.