Burt Reynolds’ Last Interview
One of the many frequent refrains and regrets of the modern franchise and nostalgia focused blockbuster era of Hollywood is the ‘death of the movie star.’ The idea, often correct, that modern audiences respond less to specific talented and charismatic individuals and more to one or two specific characters they play or series they appear in. The days when a crowd was in love enough with an actor or actress to follow them from film to film across a range of genres and quality levels, a foundational element of the business, are gone. They’ll go see Top Gun and Mission: Impossible but that doesn’t guarantee they’ll watch other Tom Cruise movies. The movie star as a singular attraction is no more.
So the refrain goes. And for people coming into film in the current era, the idea of a movie star itself may seem archaic and hard to fathom. Sure there are a couple but most of the time it’s the movie itself, not the player. To those kinds of audiences it would be very difficult to explain just how important Burt Reynolds was from the late 70s to the early 80s. How could one individual mean so much as to a movie getting made or not because of him? It’s the totality of the experience that matters! Burt Reynolds: The Last Interview will not fully explain that, it is not looking to sum up the entirety of his place in the filmmaking schema, only to shine one last light on it. But for those who were there it is both one last reminder of what movie stars were and a last moment of insight and reflection from an icon just before his passing.
Filmed several months before Reynolds’ unexpected passing while preparing for a role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the interview was never intended to be Reynolds’ last word on his own career. Intended initially as a piece for director Rick Pamplin’s documentary on the difficulty in financing filmmaking, it quickly goes off into its own place as Reynolds’ expresses his disinterest in the original subject and instead becomes – intentionally or not – an artifact of the end of a specific era. In process is as scattershot as that sort of raw, unfocused questioning is; rather than use specific pieces as part of a larger focused narrative the way documentary normally does, Pamplin instead chooses to feature almost the entirety of the interview, aware of the importance of it as an item in and of itself.
Recognizing the issues with comprehension that creates, the rest of Last Interview is focused on providing some context to Reynolds’ threads, particularly around his focus on teaching acting and directing and desire to pass along to the next generations. It doesn’t create or deliver an overarching explanation of Reynolds in his time and place – viewers not already familiar with him may will not get an idea why he was important from this film alone – but it does shine a light on some of the lesser-known aspects of his life and career from his time as a benefactor theater in his home of Jupiter, Florida during the height of his fame to his return to it later in his life.
The life and times of the various Burt Reynolds’ theaters is the focus around which much of Last Interview focuses, from the current administrator of the community theater that once bore his name to his former manager who had helped him direct his energies. The remanences are all very specific to small but engaging anecdotes about his life, details around the edges that don’t give much information about the whole but have their own interest on their own. Ironically, or perhaps not, the most complete view of Reynolds’ in respect to his greater career comes from the man who would have been his last director, Quentin Tarantino.
Cast to play George Span, the owner of the Span Ranch (portrayed in the film by Bruce Dern), Reynolds had performed one full rehearsal of Hollywood with the full cast and was preparing to start filming when he passed away. In the middle of all of this, Tarantino with his typical recall ties both the last days of Reynolds preparing to recreate 1969 Hollywood with the actors own original breakthrough in 1969 Hollywood, in the process creating some idea of what Reynolds was for those who have never seen one of his films.
Burt Reynolds: The Last Interview is exactly what it says on the tin. It doesn’t provide enough context to fully explain who Reynolds was and only makes any real sense to those who already knew of him. But for that group it’s a fascinating glimpse into what has become an increasingly endangered species – the movie star.
Rating — 6.5 out of 10
Starring Burt Reynolds, Quentin Tarantino, C. Todd Vittum, Rick Pamplin, Andrew Kato, Chuck Elderd and Michelle Hillery