Leading up to the release of Be Kind Rewind, we caught up with a blonde Jack Black at the film's press conference in L.A. where he filled us in on everything from renting video tapes, his prep for the movie, and his new RoboCop costume to whether he prefers VHS and Beta over DVD and why he's made so many animated movies.

Jack Black on why he's gone blonde:

"It’s not for Vidal Sassoon. It’s for Ben Stiller’s production that I went blonde for, and now I’m growing it out."

Black on collecting video tapes when they were popular:

"Yeah, I got a lot of videos back in the day. I watched a lot of videos. I always did rewind but I did have a problem returning them. I ended up owning a lot of movies."

On whether he paid for them or just never returned them:

"No, you gotta pay for them. They’ll track you down. I’m a good boy... Yeah, I bought them and it costs so much more when you buy them by never returning them. Somehow they’re ten times as much as they would be if you just bought them and they’re used and crappy, with 'not for sale stickers' on them - not the way you want to own them."

On whether he likes DVD better than VHS or Beta:

"Not really. The vinyl records sound better than CDs whereas video tape cassettes don’t look that different from DVDs, certainly not better than Blu-Ray. I’m an HD snob now. I can’t watch anything unless it’s HD."

Did he re-watch many older films before the movie?

"No. I was told not to by Michel [Gondry]. He said, 'Don’t rewatch any of the films.' And I said, 'But I haven’t even seen some of these films. I never saw Driving Miss Daisy. I should watch it once just to get ready?' And he said, 'No, even better.' And so since I’d seen the commercials, [so] I knew the basic gist of the film. He liked it better when it was really half-assed and not even close to the original. I think that was the point. We were remaking them but they were different movies after we were done."

Black on the movies he liked doing in Be Kind as compared to what he would have liked to do:

"I really liked doing RoboCop. When I was a kid I loved the sci-fi action genre the most, so I would have gone further into those type of movies, like I would have liked to do The Terminator as the naked Schwarzenegger. Then I would have wanted to do the Road Warrior, that was one of my favorites. I would have wanted to do The Shining."

On wearing his RoboCop gear:

"It was ingenious. A lot of car parts, like car fenders and it was all Michel’s brainchild. He had help in the construction but he sketched out all the things."

Black on the status of his musical career:

"Yeah, we’ve been trying to write songs and they’re all really lame right now except for one very powerful gem called 'Death Star', but I’m afraid that George Lucas... [checks with his people] - do we have to get the rights to have a song called 'Death Star'?"

Rewinding Video Tapes with Jack Black Page 2