America Behind the Color Line (40 page)

JOHN SINGLETON
Living in the Community

I call myself the first black film brat because I was able to come out of school saying, I’m not going to let you guys have this script because you people make bad movies all the time and I’m going to do it myself. If you don’t want to make it, I’m going to make it myself. They were like, oh wow, oh wow, he must have something. And I did
Boyz N the Hood
. It made $60 million and it was made for nothing, for $6 million. With the success of that, I was able to do all these other films and was able to not have to kowtow or ask for anything. I was like, this is the way it’s going to be, boom, boom, boom. But that could not have happened five or ten years previous to me doing
Boyz N the Hood
. If it wasn’t for Spike Lee coming up and making a name and making successful films, or Eddie Murphy coming up making films that were wildly successful—films that made billions of dollars—I wouldn’t have been in the position I was in. They kept the machine going. That’s what all this is about, is keeping that machine going. And once you come out of favor, no matter who you are, you’re out of here.

There’s plenty of people that get in this business that come from different cultural backgrounds and that want to change. They don’t realize what’s special about themselves culturally that they can bring to the medium of film. If you realize what’s special about you culturally, you can channel that into your films in a commercial way that makes everybody want to see it. Even if there are white characters in it, it’s not much different; that’s the thing. But a lot of people say, well, what does Hollywood want? What do they want? Well, who the hell is “they,” you know? There is no “they.”

Everybody talks about the five guys who run Hollywood. Well there
are
about five guys that run Hollywood, but they really don’t. They’re running scared anyway, about the next two films that come out. They could be out of here tomorrow. Those five guys that run Hollywood could be five new guys six months from now. It changes just like that. The whole business is about new blood; it’s about new, new, new. Oh yeah, that’s cool, you made us $200 million last week; what you got now? Oh yeah, you did? You made a movie that made $100 million? So can you do it again? Show me the money. That’s what it’s about.

I don’t want to sound like I’m some conservative or whatever, ’cause I’m not. I ain’t no Clarence Thomas. But I go on the old adage my grandmother said, that if you’re black, you’ve got to be three, four, five, six times better than anybody else in what you do. Ten times better. There was a time in which you were ten times better at anything you did and the response was, we don’t care. It didn’t matter. You were a ten-times-better basketball player, and we still ain’t going to let you play in the NBA. Now you’re ten times better in your subject and you can excel in this country.

I knew—not to sound high horse or whatever—that I was the best writer in my class at the University of Southern California, and I knew that whatever I wrote was going to get made. I wrote
Boyz N the Hood
, and I said in the class, I deserve an A for this and I don’t need to come to class, ’cause I did my senior thesis and this movie’s going to get made. The teacher gave me an A, and I made the movie within a year. You have to have the attitude, but you have to be able to put the work in to back it up. My saying is that the black man in this country has no power, whether financially or anything else in America, but all the black man has in this country, if he can keep his balls, is his ego. But you have to have the know-how and you have to have the patience to be able to back that up with hard work. If Muhammad Ali said he was going to knock somebody out, he knocked them out. He would call the round. If you are about something, whatever discipline it is, whether or not it’s filmmaking, whether or not it’s literature, whatever is your thing, you have to be able to do the work and the blood, sweat, and tears, be able to back it up, be the best you could. That’s a lifelong lesson. It’s like that whole thing where the guy gets a new toy and says, I want to play with it, but he doesn’t sit back and follow the instructions to put it together. I think there’s a whole lot of people that are living their lives like that. They’re not sitting down and following the instructions.

In my business, to get a movie made, you have to be able to have it on the page, but you have to be able also to verbally tell it and excite the people who are in a position to say, hey, we need to give him $20 million or $60 million to do this. And you got to be able to tell it in less than two minutes. You got to be able to say it in two sentences and then get somebody hot to do your movie. I won’t say I’ve mastered doing this, but throughout the years I’ve been able to get down to like, hey, this is what this movie is about, and hey, if you want to do it, cool, and if you don’t, somebody else is going to want to do it. You have to make it just so that the person, they have to think twice, you know, wow, they feel left out if they don’t do it. You know, this whole thing is about what’s hip. It’s like you’re hip one minute and you’re square and L7 the next. That’s what it is. It’s like, give me something new. It’s that attention-deficit society. You got to be new and you got to be fresh. We make Hollywood what it is and we feed it, and it feeds upon us, and that’s how it works. So much money is at stake that it’s a corporate decision what gets made, and so a lot of the big features suck.

After ten years of doing different types of movies, trying to establish myself with some type of respect as a filmmaker, I figured I want to do some films just for fun. Not every movie has to be serious or topical, ’cause it’s much more difficult to get a film like
Rosewood
made than a popcorn movie that everyone in the world is going to see. If I continue to just try to make films like
Rosewood,
I wouldn’t make any movies, ’cause those kinds of films are not necessarily commercial. But they’re important and need to be made, so I have to use two sides of my brain as a filmmaker. I have to entertain as well as do things that I’m interested in. Financially,
Rosewood
didn’t do well at all, but it was probably one of the films I’m most respected for.

I’ve been directing just twelve years and I’m going into my seventh film. I started directing when I was twenty-two years old, and I’m thirty-four, so I’m a veteran at a young age still. I’m cool now. Hopefully, I’ll be able to do this for the next twenty or thirty years. My second career, I want to be a photographer, follow in the steps of Mr. Gordon Parks.

As a filmmaker I’ve helped people to escape, but I’ve put harsh reality in people’s faces too, as a function of entertainment, with films like
Boyz N the Hood
and
Rosewood
. I love movies, man; I just love movies. In the sense that I’m going to try to do just basically fun films for the moment,
2 Fast 2 Furious
signals a dramatic shift in my career. If I find something that I’m really passionate about that says something, then I’ll go ahead and shoot it. But I grew up going to movies as an escape, and I’m a big comic book fan, so it’s important for me to try to do some things that are really close to my heart, that don’t necessarily have to be based in reality.

There’s a moment during the first race in
Fast and Furious
that’s just an adrenaline rush. They’re going at 140 miles an hour on a straightaway. In

2 Fast 2 Furious,
we don’t use cars just as cars. We use them like spaceships almost. Every kid wants to be Luke Skywalker in a spaceship, but it’s more accessible to get like a Celica with some hot rims, not with knots, and to be able to drive that fast, man. The way they shot the cars in this movie, they made street racing even more sexy to the kids. This is a genre of filmmaking that has been seen over and over and over again and that
Fast and Furious
put a new spin on. My mantra is, I don’t want to do anything from
Fast and Furious
that the audience will know in
2 Fast 2 Furious
. It’s a brand-new spin, a whole new thing.
Fast and Furious
was drag racing straightforward. We have twists, we have turns; you’ve got gravity to contend with, with cars hitting turns at 80 miles an hour and fishtailing. Thank God for computers. We can do all the amazing stuff we want. Still, what I’m going to rely on in the film are the basic cinematic elements of editing and the juxtaposition of certain shots to create speed and to create different levels of tension.

Every Friday and Saturday night, we screen new movies—art films, commercial films, everything. Posters of some of my favorite films are up on the wall in my little screening room. Like
Sanjuro,
a film by Akira Kurosawa starring Toshiro Mifune. And of course,
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
, directed by Sergio Leone. I have the Italian-issue poster. One film real close to my heart is François Truffaut’s
The Four Hundred Blows
(Les Quatre Cent Coups). This film is very significant for me. It was one of the films that influenced
Boyz N the Hood
, and it was one of the first films of the French New Wave, or La Nouvelle Vague. A lot of what I’ve done can be seen as having a foundation in the French New Wave movement. All these French film directors, from François Truffaut to Claude Chabrol to Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and later Louis Malle and others, were critical of the kind of conventional, formulaic movies that had come out of the French studio system in the 1940s and 1950s. They revolted against that system. They wanted to have more control, to be innovative and authentic. They carried lightweight cameras that gave them lots more flexibility in the way that scenes were shot. And even though they challenged the stereotypes of Hollywood films, they knew you have to tell a story to hold the audience.

The stories these directors told through their films often had autobiographical elements, had personal meaning for them, just as
Boyz N the Hood,
for instance, does for me. And the ideas of the French existentialist movement that had a huge impact on them are a part of my philosophy as well—individuals exercising their free will to make choices and taking responsibility for their own actions and behaviors. The way we talk about and analyze and theorize about film today owes a lot to the French New Wave directors. They gave film a new theoretical framework, gave us a way to talk about film.

The Four Hundred Blows
is one of the first big films of the French New Wave, and it’s always been close to my heart. I likened my life to François Truffaut’s, because he used to say that the cinema kept him from delinquency. Movies became his passion, and they kept him from being a criminal, and the same thing is true for me. Movies were my escape from the environment in my neighborhood in South Central L.A. If I had problems with school, with kids or in the streets or whatever, I’d go running to the theater and I could just escape. Mentally, I could just go to another plane; I could visit other people’s lives. And look where I am now.

I can make pretty much any film that I want now. Almost any film. There’s a few subject matters that would be more difficult than others to get made. I do want to make something on the African slave trade and on slave revolts, as well as just that period of time, but I want to do it in my way. Many people have come along and done it and the films haven’t made any money, so it’s going to be more difficult for me to get something like that done. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to do it anyway.

A number of factors explain why black people didn’t come to see
Rosewood
in the same way that they came to see
Boyz N the Hood
. I think that African Americans on the whole do not actively think about how history affects them in a contemporary way. There are a lot of different people who for whatever reasons are successful in American society and who continue to be knowledgeable of their history, whether they’re Chinese immigrants, whether they’re Italian immigrants, Irish, whatever. African Americans didn’t have the benefit of making a choice to come here. We were brought here, and now they say that if you actively know your history, then you can feel empowered. You can draw power from that.

This isn’t the generation that came out of the 1960s, all new, where everybody who was black discovered themselves. The sixties were the first time people were, oh yeah, I’m not Negro, I’m Black, and I’m proud to be Black. They made it hip, like, oh wow, you proud to be Black? Oh wow, that’s kind of hip; I’ll go with it. But it’s not about being hip to know your culture; that’s just the way you have to be. And I think that this generation kind of turns a blind eye to that. So it’s much easier for a film that is right in and of the contemporary, like
Baby Boy
or
Boyz N the Hood
, to succeed. People can see those films and just walk along, look across the street and say, yeah, I can identify with what I saw in that movie, personally as well as culturally. They don’t want to identify with what happened seventy-five or eighty years ago because they don’t think that that’s a part of their lives. But it is.

I had the benefits of coming along after Spike made a career for himself, after Gordon Parks did what he did, after Eddie Murphy made $3 billion or $4 billion for the Hollywood studios. I’ve had the benefit of all of these successful black people coming before, so that I could come right out of school and a month later at age twenty-two be shooting my first movie,
Boyz N the Hood
. I’m so happy that I went to USC. I was so young in the sense that I was having to try to prove myself as to why as a young black man I had a right to say what I had to say, and what stories I had to say, in the context of all these people who weren’t black giving me a look that said, why are you here, even though they weren’t saying it out loud. And my attitude was because none of my stories have been told, and my people come up with everything hip that goes on in this country anyway. So that was my attitude.