Anyone that comes from any medium, whether it they come off the bus to Hollywood for the first time or they're established musicians, if they come to act, they have to respect for the craft.
But one thing I wanted to do here was to try and do something that was totally not in my element, and attempt to excel at that, so that I can move on to other things.
Cinema was my rite of passage.
I didn't think that I was going to find someone with as much heart and soul as Tupac had, until Tyrese came along.
I don't like when people watch DVDs and look at two scenes but they don't look at the whole movie. Or they sit and talk to each other. You should always watch a movie all the way through. I can't watch a movie and watch just two minutes and turn it off, then go talk to my girlfriend.
I had such big fights on this movie, defending it from the studio. So why in hell am I here if I didn't direct the movie? And what Richard Price did to my script was disgusting.
I just keep my energy level up to the degree that everyone just has to follow what my energy level is.
I just sat down and wrote the film over the course of a few weeks sitting in the computer room at USC.
I just try to make the best film possible and once the movie's done we deal with the DVD. But we do shoot some footage.
I played a couple of video games, where it allowed me to free my mind and shoot something different from the traditional way.
I really admire from the old days like Howard Hawks and older filmmakers would go from a western to a comedy and to an adventure movie, and I just felt like it was time for me to do that.
I really took filmmaking very seriously... It was an honor and then a crutch also, because at a young age, I was like, I guess I'm a serious filmmaker. I never set out to be a serious filmmaker. I just set out to make movies.
I started breaking down how they made the shots, and studying how to make a film. And I started making animated films on the sides of notebooks, because the power of the moving image was very intriguing to me.
I think a film has a life from just being seen. I mean, the more people who see a film, the more life it has.
I think I'm more focused and mature as a filmmaker and definitely more mature as a person. I think my approach to creating what I do, as a director, has matured as well.
I thought that if I have to make a new movie I might as well make it as new as I can. Change it all up with a whole new cast and new cars and new location.
I try to make sure my commentaries are entertaining.
I try to tell the story visually... I outline the characters and the set-up, and I basically know where I want to end it.
I wanted to grow up and be that guy. I wanted to dress cool, and get all the ladies. It was always like one day I would make a Shaft movie.
I wanted to show racism intrinsically linked to money and economics.
I wanted to show what happens when a lynch mob comes down, how erratic a lynch mob would be. Yet you don't see any women and children killed in this thing.
I was like, you know what? I'm just going to go and have some fun, and approach filmmaking from an emotional standpoint. Whatever I feel like doing, whether or not it's a fun movie or a serious movie. I'm just gonna go and do it. That's what I'm doing now.
I would come up with these cool ideas and then drawn them out and put them in a sequence and then figure out how we would do this. It was cool for me, because... from the beginning of my career I was only concerned about being a real serious filmmaker.
I write when I am inspired. If I come up with an idea, right then and there I'll write it on a piece of paper. I may write for hours at a time on a given day. I'll do a first draft in the course of three months. I just attack a story like that and pick at it until I get the first draft.
I'm liking less talk and more image. I like to say multiple things with an image.
I've always wanted to do a film where I can basically plan out a whole lot of stuff and be creative. Most of things I've done have been hard-hitting dramatic pieces, so I wanted to do something that was really more like an action adventure film.
I've been doing this since I was 22, I've been nominated for Academy Awards, I know what I'm doing.
It's been said in the black community that mothers raise their daughters and spoil their sons, they baby them to the point that they don't ever want to leave, give them so much love.
Most films generally show one aspect of New York. They're all shot in one borough, or one neighborhood which, like Woody Allen's, has no black people in it.
My agent told me if you don't do it right, man, they can fire you.
My thing is that a baby boy will get your daughter pregnant and kill your son. I saw how dysfunctional these experiences are, including some of my own.
Not every movie has to speak for the whole of the black experience. I do feel that if people did not know-a black man-or have a preconceived notion of who I was, they'd look at my movies in a whole different context.
Once people found we're there, they're coming out of the woodwork. When you're not so visible, people don't care.
The cool thing about that movie was, here it is, Ice Cube is just now learning how to act, you know what I'm saying? He's just exploring it as a new venture. All those kids, it was their first movie. They just really wanted to prove to themselves, and to me, that they were doing a good job.
The cool thing about this movie was that it was like hanging out with some good friends for eight months in a sexy city like Miami. We were working seven days a week but it didn't feel like a job.
The freshest moments in my films have always been with unknown actors.
The guy who shot Ricky, he was a middle-class kid that became a killer after he made the movie. They probably edited it, who knows? But one friend of mine got killed. I know that's in the documentary.
There's been so much about too many hip-hop artists taking the work from actors. The artists that have worked for me, if you have noticed, have gone on to have careers in this business and doing other films. It's not like when they work for me, they're a flash in the pan.
This happens every film I do, stuff about race, stuff about casting.
To be a director, you have to be obsessive about details, but at the same time you have to be open and big enough to accept the surprises that happen off the cuff. I try to be a master of both. I'm obsessive now about everything.
Usually I hire a producer to be a devil's advocate, and this time I did it all myself, and figured people are either going to love it or hate it. I took the training wheels off, and it felt very liberating.
We shot that movie quick, down, dirty, and easy, which was fun.
When you're doing something that takes place in a world that doesn't exist anymore, you have to be very meticulous, very detailed in recreating that world at that time.
You can't say there's any one film that can't be made, because there's always an audience. There's a huge, vast audience. I mean, the box office for home video has surpassed the box office for theatrical now. So, it's like phenomenal, man.
You ever hear about the guys in LA who can't add seven and seven, but can count only by fives and tens, but if you ask them to divide 1000 by five, they can tell you in a second, 'cause they sell drugs.
You know, filmmakers like to tinker with something as long as possible.
You know, we were dealing with the cast member that got killed, and one guy became a murderer.
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