"Don't Have to Step in the Shit to Know it Stinks"

Our initial encounter with the rapper-turned-actor Ice Cube began with this initial exchange between him and co-star Kevin Hart when we asked if they ever had an embarrassing ‘fight or flight’ moment in their personal lives.

“Oh, hell, yes, I’ve had tons of those,” Hart replied first, “I’ve pushed several women in front of violent situations. You think that’s the first time I’ve thrown a woman in front and cover. No, my rule is save myself first. There was one incident at a movie theater where my girl just got mad at these guys because they were taking behind us, it was like three guys.”

“And I had never looked back there and she was like, ‘Will y’all just shut up,’” he adds, “And turned to them, I was like gasping. I just got up and moved like three rows in front of me and I looked back. She said, ‘What you doing?’ I said, ‘You better get up here.’ I don’t play the fighting game, so that was definitely something that was pulled from a real-life experience.”

“When we first started to do our thing, me and [Dr.] Dre, we actually went, picked up this girl that was singing for us,” Cube then went, And as I got her from the front seat to the back seat, we saw some youngsters walking by, they were going to school though, so we paid no attention.”

“And then, when they got a few houses down, they start shooting at us, so I’m yelling, like, ‘Drive! Drive! Drive!’” he continues, “And Dre like looked at me like, ‘What the fuck you looking at?’ He’s looking in the rear-view mirror to make sure they were shooting at us, like, ‘Man, drive, motherfucker, please!’”

“As you could tell, there were two different realms of growing up with me and Cube,” Kevin interjects, “There’s two different stories. I was at a movie theater, Cube apparently was in the most violent situation ever. That story just

"Don't Have to Step in the Shit to Know it Stinks"

took a turn for the worse out of nowhere. Yeah, they were schoolkids, and then, they just started shooting. Motherfuckers trying to kill us! My face was like gasping, ‘Yeah, we made it out though. It was cool’.”

After we got our answer, we realized there was more that needed to be uncovered, so we arranged for a subsequent one-on-one with one of the unlikeliest of Hollywood success stories. As previously mentioned, the man born O’Shea Jackson started up with producer/rapper Dr. Dre in N.W.A., hip-hop’s first successful gangsta rap group.

He then pursued a solo career in the early 1990’s. Soon after, he achieved critical acclaim and success in Hollywood with the urban drama Boyz n the Hood. He then achieved even more success ultimately with the stoner comedy Friday, which later spawned sequels in Next Friday and Friday After Next.

He also scored successes in films as varied as Higher Learning, Three Kings, Barbershop and its sequel Barbershop 2: Back In Business, and Are We There Yet? and that movie’s sequel Are We Done Yet?. The 44 year-old’s latest role is in the buddy comedy Ride Along.

He plays James, a cop, who has his sister’s fiancée Ben, played by Hart, go on a ride-along with him for him to prove his worth to James and his sister. Upon meeting him, after seeing recently this hilarious sketch recently on Conan O’Brien’s talk show (www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNM7Z7hir_I‎), we brought him a 40 oz. size of malt liquor as a welcome offering upon asking whether or not he felt we were as white as O’Brien was.

“You remembered the brown paper bag,” says Cube upon inspection, “Thank you. I appreciate it. Nothing wrong with that, a nice little brew. You’re definitely less white than Conan O’Brien. With that red hair, he’s a pretty tall, skinny white guy.”

We talked about how we felt the film adds new wrinkles to the fairly time-worn buddy comedy seen countless times before in films like the 48

Ice Cube

"Don't Have to Step in the Shit to Know it Stinks"

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Written by Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Interview by Dan Deevy
DanDeevy@TheCinemaSource.com

Hrs. and Rush Hour movies and asked about how he managed to pull off making it different enough.

“I think that was a challenge,” Cube replies, “Buddy comedies, they feel familiar. Once you’re into it, you’re like, ‘OK, two guys, one guy doesn’t like the other one,’ and then, by the end of the movie, they’re going to love each other. And you think you got it pegged, but in this, I wanted to make sure that we took an unusual twist. We had different textures, just different stuff that you haven’t seen. You really haven’t seen a gamer who believes that his skills on the game would really work in a real-life situation. And using techniques from that in a real-life situation that helped solve the crime.”

‘I thought that was a different texture that was new, fresh, up-to-date, a lot of dudes who own the games think If they were in Fallujah, they’d have the same skills,” he adds, “So those kind of things that we kept trying to find where we can bring to the table to give us a new texture on this standard thing that has been going on since Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello and probably way before that. So I think it’s our duty as filmmakers to try and make it unique, a unique ride for the audience.”

We talked about how nervous the scene with Ben dropping the real grenade with his previous experience with them being video games made us, considering they are not always an accurate reflection of a real life situation.

“Yeah, no shit, that’s what I’m saying,” Cube acknowledges, “My line in it is, “This ain’t no damn video game!’ which is cool, because we haven’t seen it and we know people out there think, ‘I’m a gamer and I can do it in real life.’”

We asked Cube what was the most powerful gun he’s ever fired.

“A 12 gauge shotgun,” he answers, “Those

"Don't Have to Step in the Shit to Know it Stinks"

things, especially the old ones. Now they got all kinds of recoiled stuff in them, but back in the day, they knock your shoulder back. It ain’t going to knock you back that hard, but if you’re as light as Kevin Hart, it might knock your ass back.”

“I think he weighed about 75 pounds,” Cube continues, “I was young shooting a 12 gauge back in the day, so probably, it was more powerful than it would be now, but a 12 gauge shotgun’s pretty powerful.”

We asked about what it was like to work with his co-star Kevin Hart, and whether or not he’s as “on” 24/7 as he seems to be.

“Yeah, that’s him,” Cube confirms, “That’s him in a nutshell, always on. He has the energy to make the crew laugh and the camera laugh. Most people can only do either or, either they make the crew laugh and they don’t have the energy to do when it’s time to shoot, or they are quiet and serious, but when the camera comes on, they turn into this wacky person, so Kevin is nothing like that.”

“What you see is what you get, he’s going to be cracking on you when he first sees you, he’ll be cracking on you when you leave, and he’s still going to get the job done, and he’s still going to give you multiple layers,” he continues, “He’s a real, polished performer, and I haven’t seem somebody command a scene like this since Eddie Murphy, a guy who could just come in and it’s his until he releases you and lets you off the hook. He sucks everything up and spits it out, and it’s pretty cool to see somebody that good.”

We asked Cube if Hart has gotten better rapping since the Conan sketch.

“He’s got this rapper alter-ego named ‘Chocolate Drop’ that thinks he got the skills, but the dude’s trash,” he replies, “’Chocolate Drop’ is trash.”

Having played cop roles in

"Don't Have to Step in the Shit to Know it Stinks"

the past and often railing against police brutality on his records both with N.W.A. and solo, we asked Cube what he felt was the difference between a cop and a criminal.

“The only difference between a cop and a criminal is a gun and a badge,” Cube believes, “I think to be a great cop, you have to know how criminals think, and I think top criminals could make great cops. It’s a game of tag, sometimes both sides get dirty in it. I don’t know if I would ever go into the uniformed cop roles, but undercover cops, bounty hunters, people like that have interesting lives. You can flavor them with so many different textures.”

Having started out as a street rapper and doing urban films to family comedies like Are We There Yet?, we asked him how he manages to keep his street credibility with such a diverse array of films.

“Well, to me, it’s all about being yourself,” he contends, “It’s all about not living your life for ‘cred’. I never used those terms growing up. ‘I needed street cred.’ I was like, ‘You either got it or you don’t.’”

“There’s nothing you can attain,” Cube continues, “You got to be yourself and you can’t be an image or you can’t be a gimmick or you can’t be what people want you to be. You have to give the people what they want and surprise them at the same time, and I think that’s how you maintain it.”

Having previously heard the wildly different reactions from his and Kevin Hart to our “fight or flight” question, we asked Cube about how different his life would be today if he had a situation more like Hart’s.

“I think I’d still be trying to look for a way to be productive, as far as creatively,” Cube answers, “That’s why I’m in this whole game is because it allows me to have my creative juices flowing all the time.”

“So I’d

"Don't Have to Step in the Shit to Know it Stinks"

be trying to get in, I’d be trying to get into the business, I’d be trying to figure my way on achieving these lofty goals,” he adds, “I might not be at this position, but I might be a grip. I could be anything behind the scenes. I could be a role manager, just something that gets me close to this or the sports world. I’d make myself useful if somebody gave me a job.”

Now that Ice Cube has five children of his own, we asked the former rapper how he does the dance between giving his kids a better life than his own rough, violent circumstances and not sheltering them from some of the more inevitably harsh realities of life.

“I think they can learn from your experiences,” Cube believes, “They don’t have to go through it, but if you paint them a vivid enough picture, they can fill it and go through it. None of my sons are from the ‘hood. All of them are rich, suburban kids and it’s totally different than how I grew up.”

“I don’t feel like, ‘Oh, man, they’ve been shielded or sheltered,’” he adds, “It’s like, ‘This is what my mother and father wished they could have done for me.’ The ‘hood is nothing to hold onto. When you come from there, it’s nothing to hang your hat on. It’s only, ‘How do I improve my situation?’ And so, it’s a thing where those things cross your mind, but I don’t worry about it. Your kids don’t have to step into the same shit that you did to know that it stinks, so that’s how I feel.”

We then asked if that’s something Cube ended up learning right away or along the way.

“”Something that I learned along the way and it just happened like that,” he answers, “When I first started, I used to still stay close to South Central Los Angeles. They don’t sell houses as big as mine

"Don't Have to Step in the Shit to Know it Stinks"

now in South Central, so I had to move and my kids grew up there, not thinking about Crips and Bloods and dope dealing. They’re free, they’re free of those shackles, which is cool.”

We asked Cube how he’s adjusted to Hollywood life and how he plans to make headway into the industry as his success continues.

“Oh, wow,” Cube replies, “I got a few movies in my head. I got this movie called Chrome And Paint that I want to do. The thing is I can do them, but I want to do them my way, and that’s just the hard part of Hollywood because so many people have to be involved. So many people have to be passionate about your project and these are Hollywood people that are passionate about their own projects. So to try and break somebody from their passion of their own thing and get them passionate about you and what you got going on is not easy to do, because these same execs that we meet with to get these movies made, they got five to seven movies they’re trying to get made at the same time.”

“So you have to find the right synergy, that the planets have to align, and people have to get just as excited about your project as you, and it’s just not easy to do and do it right,” he continues, “You could do it and cut corners, but I’m at a point in my career where I don’t want to cut corners. I want all the tools I need to make a great movie. And if I don’t get that, I don’t make the movie.”

We asked Cube if he would consider alternate online avenues to produce content like Crackle.

“Of course,” he replies, “It’s starting to pick up momentum. That had been the second tier of looking for backing. The first thing, you go after big major studios, then there’s the second tier studios, might even

"Don't Have to Step in the Shit to Know it Stinks"

be a third tier.”

“But now, the dot-coms, the Netflix, the people who are seeking original programming are picking up their momentum, they’re picking up their budgets, and they’re starting to become a real player in original content entertainment,” Cube adds, “In the future, you never know who Cubevision may link up with to get some of these things done. You basically have to find the right person that believes in you and in your vision, and it’s not always easy to find.”

We asked Cube if he worries about too many cooks spoiling the creative broth and ending up having as many as twelve different executive producer credits.

“That tends to happen, too,” he acknowledges, “It’s just real hard to just have one man, one vision, make it happen. You have to really convince people and you have to honor some of the people who are putting up the money’s opinion on the project, and they could knock it out of whack, you never know.”

We told him about how actor Harold Perrineau had told us he got his nose slashed by another actor in a slap fight in the back of a car during what was supposed to be a light-hearted comical moment in The Best Man Holiday. We asked him how concerned he was about horsing around with Kevin Hart during a scene like that in Ride Along.

“Pretty dangerous,” Cube says, “Kevin can’t fight, so he’s wild, he closes his eyes, he might scratch you. You have to really be careful. We had to really choreograph that with Kevin, so he didn’t bust my lip, give me a ‘bum bump’, whatever he likes to call it. We just really had to work on that. Yeah, great choreographer for that.”