One bad mo-fo

Singleton and Jackson update Shaft for the new millennium

INTERVIEW

Having made a name for himself with such socially relevant dramas as Boyz N the Hood and Rosewood, writer/director John Singleton really cuts loose with his new film, an action-packed update of Shaft (opening June 16) which he refers to as “my first real Hollywood movie.”

“I think of it sort of like a Saturday night date movie, you know?,” Singleton says in an interview. “My other pictures have a lot more meaning to them, but I wanted to get that monkey off my back and try something that didn’t have anything important to say. I just wanted to make a really cool film.”

The original 1971 version of Shaft, which spawned a number of sequels throughout the decade, was one of the seminal movie-going experiences of Singleton’s youth: “I went with my father to see it on a double bill with Bruce Lee’s The Chinese Connection, and it was awesome,” he gushes. “When that film came out, it was this cool counterculture event. It was the first time where you had a black protagonist being a nonconformist anti-hero, someone who wasn’t trying to fit in as part of the establishment, like Sidney Poitier or whatever. Shaft was who he was, a bad dude who didn’t kiss any ass and didn’t take any shit, from the militants or from the police.”

Some 30 years later, the times may have changed (or not), but the attitude remains the same. Samuel L. Jackson’s take on the character is as bad as ever and twice as slick (in designer threads by Armani). And if an action hero is only as interesting as the villains he’s squaring off against, then Jackson’s Shaft is very interesting, indeed, with not one but two flamboyant nemeses - Christian Bale (American Psycho) as a racist yuppie scumbag and Jeffrey Wright (Basquiat) as a Dominican drug dealer. Singleton’s solid supporting cast also includes Vanessa Williams (Soul Food) as Shaft’s former partner on the force and Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense) as the eyewitness to a murder they’re all trying to solve.

What was the first thing that went through Jackson’s mind when he heard about plans for the movie? “Why? Why did we need a new Shaft? I thought the one we already had was pretty good,” the actor recalls with a shrug in a separate interview.

“When they approached me about doing it, I told them there were some things that needed to be dealt with,” Jackson remembers. “The original script [by Richard Price] was an interesting cop story, but it wasn’t true to the [Shaft]-ian spirit of the other movies, you know? It’s like this: the Isaac Hayes song comes on and you hear the lyric, ‘He’s a black private dick, a sex machine for all the chicks,’ so what part of that didn’t they get? We could establish his backstory, but we had to get him off the police force so he could do what he needed to do.”

Evidently, the powers-that-be with Paramount Studios didn’t “get” the other part of that lyric, either. The character of Shaft may have been a “sex machine” back in the free-spirited ’70s, but his contemporary counterpart plays it decidedly more safe. According to Singleton, “That was an ongoing losing battle, from the development stage to the very end of the editing process. I wanted to throw in a menage a trois or something, but the big studios are a little squeamish about sex. Of course, they didn’t have any qualms about the violence. We could blow up as much stuff, kick as much ass and kill as many people as we wanted to, but no sex.

“Yeah, in 1971 it was OK for Shaft to sleep with five or six different women in one movie, but it’s not politically correct in 2000,” Jackson concurs. “I didn’t really have a problem with it, though. My only other major concern was, even though it’s an updated story as opposed to a remake, everybody was going to think I was playing the Richard Roundtree role, so the only way to get around that was to have Richard in the movie to establish our characters as uncle and nephew. Once they agreed to that, we were off and running and everything worked out fine from that point on,” he maintains.

Oh, really? Rumors have circulated about some proverbial “creative differences” on the set between actor and director. “That’s bullshit,” Singleton says. “We got along great. If anything, we were in solidarity against some of the things the studio wanted to do. We really hit it off in terms of wanting to make this a cool movie. I like that Sam came to the table with his own set of ideas about how he thought things should be done. It’s great to have that extra creative boost. He can take something I’ve written and make it 10 times better, you know? He taught me a lot about standing my ground. I mean, Sam’s a strong motherfucker, and if he believes in something strongly and I happen to believe in something else just as strongly, he may hem and haw, but he’s an actor and I think he respects that [in a director].”

Jackson puts it another way. “There’s always friction on a movie set. It’s not about John in particular, because I’ve had conflicts with other directors, too; they just weren’t documented in the trade papers. It’s an interesting thing about working with young directors, though. In John’s case, he’s done something like five movies. Well, I’ve done 65,” the actor boasts.

Those trade papers also reported that Singleton was allegedly having sexual liaisons with some of his extras during the making of the movie. The director replies, “How am I supposed to be banging two girls in my trailer and working on the damn set at the same time? You know where that came about? We had this scene in a nightclub that required all these sexy extras, so we were casting girls. We had like 100 of them lined up outside my trailer so I could do the auditions while I was having lunch. Some of the female crew members got all bent out of shape about it. They were like, ‘What is this? Ho day?’ So we started messing around with them about it, like, ‘Yeah, it’s ho day,’ and the next thing I know it’s out in the trades that I’m screwing all these extras. Give me a break.”

After a pause, Singleton grins and notes, “Shit, man, that’s the kind of stuff we kept trying to put in the movie!”