Straight Outta Compton - The Making Of Boyz N The Hood
It's all about gang-banging and gangsta rap. Oh, but it's also about good parenting and great barbecue, too!
John Singleton (writer/director): The title was inspired by a song by Ice Cube.
Ice Cube (actor, Doughboy): I wrote ‘Boyz N The Hood’ in 1986 when I was 16.
Whitman Mayo (actor, The Old Man): John Singleton isn’t a filmmaker in the tradition of Fred Williamson or Melvin Van Peebles. He’s a filmmaker in the tradition of Charles Burnett. His films aren’t about guns, drugs and black people killing each other. They’re about black people in their ordinary lives. That those lives happen to feature guns, drugs and killing is the tragedy of the America we now live in.
John Singleton: The reason I got the deal was on the power of my screenplay. I didn’t write some stupid, New Jack-shitty, Blaxploitation film. I wrote a film about people from my neighbourhood who are strong and gritty.
Morris Chestnut (actor, Ricky Baker): John was 21 when he took his first crack at writing Boyz. A lot of 21-year-olds struggle to write essays but here was this kid writing a feature-length screenplay that was beautiful and profound.
John Singleton: The bottom line was that Columbia wanted a really good film. This was a chance to say something and make some money, and that’s rarely done.
Whitman Mayo: Everyone in Hollywood talks about the benefit of a good script being its ability to raise money. But what a good script really does is attract good actors. Actors spend so much time talking rubbish in adverts and soaps and they long to read lines that are powerful and true.
Cuba Gooding Jnr (actor, Tre Styles): There’ve been a lot of black parts but, you know, the brother’s got to be in prison to overcome racism or running from the law or beaten down like Rodney King.
John Singleton: Cuba is Tre Styles and has been ever since he auditioned. Not that Columbia were convinced at first.
Cuba Gooding Jnr: The studio didn’t want an no-name but I kept getting called back. I feel like laughing when people say I’ve had no study as an actor. I’ve done so many auditions, sometimes three in a day - all different parts. That’s been my study.
John Singleton: I wrote Doughboy with Cube in mind. It was a role intended for young black men to see.
Ice Cube: With Doughboy, I feel I finally showed the real story of all these brothers in prison. You see them on the news, locked up, but you don’t know why. I finally showed America the full story.
Morris Chestnut: The reason Boyz N The Hood works so well is because many of the cast had lived those lives. That wasn’t just John’s biography.
John Singleton: Some of my best friends are drug dealers. People sell drugs out of necessity because it’s easier than working in McDonalds for $3.35 an hour only to get it taken away from you in taxes. If nobody gave me any sense that I had a future, I’d be a drug dealer, too.
Ice Cube: I didn’t have to do nothing because this film is about the life I’ve lived.
I was a lot like Doughboy when I was growing up I did stuff I shouldn’t even talk about…
John Singleton: I heard the helicopters all my life. It’s an incredible kind of psychological violence. It makes you not think in terms of the future because who knows if you’ll be around. So you say, ‘Not next year, not next week - I’m going to get mine now.’
Laurence Fishburne (actor, Furious Styles): I don’t know what would have happened to me had I not done Apocalypse Now at 14, but certainly there would have been opportunities for me to get in trouble, like there are for many any inner-city youths.
I could have wound up on the corner for 30 years.
Cuba Gooding Jnr: Everybody has hard times in their lives. My mother, my siblings and I went from the good life to being homeless. We lived in a car for a couple of months. In those kind of circumstances, it’s easy to fall in with the wrong crowd, and that’s what I did. But my grandmother dragged me down to the Baptist church and I’ve been going ever since.
John Singleton: Laurence Fishburne was absolutely the inspiration for Furious Styles. We met when I was working security for TV and he was playing Cowboy Curtis on Pee-Wee Herman’s show. Laurence was so serious about his African past. He started me thinking about strong black fathers.
Laurence Fishburne: My father is where I get my discipline from. In fact, I wasn’t aware until I saw Boyz with him how much of my father is in Furious Styles. My parents split up and I hadn’t spent a great deal of time with my father and I made it my business to go and live with him when I was 17. It was a great three months.
John Singleton: It’s very difficult, almost impossible, for a woman to teach a boy how to be a man.
Angela Bassett (actor, Reva Styles): I think of myself as someone who has overcome odds and does not desire to be part of a statistic or a stereotype so I like women who have a lot of fight.
Laurence Fishburne: Furious Styles is a symbol more than a person and not the kind of role model a man could ever really live up to.
John Singleton: My film is not a typical black film. It’s got black characters and was directed by a black man, but that’s not what makes it a good film. This film could be about anywhere.
Laurence Fishburne: It’s as true for Glasgow and Brooklyn as it is for LA.
Ice Cube: The only difficult scene was the one where I had to cry - I hadn’t cried in eight or nine years. But I’ve had lots of friends that have been killed so I just thought about them and the tears came.
Ceal Coleman (actor, Cheryl): John was extremely patient. He talked to the actors as opposed to at them. He was willing to listen to what they had to say, contributing to the family-like atmosphere that permeated the set. He knew what he wanted but it was a collaborative effort.
Whitman Mayo: What everyone kept commenting on was how good Ice Cube was. I’m sure some people saw his casting as a gimmick. It wasn’t long, though, before you had people gathering round to watch his scenes. He had such power.
Ice Cube: Rappers are very theatrical. We’re natural born actors. If you look at rap videos, they’re more cinematic since they’re more directed to what you’re hearing in the rap. Also, most rappers love actors. What rapper doesn’t love Al Pacino in Scarface?!
Angela Bassett: John was a gentleman. Well-mannered, gracious, patient - he could teach directors twice his own age how to talk to actors and women.
John Singleton: People get nervous because one character in the film calls women ‘bitches’. That is a reflection of the mindset of a few young black men in America. It’s not because they’re misogynists. Misogyny is a white term, so it doesn’t even apply to black people.
Ice Cube: One thing America really understands is violence. That’s how she deals with her problems. The only thing that keeps people from fucking with you is if they know there’s payback involved.
John Singleton: You’re not really ‘down’ in America at the age of 14 or 15 if you can’t shoot a gun. It’s like a western. America is a powder keg. A whole generation of people are very angry and though people may say ‘well, that’s their problem’, they should realise that the problems of a specific group become the problems of society as a whole before long.
Morris Chestnut: Next to Die Hard, Boyz N The Hood looks like something the Amish threw together.
John Singleton: People called Boyz a violent film, but it has very little violence compared to a movie such as Terminator 2. I have a couple of scenes where a black man has a gun, and when a black man wields a gun. automatically people are going to start arresting folks.
Ice Cube: Black people don’t own shit in our neighbourhoods. Supermarkets, gas stations, banks - we don’t own any of it. The trouble with the black community is that we’re always looking for help. Why would someone help us if they put us in this situation in the first place? That’s why the LA riots were good because they got the attention of the world.
John Singleton: The riots? I was actually shooting Poetic Justice at the time. We didn’t experience any trouble, although some of the cast did bring their families with them, to be safe.
Ice Cube: Doughboy’s hot-headed and smart and he’s looking out for himself. All these kids out there that have problems with the law are more complex than the news tends to show us.
Morris Chestnut: Ricky’s death is a terrible, tragic moment in the movie. The audience really likes Ricky because he’s a nice, charming kid who looks like he might have a future. But that’s the reason he has to die, to show white folks that many of the kids they hear about on the news are good kids just like their own. Just because you come from a poor neighbourhood doesn’t make you a poor specimen of humanity.
John Singleton: The film has a lot of messages but the main one is that African-American men have to take more responsibility for raising their children. Fathers have to teach their boys to be men.
Ice Cube: With Boyz N The Hood you got the whole picture of why a young black kid like Doughboy turns out the way he does. I’m more like Tre who gets off the street and goes to college but every character in that movie could easily have turned into the other. Each of those lives could have shifted the other way. I had a father at home and I had more fear of him than the guys who wanted me to do bad shitl. When I started running with the wrong crowd, he signed me up for football. But I know good boys who are now in the penetentiary for murder.
Cuba Gooding Jnr: I watched Boyz six times before I liked the movie. It’s hard to watch yourself on film.
John Singleton: We’re living in an age in which filmmakers and people in the media have the responsibilities once held by journalists and playwrights and novelists because nobody reads anymore but everybody goes to the movies or watches TV. It’s my job not to do what a lot of filmmakers in the 1980s did which is to tell you, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’. I want to show that the contemporary structure of American society can be questioned.
Ice Cube: The movie is like a window into the black community. In fact, it’s so
close to what really happens that you can’t criticise it as a film - it’s more like a documentary. If you want to sit home and believe what the news says, that’s cool. But if you want to see what’s really going on in a place where most people are scared to go, see Boyz N The Hood.
John Singleton: How should America increase the peace? I don’t know. I just make movies.