“BE BLACK!”

No one could accuse acclaimed director John Singleton of mincing words. Discussing race and film with Film Independent at LACMA curator Elvis Mitchell as part of yesterday’s Diversity Speaks series, Singleton unfurled on stage the bold and resolute style and fierce confidence that for 20 years has been so evident in his groundbreaking films. “Don’t be afraid to be black!” Singleton exhorted. “That’s what makes you special.”

“What we do as creative people always is innovative—and cinema should be no different.” James Brown, George Clinton, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou,… upended, elated and inspired the world. Said Singleton, “they were black. That’s what made them special.” There’s this idea says Singleton, that “‘to have inclusion, I have to be something different,’ and I say, ‘No,’ ‘cause everybody’s trying to copy our shit anyway.

“My Fast and Furious was the blackest Fast and Furious. I made Paul Walker say ‘cuz’ in the movie.”

Singleton ranted against the mainstreaming of the business, which leads to artists of color shying away from their distinctive voice. “There’s been a change in the business to try to put art in a box. They don’t really understand how special  it is to really have that funk on something mainstream. “They say ‘this is a hard sell.” How many times have I heard that?”

“In addition to trying to take all the flavor out of it is it seems they also want to get directors they can control,” Mitchell noted.

Said Singleton, “that’s why I haven’t worked as much.

“Appreciate that. I’m a general. When I do what I do,  you can count on the shit that it’s  gonna be hot, it’s gonna be commercial, but in my way.”

“Given who you are and what you are, that you’re going to do what you do and you can’t do these things they want you to do,” Mitchell asked, what’s it like for Singleton to walk into studios these days?

“I just act like myself and be like, ‘hey if you want me, if you want your shit to be cool, I’m your dude. If you don’t, then your shit’s gonna be wack. That’s how I pitched Boyz n the Hood. You can’t front if the movies make money. It’s like the movie I’m doing right now, the ‘Pac movie. My goal is to make the blackest movie ever… that’s commercial too.

“This man, he was the bridge to from the generation that everyone talked like, ‘I love you, brother. I love you sister’ to the generation that’s like, ‘I hate niggas. I hate myself. I hate everybody around me.’ He was the bridge to that.”

That role is part of what makes Tupac the deeply intriguing character he remains to this day—18 years after his tragic assassination. “He knew that he was going to be sacrificed,” Singleton says. “But that gave him a freedom—the kind of freedom young black men have everywhere, when you’re like, ‘I don’t give a fuck,’ that gives you a measure of freedom. But it also gives you a nihilistic mentality that doesn’t foster some hope. You know you’re gonna have a dark path. But I don’t like that shit. Some of our black storytellers or people who are intrigued by our journey, they always make the journey of the African-American a nihilistic thing,… ‘the woeful Negro’ they used to call it. No. Our journey in this country is a triumph. That’s why we want to laugh and why we want to dance and why we want to sing… If we didn’t have any of those things, we would have blown this motherfucker up.

“Everything I do is about elevating, really showing the depths and the specificity of negritude and how special that is.”

Race also plays a role in the lack of industry-wide recognition for Singleton’s work.  “What you don’t get the kind of consideration for that you deserve is your movies are really dramatic. There’s a big dramatic moment that comes in any of them,” said Mitchell, citing the scene in Rosewood where the character played by Bruce McGill is teaching his son to make a noose—“like he’s teaching him to pitch,” said Singleton.

“It’s the banality of evil that’s passed along from generation to generation,” said Mitchell.

“Racism precludes common sense,” Singleton noted. “When people have a certain thing in mind of how to subjugate other people for being different in a certain way, it just takes all the common sense out of their minds. That was the whole thing with that picture was to show. Everyone knows this woman was having an affair with someone else, but because there’s an economic disparity between the Jim Crow era and the segregation that’s going on with the people living under the company’s rule and the black people who are living off the land and thriving… that was an excuse.” Singleton chose, as he said, “to make the crackers in that movie these fire-breathing racists. They have a mythology about why they’re doing that.”

He pointed to the scene where a white man envies the black piano teacher Sylvester Carrier for owning a piano. “But you don’t even know how to play one,” Singleton paraphrased the line. “That ain’t the point. Why he got one?”

Rosewood may have been made in a studio [Warner Brothers], but that doesn’t mean the studio stood behind it. “They dumped it,” said Singleton. “They dumped that shit. They were afraid of it.” At the time, he said, the studios had so much money and would just hand over $30 million to him and John Peters to make a film, but when they saw it, their reaction was, “What the fuck is this? The black man is shooting back.”

“I did the movie,” said Singleton, “because I knew at some point, the brother would be able to shoot back.”

“Before Four Brothers, I thought of Rosewood as your first Western,” Mitchell noted. “Every movie I’ve done has a Western influence,” Singleton explained, partly inspired by watching “Movies ‘Til Dawn,” on TV in LA, which used to show old TV show Westerns and movie Westerns. “I used to watch those things all night,” he said. “Instead of making this figure like John Wayne, I do it with black man or black women. That kind of iconography. That’s were I learned to take a character and make it larger than life.”

“I think of Cube in Boyz n the Hood as the Western figure,” Mitchell said.

“I think he was robbed of an Oscar nomination that year because you can still look at that performance he did as Doughboy and be like ‘Whoa.’ Because at that time, no matter how good our shit was, they’d be like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’”

“What I thought was so brave about that,” Mitchell said, “was putting Ice Cube in the movie and not having him talk.”

Because “now everyone knows Cube is funny,” Singleton says “I wanna put him in something dramatic.” He says the two are always talking about what to do together next.

Perhaps the most exciting moment of the day for his fans was Singleton dropping the news that his long-anticipated sequel to Four Brothers is still in the works: Five Brothers, a title that threw Mitchell for a loop: “We had four. We lost one. How do we get to five?”

Making a sequel is a departure for Singleton, who denigrates repetition and redundancy. “Like everybody in this business that’s successful, I should have the right to double up and do that same thing and be successful.” Recalling the famous chocolate factory episode of I Love Lucy, where the assembly line incessantly pumps out identical candies, Singleton said, “movies are like that now. They’ve perfected the art of making the same shit .. and  sometimes they don’t make it better.” With the exception of T2—“that wasn’t the same shit,” said Singleton. “They reinvented the movie,” agreed Mitchell.

“That’s what’s crazy about the business now,” Singleton said. “Everything’s the same. Even the so-called ‘black movies’ are the same. I always try to put stuff in that if you were versed in this, if you grew up this way, there’s jokes you would get, that someone else wouldn’t. The same way Woody Allen did with his films in the ‘70s and the ‘80s. If you went to see those movies and you were a Jewish cat on the Upper East Side, you’d laugh at the movie and enjoy it in a different way than somebody else.

“That’s something that’s been lost—the identity of what people bring culturally to the film.”

Whether or not he’s  lauded by the industry or given, as Mitchell put it “serious consideration for his body of work,”  Singleton says, is inconsequential. “Fuck it. Our people take my shit seriously. They’re like ‘I see myself  in this. I see my family. I see my cousins. I see my mama.’  I’m not all about that other shit. It’s about the work, it’s about being able to put the soul in the material, and at the same time have a certain measure of success and do what you want to do and not have to give up your soul.

“People didn’t realize James Brown was who he was until he was gone. If we didn’t have James Brown, we wouldn’t have anything, and that’s just one figure. That’s not Miles Davis. That’s not Charlie Parker. It’s not Otis Redding… All those people, they weren’t thinking about what somebody else was thinking about them. They just did what they was doin’. And they had soul. They came out of black church. They came out of the community. All those people… Aretha Franklin…

“They had negritude.”

Pamela Miller / Website & Grants Manager