Mario Van Peebles has been on a major upswing in the past few years. His feature directorial debut, New Jack City, helped establish him and eventually many other black filmmakers in much of the same way his father, Melvin Van Peebles broke ground with his film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Then Mario paid tribute to his father in the hit independent film Baadasssss! or How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass. Marios latest feature he directed is Hard Luck which reunites him with Nino Brown himself, Wesley Snipes.
Buy the DVD of Hard Luck
Daniel Robert Epstein: Its a pleasure to talk to you. Ive been a fan for a long time. Hard Luck is a lot of fun.
Mario Van Peebles: Great, Im glad you saw it, man.
DRE: Howd you get involved in it?
MVP: What happened was, there was a script called Little Man that had been around for a while and one of the producers had seen my movie Baadasssss. He liked what saw and called me up. I read Little Man and I didnt know if I would do it or not but I thought it was interesting that it had this mix of genres. It had a little bit of the what the hell factor because there are these serial killers that bump heads with these gangster underworld themes. I thought that was interesting and then Wesley Snipes hadnt paid his taxes and wanted to work with me. Im kidding about that.
Well Wesley wanted to work with me again and since it was a trip working with him on New Jack City we decided to do it again. Once Wesley got into it, I rewrote the part specifically with Wesley in mind. So rather than having this character be the coolest guy on the planet instead he would be this unlucky guy who works his way up from the very bottom. We took every racial stereotype and flipped it on its head. So Cybil Shepherd kidnaps Wesley and all these segments of humanity overlap on each other.
DRE: Me and a lot of other people felt that Wesley should have got an Oscar nomination for New Jack City back in the day. He was so good in that. Ive heard hes become quite a bit crazier since then. How was it working with him again?
MVP: I think we must have some past life thing. He has his own stuff with him like most people do. But I think Ive been pretty lucky with him. I think in Hard Luck people find him to be the same kind of character [as in New Jack City] almost 15 years later. Like if you think of Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, how he plays the summation of all the stuff he did in all those spaghetti westerns. So thats what I did with Wesley. The scene where he plays the drums totally comes from him. I find him after all this time to have mellowed. We always have our differences, but weve made some pretty good movies together. Thats just a part of working with him so youve got to be ready. With a marriage you cant say youre not going to fight. Hell no, were going to have our differences but at the end of the day we would still go out to the club together or go party together or go get the kids together or do whatever. So I couldnt say we never had our arguments or our differences because sometimes hes got some pretty shitty ideas and sometimes Ive got some pretty shitty ideas. Sometimes hes got some great ideas and sometimes I have some great ideas. So I listen and he listens and between the two of us we figure it out.
DRE: So he didnt try to choke you or anything [like he did with David Goyer on Blade: Trinity].
MVP: I dont think hed go and do that with me and I wouldnt do that with him.
DRE: Im a big fan of the movie Narc which your Hard Luck cinematographer, Alex Nepomniaschy, shot. What was it like working with Alex?
MVP: Alex is this real quiet guy but thats ok because he speaks with his camera. He says everything he has to say with the imagery that he creates. I thought that he was a guy that really can do some edgy stuff and I wanted the movie to be really visual and he really likes those primary, rich colors. I wanted this film to be an odyssey so I wanted someone that I felt could paint a lush film. Alex can do that.
DRE: Was the Hurricane Katrina element in the script before you rewrote it?
MVP: No the script had a real heavy rewrite even though [Hard Luck co-screenwriter] Larry Brand and I hung out. Before I rewrote it, the serial killer was not a female, the Hurricane Katrina stuff was not in there. It was a real different script but it still had the serial killer, the violence, the kidnapping. What happens to the baddest cat on the planet when someone even badder kidnaps him.
DRE: You had mentioned how Hard Luck is a bit of a New Jack City what-if scenario. That brings up what weve heard about for years, a real sequel to New Jack City.
MVP: Thats one of those things that gets kicked around everyday and it just depends on the idea. If youve got a great script, lets me see it. New Jack City was a special situation and each movie is special in its own way. So if there is a time where the script is really terrific then I might just do that.
DRE: I know youve acted in a lot of direct to DVD movies over the past ten years or so, but with such big stars in Hard Luck, why is it going straight to DVD?
MVP: Well first I havent directed any straight to DVD movies. I think we may be seeing more of that now. They have another one recently called Edison. Did you see that one?
DRE: Ive heard of it, its now called Edison Force.
MVP: Yeah, thats with Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey and that, like Hard Luck, was released by Sony Pictures, they have their own rhythm of how they do it. Baadasssss was a theatrical release for Sony. Wesley has a big following in the action movie world but I dont understand how they decide to release films. The business is changing in that theyre doing much bigger movies on DVD. We premiered Hard Luck up at the Harlem Film Festival and it played well with an audience.
DRE: Are there certain things you have to do with a straight to DVD movie like, Ok, its been 15 minutes without an action scene. Time to put one in?
MVP: I like do that anyway and it depends on the rhythm. I noticed that some of my fans tend to be potboilers. If you look at New Jack City and even Posse I think youll see the same thing. All the elements start coming together until it gets to that big crescendo. So I have a rhythm as a storyteller. No ones ever said, Oh you need an action scene here or here. I did get a request for Hard Luck to start out with an action scene and I thought about it and it worked.
I guess the biggest compliment I got on a movie recently was with Baadasssss. I was at Fort Hood, Texas and we were playing Baadasssss for the troops before they went off to Iraq. There was a guy with two gold teeth that came up to me and said, Black people like your shit because Baadasssss isnt just a film its a movie too. The notion that something could be a film and a movie too is interesting. Hard Luck is a movie that may be a bit of a film too and thats the surprise. I like films that you can enjoy on multi-levels.
DRE: Im going to assume that since Baadasssss got so much press that it was monetarily very successful on a certain level.
MVP: Yeah, I made the movie in 18 days for two million bucks. So success, in terms of monetarily is how much you spend versus how much you get back. Therefore Baadasssss did well. Also it was named one of the ten best movies of the year by Ebert & Roeper.
DRE: Most of the films youve directed have some importance to them like New Jack City was the first black gangster film, Panther was about The Black Panthers and Baadasssss was about the beginning of black films. But Hard Luck is, as I said before, more of a fun movie. You couldnt exactly say it was important like the other films youve directed. Is it a different mindset when youre making these kinds of films?
MVP: Oh absolutely. I hope that I am able to go off and play. Sometimes when you just straight up entertain people, you can reach a lot more folks. If your objective is to say something to the masses then where are the masses? Are the masses watching independent films or are they watching Day After Tomorrow? I hope that Ive done movies that have a more of an overt stance, be it political, social, ecological, spiritual, whatever it is. But I like to do some other shit for fun. Take Michael Mann for instance, hell make a film like Ali, which obviously has a political and social current, then he will go off and do Miami Vice. New Jack City has a lot of just straight up entertainment in it. What I did was take a genre movie and elevate it but I dont think its diametrically opposed to the film component to have them work together.
DRE: Im friends with Jon Kesselman who directed The Hebrew Hammer. How was working with him on that film?
MVP: Jon, as you know, has a good sense of humor about life and himself. It wasnt an easy film for him because he was under the gun time wise as filmmakers often are. But I thought he survived it really well. Hes got a good sense of humor and I think hes one of those people who is going to last in this business a long time.
DRE: One of the interesting things about The Hebrew Hammer is that he had a very difficult time getting it made. Its much easier to do a Blaxploitation movie than a Jewsploitation movie. Are you surprised by that?
MVP: Thats an interesting thought. Its a provocative thought. But think about this, is there any head of any major movie studio thats black? Youll probably find that most of them are Jewish people. So while were making gain in front of the camera and were getting some awards, the golden rule is that he who has the gold makes the rules. Ultimately the people who control the money will decide what movies are getting made so I dont think that Jewish folks say you cant have a Jewish exploitation movie. They would discuss, Do we think people would want to see this movie? and maybe they wont have the sense of humor about it that Kesselman has. Not everyone can laugh at themselves like Kesselman can. Malcolm X said that if you take a pot of water and boil it and keep a lid on it, sooner or later the pot will blow up. You take the same pot of water and you leave the lid off, but you let the steam out, you can boil that pot for a long time. So if you give folks some nice awards and we deserve them and thats all good. But we tend to not look at the fact that people of color are 33 percent of the film-going audience but only two or three percent of the filmmaking population. Progress is something you really have to look at with very clear vision and I think Jon has a great sense of humor but I think a lot of the folks that run the industry by and large are not folks of color. Does that mean since Japanese folks technically own Sony Pictures they are going to make a lot of Japanese movies, probably not. Theyre not going to interfere with the software, theyre just going to control the hardware.
The New York Times had a very interesting article where they said, Here on the same day you have a movie called Baadasssss opening and a movie called Soul Plane opening. Technically you could say Soul Plane is Blaxploitation. But whats interesting is that Soul Plane was made for $16 million by a big white studio that says the idea of black people running an airline is a joke. Its so funny that black people could even run an airline, thats just spectacular. Here you have Baadasssss, made by an independent filmmaker for a million dollars which has the idea of people of all colors coming together and making a hit film. So this film made by a big white controlled studio is a disempowerment method and the film made by the independent filmmaker is an empowerment method that crossed color lines. I thought that analysis was pretty spot on. If your message is to say that people of color cant run an airline and we would buy purple airplanes, theres some funny shit in there. But if what you want to say is No man, we can all get together and make a movie and do this together. That may not be a message thats any easier to make than Hebrew Hammer.
DRE: What are you working on next?
MVP: Im shooting a documentary called Bring Your A Game about this epidemic where 50 percent of young black men dropping out of high school. For the documentary were taping interviews with people like Ice Cube, Damon Dash and other people who respect why its important to get that education. If you get that education, you can make your life last a long time. In other words, if you have a great jump shot like Magic Johnson and if you understand business and have an education, you can deal with people of all colors and you can do what Magic Johnson is doing now. I did Hard Luck which I genuinely enjoyed and then I can go off and do something like this project.
I also just finished writing this script that right now Im calling the Uniter.
DRE: Whats Uniter about?
MVP: Uniter is about this kid that turns out to be the one person on Earth that can unite the warring tribes of America. It goes into this Terminator, Matrixy, it is a real trippy movie.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Buy the DVD of Hard Luck
Daniel Robert Epstein: Its a pleasure to talk to you. Ive been a fan for a long time. Hard Luck is a lot of fun.
Mario Van Peebles: Great, Im glad you saw it, man.
DRE: Howd you get involved in it?
MVP: What happened was, there was a script called Little Man that had been around for a while and one of the producers had seen my movie Baadasssss. He liked what saw and called me up. I read Little Man and I didnt know if I would do it or not but I thought it was interesting that it had this mix of genres. It had a little bit of the what the hell factor because there are these serial killers that bump heads with these gangster underworld themes. I thought that was interesting and then Wesley Snipes hadnt paid his taxes and wanted to work with me. Im kidding about that.
Well Wesley wanted to work with me again and since it was a trip working with him on New Jack City we decided to do it again. Once Wesley got into it, I rewrote the part specifically with Wesley in mind. So rather than having this character be the coolest guy on the planet instead he would be this unlucky guy who works his way up from the very bottom. We took every racial stereotype and flipped it on its head. So Cybil Shepherd kidnaps Wesley and all these segments of humanity overlap on each other.
DRE: Me and a lot of other people felt that Wesley should have got an Oscar nomination for New Jack City back in the day. He was so good in that. Ive heard hes become quite a bit crazier since then. How was it working with him again?
MVP: I think we must have some past life thing. He has his own stuff with him like most people do. But I think Ive been pretty lucky with him. I think in Hard Luck people find him to be the same kind of character [as in New Jack City] almost 15 years later. Like if you think of Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, how he plays the summation of all the stuff he did in all those spaghetti westerns. So thats what I did with Wesley. The scene where he plays the drums totally comes from him. I find him after all this time to have mellowed. We always have our differences, but weve made some pretty good movies together. Thats just a part of working with him so youve got to be ready. With a marriage you cant say youre not going to fight. Hell no, were going to have our differences but at the end of the day we would still go out to the club together or go party together or go get the kids together or do whatever. So I couldnt say we never had our arguments or our differences because sometimes hes got some pretty shitty ideas and sometimes Ive got some pretty shitty ideas. Sometimes hes got some great ideas and sometimes I have some great ideas. So I listen and he listens and between the two of us we figure it out.
DRE: So he didnt try to choke you or anything [like he did with David Goyer on Blade: Trinity].
MVP: I dont think hed go and do that with me and I wouldnt do that with him.
DRE: Im a big fan of the movie Narc which your Hard Luck cinematographer, Alex Nepomniaschy, shot. What was it like working with Alex?
MVP: Alex is this real quiet guy but thats ok because he speaks with his camera. He says everything he has to say with the imagery that he creates. I thought that he was a guy that really can do some edgy stuff and I wanted the movie to be really visual and he really likes those primary, rich colors. I wanted this film to be an odyssey so I wanted someone that I felt could paint a lush film. Alex can do that.
DRE: Was the Hurricane Katrina element in the script before you rewrote it?
MVP: No the script had a real heavy rewrite even though [Hard Luck co-screenwriter] Larry Brand and I hung out. Before I rewrote it, the serial killer was not a female, the Hurricane Katrina stuff was not in there. It was a real different script but it still had the serial killer, the violence, the kidnapping. What happens to the baddest cat on the planet when someone even badder kidnaps him.
DRE: You had mentioned how Hard Luck is a bit of a New Jack City what-if scenario. That brings up what weve heard about for years, a real sequel to New Jack City.
MVP: Thats one of those things that gets kicked around everyday and it just depends on the idea. If youve got a great script, lets me see it. New Jack City was a special situation and each movie is special in its own way. So if there is a time where the script is really terrific then I might just do that.
DRE: I know youve acted in a lot of direct to DVD movies over the past ten years or so, but with such big stars in Hard Luck, why is it going straight to DVD?
MVP: Well first I havent directed any straight to DVD movies. I think we may be seeing more of that now. They have another one recently called Edison. Did you see that one?
DRE: Ive heard of it, its now called Edison Force.
MVP: Yeah, thats with Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey and that, like Hard Luck, was released by Sony Pictures, they have their own rhythm of how they do it. Baadasssss was a theatrical release for Sony. Wesley has a big following in the action movie world but I dont understand how they decide to release films. The business is changing in that theyre doing much bigger movies on DVD. We premiered Hard Luck up at the Harlem Film Festival and it played well with an audience.
DRE: Are there certain things you have to do with a straight to DVD movie like, Ok, its been 15 minutes without an action scene. Time to put one in?
MVP: I like do that anyway and it depends on the rhythm. I noticed that some of my fans tend to be potboilers. If you look at New Jack City and even Posse I think youll see the same thing. All the elements start coming together until it gets to that big crescendo. So I have a rhythm as a storyteller. No ones ever said, Oh you need an action scene here or here. I did get a request for Hard Luck to start out with an action scene and I thought about it and it worked.
I guess the biggest compliment I got on a movie recently was with Baadasssss. I was at Fort Hood, Texas and we were playing Baadasssss for the troops before they went off to Iraq. There was a guy with two gold teeth that came up to me and said, Black people like your shit because Baadasssss isnt just a film its a movie too. The notion that something could be a film and a movie too is interesting. Hard Luck is a movie that may be a bit of a film too and thats the surprise. I like films that you can enjoy on multi-levels.
DRE: Im going to assume that since Baadasssss got so much press that it was monetarily very successful on a certain level.
MVP: Yeah, I made the movie in 18 days for two million bucks. So success, in terms of monetarily is how much you spend versus how much you get back. Therefore Baadasssss did well. Also it was named one of the ten best movies of the year by Ebert & Roeper.
DRE: Most of the films youve directed have some importance to them like New Jack City was the first black gangster film, Panther was about The Black Panthers and Baadasssss was about the beginning of black films. But Hard Luck is, as I said before, more of a fun movie. You couldnt exactly say it was important like the other films youve directed. Is it a different mindset when youre making these kinds of films?
MVP: Oh absolutely. I hope that I am able to go off and play. Sometimes when you just straight up entertain people, you can reach a lot more folks. If your objective is to say something to the masses then where are the masses? Are the masses watching independent films or are they watching Day After Tomorrow? I hope that Ive done movies that have a more of an overt stance, be it political, social, ecological, spiritual, whatever it is. But I like to do some other shit for fun. Take Michael Mann for instance, hell make a film like Ali, which obviously has a political and social current, then he will go off and do Miami Vice. New Jack City has a lot of just straight up entertainment in it. What I did was take a genre movie and elevate it but I dont think its diametrically opposed to the film component to have them work together.
DRE: Im friends with Jon Kesselman who directed The Hebrew Hammer. How was working with him on that film?
MVP: Jon, as you know, has a good sense of humor about life and himself. It wasnt an easy film for him because he was under the gun time wise as filmmakers often are. But I thought he survived it really well. Hes got a good sense of humor and I think hes one of those people who is going to last in this business a long time.
DRE: One of the interesting things about The Hebrew Hammer is that he had a very difficult time getting it made. Its much easier to do a Blaxploitation movie than a Jewsploitation movie. Are you surprised by that?
MVP: Thats an interesting thought. Its a provocative thought. But think about this, is there any head of any major movie studio thats black? Youll probably find that most of them are Jewish people. So while were making gain in front of the camera and were getting some awards, the golden rule is that he who has the gold makes the rules. Ultimately the people who control the money will decide what movies are getting made so I dont think that Jewish folks say you cant have a Jewish exploitation movie. They would discuss, Do we think people would want to see this movie? and maybe they wont have the sense of humor about it that Kesselman has. Not everyone can laugh at themselves like Kesselman can. Malcolm X said that if you take a pot of water and boil it and keep a lid on it, sooner or later the pot will blow up. You take the same pot of water and you leave the lid off, but you let the steam out, you can boil that pot for a long time. So if you give folks some nice awards and we deserve them and thats all good. But we tend to not look at the fact that people of color are 33 percent of the film-going audience but only two or three percent of the filmmaking population. Progress is something you really have to look at with very clear vision and I think Jon has a great sense of humor but I think a lot of the folks that run the industry by and large are not folks of color. Does that mean since Japanese folks technically own Sony Pictures they are going to make a lot of Japanese movies, probably not. Theyre not going to interfere with the software, theyre just going to control the hardware.
The New York Times had a very interesting article where they said, Here on the same day you have a movie called Baadasssss opening and a movie called Soul Plane opening. Technically you could say Soul Plane is Blaxploitation. But whats interesting is that Soul Plane was made for $16 million by a big white studio that says the idea of black people running an airline is a joke. Its so funny that black people could even run an airline, thats just spectacular. Here you have Baadasssss, made by an independent filmmaker for a million dollars which has the idea of people of all colors coming together and making a hit film. So this film made by a big white controlled studio is a disempowerment method and the film made by the independent filmmaker is an empowerment method that crossed color lines. I thought that analysis was pretty spot on. If your message is to say that people of color cant run an airline and we would buy purple airplanes, theres some funny shit in there. But if what you want to say is No man, we can all get together and make a movie and do this together. That may not be a message thats any easier to make than Hebrew Hammer.
DRE: What are you working on next?
MVP: Im shooting a documentary called Bring Your A Game about this epidemic where 50 percent of young black men dropping out of high school. For the documentary were taping interviews with people like Ice Cube, Damon Dash and other people who respect why its important to get that education. If you get that education, you can make your life last a long time. In other words, if you have a great jump shot like Magic Johnson and if you understand business and have an education, you can deal with people of all colors and you can do what Magic Johnson is doing now. I did Hard Luck which I genuinely enjoyed and then I can go off and do something like this project.
I also just finished writing this script that right now Im calling the Uniter.
DRE: Whats Uniter about?
MVP: Uniter is about this kid that turns out to be the one person on Earth that can unite the warring tribes of America. It goes into this Terminator, Matrixy, it is a real trippy movie.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
courtneyriot:
Mario Van Peebles has been on a major upswing in the past few years. His feature directorial debut, New Jack City, helped establish him and eventually many other black filmmakers in much of the same way his father, Melvin Van Peebles...
thenastynazi:
Heartbreak Ridge and 44 Minutes, thats all I have to say, both great movies. MVP rocks. 
