Cube Meets Dre After “Friday”
Craig and Day Day, the ne’er do well protagonists of the
Friday franchise, return this week in Friday After
Next, the third entry in the series. This time out, the Ice
Cube-penned characters usher in Christmas in the hood, as Craig
(Cube) wakes up in the wee hours of Christmas Eve to find a
thieving Santa Claus rooting through the residence he shares with
Day Day (Mike Epps).
Among the crook’s loot is the duo’s rent money, forcing them to
take jobs as strip-mall security guards. The rest is ninety minutes
of the sort of humor that made a left-field success out of the
original film. Ice Cube says that he got the itch to write shortly
after his appearance in Boyz in tha Hood.
“I got a lot of scripts,” he says, “none of them as good as
[Boyz], of course. I was telling John Singleton my
frustration, that it doesn’t look like I’m ever gonna be in a movie
again, because these scripts are weak. And he said, ‘Write your
own. You can write a record, you can write a movie. Look at some
scripts, you can write that. Just see what the formula is and if
you need some help come on by.’ I went over a couple of times and
he showed me some tricks of the trade, and from there I was just
doing it myself. Friday was the third script I wrote, and
it was the one that got made and launched.”
Friday, which like its sequels was co-written with D.J.
Pooh, was directed by F. Gary Gray and released in 1995. Next
Friday (directed by Steve Carr) rolled into theaters two years
later, and though only two years passed between the second and
third Friday films, the latest entry was hatched with as
much care as its predecessors, right down to the selection of
director Marcus Raboy, with whom Cube first worked a decade ago on
his “Guerillas in the Mist” video.
“There’s always reservations,” Cube says of the decision to
return to the series. “You don’t wanna mess up what you’ve done.
It’s like Jordan coming back: You’re scared to mess up the legacy.
But we’re in this entertainment business really to give the
audience what they want. People come up to me all the time, asking,
‘When’s the next one, when’s the next one, when’s the next one?’ So
we made an effort to see if there can be a next one,
because we don’t wanna do it for the wrong reasons just because we
can make a lot of money or all those things that the movie
companies love to promote. We just wanna do good movies.”
And the Christmas holiday provided the perfect vessel for
keeping Friday fresh. “With a movie like Friday,
it’s straight for laughs,” Cube says. “I don’t have no social
commentary in there whatsoever. If you got a tie on, loosen it up.
We take things that you would normally cry about, and laugh about
’em. We take the stuff in the neighborhood that you would normally
be pissed off about, like somebody breaking into your house on
Christmas and stealing all your stuff.”
Friday After Next falls in the middle of a busy
Hollywood stint for Cube. Earlier this year, he starred in The
Barbershop, and he also shot Torque, in which he
plays the vengeful leader of a biker gang, due next spring. “Joseph
Kahn the director, he’s dope,” he says. “The way he’s shooting it
is kind of like Japanese animation, reality in that style. I wanted
to do a big action movie after doing Barbershop and
Friday.”
In other Ice Cube news, he’ll step out of his cinematic shoes
and back into those of his initial creative outlet next month. Cube
will enter the studio with Dr. Dre to record his seventh album and
the follow-up to 2000’s War and Peace, Vol. 2 (The Peace
Album). That record teased at a reunion between Cube and Dre
with its opening track, “Hello,” which featured the two former
N.W.A members and fellow alum MC Ren. And with the release of the
career-spanning Greatest Hits last year, Cube’s reached
the end of his contract with Priority Records, and his next record
will be released on Dre’s Aftermath.
Though N.W.A, without the late Eazy-E, enjoyed a brief reunion
on the Up in Smoke Tour in 2000, the initial recordings made while
on tour have yet to coalesce into what was tentatively titled the
“Not These Niggaz Again” album.
“I’m just an entertainer, man,” Cube says of his dual pursuits.
“I don’t like to pigeonhole myself to anything. I love to do it
all. Right now I’m working on movies, next month movies are gonna
be forgotten about. [But] I wanna keep doing music as long as it’s
interesting to me. Working with Dr. Dre just excites me to the
fullest, because my next record could be the best one. That got me
turned all the way on . . . rap music is my love.”