flashback jeffrey wright shaft

Flashback: Jeffrey Wright, the Shaft interview

Watching the Casino Royale DVD this week, it dawned on me that I have

interviewed two of the film's supporting stars in the past.

Eva Green (Vesper Lynd) was on the press junket for Kingdom of Heaven

(2005) -- though I admittedly didn't use any of her quotes when I

wrote up my junket report -- and I did a phoner with Jeffrey Wright

(Felix Leiter) in connection with Shaft (2000).

Here is the article that came out of that phoner:

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Interview: Jeffrey Wright in Shaft

by Peter T. Chattaway

It's a rare actor who can steal a movie from a charismatic star like

Samuel L. Jackson, but Jeffrey Wright may have pulled it off in Shaft.

The actor, best known in film circles for his starring role in

Basquiat, has won raves for his performance as Latino drug lord

Peoples Hernandez.

The character was originally conceived as a sort of secondary villain;

Peoples is hired by Walter Wade, a rich white bigot played by

Christian Bale, to find and kill the cocktail waitress who saw Walter

murder a black man. But Wright's funny, deadly take on the character

led the filmmakers to beef up his role while cutting back on some of

his co-stars' scenes.

Wright, in a phone interview from Toronto, says he was only six years

old when the original Shaft, directed by Gordon Parks, came out in

1971. "I was a little too young for 'the black dick who was a sex

machine to all the chicks,'" says Wright, who is part African-American

and part Native ("And I even admit to a thimbleful of European, that

being Irish").

"But I do remember the aura that was created around it, and I vividly

recall driving my mother to the edge by pulling pots and pans out of

her kitchen cupboards and banging on them to the soundtrack, trying to

create that high-hat riff. It made a really deep cultural impact at

the time. For black folks particularly, it was the first time they'd

seen a hero in a film like this that was drawn as they would draw it.

"He was born out of a time when there was a kind of awakening of the

black esthetic, a kind of Black Power, and he was a character that

reflected that reality. But beyond that, he was a hero for all people.

He was an inclusive hero. He wasn't simply a hero for one type of

person."

In some ways, mainstream movies are still catching up to the original

film's vision. Not only was the black private dick immortalized by

Richard Roundtree willing to sleep with women of any race or colour,

he was also chummy with a gay bartender, who was portrayed in

refreshingly non-stereotypical terms.

"[The bartender] is just there," Wright observes, "because he lives in

New York and he bartends in New York, which is reflective of the way

the city is. And in many ways, Gordon Parks' vision was obviously

sophisticated, on that level, in terms of its respect for the kind of

cultural milieu that is the city. There are a lot of American

television miniseries that are set in New York that don't show that

sophistication, and they're being shot in the year 2000."

So what has changed in the intervening decades? "If you look at the

two movies, one is set in a period of social upheaval, but social

progress, whereas our film is set in a time driven by money," says

Wright. "I think that's indicative of the change, at least in the

States, where you have people scrambling about, trying to make their

way under the shadow of a system that is too easily corrupted by

money, and that's where my character comes in.

"In a lot of ways, Peoples is just a capitalist who happens to carry

an ice pick and poke people with it occasionally, if they stand in the

way of business. Most capitalists have armies."

The new Shaft has been plagued by rumours of fights between its star,

its director, its producer and its screenwriter. But Wright refuses to

comment on all that. "My perspective on it is, really, that going to

the movies is much like going to a restaurant. The less you know about

what goes on in the kitchen, the more likely you are to enjoy your

meal."

He will, however, say that he had the opportunity to improvise some of

his scenes, including one in which Peoples sits on a toilet while

conducting business with the film's other main bad guy. "I thought it

reflected a power dynamic, and it was an act of humiliation and

complete disrespect for a character, Walter Wade, who I think Peoples

ultimately despises," says Wright.

However, he worries that a rude sound effect added to the scene after

it was filmed might undercut his more serious intentions. "I think, as

edited, it might take on more of a comic quality. The sound effect

kind of changes the texture of the scene."

Wright, who can also be seen in the current version of Hamlet as a

Dylan-singing Gravedigger, won a Tony Award a few years ago for

playing a flamboyant gay nurse in Angels in America: Perestroika. He

prepared for his role in Shaft by visiting Dominican barbershops and

restaurants.

"I just kind of soaked up the flavour of the people as much as I

could," he says. "The people quite often come from very humble means,

but they are vibrant and spirited people because they've had to

survive, for the most part, on their essences, as opposed to their

material things. So if you just walk around their neighbourhood,

there's an aliveness about the place that you can't help but be