On August 21, director Mario Van Peebles joined IndieWire for a live edition of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles. Warner Bros. provided a beautiful 35mm print of “New Jack City,” Van Peebles’ feature directorial debut, and after it screened Van Peebles took the stage for a look back at his breakthrough gangster film.
“It’s a trip to see on the big screen again,” Van Peebles told the crowd, noting that the screening was particularly special because it was taking place on the birthday of his father Melvin, director of the classic independent film “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.” “Growing up with Melvin Van Peebles, I learned a lot by osmosis. He’d have me go to movies and take surveys of the audience.”
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One of the things Van Peebles learned by taking those surveys and talking with filmgoers was that black audiences were often short-changed when it came to representation. When the time came to direct “New Jack City” — a gig Van Peebles got after proving himself in television and finding a champion in Clint Eastwood — the young director was determined to announce to audiences that this would be an A-list production without compromise.
That led to the movie’s extraordinary opening, in which a helicopter moves into the city before the camera lands on Manhattan’s 59th Street Bridge for an electrifying introduction to antagonist Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes). “Warners said, ‘We’ve got great stock footage, just open our vaults,’” Van Peebles said. “And I said no, I want to shoot it ourselves because I want that opening shot to go past the Statue of Liberty and to the 59th Street Bridge and see the guy hanging off the bridge and Nino stepping out in one shot. Early on I wanted to say, this is a real movie. We’re going to bring it.”
Van Peebles also brought all his experience as an actor to the film, casting it impeccably and getting the most out of actors who were either inexperienced, playing types of roles they never had before, or both. Ice-T wanted to play gangster Nino and Wesley Snipes wanted to play the story’s main cop, but Van Peebles convinced them to switch in a decision that yielded iconic performances from both. He also upended expectations by casting comedian Chris Rock in a stone-cold serious role as Pookie, a doomed crack addict.
“I thought, if this guy can make us laugh, maybe the flip side of that coin is to make us cry,” Van Peebles said. To get the results he wanted, Van Peebles shot Rock’s most dramatic moments — the ones where we really see his internal struggle over his addiction — without sound and relied on the techniques of silent film directing. “Back in the day, you could talk to your actor [during a take]. You could tell Mary Pickford what’s up. So I said, I’m gonna go old school. In the scene where he’s got the crack pipe and is shaking, I’m talking him through it. Then I pulled my sound out in post, put his sound back in, and he’s killing the game.”
The presentation of Rock’s character was one of the keys to Van Peebles’ intention, which was to make a film in the tradition of gangster classics like “Public Enemy” and “Scarface” that would counter the glamor of crime with a genuine sense of tragedy. “I didn’t want to do a wholesale glorification of the drug lord,” Van Peebles said. “The problem was to make it less ‘Scarface,’ and maybe more of a multicultural ‘Untouchables.’ You had to have viable role models, because if you want people to say no [to drugs], you gotta give them something to say yes to.”
To that end Van Peebles assembled a diverse, charismatic cast of cops played by Ice-T, Judd Nelson, and Russell Wong to balance out the seductiveness of Nino’s world, and was sure to counter scenes depicting Nino’s opulence with the cost for his community. Directing the ensemble, Van Peebles found that his own background as an actor came in handy. “Not every actor speaks the same language,” he said. “Each one is different.”
Van Peebles credited his cast with helping him fully realize his ambitions for his directorial debut. “Here’s the thing: when you’re a director, it’s like you have a revolver and you’re going in a haunted house,” Van Peebles said. “The bad news is you only have three bullets. You can’t shoot at everything, so you’ve got to figure out what you want to shoot at. You want to get the best cast you can get, that’s key. You want to get the best DP you can get, who knows how to shoot pretty pictures but knows when to make their day. And you want to get a first AD who doesn’t want to be a director.”
Van Peebles said that he had those three things in his back pocket. “The rest was just knowing when to shut up and get out of the way,” he said. “Sometimes the best ideas are not coming from you. It’s not my movie, it’s our movie. If you’re egoless enough to let folks know they can come forward with good stuff, you have the advantage of a group mind. And that’s very powerful.”
To hear the entire conversation with Mario Van Peebles and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
