a16z Podcast Straight Outta Compton, The Interview (including Ice Cube and Ben Horowitz)

Well, first of all, I'm honored to be able to tell a story about such a phenomenal group that changed the course of popular culture. You know, history was changed when NWA came out and made Straight Outta Compton. And how I approached it, you know, it was actually it was hard and it was easy. It was hard because it was so many major things that happened with this group, so much controversy, so much drama, and it's so many, it's like five guys over the course of 10 years. To actually choose what to put in the movie was really, really hard. What was easy about it was it's not only hip-hop history, it's American history. And these guys seriously, these guys weren't really interested in serving polite society or being politically correct. And this is something that you can go your whole lifetime and not learn that lesson, and they did it as young guys. And to tell that story, it's just kind of a universal theme that I think anybody can actually identify with. And when you have a story that has a brotherhood and that has triumph and tragedy and rags to riches, that made it easy for me because these are all universal things that we all can identify with that has nothing to do with where you come from, what your culture is, or if you even like hip hop or not. So it was hard, but it was also easy.

Well, we was just so frustrated at the time, you know. We was dealing with Daryl Gates, who was the chief of police in Los Angeles at the time, and he had declared a war on gangs. Now, to most law-abiding citizens, a war on gangs sounds pretty good. But if they think every black teenager they run across or brown teenager they run across is a gang banger, that means it's a war on black young teenagers and brown young teenagers. So it was a war on all of us, whether you was banging or not. You was swept in it, caught in it, steamrolled by it. And it was no relief in sight. Before NWA, if a cop testified against you, everybody believed him. You were going to jail, straight up. After NWA, people started to say, 'Hmm, is this true? Is this true?' Then the Rodney King incident happened to let people know what we was talking about was true, and that it was thousands of Rodney Kings all through the community, in every community. Then you know, people start realizing, 'Oh man, they are serious.' So we really decided to use this song as a weapon, as our protest against what was happening to us. Then now, you look up and people realize that it's an epidemic because we have camera phones, body cams, dash cams. All these things are letting people know the things that we've been knowing for hundreds of years in this country, that law enforcement is really stacked against us. And you know, it's a shame when a country prays on its own citizens, and that's exactly what's happening right now.

My preparation was the hardest part, you know. He brought me the idea of being in the movie before there was a script, and he flat out said, 'You know, I need you to play me.' So you kind of got to get this. So we talked to Gary, and Gary got me the acting coaches I needed: Aaron Spiser, Susan Batson, and Dustin Felder. Once I got the role, I was auditioning for two years before I got the part. And that's annoying, that's the longest ever. But because you know, there's the idea of you're not going to get it. And that would have killed me. That would have really, in a way, humiliated me. You know, it's my father. This movie is so much bigger than music, it's so much bigger than the group. This is my family's legacy, and it means the world to me that I have the opportunity to submit him in cinema forever. And that's something that I felt like I needed to do for him.

Well, can we back up just a little bit? I want to dispel any rumors or thoughts that this guy actually was given this role. He worked the hardest out of anybody in this cast to get this role. It took him two years of auditioning and callbacks and chemistry tests. And even with the chemistry test, tell me what happened with the chemistry test.

Okay, okay, okay. Let's back it up. We worked for this role. So two years of auditioning, and then we finally get to a chemistry test. Now I've never done a movie, I don't know what that means. I'm just thinking it's going to be a Cube but easy, we're going to do some scenes. So I get there, I walk in there, I see a Jerry curl. Now I know I'm going for Cube. I step up, 'What's going on? How you doing? I'm O'Shea.' 'You going for Eazy?' 'Nah, no, I'm going for Cube.' 'Oh, okay, okay. Well, I got some bad news for you today.' And so I had to deal with two other Cubes there, competition if you will. But it was just another challenge that I had to get over from the get-go. Me and these two guys, we clicked. These dudes are some of my best friends at this point. And the chemistry test was just another notch in my belt. All the hard work, everything I had to go through, it was all building confidence that I needed in myself. I needed to cram as much experience as I could in a short amount of time to give y'all the best project that I could.

Come on, stages. He did an amazing job in the movie, but he did an amazing job really earning the part. People don't realize that these guys went through boot camp, not only to earn the part but just actually preparing for the part. So I'm going to let you do this thing, but I want people to understand. Go ahead.

It's just one of those things, man. I've been involved with this project for four years. It took me four years to get this on up to the screen. I think it took Cube over a decade, maybe 13 years, to put this on the screen. So this is not something where we woke up and said, 'You know what, we want to make a movie, okay, NWA, it's a slam dunk.' It's a passion project, it's a labor of love. And everybody who's sitting up here really put their blood, sweat, and tears into making this movie what it is today. And nepotism was not a part of this project because when it's all said and done, the novelty of Cube's son playing Cube wears off after the first five minutes. If he can't carry a movie, this movie doesn't work. Period. So I really wanted to put that out there because these guys really worked hard to do this.

I had a lot of drive coming into the part from the beginning. And I really had the honor. I saw Eazy as an opportunity to not only recreate him and recreate people as they know him, but to really be able to pull all my creative guns out. And I had to make a complete transformation to do it because I had to drop the accent and learn how to talk and walk like I was from California, and learn the music, and learn how to rap, and learn all these different things, and eat 4,000 calories a day to get my chest big and box, and do all these things. I'm like, he wasn't doing all this, you know what I mean? But I had it, it was a heavy task. It was a heavy, heavy, heavy task. But that was before I could get to the point where I could take direction, because all of these things are things I felt like I didn't want to worry about while trying to act. Because acting has to be real. So there were a lot of things that went into that. But Gary and the rest of NWA really, really helped me channel what I felt like was him and to give him a real opinion. But Gary had this real safe zone for each of us because everybody had their own things to do. He worked super hard, but he had a vision for everybody, I think. And it was kind of chronologically set up for us to develop a real brotherhood. And a lot of that we did that kind of transfers on screen.

Well, listen, you guys have to appreciate the transformation that Jason made because it's one thing if you're from the streets of LA and you are from the streets, but the streets of New Orleans is completely different. So he's from the South. So to learn the culture, learn the swag, learn how to perform, get larger, all these things you have to do in such a short amount of time, the transformation was crazy. And the boot camp that you had to go through in order to give such an honest performance was absolutely amazing as well. And I read these stories about some of my favorite films like Raging Bull where De Niro has to gain weight and lose weight and do all these things to give such a great performance, or City of God where the director works with these kids for months and months and months. I think he worked with them for nine months. You guys came in in eight weeks, recorded the entire Straight Outta Compton album. These guys, the actors, recorded the album, gained weight, lost weight. Corey went to school to actually DJ. And you bring up Shakespeare, Corey actually was doing Shakespeare on Broadway, something like that, and went to Juilliard. Come on, let's talk.

Man, I don't know. I just look at it all as a huge blessing, first and foremost. Because as an actor, especially as a black young brother in this business, you never know what the next paycheck is going to come from. You never know what the next opportunity is going to yield. So as we always say, Jason says, it feels like we hit the life lottery with these roles and these characters. And it wasn't lost on us the task that was ahead. Because initially with Dre, I got the call to come in for him and I was like, 'Nah, I don't think I can do that. I don't think I'm the one who can. I don't think I look like him, sound like him, act like him, none of that.' But it was a lot of just your actor insecurities getting in your own head and getting in your own way. And I remember when I found out Gary was involved and how heavily Cube was involved and Dre, it was like, 'Okay, it's game time now.' Because I knew this story was going to be epic, but I didn't want to be the one to mess it up. But thankfully I got the role. And these guys, though, man, they made it easy. Working with Jason, working with O'Shea, Aldis Hodge who plays MC Ren, Neil Brown Jr. who plays Yella, we became brothers during this whole process. I can't even put it into words how closely we had to get in NWA right before we could even step on set. The two months of prep work, and Dre was there for the whole thing, man. From the very beginning, he was there on set every day. And anytime I needed something, if at four o'clock in the morning I called him, he'd pick up the phone because he's in the studio working. But it was a lot, man. I had to learn how to DJ, never did that before in my life. Had to learn how to produce. The amount of respect that these guys had for what they was trying to do, because they're legends. Who sits in the presence of legends like that to the point where they're falling asleep? Like, 'All right, I'm still here, I'm good.' Cube shooting right along too. You're like, 'Why do I feel like Ice Cube is behind me right now?' Somebody got the iPad, they like, 'Jason, you good? I'm checking up on you.' I'm like, 'Wow.' But to know that the same people who put that huge insecurity or that huge fear when you first meet a legend, they completely swept that off the board for us and said, 'Man, you're the man for the job. We trust y'all to do this, but we're going to watch.' And I think we really came out with something good. It's about capturing their humanity, man, because we're not playing who they are today. We're playing the young men they were then. And you can look at who they are today and see where they came from and everything they overcame. That's what we wanted to capture, just who the men were. And like you said, you were talking about Shakespeare, man. It is Shakespearean. In Romeo and Juliet, there's the Montagues and the Capulets, and they're feuding for no reason. Nobody knows why they're feuding. You can look at the Bloods and the Crips and see that same energy is there, man. It's in the language, man. In hip hop, it's the same. It all correlates, man. But we pulled on everything Gary gave us, everything we needed to get this job done. And then the big homies, the big uncles, they were there every single day to make sure we did it right.

Thank you, Mr. Horowitz. I want to thank the Hitz family for bringing us all here today. What an amazing opportunity. So I have a quick question and a comment. My name is Latifa Simon, and I'm really excited because just yesterday I was elected as a new board member for the National Black Lives Matter movement. Congratulations. In this moment, a couple of things. This movie matters. And many of us who are writers, we want to run to our computers immediately and write a commentary about why it matters: the commodification of hip hop, the forgiveness and love and humanization of black men. And all that you all did in two and a half hours, I can't even begin to capture what this will do for movement in this time. So my question... damn, this was a damn good movie. Thank you so much. A couple of things. And I'm shaking because many of us who are involved in the HIV movement 20 years ago when we were 16, 17, and 18 and on the streets, when I saw that amazing scene, I want to understand how you all prepared for that. When we saw Eazy's patch years and years ago, we brought the quilt to Hunter's Point and seeing mothers weep because they had lost their babies and they were never able to talk about losing their babies. Eazy gave HIV voice in our community. And what you all have done with this picture, you reunited because HIV is still the leading cause of death of black young people in the Bay Area. Let's speak. Not murder, not homicide. I want to know from Mr. Cube and also from the director, your hopes and dreams for this film.

So I'll give the microphone to Mr. Horowitz. Well, you know, I want people to be inspired by our story. Our story can be any person in here who has a dream, who won't be stopped. We did this with creativity. We fought back with a pen and a piece of paper. You can do the same thing with a laptop, iPad, whatever y'all motherfuckers would write about now. But it's all about creativity. It's all about being constructive and not destructive. And you're going to have powerful forces against you. What we didn't show is people that were in our neighborhood and our families told us we couldn't rap, that we weren't going to be nothing. And we didn't listen to nobody. We just was ourselves, and it was all right. So I want people to be inspired by the story. It's a great American story. It's youngsters with courage standing up for what we want to do. Now, everything we did wasn't positive, that's not what we're saying. But everything we did was honest. And people like that. People like when you're honest. They don't like when you're full of shit and when you're lying all the time and when you're just trying to put on a good face or put on a good mask. A lot of artists would do that. They put on the good mask when they get on stage, get off stage and be Ike Turner. So we was like, if you want to be Ike Turner, let us know. Be that motherfucker on stage so we know who you are so we stay away. But don't hide behind no mask. So I just want people to be inspired. That's all.

It's a movie of a lifetime for me. It's a project of a lifetime because it's very personal to me. I grew up in South Central LA in the 80s and the 90s, and I worked with Cube at the beginning of my career. He gave me my break. I did Friday, that was my first movie. And so when you talk about LA, South Central LA, that era, hip hop, movies, and all of the points that we touched on in this movie, all these things don't normally intersect. You bring up HIV and AIDS, and police brutality, and if you're going to be politically correct or not and serve polite society. It's a project of a lifetime for me because it's not only personal, it's relevant in so many ways. And it'll be relevant for a very long time. When people say what was going on in America a hundred years from now, hopefully this is the film that they reference. And I just wanted to be as honest about the depiction as possible. And fact is, sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. All these things where a guy starts off DJing in the garage and becomes a billionaire, and another guy starts off riding in a bus at school and becomes a Hollywood mogul. You can't write that. If someone sent me that script, I'd be like, 'That's bullshit.' And so to touch on these topics honestly, I don't know if any of these things will ever intersect for me as a filmmaker ever again. And so it was really important for me to make it as honestly as possible. And I'm glad that it's relevant, but at the same time, I'm a little sad that it's relevant. I wish I could say, 'Remember back in the day when the music was great? Remember back in the day when the police used to overstep their boundaries and abuse their power? That was then. We're all kind of doing our thing now as Americans.' But it's sadly not the case. But I will say that I'm cautiously optimistic that all of the pressure from the headlines and women like you that are stepping up and actually doing something about it, it's going to force change. It's going to put pressure on our leaders in law enforcement, it's going to push pressure on our leaders in Washington. And for those law enforcement officers that are out there that have the tendency or the propensity to actually do things like that, maybe they'll watch this movie and think twice. So thank you for that. We really appreciate what you do as well.

Good luck to the second question. He put his hand down. Well, I just have a question about the struggle obviously from inner city and from getting out, but it was also a struggle for the art form to gain respect. And I wonder now, you look at hip-hop and it's a global phenomenon and it's changed. So for Cube and for Gary, how much could NWA come out now, do you think?

Yeah, definitely. Now is probably more easier for NWA to come out than back then. Hip hop was the underground enemy of music back then. You hear a lot of people in the movie saying, 'Rap is not an art, nobody wants to hear that rap reality bullshit.' They were saying all that to us. The soul music, R&B music singers hated us, thought we was the scourge of the earth. And so we wore that as a badge to be ourselves even more. The more that the industry hated what we were doing, the more that we wanted to do it and be ourselves. And we didn't care about what they was saying about us and what they was thinking about the music. We knew that this music was powerful and it finally gave the youth a voice. The youth is voiceless. Nobody listens to the youth. And with rap music, you got to listen. So it was a powerful time against powerful opposition. But that's why this is movie worthy, because there were so many obstacles that were in our way that tried to take us down. A few of them worked, but most of them didn't. And that's what it's all about.

I look at it a little differently. I kind of feel like there'll never be another group like NWA because they had to do it without any reference. There was no real examples of guys stepping up and doing it the way they did it, facing the opposition of the FBI and law enforcement, having to build a company without any real reference. So you look at Cash Money Records, you look at Death Row, you look at Bad Boy Records, they all had Ruthless Records as a reference. Unless you look back at maybe Motown or something like that, which was not even the generation that they could really connect to in that way business-wise. It was a bunch of young guys just finding their way, and we watched them grow up on wax. So I'm not really sure if you'll ever really see another NWA. And while I appreciate there are a few guys out there that are really doing it, J. Cole is doing it, Kendrick Lamar is doing it, but there's no Kendrick Lamar without NWA. So I personally feel like I hope it inspires artists to actually get out there, but again, they'll still be inspired by groups like NWA.

Man, I just want to say what's up and how you doing, man. What up, homie? South Central is in the house. What's up? We brought four or five kids. Can you guys stand up? Five kids we drove from South Central just to come see this today. So let me tell you why. I grew up in Watts. It's such a great pleasure to be here today with you guys because this morning I was in Watts talking about today's the anniversary of the Watts Riots back in the 60s. So now I'm here watching this and I'm blown away. And the reason why, because NWA has been inspiring me ever since the 90s, ever since the 80s when I was growing up in South Central and Watts. And ever since then, I thought, man, we got to keep doing something different, do something new, and get the youth to be inspired. And you used to speak out. So you guys had NWA, we have TET, which means Team Exploring Technology. And this is the future technology, young entrepreneurs in South Central Los Angeles doing things, doing hackathons. We just had the biggest hackathon in Watts. We had about 200 people, about 100 kids in the Nick's. If you know the Nick's, Nickerson Gardens, Watts. We had 70, 80 kids down there. And we are facing the same thing that you guys face with music about not rapping, not being an artist, or rap not being music. We're facing the same thing because people in Watts, leaders or police officials, are telling us hackathons are a bad thing. That's what they're telling us. Hackathons teaching kids how to code is a bad thing. It's going to hack into a computer, they're going to do something illegal, and we shouldn't be doing it. But we brought it to the Nick's. We had a hack. My question to you is this: there's kids down there doing this, and they're hacking away, learning how to code, and building their own tech companies, not having a lot of knowledge how the tech world starts and how the tech world gets going. I'm asking you today, you didn't have any knowledge of the rap and the music industry. What advice would you have for kids now to say, 'Hey, keep going'? I made a shout out to USC with QD3, and I remember him telling me that you said to him, 'Hey, I want you to get your degree first before you come and work with me.' And he got his degree at USC. I remember him talking to me about that back there. But I'm asking you today, what advice would you have in order to inspire kids and say, even if you don't have all the tools necessary, to keep going and achieve their dreams?

Today, you got to believe in yourself. It's all about having that self-determination. You know what you're doing is right. It feels right. Don't worry about what people say. Don't let people discourage you into not doing what you know you want to do and what you're feeling. Even family members, friends, close people will try to discourage you and get you off your path. It's just natural, especially when they don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. But you just got to work and be determined, not care what people say. And study. Everything you want to learn is in a book somewhere. So that's what it's all about. It's all about getting your determination up and getting your passion up and trying to be great at what you do. And that to me is all the ammunition you need to get out there and do anything you have your heart set on. And it's not cool to be what they call a nerd now, or it's not cool to be smart, which is the dumbest shit in the world. I don't know when that happened because it was cool to be smart in my neighborhood. It's cool to be smart because everybody knows that all the cool people, you ain't going to be doing nothing but working for the geeks anyway when you get out of high school. So you need to go on and get your shit together and you might need to become a nerd and a geek too. Nothing wrong with that. They give these names, but that just means you're smart, you're focused, and you know what you want to do and what you want to be. Nothing wrong with that, man. Don't let nobody make you feel ashamed. That's cool to me. It's cool to have things and to be smart. So that's what it's all about.

Hey, VJ. A couple of questions for the actors. What are you going to take out from the movie going forward? There must have been scenes that brought you back to what you went through at that point in time.

Well, the one thing that I'm going to take from this film that I hope everybody takes from this film is the confidence that NWA had, and their courageousness, their willingness to be the straw that stirs the drink. And anybody else who follows in their footsteps are just caught in the current. And everyone should take the kind of confidence and integrity that the characters show and apply it to anything that you do, from the custodian to the president. Everybody should take the same kind of characteristics. The things that speak to the human character in this film are things that I feel like we as society need to be refreshed on constantly. So I just want everyone to take that from the film and to apply it to your everyday life, no matter what it is that you do.

Yeah, that's super important because if you take my situation for instance, I've only been acting for five years. I never thought this could happen. If I wrote my own story, it wouldn't be this good. So I think, like watching NWA, you can see that they were just five guys of a like mind and they changed the world. What if it was 10 guys? And we got to start thinking on that level. We got to start thinking like we could do anything, for real. And for me, what I took from this movie really is that these guys never changed. I'm somebody from the street, and I always thought that I would have to articulate so much better and do these things and wear these kind of pants and have this kind of job. And none of that is true. You just got to be you. And if you continue to be you, it'll bring you exactly where you need to be. So be happy with that.

Yeah, that's real talk. Be you, and be the best you, though. Be the positively you. And from this film, I take away going the path less chosen and being strong enough to make that decision. Because for me, I grew up in DC. My mother's a police officer, my dad dealing with drugs. It's a whole other lifestyle. And for me, I grew up seeing both sides of the tracks. I grew up watching a lot of my friends go that way, and I had to make a choice. Everybody else is doing that, that must be cool. What's the choice that's going to lead me to go this way? The same way that NWA had to make a choice when the FBI came down on these teenagers for speaking reality. They made a choice to put their foot on the gas and keep going. And that's the thing that I take away from it. It doesn't matter where you're from or what your situation is, whether you're white, black, Asian, Latina, whatever your race, whatever your sociopolitical economic status, you can be the best you. And this film shows that because you see where they came from and you see who they are today, and you see the choices that they made to get there. This is no fairy tale. This isn't fiction. This is real life. And like Gary said, you can't write this shit. You really can't. If you think about, 'Oh, this would be a great movie,' no, no, this is reality. It was funny because we would be on set, man, and I remember Dre was like, 'Man, this could be a movie, man, because this part was...' and we were shooting it. So it's just, be you. Have that confidence and go get it. Straight up.

Some of my favorite parts of the movie is that I remember real vividly like happening, like on the bus that day when dude got on the bus, tripped out, gave the motherfucker a motivational speech and bumped out. And then performing at Dude's. I remember that night vividly. My favorite part though is going in Brian Turner's office with the bat. Yeah, that brings back memories right there. Yeah, I was on one for real. But we cool now. He paid me my money too.

Okay, I just wanted to know what made you guys want to become actors in the first place and why did you choose to audition for this film?

I just needed new friends, for real. I was like, 'I don't really like what y'all into, maybe I'm going to go do this.' And it was something that I never really thought was going to turn out like that. They had this lady who just had this acting workshop, and I was like, 'They might got some nice looking females in there.' So I'm like, 'All right, let me go do this.' And maybe like three weeks into it, I was like, 'I really, really, really like this. This is something that is expressive. I can go there and just do something different for four, three hours out my day and be like, that's what's up.' And maybe like five weeks into it, they had an agent come in there and check me out. She looked at the whole class and was like, 'Everybody needs to take this serious. You want to know how serious it is? I'm about to sign him.' I was like, 'What?' And it took me maybe about five or six months to book. But after I seen one of them checks, I'm like, 'Man, hey, hey, hey.' And after that, it was all about trying to push and get to the next level because you're really nothing without a resume in acting. Everybody got to start somewhere, but you have to humble yourself and say, 'I can't take that lead role' because you think you know how to act until you get there and have 80 different setups that you got to do and you got to do this and you got to do that, and you're like, 'Ah, wait,' because they don't have time to teach you when you're spending millions and millions of dollars. So it was one thing that kind of went to the next and the next, but I was always so happy to work that people were like, 'Man, he's just a good dude to work around.' So they was like, 'Man, maybe we should try to read him for a lead.' That's how I got Eazy-E.

For me, I don't know. I just like telling stories. I like the old tradition of the griot, sitting around a campfire growing up, hearing Grandma telling stories. I just love being able to translate real life to screen or to the stage. Because we get to do this for a living. This is fun, man. This is a blessing to be able to wake up every day and do this and be able to be here with you guys. But the truth is, I'm more of a reserved kind of guy. I'm not very... but when I get to get on stage or get on film, I can let go and just let loose. That's sort of an outlet for me, whereas it could have been something else. So I just encourage people who are interested, go for it, do it, because you can be here. You will be here.

I'm really into screenwriting. I'm definitely into writing scripts. I've always liked telling stories and things like that. And he's really the reason why I got into it. I saw that he needed me. He told me in the beginning during the auditioning process that there's a lot of people that don't want you to get this, plain and simple, because of nepotism and things like that. But knowing that a lot of people don't want me to do it, but he wants me to do it, that's really all that I needed. And I never acted before. I had drama in high school, but that's really it. But I had fun. I had the time of my life. I'm not going to act like this movie didn't drive me crazy, but it's all because of the pressure I put on myself. While I was filming, I was thinking about my screenwriting friends, like they're going to chew my ass out, 'Oh, you're an actor now, this what you do?' So it was all a collective things. I feel like I know what goes into a good movie, and I've had way too much fun on this project. These guys, great morale makes great movies. And I pray that I get another set like this because I didn't put all this hard work just for one. I'm trying to be here for a while.