Rock, Star

Chris Rock talks about the transition to leading man.



Bring the champagne: Rock dresses up.

Chris Rock comes into the Presidential Suite at the Hyatt Regency in Washington, D.C. His "people" are already there, the ones who set up his schedule and look out for him. It’s a little past 7 a.m., and they’re in the midst of a jag across country to promote Rock’s new movie, Down to Earth, a jag which includes filming an MTV Diary episode over three days, a weekend junket in New York and visits to several cities to talk to people and tell them how much he likes this new movie. And he does like it. He says that a few times, and encourages me to see it with an audience, because "it annihilates."

Rock talks fast, while eating his breakfast of pancakes and sausages. He says that he chose this PG-13 romantic comedy as his first starring vehicle because he immediately felt comfortable with it. Though at first he didn’t even know its history —it’s a remake of Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait (1978), itself a remake of the 1941 Here Comes Mr. Jordan — he immediately felt like he knew the story. He recalls, "It was like a woman walking into an empty house, and knowing, ‘The couch goes here, the drapes go there.’ I could see where all the jokes went." Rock went on to write the movie with Ali LeRoi, Lance Crouther and Louis C.K., his former Chris Rock Show collaborators. (With everyone involved moving on to other projects, they’ve decided to cease production on the show.)

Rock remembers the writing "like a pick-up game of basketball. Some parts we just sectioned off — like Louis wrote most of the Chazz [Palminteri] stuff. We wrote it while we were doing the show, so we handled it like the show." Working within the story structure allowed them to focus on "the characters and the jokes. We just thought, ‘Let’s make it funnier and more romantic,’ like Eddie Murphy’s Nutty Professor." In addition, he says, because they wrote it before they made the deal with the studio, "we wrote the movie we wanted to write, rather than sell the idea and end up writing a watered-down version, with mail room people, essentially."

As for his directors, Chris and Paul Weitz, Rock says that he was looking for a director when he saw American Pie. "The fucking a pie I could do without," he laughs, "but I liked the rest of it. There was a sweetness to it. Plus, as soon as I saw it, I knew it was going to make a ton of money. I knew they were going to be hot, and they would help me get more money for this project, to get it made." While he was getting things into place, Rock says he "talked to [Bill] Cosby a lot, because you gotta get prepared. On movies, it’s a lot of arguments, everybody’s got an opinion. Studios are huge, they waste so much money on so many people doing so little. There are six execs on one movie; none of ’em can write, but they all got notes."

He’s looking forward to this new phase of his career, as movie star. "They let you do anything, and it’s like sex, you try all the positions. The only pressure is that there are certain things you can only do at certain points in your life. You gotta do movies when you’re hot. I had to do a movie now, or it wasn’t going to happen." At the same time, he sees all that he does as comedy, with the movie as "an extension." he doesn’t see himself branching too far out any time soon. After all, he offers, referencing Puffy’s Sean John fashions, "It’s not like I have a clothing line. I can’t sew."

Rock says he feels confident these days, a feeling that he’s developed recently, while working on his stand-up act. "You just know when it’s ready," he says. "You get cocky on stage. You feel like Mick Jagger, and you just did ‘Start Me Up,’ and you know you’ve got ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ in your back pocket. And the audience doesn’t know what’s coming."

See Cindy Fuchs’ review of Down to Earth in Movie Shorts.