Jet-set life enjoyable to Ice Cube

By Marshall Fine
Westchester (N.Y.) Journal News

Ice Cube studies his cup of coffee with a sleepy look of seriousness.

It's Monday morning and, at 4 a.m., he wrapped filming on his latest movie, "Barber Shop." Then he got on a private plane and flew to New York. It's now 10 a.m. and he's about to conduct an interview for his latest release, "All About the Benjamins," which opens nationwide today.

"I'm just trying to rejuvenate a little," he says, sipping the coffee gratefully. "I think I'll be all right by midday."

He considers the jet-set schedule that has him globe-hopping and says, "My body tells me I should be complaining, but my mind and heart tell me I should feel lucky. I'll go with the feeling-lucky part. Actually, feeling blessed, more than lucky."

"Barber Shop" is actually Cube's third film in the past year, after "Benjamins" and the subsequently completed "Friday After Next." Cube, 32 (whose real name is O'Shea Jackson) is the writer on the latter two and says he has a pile of scripts at home in various stages of development.

"You have to wait for your opportunity," he says. "So many things have to come into play to get a movie made. You're asking someone for millions of dollars, just for an idea in your head."

In the case of "All About the Benjamins," the idea was a script about a white cop and a black con man that, Cube says, "was not right — kind of cliched." So he and co-star Mike Epps reworked it to suit themselves, leaving the con man (Epps) but making the white cop into a black bounty hunter (Cube). Their models were films like "48HRS" and "Bad Boys" — buddy comedies with lots of action.

As one of the film's producers, with a budget of $14 million, Cube had to ask himself how the action would be staged. While gunshots are cheap, fake blood is expensive. So, for that matter, are fiery explosions, a staple of the genre.

"We didn't have a lot of money to blow up a lot of things, so we made it count," he says. "We wanted to find a low-budget way to make the audience cringe, things that get under people's skin. We wanted to maximize our punch, along with our one little explosion."