The image of Wesley Snipes in movies like Rising Sun, Jungle Fever and Mo’ Better Blues is that he is one cool cat. He exerts a strong physical prowess, a sense that he commands his surroundings.
In person the tightly muscled Snipes lives up to expectations. He has the aura of a movie star very much in control of the situation and those around him. He strides into the suite at the Casa Grande Hotel with two companions – a male assistant and David C. Pollick, senior vice president of Baker Winokur Ryder public relations. The assistant is asked to bring him a club soda. Pollick is dispatched to see that Snipes’ suit is pressed for tonight.
As a guest of the Miami Film Festival, Snipes is here to introduce Sugar Hill, his latest film, now playing in area theaters. He is memorable as Roemello Skuggs, a drug lord tired of turf wars and violent deaths who wants out of his dirty business.
Sitting cross-legged on the couch, Snipes, in a white T-shirt, black pants, black socks, granny style sunglasses and silver loop earrings on both ears, describes Roemello as “more or less quiet, contemplative and slightly tormented. Walking into a room, he’s not one to draw attention to himself – unless she’s that beautiful.”
Snipes is referring to a scene in Sugar Hill when he approaches the beautiful Theresa Randle as Melissa. She plays a virtuous middle-class actress drawn to Roemello in spite of what he does.
“Theresa’s coming up strong,” says Snipes of Randle, who beat 40 other actresses for the role. “She’s going to get stronger from part to part. So it was very easy. I don’t have a great deal of difficulty in getting along with other actors, as long as they’re good and open to themselves. They try stuff, they’re courageous and do their jobs. But if they don’t, there’s static. Much problems.
“Some of ’em are very neurotic, some of ’em are very insecure. It depends on how long they’ve been in the business. Some can be very, very temperamental, which makes it worse.
“Working with Harvey Keitel, he’s a great actor but he just wears you out when it comes to the experience,” says Snipes with a laugh.
He recalls when they made Rising Sun. “Funny story. The scene where we’re in the police office, viewing the videotape, the disc. The first time, you’re not supposed to be able to tell who is going past the mirror, right? The script says that we see Eddie Sakamura when we slow it down. The guy in the mirror is Asian.
“Do you know Mr. Keitel was set in trying to convince everybody it wasn’t a Japanese guy? He could see it was the Senator, a white guy. It’s like, ‘Yo, man, the script says you don’t see it, so you don’t see it.’ It’s easy enough. For two hours, we were going back and forth. Absolutely and completely absurd.”
Though Snipes in his early 30s is not that far away from his formal schooling, he continues to educate himself about his art. “I’m a student of some pretty good actors. I watch them to see what it is about what they do.”
James Woods, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, Al Pacino and Rutger Hauer are the objects of Snipes’ fascination. “I like their intensity,” he says.
Yet Leon Ichaso, the Cuban-born director of Sugar Hill, brought a level of intensity to the set that Snipes was not prepared for. “He would tell me how he wanted lines to be spoken, as if they were the most profound and emotional lines ever,” says the actor. “I couldn’t do every line that way. Leon brings that passion across on the screen.”
By contrast, there is director Spike Lee (Jungle Fever and Mo’ Better Blues) “who is not so passionate.”
“He likes more humor than Leon,” Snipes says, adding, “I usually don’t have problems with directors.”
— Born in Orlando, Snipes realized the urge to perform in high school. He was good and he got noticed. Snipes was approached to start a traveling cabaret-variety-puppet theater called Struttin’ Street Stuff along with 10 other young people.
“It was a lot of fun,” he says. “We’d go from city to city and park to park, doing these free shows.”
In 1980 Snipes went to New York, attending college at SUNY/Purchase and majoring in theatrical arts. Professionally, he sharpened his craft in the theater, with roles on Broadway in Boys of Winter, Execution of Justice and Death and King’s Horseman.
Yet it is his facially expressive qualities that help to make him such a fine screen actor. In Sugar Hill, much of what Roemello conveys is less through dialogue than unverbalized emotion. It’s in his eyes. “Movies are more economical in terms of delivery and characterization,” Snipes says, drawing a comparison to work in theater.
With five successful films under his belt in the last two years, including White Men Can’t Jump and Passenger 57, he is on a short A-list of actors whose names translate into handsome profits. Snipes is also admired among his peers. When his name was suggested as a possibility as co-star of Rising Sun, Sean Connery watched Snipes in New Jack City. “He was marvelous, kind of dynamic and attractive,” Connery told Premiere magazine. “Very good actor, very physical.”
Yet there are potential detractors of the parts he plays. The political correctness squad might come after Snipes for playing a criminal profiteer in Sugar Hill at a time when there are few enough protrayals of African-American men as leads in movies. Yet he understands why some film watchdogs are so sensitive. “The reason it’s such an issue is how disproportionate the negative images are to the positive images. But to be an artist means you have to do them all.
“I don’t ever want to be in a situation where I’m playing just heroes and good guys. I would be very very bored. Yet people would want that – they want me to be the hero forever. It’s not as interesting.
“Plus,” Snipes says, “I do the bad guys well.”And he laughs.
— To create more opportunities for himself, Snipes has formed his own production company, Amen Ra Film, in New York City where he lives. Translated from classical Egyptian, Amen Ra means hidden light.
Directing may be in his future. “I’m not looking forward to it any time soon,” he says. “There’s a lot that goes into it. I need to improve my patience and be in a strong position to dictate the end result of a film.”
As a director, Snipes could at least guarantee that his best scenes wouldn’t be left on the editor’s cutting room floor. “It’s the worst. It’s absolutely and completely horrible. It’s a very frustrating position to be in. Every film! There was a love scene in Sugar Hill [between myself and Randle). They asked me what I thought of it and I said they needed to keep it in. But they kept it out anyway.”
An exception to the rule of disappointment was White Men Can’t Jump. “But maybe that’s because I got the chance to write half the dialogue,” says Snipes. “It was kind of on the spot, spontaneous kind of stuff with a lot of humor in it. That was like getting paid to have acting class.”
— When a photographer arrives during our interview, Snipes is vocal about what he will and won’t do. “You’re trying to get me to do this pose thing,” he says, unhappily moving from the couch to a chair.
“You want me to sit in the sun, huh? My body doesn’t know what the hell is going on, coming from Chicago and New York. Cold and hot, it’s all mixed up.”
Snipes summons his assistant to bring him a bottle of kelp pills. “They stabilize my glands,” he says, taking one pill with water. “They make your body more alkaline and balanced.”
He’s not only concerned about taking care of himself. It matters to Snipes how the public responds to some of the offbeat characters he creates, like the paraplegic in Waterdance.
“It’s going to take people to support these projects and go see the movies [that are different),” he says. “If they only go to see the Demolition Mans and the Passenger 57s, then particular characters will drift away into the celluloid void.”
But while other actors scramble to solidify their careers and choose roles in movies that might be hits, Snipes doesn’t have to worry. He’s on top and he knows it.
Asked if he is pleased with the direction of his career, Snipes says, “I’ve been very blessed and very lucky. I’m rather happy. It’s been a nice run so far.”
