And that's something not open to a black girl of her age.

No. Which is why the reverse exploitation -- well, exploitation may be too strong a word -- but the reverse use of white culture from the black point of view is economic. As Power says, "I want to get some of her information." He refers to it, metaphorically, as "Central Park West living." He asks, "What is it that white people want from us? I guess it's a life force or something."

The irony is, the real thing in hip-hop that's going on is: Let's participate in ownership, let's become businessmen. There's an anti-revolutionary, capitalist-grounded nature to the black side of hip-hop. There's a desire to be rich and famous, not to rip apart society. The Rap Brown era is of the past, which is why it was so bizarrely anomalous to see the picture of him in the news the other day. Rap Brown got arrested in Atlanta for murder; it turns out he's this kind of big drug dealer in Atlanta. I mean, last I heard he was doing cookbooks in New Haven, and here he is arrested for killing somebody. The irony is that all these Black Panthers from the '60s became drug dealers in the '90s and involved in traditional black street crime.

How did you get all these people to work for you on "Black and White"?

I felt like fucking smacking Tim Robbins the other night. I saw him on television, and he was saying, "On 'Cradle Will Rock,' I got all these people to work for nothing -- so and so got $1 million, so and so got $500,000." I mean, I got everyone to work for $2,000! They just wanted to make this movie.

When you compare it to other movies about race, yours never becomes schematic -- you know, whites do this, blacks do that.

What saved me was the choice to have a strict, developed narrative. I felt this movie can indulge in all of its riches of surprise only if it has a really tight, interesting plot that it gets into not too late -- and I think I get into it just at the last possible point in the movie. Once you get into it, it drives you. Whatever else is going on, the film does have this "What's going to happen next?" sense to it. As I was editing it, the movie started to work better and better as the narrative drove it more and more.

That's interesting because the critical rap on you always seems to be: He's brave, he's audacious, but he also has this clumsy melodrama. I often respond more to your movies when they do have a melodramatic hook.

You read the newspaper any day and you see melodrama that puts half of this to shame. I remember William Inge [the author of "Picnic" and "Splendor in the Grass"] talking about how he only read tabloids because they made him understand that the world he was depicting, which he knew was real, was no more sensational or unrealistic or melodramatic than reality. Melodrama is half the narrative power of most great literature -- all of Dostoevski and Shakespeare is melodramatic, but the same people who condemn "Black and White" as melodrama would never refer to the melodrama of "Macbeth."

The melodrama hinges on the cop played by Ben Stiller; I know a lot of people find him problematic, but I think he's terrific. He assumes the burden of it being a tale of people testing the bounds of their behavior. I saw a lot of vintage Toback in him: his willingness to do things that may be bad, but then agonizing over it in a way that becomes its own weird masochistic reward.

Michael Barker, of Sony Classics, came up to me at Telluride and said, "The Ben Stiller character is the most purely Tobackian character you've ever written. You can't tell me the whole movie was improvised; there's no way Ben Stiller came up with that dialogue." "You're right," I said, "it's all written." Some people think Ben Stiller's terrific in the movie, and others think he's the worst thing in it. Almost everyone loves Tyson and Downey in the movie. Just about every other character is all over the place. Did you see Stanley Crouch's piece in "Talk"? His favorite character is Claudia Schiffer. Different people react in different ways. I keep saying, over and over, that more than any other movie I know of in the last 10 or 20 years, this movie is a real Rorschach test for the viewer on a number of incendiary issues: race, sex, interracial sex, murder, respect for the law, young kids and their behavior, identity, class distinctions, music. It's almost impossible to see the movie and not reveal how you feel in some fundamental way about these things -- as opposed to a lot of movies which you might enjoy, and say it's a good movie or a great movie, and yet you're revealing nothing about yourself except your taste in movies.

If early on you decided to give the film a melodramatic spine, was Stiller the first character you came up with?

The first character was the D.A.'s son. I knew there had to be a murder, because I don't think you can make a movie about hip-hop without having there be a murder, since it happens to be one of the distinctive forms of that existence. The question then would be to try to hook into that story one of the white kids obsessed with the black life, as the one who's enlisted to do the murder. And I thought if he's the son of a D.A., that's really interesting. So those characters came in, and then Stiller's character came in as a decoration on that theme. But first there were white kids into hip-hop -- hip-hop means murder, who commits the central murder and why, and then what are the consequences of that murder. If you answer those questions the movie is basically set up.

You've said you wrote Stiller's character totally. How much was improvised?

A lot. All the Wu-Tang stuff [Raekwon and Method Man as well as Power], all the Mike Tyson stuff and all of Downey's and Brooke's stuff. They all had goals and intentions in their scenes but did not have their dialogue written for them. They were able to create their specifics in speech and behavior given that they knew where they were going. In all the scenes with Allan Houston, Claudia Schiffer, Ben Stiller and Joe Pantoliano, every word was written. So it was a combination of improvisation in terms of language, on the one hand, with total tight scripting on the other. And I think it would be hard for people watching this to tell the difference.

In your improvisational mode, who was giving out the goals?

I would give the actors the goals, and in the case of the Wu-Tang Clan guys, they would often correct my goals, or correct my methods.

Can you give me an example?

When they come into the new club, and tell the white team opening it up that it's not going to open up unless they're cut in, I originally had it in a much calmer, more verbally oriented way -- that it was extortion through subtle threat. And Power said, "Fuck that shit! What do you mean, subtle threat? We just walk in and stick a gun in their face. We'd just say this is what you're going to do, here. Who the fuck are they? And that's going to be the attitude. Who the fuck are you?"

The minute he said that, the whole tone of that scene became completely different from the way I had imagined it. And I didn't even tell the white kids in the scene that that's what he was going to do. All through the first few takes, they were shaken up by it. Because even though they were real club kids and do set up clubs in New York that way -- they round up models and the right people for premieres and get the style of a club going -- they're not used to having a bunch of guys come in and stick guns in their faces and extort them. Particularly the way it was done, which was without warning. I had told them it was going to be totally different, it was going to be a discussion. They thought they could reason, they could argue. And all of a sudden on the first take they are hit with something completely different.

Bijou Phillips -- you never knew what the fuck she would say or do next. There is no line between her unconscious and her articulation of it and her behavior. She is a genuine psychopath. I say that with affection and admiration, because she's also incredibly smart and talented, so she knows how to amuse and how to get and hold attention. If she were just a psychopath, you wouldn't want to use her; you'd just be bored. But she is always kind of amusing and interesting, and if one thing isn't working she has a good sense of it, and she just starts on something else.

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