What about your own appearance in the film? You play a fellow who owns a recording studio and is fearful of dealing with Power.

I knew I needed a character like that. And it's much easier for me, if I'm going to have a guy who I want to make fun of a little bit, to do that myself than to try to find some interesting and articulate actor who's really ready to do it and go all the way with it. Most actors, when you only give them a scene or two and they know you're going to ridicule them, they really don't like it. They cheat it a little, they try to cut a corner or two and make the character a little more appealing and likable. I know I don't give a fuck, so if I think I can say the lines and make the thing believable, I'd be better at getting my goal than anyone else immediately available. And he is a realistic character: He doesn't want a body in the elevator, a corpse in the lobby.

You bring up Crouch's "Talk" piece. He writes about the film as if it's a cautionary tale, and that's not how I experienced it. [Crouch writes: "Toback is hardly the first one to realize that the forces of the gutter, if sufficiently powerful, can beget terror, destruction, and moral chaos."]

That is how one is going to see it if one has his attitude toward this scene. Hip-hop is not being celebrated here. The movie doesn't take its side. It shows all the attendant behavior in a cold, detached way. So it's possible to adopt Crouch's perspective, even if you don't and I don't. I wanted the movie to evoke a complexity of response. You see it in the way that people respond to the murder, too. A lot of people say that this movie exposes the Wu-Tang guys as people who are ready to kill to get what they want, with no compunction about it, and that therefore they are morally reprehensible. Certainly, one attitude toward what they do is: "Murder is not the way to settle something." But the other is: "The victim was a snitch, the lowest of the low, and he should have been killed."

The movie does not gang up on you if you want to take either point of view. It doesn't advocate both, and it doesn't exclude either. When I had central surrogate characters for me, in "The Gambler" and "Exposed" and "The Pick-up Artist," it was harder for me to want to be totally detached. But by revolving this movie around all these people, I'm not saying any one person is the hero or the right one. I'm saying that this world is worth observing and listening to. So you can come down on one of several sides on almost any of the issues. The only thing you could not say is that this is a movie discouraging or condemning interracial sex. It is not possible to say it shows the odiousness of interracial sexual behavior.

You and Beatty again. Wasn't that his line from "Bulworth"? "We should keep fucking each other till we're all the same color"?

I claim he got that from me! He claims he came up with it. We had a very funny and not unserious argument about that. I said I can't believe you're going around telling people you wrote that line, when I wrote the line and I've been telling you for 10 years and it took me five years to convince you. And he said, "What?" I'm sure he believes what he's saying, but he's wrong.

When you talk about the divergent attitudes toward the street culture in this movie, you're talking about genuine ambiguity, something that's been a part of our best adult pop culture. I wonder if there's a bias reflected in the general condemnation of Power? To its great credit, "The Sopranos" does not go soft on its characters either, but if it's Tony Soprano ordering an execution instead of Power, you're more likely to hear, "Well, the guy was a snitch."

"The Sopranos" is a good analogy, in that you're being allowed to accept the morality of the wise guys in the movie, while at the same time you're not being courted to accept them as you were in "The Godfather." You can enjoy "The Sopranos" and say this is a bunch of lowlife hoods. Week after week, you can say, I still want to see these characters, even though they're a bunch of fucking pigs. Not that you have to say that. But it's not like "The Godfather." You cannot go to "The Godfather" and say this is a bunch of fucking pigs. The movie romanticizes them, glamorizes them and insists you like them. And indeed, "Bugsy," too, did that. There was no way you could go with Bugsy Siegel and say he was a homicidal creep and he deserved to be shot in the end. If that's how you feel, you're not going to like the movie. It does, on some fundamental level, take his side, in a way that "Black and White" does not take the side of any of its people. All are adrift, in transition from one unrealized identity to another.

Is that why you cast all these people? Brooke Shields, Marla Maples, Mike Tyson, Robert Downey Jr. -- they definitely are in flux.

All of them. And that's one of the reasons they were so ready and eager to do the movie. It gave them an opportunity to display that and be observed in the process, Brooke in particular, as if the film and life were going on simultaneously. And Downey as well. Of course, he's in a class by himself. The sad thing is, among the most significant factors that have brought him from cute talent to real acting genius has been the massive unjust suffering inflicted on him. Some of it he's inflicted on himself, but the legal part has been inflicted on him. And that has worked to deepen him as an actor, to the point that he's as good as or better than anyone else around today.

The bit with him and Tyson is really interesting because you have two guys who are wild in different ways. Tyson is like a murderous boy. You're touched by him when he tries to deflect Downey's sexual come-on; then this other side comes out.

There is a really complex and fascinating portrait going on there -- also because of the mismatch of the body and the voice, and the face and the body. I love that line when Brooke pays him the modest compliment of saying he has beautiful eyes, and he immediately translates and exaggerates that into "No one ever expressed to me that I was gorgeous before." Even the way he uses "expressed" instead of "told" and uses words like "fastidious" -- that's part of his language; he'll suddenly stick in a multisyllabic word.

Very much like Bugsy, who learned a new word every day from Roget's thesaurus in real life and put it on his mirror in the morning when he was shaving. You get a linguistic flavor from that, and it's a hybrid. And who including me, who knows him, could have written "expressed" instead of "told," or "fastidious"? Those are words that come out of his yearning to complicate and expand his vocabulary, and who knows where they're going to pop up, and when. And they're not used inappropriately, in a Sam Goldwynesque way -- they're used in a fresh and surprising way.

Without giving too much away, I found Allan Houston moving and vulnerable as the basketball player and Schiffer truly chilling as the girlfriend who goes from him to a string of other striking black men. She's studying anthropology and she's treating him as a specimen.

She's a truly Nietzschean character -- the woman Nietzsche never knew and always dreamed about, who might have saved him from madness, prostitution, syphilis and an early death. She's the Nordic plunderer in a black world, Leni Riefenstahl among the Nubians. She will survive them all, including Mike Tyson.

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