Emmanuel Itier: Why was this film important for you to make?

Jamie Foxx: For one, working with Michael Mann who said, “How about we do a movie about this subject matter?” Michael Mann is a man who tackles things and hits right on the head. It’s tricky because the documentaries are so one-sided, but he said, “Let’s do an entertaining movie but use this subject matter.” And he said, “This guy is a federal agent and he’s just really going to do his job, and then he finds out his best friend gets killed.” And that makes him want to go and break rules and try to fight it, because we all think that way. If you are watching a tragedy on TV and it really doesn’t affect your family or friends, you watch it and feel for the people, and you go to the next channel. But if it’s someone you love, that turns something on in you. So that’s what I liked about this character. And Peter Berg, who directs it in such a way that you get entertainment and the way he handles the Middle Eastern side of it, the Muslim side of it–the way he showed Ashraf and his family in a decent way, which you don’t get a chance to see a lot on the news. The news will show you because they are supposed to. So that was some of the reasons I thought it was a great movie to do.

EI: What about Peter’s pranks?

JF: I stayed neutral, but I know they were going back and forth. And when she finally set him up, it was funny because Chris Cooper is very serious, a very serious guy, so it’s this point where Peter does the prank and Chris says, “Man, I’ve had it with this! Are we going to do a movie or what?” And Peter was like, “Oh shit, that’s Chris Cooper! It’s like God losing it. Shit, I can’t work like this! I don’t know what you are going to do, but he’s mad.” Jennifer starts crying and you just see the life in Peter go out. He said, “I just messed up. I went too far.” I told him he better go fix it and he didn’t know they were following him with the camera, so they ultimately got him back. They got him good too. He literally just wanted to go home for the day. It was too much for him.

EI: What was the most dangerous thing?

JF: I think the most difficult and dangerous thing in the movie is when we were upside down in the car and having to manipulate your gun this close to someone else. Those guns are very powerful, even though they are blank. So that, and running in the heat. It was like 100, or 110, or 115, or 125 down on the thing. So I kept going to my car to get some air and get out. That was the most difficult part.

EI: Did you get hurt?

JF: No.

EI: What was the most astonishing thing you learned?

JF: We learned what they could make a bomb out of. It could be this or anything. That was the most intriguing thing, and these bomb guys are intriguing too. They were a little too excited about it, but they were showing us things…like, wow. And it’s their world, so they like it. And we were actors just watching. It’s a trip what the human spirit will do.

EI: How do you do music and films at once?

JF: You have time. You do a movie for four months and then we have time off. And what helps me is doing stand-up and music as a fun thing to do. To go from a movie and all of a sudden you are in a room with Kanye West–that’s fun! That’s a great vacation. Or you are doing stand-up and it’s 12,000 people in Detroit. “Hey, Foxx, tell me a joke!” So I tell a joke and watch it go out, and have 12,000 people laughing–that’s the fun part of it, so it makes it easy. And people accept it now. There used to be a day when you’d have to do one thing. You are an actor. Don’t sing. You are a singer. Don’t act. Now it’s opening up.

EI: But you are producing too.

JF: I’ve got ADD. I don’t know if I have that type of temperament to direct.

EI: Do you have an album coming out soon?

JF: Yeah, in 2008. It’s called Man’s Intuition and it deals with man. It deals with relationships in the most unique way. There is a song called “All I Got is Weeds.” I don’t know if that makes sense, but it’s like they say, “The grass is greener on the other side.” And I leave my grass, my girl who has really been with me, and I go for that and I end up with just weeds. So it’s a metaphoric thing.

EI: Is it autobiographical?

JF: No, it’s not, but I’ve experienced that when I thought, maybe this relationship is not all I said, but you go for that beautiful, shiny thing and you think, she’s going to be the one, and you go, I can’t believe this.

EI: Are you collaborating with anyone?

JF: Yeah, of course Kanye, of course Timbaland, and then some young producers that people don’t know. We are trying to get off the beaten path.

EI: Do you think Britney can make a comeback?
JF: Of course. Any recording artist is only a hit away from making a comeback. This is how we are as a society–build you up, cut you down, and then we wait for the comeback. We really want Britney to come back. I wasn’t a Britney Spears fan, but my daughter respected her when she first started, and then when you see what happened–a young girl gets all this money and then nobody there to protect you. So that’s what it is. I hope she does that. I hope all of those guys come back in some way because it would be sad to see them just disappear.

EI: Since you’ve won the awards, do you now have a relaxed attitude?

JF: No, you’ve got it all to prove because, for one, it’s about the art. The awards, that’s really secondary. But about the art, here is the art. When you have a movie and it’s a piece, you think about people like this in a room and how they are going to respond. And that’s sometimes more than the actual awards. When you have a movie and your peers come, and they watch it and you are able to be provocative enough to hold them in a world where text messaging, “I’ve got to get to my office,” and how can you hold them? So that’s the challenge. And if you don’t have that challenge…I talked to Clint Eastwood, and Clint Eastwood said, “I still get nervous. I still don’t know if they like it. I still don’t know if they like me.” And if that’s Clint Eastwood, then you’ve got a long way to go. So I look at it like, hopefully I’m still humble enough and lucky enough to keep getting work and keep challenging myself.

EI: Why were there parallels between your character and Ashraf’s character?

JF: It’s important to the film, because what you do is allow people to form their opinions about children in the age of innocence. My daughter, when we have our political discussions about George Bush and so forth, and my daughter asks, “Aren’t we just supposed to respect the presidency?” Wow, but you know, it’s innocent. I remember my age of innocence going from the first grade to the eighth grade. Around the eighth grade we all played–a white guy, a black guy, a Hispanic–and in Texas at that time, that’s all I knew: black, white, and Hispanic. I never heard of Jewish. This was Texas. I didn’t know there were different white people. I thought everybody was white. But at a certain point, when I got in the 9th grade, I’d go to hang out with my white friends, and the older black guy tells me I can’t hang out with them. And then the older white friends tell me the same thing. So now, the friend I played and did everything with through the 8th grade, the age of innocence was gone. So by the time we were seniors, if there was a black song playing at the dance, the black people would dance. And if there was a white song playing, we would sit down. So that’s the reason for having the children. Where do they lose? And you were watching the age of innocence be destroyed, in a sense. Because here’s my son going, “Dad, there is a lot of bad people in the world.” And what do I tell him? And the other son, what is he being shown? So what you see that in order to say, in your mind you are thinking, What are we going to do to give them a chance, or do they jump right on the conveyer belt and they keep going? It’s the same with racism in America, or placism, or women. Somebody pushes a domino years ago, whether it’s racial or religious, and it keeps falling. And when do you put your hand in front of it and say, Okay? And that’s what you hope will happen.

EI: Is there a message of hope, or just what’s the point?

JF: That’s for you to determine. If it ended hokey and you cut to us in convertible Cadillacs eating apple pie with a baseball bat and waving and American flag and ticker tape, and there was a baseball game and we are singing “We Are the World,” that would have been hokey. So what you do is you still leave it cinematic, like boom–it ends like that, so now what do you do? What do you do as a person walking out of that theater? Because there wasn’t a message until that point. Until that point, it was, Wait a minute, what? And it was what my character said at the beginning, not how he actually felt then, but he said, “I said we are going to kill them all.” But then he walks off like, Shit. That’s not art.

EI: Was it originally a mission of vengeance or justice?

JF: I think vengeance, in a sense, and then somewhere justice was played around with, and then somewhere it was just being lost in the abyss, like every person that goes to war. Before they leave it’s like, Go get them! We are doing it for the cause! And then when they get there, they think, “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I’ve got to fight for this person right here, and I don’t care what’s going on back home.” So that was the thing, and there was a lot of different levels.

EI: How do you juggle projects and family?

JF: Family is with me all the time. My two sisters and my father live with me, so that’s always that right there. It’s different now. I’m bad now. I’ve got the money. He asks for about $1,000 and I say, yeah, let me see what I’ve got in my pocket, as long as you’ll be in by a decent hour. But it’s great to have my family there because I’m a Texas gentleman. I’m a Texas guy to the core. And to have Texans live with me and have my daughter come and watch her aunt teach her how to cook and stuff like that… What I had being adopted (I was adopted), growing up, I had a great childhood, but my stepfather and my biological sister and her sister, they didn’t have that. So now we are getting that. For the past 10 or 12 years, I’ve taught them to embrace holidays–not for the religious aspect of it, but for the human spirit of it. So now they finally like Christmas and they finally like Thanksgiving. They finally come out of their rooms because I’m in there with boughs of holly and shit, and ham and turkey in their rooms, like they don’t want to come out. So now we reach a point to finally where we get along as a family, so this career has really been an instrument to make my family something special. So that’s what we do and we’ve got time.

EI: Did you shoot pool with Gong Li on Miami Vice?

JF: No. I don’t think so.

EI: Was there an album that changed you most?

JF: Being in Texas, which was the Bible Belt, we were only allowed to listen to gospel, and hearing a Prince record? My grandmother was like, there is Satan. It’s the devil in pantyhose. And to hear the Soft and Wet record, things that…this is 1977 and I’m in like 6th or 7th grade…but to hear the music was incredible, to hear all of his Dirty Mind. Everybody who was a musician gravitated towards Prince because of the way his chords were, because we all come from the church. So we had the same chords that Prince had, so we’d be like, you’ll be playing in church and there was a guy I looked up to who was four years older than me, and he was named Paul. So Paul would be playing in church and we’d be singing a song, and he’d throw a Prince lick in, and I was shocked, but the older people don’t know what it is. So it was a wowee moment every time you heard a Prince record, because he was so provocative and so ahead of the game, and no one’s caught up with him yet.

EI: You still listen to a lot of music?

JF: Oh yeah. I like some of the stuff. I think music is anemic right now because the record companies had to cut back so they can’t go out and get the best artists right now–they are going for the best they have. So it’s a little anemic, but some of the stuff I dig. I like Neyo, I like Tank, I like John Mayer, I like Maroon 5, Timbaland, so it is what it is right now. It’s not like those songs like the ’80s. Jesus man, Men at Work…and it was crazy, so it’s not that anymore, but I guess it’ll turn itself around.

EI: Have you worked with any Chinese actresses?

JF: Gong Li was incredible. She was trying to master the English language, and after years of speaking Chinese, your muscles are formed a certain way. So to see her be able to make that work and also be so dynamic on film, it was incredible.