John Singleton: A change of gear

After his much-praised debut, Boyz N the Hood, John Singleton's name was being mentioned in the same breath as Orson Welles's. Then his career stalled. Ryan Gilbey asks the director if 2 Fast 2 Furious marks a return to form

John Singleton has just directed the number one film at the US box-office, a trashy smash-'em-up spectacular called 2 Fast 2 Furious. What I encounter during my meeting with him is more like 2 Tired 2 B Bothered. At one point, he even falls asleep, which on reflection is possibly a sign that I don't have his full attention. Meanwhile, his 6ft-something assistant pads around the hotel suite in a basketball top, opening and closing cupboards and cabinets for no discernible reason.

Singleton's initial high-five is encouragingly energetic, so maybe I knock the wind out of his sails when I tell him that I was shocked that he was directing the movie - a sequel to the 2001 rubber-burning, tarmac-eating, brain-numbing hit The Fast and the Furious. His enormous bloodshot eyeballs rotate toward me. "Really?" he asks in a low rumble.

In fact, I wasn't shocked. I was dismayed. Here is a director who has stuck to his guns throughout his short but tempestuous career. It began with a bang 12 years ago in the shape of Boyz N The Hood, a gangsta tragedy drawn from Singleton's own upbringing in South Central LA. Like Pasolini's Accattone or Scorsese's Mean Streets, Boyz N The Hood brought new inflections to the cinematic vocabulary. And like those movies, it resembled a bulletin from the front-line of a war that the world didn't know was being fought. You got the impression that Singleton would have combusted if he had not been able to tell this story. Could the same be said of 2 Fast 2 Furious?

"Look," he says, "the cool thing about doing this movie is that there's nothing controversial about it. It's just a fun, Saturday night, popcorn picture. I've been trying to do something like this for a while now. But when you do certain films, people in Hollywood tend to think that's all you're capable of. I've proved to everyone that I can make serious movies. It wasn't like I started my career with 2 Fast 2 Furious, then tried to get respect. I've already got respect!"

He booms that last word, turning it into some kind of burden, like manic depression or halitosis, of which he would gladly be rid. "I felt that the only revolutionary thing I could do at this point in my career was to do a blockbuster movie that made a lotta money."

Well, he's accomplished that. But what a curious bind - to have the integrity all sewn up, and be chasing the dough. Throughout his late teens and early Twenties, Singleton couldn't sit down at a typewriter without having prizes or chequebooks waved in his face. He was accepted into the prestigious screenwriting course at USC on the strength of three script ideas (one of which would evolve into Boyz N The Hood). While there, he twice won the Jack Nicholson Award, landing himself a prize of $16,000 toward his fees. This approbation led to him being signed by the mighty Creative Artists Agency while he was still fielding homework assignments. He finished directing Boyz N The Hood for Columbia Pictures before his 23rd birthday. By the time he was 24, he had become the youngest ever film-maker, and the first black American, to be nominated for Academy Awards for both Best Screenplay and Best Director. Talk about pressure.

Needless to say, his second film was unimaginably bad. Poetic Justice starred Janet Jackson as a hairdresser more interested in stanzas than split ends. If you wanted to be kind, you could say that the film was redeemed by the soulful presence of the late rap star Tupac Shakur. If you didn't, you might observe that the success of Boyz N The Hood had gone straight to Singleton's big, shaven head. Plenty of directors come a cropper when they hit the jackpot too young; this isn't the first time that the names Orson Welles and John Singleton have appeared together in the same sentence, and it won't be the last. The difference is that Singleton never fully regained the clear-headed coolness that made his debut so unique.

His third film, Higher Learning, was an overly ambitious attempt to draw together the disparate figures on a university campus - lesbians, black radicals, neo-Nazis - into a single narrative. My suspicion that the film was a touch too pleased with its own daring is confirmed when Singleton starts reminiscing about it. "Higher Learning could never get made now," he says. His tone suggests a wistful boast. "That was one incendiary movie. Only the success of Boyz allowed me to make that." He might have revealed more than he realises. If it's true that he was being indulged because Boyz N The Hood was fondly regarded, then that goodwill was about to expire. Poetic Justice and Higher Learning flopped, while Singleton's next film, Rosewood, was buried by the studio, which didn't have a clue how to market a period drama that looked like a western but crackled with modern, politicised rage. It's easy to see why he would seek refuge in something as calculated as the remake of Shaft. But even that didn't turn out as planned.

The rumours suggest that many of the problems on Shaft arose from Singleton's allegedly hedonistic lifestyle, which was said to have brought him into conflict with the film's star, Samuel L Jackson. Singleton refutes this. "It was a tough shoot. But it was really down to a personality clash between myself and the producer. We just didn't mix well."

I ask if he was happy with the finished film. "Yes!" he says. Then he rights himself. "Er, well... It was alright. But 2 Fast 2 Furious is much closer to my vision of the kind of mainstream film I wanted to make."

He's playing the PR game, steering us back to discussing the new movie after nearly half an hour of trawling through his difficult last decade. It has, in truth, been a strained conversation, real blood-out-of-stone stuff. The most garrulous I have heard him was at the press conference preceding our interview, when he revealed that he had recently bought a new jalopy (it's a BMW-something-or-other). It is understandable that he might want to wallow in the commercial glory of 2 Fast 2 Furious. But it's also frustrating that a man who has in his writing been so intrigued by contradictory characters should dismiss out of hand the merest suggestion of a disparity between this movie and his previous work.

"I think every film I've done is personal," he explains. "When you watch this movie, if you know my personality, you'll feel the funkiness. It's not your average Hollywood blockbuster." Maybe he has a point. Just look at the first 10 minutes of 2 Fast 2 Furious. You get breakdancing, spiffy cars, a fat man shaking his hips, women in hot pants, a mechanic with a giant afro. Isn't that the OED definition of funky? Then there is the string of breathless double entendres that should qualify the picture as an honorary Carry On film - "Let's work on that front-end of yours", "You can pop my clutch any time," etc. And the stunts are up to scratch, which is surely what counts for the young core audience. It should have particular value for drivers like myself, who rarely do anything more reckless than forget to pay and display: we're the ones you can hear ooh-ing and aah-ing in the cinema when the hero reverses at high-speed along a packed freeway, or when a car ricochets between two speeding juggernauts.

I hear Singleton loud and clear when he claims that the action sequences were stimulating to direct. "It's like putting together a puzzle," he says through a yawn. "There's a lot of pleasure in that." What ultimately makes the film look incongruous on his CV is its position immediately after his best and bravest film. Baby Boy, which was released to little fanfare in 2001, is an instructive companion piece to Boyz N The Hood. This time the focus is mothers, rather than fathers, and their errant sons. From the movie's opening image, of a fully-grown man curled up inside the womb, Singleton made his points about the arrested development of the mollycoddled modern male succinctly and poetically. The film's hero, Jody, is a 20-year-old loafer who still lives with his mother, despite having fathered two children and fancying himself as a budding gangsta. For Singleton's fanbase, it was an unwelcome wake-up call. "It upset a lot of people in the black community. There are so many Jody-types out there, they didn't want to see their behaviour up on screen. Their girlfriends all liked it; they could see it was true. But it broke up a lot of relationships. Men weren't expecting a movie that told them they were living their lives in a fucked-up way. Sometimes I like setting up those situations, to see the reactions they provoke. I like to get people scared or angry - even if people didn't like Baby Boy, it was good that it pissed them off."

The contradiction is staring us both in the face. So is Singleton a provocateur who relishes upsetting his most ardent fans? Or is he a journeyman who, as he said, enjoyed making 2 Fast 2 Furious because it was a safe bet, drained of any potential controversy? I'd like to know. But it's too late to ask. The eyelids have fluttered shut. He's sleeping like a baby.

'2 Fast 2 Furious' is released 20 June