In the last 10 years, John Singleton has made some unexpected choices, and perhaps as a result, his career has taken some unusual turns. Between 2001 and 2005 he revisited the ‘hood with “Baby Boy,” directed a big-league Hollywood sequel with “2 Fast 2 Furious,” and helmed the drama “Four Brothers,” but it’s taken six years for him to return to the director’s chair with the new thriller “Abduction.”
According to online sources, Singleton has a variety of projects in development, but at the Los Angeles press day for “Abduction,” the filmmaker revealed that he may be reuniting with his “Boyz N the Hood” star Ice Cube for a project that sounds close to both of their hearts.
“I can’t talk about it too prematurely about the stuff I’m doing because nothing’s come to fruition yet, but Cube and I are talking about doing the N.W.A. story,” Singleton told The Playlist. “The script is really, really good, and so we’re just figuring it out. New Line really wants to make it.”
The first news of a proposed N.W.A. film came in 2009 when Cube announced that he planned to produce a film about his days as a member of the influential gangsta rap group. Currently, four writers, including Andrea Berloff, S. Leigh Savidge, Alan Wenkus and Matt Alvarez, are attached to the project, and Cube is joined as a producer by David Engel, Bill Strauss, and Tomica Wright. Given New Line’s tenuous future as an arm of Warner Bros., it remains to be seen whether Singleton and Cube will be able to get the project going at the studio, much less at all. But as a publicist observed as the interview ended, “the soundtrack would be insane.” The proposed title of the film? Why, “Straight Outta Compton,” of course.
