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Chris Rock Tackles The Pitfalls Of Married Life With 'I Think I Love My Wife' |
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Sunday, 18 March 2007 |
By Christina Radish
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Chris Rock at the premiere of "Match Point" held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, Calif. on December 8, 2005. | In the Fox Searchlight film I Think I Love My Wife, writer/director Chris Rock stars as Richard Cooper, a happily married man with a beautiful, intelligent wife (Gina Torres), who is also a fantastic mother to his children. But, there’s just one little problem: he’s bored and can’t stop fantasizing about having nearly every woman he sees. Then, one fateful day, his alluring old friend, Nikki (Kerry Washington), suddenly appears at his office door, leaving him to choose between the wife of seven years that is not about to let go of the man she loves, and the bold bombshell with the power to bring some much-needed excitement back into his life.
As a husband and father himself, the 42-year-old Rock was looking to take on more adult issues, this time around. Inspired by the French film Chloe in the Afternoon, the fearless comedian saw the film as his chance, not only to tell the humor-filled truth about the pitfalls of married life, but also as an opportunity to shine a little ray of hope on the state of modern matrimony.
“I wanted to have a departure from my previous work,” Rock tells MediaBlvd Magazine. “I wanted to be a grown up in a movie. No one was going to cast me in a part like this. It was never going to happen. I really wanted to play a grown man, but have it still be really funny. There is this thought that, if you do something mature, it’s not going to be as funny as the gross-out stuff. I was like, ‘No, man. I’m going to play a grown man and it’s going to be a really funny film about grown man problems.’”
Rock feels that, human beings just get bored with the same way of life, regardless of the exact cause. “It’s not just relationships, it’s life. People say, ‘Why is he bored with her?’ It’s because he’s human. That is what marriage is. Anything that’s supposed to be forever, you’re going to get bored with. There is nothing wrong with it, so don’t take it personally. If you are with somebody for 10 years and they are not bored with you, then something is wrong with them.”
{quote_top}Rock met his own wife when he went to a Knicks game in New York City. “Me and my friends were leaving the Knicks game at Madison Square Garden, and right next door is the Theater at the Garden, where they were having the Essence Awards. We saw all these beautiful black women walking in and were like, ‘Man, we have got to crash this party.’ So, we crashed the party and were walking through there, surrounded by all these beautiful women, and my friend said, ‘This is where you’ll meet your wife,’ and I did.”
Even though Nikki is a gorgeous woman who can seduce just about any man she comes across, Rock says that he didn’t write her as a villain. “Nikki is just Nikki. She is just doing what she does. One of my favorite movies is The Fugitive because Tommy Lee Jones is just doing his job. That’s how it is in real life. The villain isn’t like, ‘I must destroy you!’ Sometimes, the villain is just doing their job. Nikki is just, ‘Hey, I’m here. You’re here. I’m hot. I know you. It’s not like we don’t know each other.’ In a country where the divorce rate is 52%, is it really bad to wait a marriage out and just check in from time to time? The important thing is that, when you get married, you just can’t get that close to somebody. You have to put a wall up and say, ‘Alright, it’s 8 o’clock and I’m going home.’ You can’t let it get to that other zone because you will want to check it out.”
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Chris Rock with his wife Malaak at the UPN All-Star party held at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, Calif. on July 21, 2005. |
In his last directorial effort, Rock played the President of the United States in the 2003 comedy Head of State. Since then, he feels he has grown quite a bit, as a filmmaker. “On that movie, I was kind of cocky. I had done a movie before that, also with Kerry Washington, called Bad Company, and I wasn’t really satisfied with it. I did it for the wrong reasons. I was like, ‘I’ll do the movie myself. I don’t need y’all.’ But, you can’t direct a movie with the attitude of, ‘I’m gonna show everybody in high school that I’m cool.’ So, with this movie, I came in at a much more humble place, and just sat down with my cameraman and went through the whole script. We drove around New York and said, ‘How beautiful can we make this city look? How great can we make Kerry look? How great can we make Gina look?’ Head of State lives and dies on the jokes. If the jokes aren’t working, the movie ain’t working. This is a story, so when you don’t like the jokes, the story is carrying it, the acting is tight and the camera is moving all the time. Head of State was shot like a play, with everyone just walking in the room and doing what they do. It was time to get better.”
{quote_bottom}Since filming I Think I Love My Wife, Rock has directed the Red Hot Chili Peppers music video for “Hump De Bump,” voiced a mosquito for the Paramount Pictures animated feature Bee Movie (opening in November 2007) and has started preparing for a stand-up tour. He admits that, in the future, he would like to continue to work with good people, in whatever medium he chooses. “I’m so self-generated. I’d rather be Matt Damon and do The Bourne Supremacy. I’m not sitting around writing movies because I want to. I have to, if I want to take advantage of this opportunity. Right now, they are letting me be in movies. They don’t let black people make the kind of movies I want to make. I’ve got a couple of scripts laying around that I need to dust off, so that I can see what’s there. This movie is such a jump for me that I don’t want to go backwards. I like where I’m at artistically. I’m in a new zone that a lot of brothers don’t get to go into, so I’d like to stay here.” |
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