Interview with Method Man and Redman

It's strange to see Method Man and Redman come into a room without, you know, making an entrance. For those of us who only see them at shows, in videos or at the movies, it seems like they should have a bevy of beauties trailing them, or at the very least a solid beat thumping in their wake. But here they are at a New York City hotel, being guided into a conference room by a harried-looking publicity person. They look very human as they take their seats and take in the media personnel crowding in for the roundtable. We are here to discuss "How High," the new film in which Johnny Blaze and the Funk Doctor Spock take a big risk by playing inveterate marijuana smokers who go to Harvard to teach Crimsonites about the virtues of smoking marijuana.

Mister Meth takes his seat deliberately, looks placidly out from beneath the brim of a Yankees cap and does most of the talking for the next fifteen minutes. Redman bounds into the room and then spends much of the interview lazily doodling with a Sharpie permanent marker on the hotel tablecloth. "Hey, girl! How ya feelin'?" he asks one of the more comely female media persons as he sits down. Neither of them seem as high as publicity-person scrambling has indicated they might be, but they seem plenty high enough nevertheless.

There is a little pause as the recording system is checked and we all get used to the idea of Method Man and Redman being in the room with us. "So! Don't ask all at one time!" Redman admonishes.

I decide to ask the question I am most interested in: "So, how high were you when you made this movie?"

"Not very," Meth answers. "We were smoking a lot of cloves."

"What's the reaction you get from smoking cloves? Do you get anything from that?" someone else asks.

"Nasty as hell," Meth answers.

"Nasty, disgusting," Redman assents. "So we had to smoke a blunt like between, like at lunch break, on our own time and our own troubles to get the feeling back. Have to keep it professional."

"Always," echoes Meth.

And thus the interview begins.

Meth tells us about the duo's preparation for the film. "We went over the script so many times it was more or less like, just go in there and do it. Cause we did sit down with the writers and go over each page of the dialogue, so we didn't sound like someone else's words was flying out of our mouths. I mean, from Day 1, we gave our ideas, somebody wrote a script built around us, and Dustin Lee Abraham came with the best one, and the results is this movie."

Redman tells us that they might be doing a series "under BBC, Blunt Brothers Cinema. No straight-to-video type joints, though. Hopefully we'll keep it in theaters."

Someone asks, "What was it like working with Danny DeVito?"

Meth responds, "I don't know Danny, I don't know." Redman agrees: "Yeah, his ass wasn't on the set. He was in on the cut."

I ask, "How about Spalding Grey? I was kind of surprised to see him in the movie," seeing as how he is best known for his suffocatingly self-obsessed humorous monologues. Method Man smiles broadly, laughs, and drawls, "Spallll-ding Grey. He's dope. I got to kick it with him. He's quoting from the book of 2Pac, 'money over bitches.' You had to hear him say it, though. It was crazy."

An earnest radio person asks how long it took to take the movie. Spokesman Meth responds, "Thirty-six days. Exactly thirty-six days. I think when we finished we was under budget." Redman looks up briefly to assent, "Yeah, we was under budget." Somewhat proudly, Meth adds, "Everybody showed up on time every day."

How did they use the extra money? Meth: "We went and shot extra footage, coverups." Redman elaborates: "There's shit they ain't understand in the movie. They said, 'How the fuck did this happen? Go shoot a part to make it fit together.' They had to come back and put it together." Meth adds, "Make it fuller."

"Are there other actors out there you guys want to work with?" asks another of our fine airwaves personnel. Meth immediately responds, "All of them." I ask, "In one movie?" and get a sarcastic laugh from Meth.

Undeterred, I press on: "Could you do something with Julia Roberts?"

This draws a response: "I'd suck her bottom lip dry." Redman agrees: "Man, she's twenty million. You do something with her, your quote gonna go up."

Teasingly, Meth: "Unless she blow you out the water in the scenes."

Confidently, Redman: "I know she gonna blow me and the water in the scenes. Julia Roberts, twenty million. Do something with her, your stakes going up, boy."

Someone mentions that it must be difficult for a rapper to prove himself to actors, and Meth readily discusses it. "You walking in there and like a stripper trying to get a job and shit. All they gonna see is the stripper. They don't know what her capabilities are, what she can do, all they see is that she was a stripper. And I'm walking in there, I'm a rapper trying to be an actor. And that's what they're looking at. They're like, 'Oh, he's a rapper, he's not gonna show up on time and anything, gonna come in here with his guns and chronic and forties and shit.'

"They ain't gonna say it in your face. Hollywood is built on" — here Meth spreads his hands in an infinitely expressive gesture meaning something like "bullshit" —"you know what I mean? And they good at it, they real good at it. So you just take it for what it's worth, man. You know when you did good. For real."

Future plans are discussed, such as rappers the two would like to bring into Blunt Brothers Cinema. "I wanna see M.O.P. in the action," Meth says. "I wanna see Keith Murray in the action," Redman says. Everyone tries to remember the last time Keith Murray did anything interesting.

Meth continues, "I'm trying to develop a movie right now where it's a man versus the world. And this motherfucker gotta fight everybody, and I mean everybody in the world wanna kick his ass. He gotta fight everybody."

"Why does everybody want to kick his ass?" I ask.

Meth smiles and responds, "I ain't developed that part yet." The room breaks up. Meth finds it equally funny when someone asks if he's interested in being in "Terminator 3." "Yeah, they called us the other day," he says. "I'll be Corpse Number 6."

"Cause you know that's what's gonna happen. We gonna die in it," says Redman, who has obviously watched a few action movies featuring early-demise black characters.

Meth caps it: "I'm going right for the Academy Award."

Unfortunately, the rest of the interview consisted of radio personnel asking questions about keeping it real, which is uninteresting for University of Maryland students because we all keep it as real as it gets every day, except for that person who flooded Denton by putting a clotheshanger on a sprinkler. But one thing is clear by the time Method Man and Redman are hustled out of the room by the same harried publicity person: They may not have made such a good movie, but they were just high enough (and just professional enough) to give a good interview.

JUNKET LORE

•The hotel suite in which Universal Pictures put me so I could attend the junket to get this interview was substantially larger than my apartment, including a bathroom at least twice the size of my kitchen.

•I got $125 of the hotel's money to spend, too, which I promptly used for steak dinners for myself and my man Aaron Lampell.

•The toilet had the following sign on it (I swear):

CAUTION

READ ALL OF THE OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS

BEFORE OPERATING THE PHS UNIT.

•Do not splash any liquid on the control panel, the seat and lid.

•If you have sensitive skin, please adjust seat temperature to lowest comfortable setting for protection against low-temperature burns.

•If you have a skin disorder, please consult a physician before using this unit or selecting temperature.

•Children, elderly, and invalids should use this unit with assistance and monitoring.

•Do not sit or stand on the control panel. These areas are not designed to support body weight.

•I also got an all-you-can-eat-without-looking-like-a-total-hog brunch buffet the day of the interview.

•Then the evening after the interview I played Ping-Pong like all night with my friend Nate Vaughan. It was a fun day indeed. Even if that movie still blows.

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