On the set of the Screen Gems movie First Sunday - a buddy comedy about two guys who come up with a scheme to rob a church - Ice Cube joked this particular film was just the next step in his plan to make movies featuring specific days of the week. “Pretty much,” laughed Ice Cube. “I never realized, you know, that I'm kind of stuck in this weekend so a Saturday movie is somewhere in my future. I can feel it.
So, you know, it's just a perfect title. You know what I'm saying? I’ve got people asking me, 'Is that part of the Friday series?' You know what's good is we are doing a whole different movie, a different day of the week, a different tone and it's cool.”
Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan (30 Rock) play friends forced into coming up with a desperate plan. But why steal from a church? “Well, you know, I feel personally - my character Darrell feels the church has basically, you know, sucked all this money from his grandmother,” explained Ice Cube. “He sees this thing on the wall where she's given like 31 g's to the church and he's broke. Struggling, needing to borrow some money, she gave her last bit of money to the church. Okay, it's her money so that's fine, but when the church doesn't, you know, offer the van ride service that they used to, now you know it's like, ‘Well, what are you getting out of giving all of this? What are getting out of it?’”
“He ends up in the church and finds out that the church is basically planning to move.
‘So now you [have] sucked all the money from this neighborhood and now you're going to go and put it in a neighborhood where my grandmamma really can't get to. You know, if she's having trouble getting to the church while it's here, just think how much trouble she'll have getting to it when it's ten more miles away or whatever.’ So, you know, he feels that these are poverty pimps and he's going to set it straight and get some of that money back and also take care of his problems. You know, it's twisted but in reality the grandmamma is more sacred than the church, so that's what's going down.”
The First Sunday production went out on the location to a real church as opposed to working on a set. “You know, it's still a lot of profanity that's going on and probably shouldn't,” said Ice Cube about working in that environment. “People forget where they [are] at then everybody starts to look around… I think at first people were a little subdued. I know being in the church has definitely helped Tracy Morgan and Katt Williams. You know, their dark side is starting to see the light. So being in the church has helped them. But everybody else, it was like a little nervous at first but now it's really a location. You know, I feel like we're on a stage to be honest.”
Asked if there’s a spiritual element to First Sunday, Ice Cube responded, “I think so. You know I think not overly done. It really matters what David [Talbert] cuts and how he cuts it. For the most part, religion is put on the back burner. It's the conscience of the church is what's [shown]. At the end of this movie we redeem the church and the church redeems us in a way, so we represent the guys who won’t go to church, who [are] just looking at it as a building that they in there getting paid, basically. We represent that element. You know that's not necessarily true so our minds need to be reformed. The church thinks, ‘Hey, let's go bigger and better,’ instead of, ‘Let's deal with what we got and help the community.’ You know, ‘A bigger and better building [equals] more people, more money,’ all that kind of stuff. So they need to be brought back home and realize what they're here for.”
Ice Cube thinks a better label for First Sunday would be ‘dramedy’ rather than a straight comedy. “The whole story is an edgy balance,” said Ice Cube. “We tell people that we're robbing a church and people are kind of taken aback a little bit by that. When I add that we [are] stupid enough to rob a church, you know what I'm saying, people can see what's the funny in that. So I think we got a touchy subject but we have a subject that's real. You know, the church's responsibility to the hood, the hood’s responsibility to the church. But it's lightly taken on with the comedy of the comedians and the people that we got to move in on in some spots, but it gets heavy.”
Ice Cube gets to leave most of the comedy to his co-stars Tracy Morgan and Katt Williams. Playing the straight man is a role Ice Cube’s used to and one he doesn’t object to in the least. “I let people who are naturally funny, you know, Katt and everybody I've worked with is naturally funny with the lines, without the lines, with ad-libs, with physical comedy, so you know Tracy's no different, Katt… It's like, ‘Man, I don't want to get in the way.’ I just want to make sure that I'm there to pitch them and you know they'll knock them out.”
Ice Cube has nothing but praise for Morgan and Williams. “Tracy was cool because he's an East Coast dude. We want to pull off this Baltimore thing and he's a guy who has done a lot of different things. He's well trained because of Saturday Night Live and him coming from stand up so I knew that he could do anything we asked him, and he wouldn't hesitate to jump in there.”
“Katt, you know, he's the king of the one-liners. With that voice all he has to do is say something. He has like a nervous pimp voice or something, you know what I'm saying? It all sounds funny coming out of there.”
* * * * * * * * * *
First Sunday hits theaters on January 11, 2008.