QUESTION: Were you nervous playing a sex symbol like Shaft?
ANSWER: It never occurred to me that that what was going on. Once I convinced them to put Richard in the movie it was like, "Okay, that responsibility is gone now so I can do what I want to do." He's still like "the private dick who's a sex machine for all the chicks." I'm just trying to feel my way around trying to find out who I am and what I'm doing.

QUESTION: So you look pretty good as Shaft.
ANSWER: I think it looks good. Hopefully I'm the same kind of hero that I thought he was when I first saw the movie. Hopefully I'm tough, cool and smooth talking and hopefully good looking and sexy.

QUESTION: When was the first time you saw SHAFT?
ANSWER: When it first came out. Was it 1970 or 71? I was in college.

QUESTION: Was Shaft your first black hero on the screen?
ANSWER: It was the first time there was one for me. I wasn't aware if everybody in the world would see him in the same way. It was the first time I saw someone who looked like me, sounded like me, dressed a little better than I did. He was a hero, and I saw it was someone I can emulate. It was someone I can beg, borrow or steal a black leather jacket, buy a turtleneck and maybe a girl might pay me some attention. There it was, a role model.

QUESTION: Did you have a problem with the violence in this movie?
ANSWER: I've been watching violent movies all my life. When James Cagney and all those guys showed up they were killing people. Guys were clutching their stomachs or their arms, whatever. I grew up watching Westerns and gangster movies. People have been dying in movies forever, and on television. When I was a kid, television was a lot more violent than it is now. We had GUNSMOKE, HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL, WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE, CHEYENNE, THE BIG VALLEY and then we had MANNIX, THE MOD SQUAD, PETER GUNN, THE UNTOUCHABLES. People died on television every night and we didn't go and kill people. Nobody blamed television for the few crimes there were out there. I don't take that responsibility and I think gun movies are as valid as movies about non-violence. Christmas wasn't Christmas for me unless I got a gun and this is an extension of those gun games I played when I was a kid. I had arguments with the producers and the director because they aren't old enough to play gun games. The writer says, "You run into the street and you take out..." I'm like "There's no cover out there man, why would I run out in the middle of the street. The bad guys are hiding behind something."

QUESTION: How cool was it to walk around with a gun and play a larger-than-life character?
ANSWER: Very cool, its very cool. It's a wonderful thing to be as heroic as those guys I watched be heroic all those years that run down the street and guys are shooting everywhere and everybody misses them. You're just impervious. My character is a different hero for a different time. When Richard was John Shaft his enemies were the man and society and he was dealing with them in that way. Now he's fighting race, hate, and drugs. My enemies are a lot more violent and my character embraces that kind of violence in a real sort of way. He gets a smile on his face when he gets to that point because he knows he can solve it.

QUESTION: Do you see Shaft as a vigilante?
ANSWER: Kind of, but I don't look at it as vigilantism. He has two specific enemies in this film and they're pretty volatile guys. You can see the enmity between John Shaft and Peoples Hernandez. They've been after each other in a real way for a few years. Christian's character, the fact that he can kill this kid, leave this country and get away with it just pisses Shaft off. There's something that needs to be done about it and he's trying to bring him to justice by the correct means, but if that doesn't happen we can go the other way.

QUESTION: Shaft is not exactly your perfect cop, and he doesn't even get any girls in this picture!
ANSWER: He's not a cop, he quits. That was a very specific plot point in this movie because when I first started talking to the producers and everyone else about this movie-- Richard Price wrote this very specific, nice-cop story--my point was you cant put SHAFT on a cop story. The first thing of the song you hear is, "He's a black private dick who's a sex machine for all the chicks." Its bad enough that there's no sex in the movie but you cant make him be a cop either." They told me, "Well were giving him a background story." I said, "Fine, he starts out as a cop and quits at some point." Uncle John is still stuck in the 70s, its okay to leave with two women but its the year 2000 you cant politically correctly have sex with 5 women in the same movie that you aren't married to. Unless you have the James Bond government-issued-where-you'll-never-catch-anything shot, then you can do it.

QUESTION: It must have been frustrating trying to get your vision across while making SHAFT.
ANSWER: It's true, but that's them. They had their own ideas what the movie was, hence all those stories of conflict on the SHAFT set. You have guys who have ideas of what a SHAFT movie is. They happen to be ethnically incorrect but that's who they are and they have the power. Sometimes things happen where you have to go, "I know what you're doing and you don't." There's one voice telling you to do something, another voice insisting something else. If the director has to do what the studio wants to do, there is only one person who can stop that. I am that person. In the end I'm the one that's up there on the screen. No ones going to say, "Look what Scott Rudin made Sam do," they're going to say, "Look at Sam, he looks stupid."

QUESTION: Its obvious Paramount wants a SHAFT sequel. What would you like to see in the sequel?
ANSWER: I hope that the way its set up is Richard Roundtree will be a lot more proactive in the sequel. In the original script, every time I got into real trouble, he showed up and got rid of some guys for me and made things happen. That was really cool.

QUESTION: In past interviews, you were a bit standoffish about SHAFT.
ANSWER: There were a lot of things shot and when you do that, it gives a lot of people a chance to make the movie they want to make. You don't know how it will be put together. I knew we were at the mercy of a lot of things. John Singleton had his vision, Scott Rudin had his vision, God only knows who in Paramount had their vision. Last time I saw this movie was months ago with a test audience, who gave their opinions. Richard Price wrote it and they paid him a lot of money to rewrite and there are inconsistencies everywhere. Some girl sitting in front of me when I saw it--when Christian takes the jewellery to Peoples and said he had it assessed for $40,000--the girl is like, "That's it, his father can pay $1 million bail but his mother only had $40,000 worth of jewellery. What the hell is that?" Or when Toni said, "They paid me $100,000 to be quiet." They would say, "That's it?" Give me a break.

QUESTION: How do you think people will respond to SHAFT?
ANSWER: I have a feeling that people enjoyed it and apparently someone had sense enough to take out the bullshit and the fat. Some people in Hollywood don't trust audiences and they want to spell everything out. You reach a point where you go, "I don't need to shoot it because audiences will get it. Well we need it because just in case..." And I'd respond, "I'm not shooting it because if I shoot it you'll put it in there and you'll look stupid." There's stuff that's not there that the audience still got, which I'm very happy about. My character is hard, fast and mean and Richard is the voice of reason to me in a real kind of way. I think Jeffrey's character became three-dimensional; it was very one-dimensional on the page. Luckily, we got an actor like Jeffrey that came in and brought things with him that humanized him in a real kind of way. You can look at him and not think he's just some stupid-ass Dominican drug dealer. He's got family values; he has his own idea of what he wants to do. He has aspirations and dreams; he thinks about stuff like how much fun it would be to be Christian Bales character. You can feel a two-year enmity between John Shaft and Peoples Hernandez. They have a respect for each other but they want to see each other dead. You see the hate I have for Christian and Christian's angst about his family. There is human stuff in there that they got to keep and they also kept the fast-paced morality play, good guy vs. bad guy popcorn movie. All the other crap went out the movie, but in the end even someone like Scott Rudin can say, "You were right, you knew what you were talking about."

QUESTION: But all in all, it was fun doing SHAFT?
ANSWER: I enjoyed this. This is the first time I've been a straightforward action hero guy. Its fun walking down the street in the middle of a hail of bullets and none of it hits him. That's how I watched Richard, he was a hero, I never saw myself as that guy. Hopefully 30 years later, someone will feel good about the fact that we have a pure black hero. This guys looking good, talks tough and kind of gets the girl.

QUESTION: Did you compromise a great deal with the producers of SHAFT?
ANSWER: I don't make decisions that those guys were trying to make. I try and say, "The days getting short and we have to get this amount of work done, how many shots do we need?" We make compromises and not about the performances. It's not like, "Make him say that line, we paid a lot of money for that line, Richard Price wrote that line." The black writer that wrote that line doesn't sound like me. They'd go, "Well Richard Price is not black." And they'd go, "Oh I get it." Can't make me talk that way if I'm not going to talk that way. Its bullshit issues that have nothing to do other than I have more power than this person and we paid a lot of money for this stuff and I want to hear it the way its written. Well, the way its written is stupid. There will be no compromise and well either shoot my way or we'll keep going. I find myself on movie sets and I'm working with directors who've done 5 to 7 movies and I've done 65 plus movies and a lot of times I know a quicker way of getting something done. Even the crew is standing there, sighing. When you suggest the most efficient way of getting things done, they appreciate it. When you complain about, "Why are we doing this when all we need to do is this?" The crew is very appreciative of that because they want to see a good film and make a good film too. They want to make it as efficiently as possible. They don't think you're difficult because of that; sometimes you have to protect yourself because no one else will do it for you.

QUESTION: What was it like working with Busta Rhymes?
ANSWER: I'm pretty well documented on what I feel about working with rappers, on what that experience should or should not be. He showed up with this humility about him, he wanted to learn and listen. Busta is a larger-than-life character. You can actually say to Busta, "That was good but don't do that thing but keep that thing." He'd say, "Okay dude, I got that, that's cool" He came with a lot of enthusiasm every day. He was a joy to be around. He was never the big fish from the rap world in our little pond. He was just another guy hanging out with us.

QUESTION: So hows the new movie you're doing with SIXTH SENSE director M. Night Shyamalan?
ANSWER: Its good. UNBREAKABLE with Bruce Willis, it's a lot of fun.

QUESTION: Can you tell us the plot of the movie?
ANSWER: I play a guy who owns a comic book art gallery who has osteogenesisimperfecta, which is brittle bone disease. Bruce plays a guy who s never been sick or hurt and were trying to figure out why I get broken all the time and he doesn't. It's one of those things.