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Matching Characters to Personalities: Benjamin explained the difference between his own personality and that of his character’s: “Most people have seen Hey, Ya! and Roses, and there’s all this energy and this dancing around character. In real life, I’m not dancing around all the time. So, I would say Percival is closer to Andre Benjamin. We’ve known Bryan since we gave him his first shot on our video, so he knows our personalities. He knows our lives. He knows things about us that people don’t see, so he pulled from those parts and created these characters, but gave us the room to play in these characters. The side of me that people don’t get to see, I did the extreme version of that. No, I’m not moping around like Percival all the time. But in every character you play, you’ve got to find something that connects to you to make it real. You’ve got to find some jumping off point.”
Patton sees himself in the character of Rooster. “Yeah, I think there’s more than just a little bit. (Laughing) What [Bryan] did was, he took it and exaggerated it, and gave us room to play with it and do whatever we wanted to do with the characters. So by him knowing the intricate details of certain parts of our lives and how we’d react to situations, he hit right on the bullseye.”
Tackling a Feature Film - Outkast's Approach to Idlewild: Benjamin says they didn’t approach this film the same as they would a music video. “No, not at all. ….It could have been anybody playing my part and it could have been anybody playing Rooster’s part. It didn’t actually have to be Outkast. And that goes to say that it was just a great movie and a great story. Anybody could have done it, but I think the music that we did bring to it brought a certain style. Some of the songs were around before the script was even written, so Bryan was writing around certain songs and that did bring flavor to the movie as well. I would say, even if you’re not an Outkast fan, or even a music fan, really, you will enjoy the movie. You’re going to laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll get pissed off, which is all the things you want from a movie.”
The Visual Style of Idlewild: “As far as the extra added values in the movie, we call it that funk,” Benjamin explained. “That’s the funk you bring to the movie. We are film fans. Bryan would say, ‘Have you seen Amelie? Did you see how they tricked this?’ So we knew what kind of game we were playing here. We knew what type of film we wanted to make. It can’t be so straight and narrow all the time. It has to be magical in some kind of way, at least for this film.” And speaking of magic, Benjamin worked a little dancing magic in order to be ready for Idlewild. “I had to learn how to tap dance in like a week and a half, two weeks. I had never tap danced before, but I liked it.”
Antwan A Patton on Squaring Off with Terrence Howard Onscreen: “Well, actually, this was my first film. The first day we shot was the scene on the sidewalk outside, when I was with Zora and the kids, so that was my very first scene I had to shoot. I was so nervous. At the same time, I was gearing up for it. Ben Vereen was kind of like a mentor the whole time. We would go running through it. He already had me psyched up a little bit because, before Terrence got there, he was like, ‘I’m telling you, this guy’s going to come in here, he’s a veteran actor, he’s going to already be in character. He’s not going to like you, he’s going to treat you like s**t. Don’t play into it. He’ll try to sucker you in and try to be your friend, just to throw you off. You can’t let him take the scene away from you. You have to go toe-to-toe with him.’
One day when Terrence showed up, he was in the make-up room and I saw him, and my heart was beating fast. I was like, ‘Oh, man, here we go!’ He turned around and was like, ‘Man, what’s up, man? I’ve been checking you out for a long time. Hey, man, wanna hear some songs?’ He had a guitar and I was like, ‘He’s trying to sucker me in,’ so I told Ben (laughing). I said, ‘Man, he’s trying to come to my trailer and play songs.’ He was like, ‘Don’t let him do it.’ I was like, ‘Man, I’m going to watch him,’ so I let him come in there and we talked and we kicked it, and he was a good guy. To go back to the first day of shooting, I was so nervous to where I turned the nervousness into the anger that I needed for the scene. After we shot a couple of times, Terrence was like, ‘Brother, the way you’re staring at me, you had me shook up for real. You looked like you were going to kill me. You really had me going.’ And for him to say that to me, I was just like, ‘Okay, all right,’ because I know how to do it now. He made me feel comfortable and after that it was all good.”
Page 3: Andre Benjamin and Antwan A Patton on the Future of Outkast
