Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding Jr (Jerry Maguire) stars as a dad who decides to take on the job of running a summer day camp for kids in Daddy Day Camp co-starring Paul Rae and directed by Fred Savage. Gooding Jr doesn't really look at this film as a sequel to Daddy Day Care. "We weren't looking to make a sequel," explained Gooding Jr. "We weren't looking to do anything. If anything, we were making a remake with a re-imagined cast and conceptualization. The only thing that we stayed true to was the Daddy Day theme of a father connecting with his children.”
Cuba Gooding Jr Missed Out on Camp: Unfortunately, Gooding Jr didn’t have any childhood camping experiences to fall back on for this film. “I never actually as a kid went camping,” said Gooding Jr. “I went to the Raiders Pro Football camp and that was the extent of it. Now, I’ve done more camping as an adult that I ever did in my entire life. That’s why I wasn’t looking to do a sequel to one of my movies, let alone Eddie Murphy’s movie, and I read this script and it was like, ‘Yeah, they pretty much hit it on the head.’ My two boys, 10 and 12, we just dropped them off at camp yesterday.”
Gooding Jr continued, "They go every year. They love it, they love it, and it’s great because you always get the same thing. They’re excited to go the night before. They don’t sleep. They get on the bus. They drive up there. They call crying, ‘Oh, this is a mistake.’ Right? Then we get the first couple of weepy postcards and then you don’t hear from them so you think, ‘Uh oh.’ And then they show up and they’re dirty and smelly because they forgot to shower the entire two weeks. They’re like, ‘The best time ever. Can’t wait until next year.’ Every year it’s the same thing.
It’s great because it is a bit of adult responsibilities. They have to fend for themselves, but it’s great. It’s great. It really is. And then my youngest boy is a Boy Scout. I’ve been the chaperone on a couple of those camping excursions.”
Working With Kids Comes Easy: Director Savage said Gooding Jr really enjoyed hanging out with the kids. “I’m like the grandparent,” joked Gooding Jr. “I come get them heated up and then I split to my trailer and they’ve got to figure out how to calm them down. It’s great. The only trick, I think, was my off camera dialogue because the kids didn’t really get that. I mean, I’d be saying serious stuff like, ‘You know, we’re a family. We’re a team.’ And the kids like yawning and picking his nose and pinching the other one.”
Cuba the Parent vs Cuba the Actor: Although he occasionally had to suppress his parental instincts on the set, Gooding Jr has no problem with kids being kids. In fact, his house is set up to make his children and their friends feel comfortable. “You know it’s funny because if you’ve ever been to my house, I have a hockey rink, a batting cage, a sunken trampoline, boxing. We have everything on our property and every weekend all the kids come to our house. It’s just like romper room and it is. A lot of times when kids have to govern themselves, there’s a certain form of self-awareness that they get and a certain self-confidence that they get, as long as you’re setting certain out of perimeter guidelines to them. You let them govern each other. I think it makes them grow up more aware.”
Fun on the set of Daddy Day Camp: Asked what was the most fun scene to shoot, Cuba Gooding Jr replied, “Probably the camping stuff when the tent gets destroyed and the fart, with the fly, and all that stuff. That was great because we were really camping. We were about two hours outside of Park City, Utah in the middle of nowhere, and just having a ball every day for about a week, a week and a half, doing that scene.”
Up Next – American Gangster with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe: Gooding Jr recently completed work on Ridley Scott’s American Gangster set to hit theaters in December 2007. Describing the movie as awesome, Gooding Jr provided just a tiny bit of info on what it was like to work on that Ridley Scott drama. “It was one of those opportunities where you get to work with a master craftsman, Ridley Scott, and have Jordan and Gretzky as your wingmen,” said Gooding Jr. “You know what I mean? …I’ll be excited to see that movie. I can’t wait to see it because it was an amazing experience. I played Nicky Barnes who was one of the original heroin pimps in the 70s that brought all of that s**t to Harlem.”
Comparing Director Fred Savage with Director Ridley Scott: “Well, it's funny because they both have obviously been trained in film, cinema,” said Gooding Jr. “Ridley probably 50 years ago, and Fred just recently in the past 10 years. And Fred's process is steeped in children's cinema. You know, be it through his film school experiences or be it the children's television shows. So when I met with Fred for this project, I knew how well versed he was on how to handle the kids, and how to do the material, his knowledge of the material. But it was more of an influence, my personal influence, on his vision that was more a collaborative thing.
Whereas Ridley Scott, it's like working with Yoda. I mean, there was one scene where it's just a really violent scene, a real aggressive scene, and Denzel and I were in a competition. And something wasn't working. I go, ‘Listen, if we...,’ and I kind of rattled off real quick. And everybody's kind of shaking their head and Ridley goes, ‘You know, I have done this before.’ (Laughing) It's like, ‘That's right! Okay. So what do you want us to do?’ You know what I mean? So yeah, very night and day. And again, I'm blessed to be in both those positions.”
Also on the Horizon: What else is coming up for Gooding Jr? “I know I've talked about a few projects between American Gangster, Hero Wanted, and Linewatch, but I am producing and co-starring with Spencer Breslin in a Napoleon Dynamite-esque comedy. He plays a 12-year-old boy with male pattern baldness in an elementary school, and I'm the janitor that he befriends. And it's this quirky relationship with these two guys. It's called Harold.”
