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According to director and co-star Damon Dash, life imitates art "in a big way" in his sequel to 2002's "State Property." The film's star, Beanie Sigel, was sentenced to a year and a day on a federal gun charge in November, and is currently behind bars in New Jersey. The character he portrays in the film, Beans, spends much of the movie learning to "kill time while doing time." His scenes — as well as those involving N.O.R.E., Freeway, Kanye West, Mariah Carey, Lil Cease, Cam'ron, Loon, Young Gunz, and a whole host of other hip-hop luminaries — were shot while the deadline for Sigel to turn himself in to authorities loomed ever closer. But as Dash told MTV News' Jennifer Vineyard, despite all the drama, Beanie — and everybody else involved — seemed happy enough during the shoot. Not that surprising, really: after all, the movie is a comedy.
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"It wasn't necessarily meant to be a comedy. But there is no gangster I know who's mad all day long." - Dame Dash
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MTV: So many of your friends make cameos in this movie. Mariah Carey, for instance, looked like she was having a lot of fun with her scene. Was any of that improvised?
Damon Dash: We gave her the gist of what to say and how to say it, then we went through it a couple of times and she got it. It's easy for her to act like a diva. She's not a real diva, but she acts like one really well. She gets the joke.
MTV: When did you decide that this "State Property" was going to be a comedy?
Dash: As far as the freeze frames and the narration goes, I thought it would be really important to stylize the movie. I'd been learning a lot from making independent movies with people like ["Monster's Ball" producer] Lee Daniels, and I was very influenced by certain movies like "Requiem for a Dream" and "City of God," so I thought it would just keep it moving, keep it entertaining. It wasn't necessarily meant to be a comedy. But there is no gangster I know who's mad all day long.
MTV: Did people feel loose on the set, even though you were dealing with serious subject matter?
Dash: I always feel like we should have fun while we work. It's a pretty relaxed environment. It got funny at rehearsals [showing certain people] how to act, because they had never acted before. I think everybody felt comfortable because we allowed them to be themselves.
MTV: What was Beanie Sigel's mood, since he got sentenced during the shoot?
Dash: Beanie is strong. I know when I was doing the scenes in the jails, I felt uncomfortable for him. I thought it took a lot of character to be able to just come in there and know your lines and have such a good demeanor. You would have never thought he was going to go to jail the way he acted on set, so I gave him a lot of props for that. He had a good outlook on things. The only thing we had to rush [because of his impending jail sentence] was voiceovers. To a degree, he was under house arrest, so he had to be at home by a certain time, before that little thing went off on his ankle. I don't think it affected the movie or the mood of the movie or made us rush anything, except for those late nights. I wish he could have been here to do the DVD [commentary]. I wanted to do it with him.
MTV: Was there any thought to delay his album or the movie so he could be more involved?
Dash: We didn't know how long or what kind of time he was going to do. At first, he was facing three years, so we basically tried to prepare and do as many things as we could related to his album and the movie. He was conscious of that, but he was always like, "Do what you got to do."
MTV: You talk to him a lot?
Dash: I saw him on Friday, which was two days ago. He seems real happy about what's going on. Of course, he wishes he could have been here for it, and he's missing it. I guess it is what it is. It can't get any better for someone who's sitting in jail, besides the fact that he's been in the hole for three months. He just got out of the hole, so he was happy to be out of that situation. It's funny, because he's really doing hard time. The time he is doing is probably harder than how it looked on the movie screen. So it's almost like life imitating art in a big way.
MTV: And there's another life-imitating-art parallel — in the movie, Beanie's crew starts to fall apart while he's in jail, and in real life, State Property's on hold, and they're not too happy about it …
Dash: You make a certain announcement, you expect a reaction. He didn't hear anything that he didn't expect and wasn't surprised about. It's like, wait till he gets home. That's the message he sent me.
MTV: His album debuted at number three — his highest yet. Is that something he's excited about?
Dash: Definitely. We were just happy we were able to represent and support it in a way where it wasn't a traditional way of selling an album. But he was properly represented by the television shows and the programming that we did. It's kind of gratifying to see it all worked. To shoot all those videos, to do all those mix tapes, and for me to do all this press. I damn near had to do shows for him. It would be a Beanie album release party, and I would be going on stage and I don't rap, you know what I mean?
MTV: You have another album coming out by someone who can't be there to promote it, the ODB album.
Dash: When we were making his album, we weren't anticipating his demise. We didn't know he was going to die. So for that, we didn't get as much as we wanted, but the album was finished by the time he passed. It's a real classic album. The RZA represented in a big way.
MTV: This movie was also ODB's final performance [playing what might be the world's most unsanitary fry cook]. Did he have fun playing up the "Dirty" side of his Dirt McGirt character?
Dash: He got it. He got the joke. It was actually the first time he had been around everyone, everyone from under the umbrella, underneath our music group. He got real comfortable real fast. A lot of times in hip-hop, people don't think we can laugh at ourselves, but we really can.
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Photo: Lions Gate
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