Gary Thompson gets 'Compton' straight outta the mouths of the people who made it and lived it

RECENTLY, Daily News Movie Critic Gary Thompson sat down with Ice Cube, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Jason Mitchell and F. Gary Gray, the stars and director of "Straight Outta Compton," for a wide-ranging discussion of the movie and its subject, the influential rap group N.W.A.

DAILY NEWS, To Jason Mitchell: You play Eazy-E, who died in 1995. You did a lot of research into his life and career. What suprised you?

MITCHELL: He's made to seem like he's a huge weed smoker, but he's not, he's foremost a very business-minded person who liked to really stay really clear-headed most of the time. A lot of that was for show. How business-like he was, that was a revelation to me.

Getting that right was important for me. Also, to show what a loved guy he was. I talked to a lot of people, and no one ever said, ugh, I hate that guy. They didn't have anything really bad to say about him. He was just a really, really, really loved guy.

DN: We know these guys as icons, but "Straight Outta Compton" really shows them as friends. We get to know them before they were famous, in some cases before they were performing.

ICE CUBE: I think that was so important, to talk about the friendship. With N.W.A., people tend to want to talk about the broad strokes, the most exciting things that happened or the roughest things that happened, but we wanted to show that behind it all was a group of guys who were really close friends. And we had a lot of fun making these records. We had a lot of fun with each other. And we really get a chance to highlight that.

DN: Getting that right - it helps to have a director who knew the landscape, literally. A guy from South Central Los Angeles.

F. GARY GRAY: I was honored to be able to tell their story because I was there and I grew up not too far from Cube. That was part of my life. When I got the call I was a little nervous at first because I knew the story was important, and I knew there were so many things that happened, and I wondered how I was going to fit all of it into two hours. Once I read the script and saw how it was framed as a coming-of-age story, I realized that was a great way to get into it. Start with the friendship, the brotherhood. I knew that was something I wanted to shine a light on.

DN to O'Shea Jr.: Ice Cube has said he's revealed details to his children about his N.W.A career on an "age appropriate" basis. What was your sense of his music career growing up?

O'SHEA JR.: I will admit I didn't know what it meant for my father to be Ice Cube until I was about 18. Of course, I've seen him in movies my whole life and all that, but I didn't realize how he touched people and reached people through his music, that didn't register with me until I was about 18.

As far as the movie, goes, I'd heard most of the stories, the encounters, these tales. I felt really shouldn't be in someone else's hands. It was my obsession to get the role right and to push myself because I knew it was my family's legacy and nobody could handle it better than a member of the family.

DN: It's a story of friends, but also of the neighborhood they grew up in, and how it informed their music.

GRAY: N.W.A., they were responsible for shifting and changing popular culture. We were going from this kind of cleaned-up politically correct form of entertainment to these guys speaking the unvarnished truth from their perspective. Some of if was fun, some of it was extremely controversial, but ultimately all of it was honest. And I think it tapped into the rebel in all kinds of people.

It didn't matter if you were from L.A. It transcended all kinds of geographical and racial boundaries.

DN: "Controversial." That's putting it mildly. "F--- The Police" became notorious. The song scared people.

GRAY: They stood up and addressed police brutality. Remember, back then there weren't video cameras capturing things. They called attention to something that had been going on for a very long time.

ICE CUBE: The song was the camera, in those days.

GRAY: Right, the song was the video camera. And, ultimately, I wanted to focus on why they wrote that song. Why would a 16-year-old write these lyrics? The average guy who grows up in the suburbs is not going to wake up one day and write "F--- The Police."

DN: "F--- The Police" certainly became an anthem. The movie reminds us that the song caused you to be regarded as this threatening, dangerous figure. That seems strange now, given that you're the comedy star of "21 Jump Street" and family movies like "Are We There Yet?" Does that transition seem strange to you?

ICE CUBE: Not really. Becase I've always enjoyed all types of entertainment, and never saw myself as one thing. And I drew from my surroundings, and there were all kinds of people, so much talent in our neighborhoods. I've always said: I was lucky. Dre is lucky. Yella is lucky. There were a number of talented people on our street that could have been me. It was circumstance. What people were into, what we were doing at the time.

I could always see myself doing more than just rapping. Even when I got into the business, I wanted to do more than just rap.

GRAY: If you study Cube's writing, a lot of it was humorous from the start. If you listen to "Straight Outta Compton" and the skits in between, there was sharp writing there, there was humor there. For Cube to find success in movies, with comedy, I think it is a natural progression.

Part of what's inspiring about the movie is that Cube grew up on wax - we see him grow up through his music, and now in film, and see that transition from young man to adult to family man to father to businessman to mogul. That should inspire people. You don't have to stay in one lane.

DN: There is one thing that seems not authentic, and that's N.W.A. drinking Old Milwaukee beer at Eazy-E's pool party.

GRAY: I almost fired my prop guy for putting that on the set. I'm so glad that you watched it that closely. You wouldn't believe how much time I spent on the set, turning around bottles of whatever, Schlitz.

CUBE: They shoulda used Olde English.

(General agreement).

GRAY: Why are you guys tapping into that?

MITCHELL: We also had this problem with a cigarette box. Kool cigarettes used to be in a white box, not a green box, and a green box found its way onto the set.

GRAY: You guys are just tearing my work apart. I'll come back when you guys are finished highlighting all the continuity errors. They wouldn't have been drinking Old Milwaukee. Thanks a lot, I feel judged now.

ICE CUBE: If that's the only problem with the movie, you should feel good about it.

DN: It's not all partying and laughs. You get into Eazy-E, his battle with AIDS, his death. That also had a huge cultural impact.

ICE CUBE: I think Magic really brought to the forefront for many of us. But Eazy made it super real because Magic seemed like this big superstar we all loved but nobody really knew. Having Eazy-E with AIDS, it was like your next door neighbor.

DN: You played a famous show at Philadelphia's Spectrum, part of your tour to conquer the East Coast. Anything stand out from that show?

ICE CUBE: That the Philly crowd was just so rowdy. They just wanted to see if we could deliver. The sense was like this: You got a hit record, but you guys are playing THE SPECTRUM tonight. You know what I mean? All we heard all day was: You'd better be up for this, man.

Yeah, it was fun until it got serious. We started getting letters from the FBI. Police would come and basically threaten us. Like, if you break any of our obscenity laws here in Macon, Georgia, and there are a lot of them, you're going to have a problem.

Our tours followed the Beastie Boys and then Bobby Brown, so they was waiting for us. The Beastie Boys came through and tore s--- up. Bobby Brown came through, and was doing too much sex stuff up on stage.

We actually had to run out of a stadium to avoid arrest one time, we jumped in a fan's car to get back to the hotel.

DN: It certainly takes a lot of self-confidence to walk away from a phenomenon like N.W.A. and go your own way. Where did that come from?

ICE CUBE: It's my Pops. I'm fortunate that my father stayed around and he was into us and really taught me how to be a man, to stand on my own two feet. I've absorbed his personality.

DN: The music in "Straight Outta Compton" is a mix of recorded stuff and new live performances that re-create the old sound. You brought in DJ Jazzy Jeff to help with that.

ICE CUBE: All the scratching you hear that Dre's doing on the turn table, that's DJ. Dre actually requested him. Scratching now is different than it was 10 years ago, and that's different than it was in the 1980s.

Dre said, "Listen, this is period scratching and one of the guys who's been in the game the whole time is Jazzy Jeff and I want him to replicate what I was doing, because I can't do it now!" Dre kept it real. And Jazzy Jeff killed it.

DN: The studio is releasing this at the height of the summer. How do you feel about competing with the special-effects and blockbuster movies.

GRAY: I feel ike this is a superhero movie, or an origins story. About how someone like Cube goes from riding a bus to being almost bigger than life. Or Dre, who goes from being a kid in Compton to N.W.A. to being a tech businessman who makes a billion dollars.

That's comic book s---. It just happens to be real.