Wesley Snipes remembers his first time, right down to what he was thinking:
“Please, don’t let me get killed. Please, I got a lot of stuff to do.”
That seems natural. Sky-diving, to most people, is a fairly intimidating activity. But Snipes had to attempt it to prepare for his new film “Drop Zone,” in which he plays a federal marshal chasing high-tech thieves who do much of their traveling by parachute.
“I wasn’t as scared going up, but once the door opened, that’s when it hit me,” Snipes says. “And the place I really got scared was when we had to step out on the side of the wing of the plane. I did it in a single-prop. And to stand out and hold on to the side of the plane, 11,000 feet in the air, even with a parachute on my back, was bugged.
“It was very different. I jumped off. I put my hands down as if I was gonna touch the ground. There was nothing to touch, so I just started screaming. Aaaoooh!”
Snipes, of course, didn’t do the hard-core aerial work in “Drop Zone.” That would make producers and insurance companies too nervous. Besides, that’s what stuntmen are for. But he does have five jumps to his credit now, he says.
Skydiving is an “extraordinary feeling,” says Snipes, 31. “Safer than a motorcycle, trust me.”
He should know. In August, Snipes pleaded no contest to a Florida charge of reckless driving resulting from a 30-mile, 120-mph motorcycle chase on which he led police in April. He was sentenced to 80 hours of community service and six months’ probation, plus he had to pay $7,100 in court costs and fines.
Recently on “Late Show With David Letterman,” Snipes traded speeding quips with the much-ticketed talk-show host. The actor said he didn’t know the cops were after him; he only found out when he stopped for gas, and they finally caught up with him.
Snipes has approached his film career with the same energy and speed that he applies to his cycle-riding. Since he seared his image into the public consciousness with his performances in 1991’s “New Jack City” and “Jungle Fever,” Snipes has been on screen almost non-stop in such disparate films as “The Waterdance,” “White Men Can’t Jump,” “Passenger 57,” “Boiling Point,” “Rising Sun,” “Demolition Man” and “Sugar Hill.”
His first film role was in Goldie Hawn’s 1986 football comedy “Wildcats.” Other early career highlights included appearing in the Michael Jackson video “Bad” and winning a 1989 Cable ACE Award for best actor in HBO’s “Vietnam War Story.”
In “Drop Zone,” Snipes plays U.S. Marshal Pete Nessip, who finds himself working outside the law to track down a group of skydivers who helped a convicted computer hacker (Michael Jeter) escape from Nessip’s custody on a commercial flight. Gary Busey plays the head of the skydiving team, and Yancy Butler (“Hard Target”) plays the ace skydiver who reluctantly puts Nessip in the air to find the bad guys. John Badham (“Saturday Night Fever,” “Point of No Return,” “Stakeout”) directed.
Impeccably attired in black suede shoes, black slacks, black shirt and a green and black felt-wool cardigan sweater with leather piping, the handsome, fit-looking Snipes is sartorially prepared to represent the new breed of action hero. His shaved head and closely trimmed goatee indicate that he’s a star in control-of his career and of himself.
“This is the first action (film) that I’ve been in that I think I had a lot more to say and worked with a director that was experienced,” he says. “So I figure if I come in and I’m up to speed and the director comes in up to speed, what we can produce could be extraordinary and powerful.”
Although he has won kudos for his acting, Snipes doesn’t have anything against action.
“I’m a fan of action films,” he says. “I like them, and I like the entertainment value of them. It’s good business sense as well because, you know, a lot of the most powerful personalities in the business now are the ones in the action movies. They really get great political, artistic clout.
“So I do it for that reason as well, and for the pay. And because I’m physical. I like the physicality of it. All the way back to the Jim Brown days and the Fred Williamson days, Jim Kelly and the Bruce Lee days. It fires me up.”
When Snipes takes action audiences for a ride, he often displays the skills he has learned through his practice of capoeria, an African/Brazilian martial art form. The spiritual side of capoeria doesn’t preclude using it aggressively, he says.
“All the things that I do in movies, I infuse spirit in it,” he says. “I don’t do a scene without giving praises first and asking for guidance. So I never separate that physicality from the spirituality.”
Still, Snipes doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as an action star.
“It’s like when I was a deejay, after college, you wanted to move the people in the right way,” says Snipes, who attended Rollins College in Florida and the State University of New York at Purchase. “A deejay, (with) the sequence he plays certain songs, has a great deal of influence on if the people have had a good time and a good experience, if they’ll come back to the club. I plan out my movies the same way a deejay plans out his night in the club.”
Snipes’ next film is “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar,” also starring Patrick Swayze, John Leguizamo and Stockard Channing. Snipes plays a drag queen, and he loved it.
“I’ve grown up around drag queens,” says the actor, who was born in Orlando and grew up in the South Bronx, attending New York’s High School for the Performing Arts before returning to Florida as a teenager with his family. “I’ve grown up around dancers. I started out as a dancer, so I know how the body moves. I love women, and I study women. I like watching women in all of their glory. So that was easy.”
He did, however, discover that when he tries to look like a woman, “I look like an ugly Angela Bassett or kind of a muscular Naomi Campbell.”
Snipes will reunite with Woody Harrelson, his co-star in “White Men Can’t Jump” as well as his teammate in “Wildcats,” to shoot “The Money Train” and then make the science-fiction action film “Taking Liberty.” Then he hopes to do something romantic.
But the big project on Snipes’ plate is “Miles,” his biography of the late jazz great Miles Davis. Charles Fuller is writing the script.
“What we’re trying to do is find the through line and the hook for the film,” Snipes says. “To me, the hook is the matter of what makes a genius. And how does a genius who by nature is a rebel . . . survive in a conformist society, where society says, `Look, don’t be different; be like us. Do what we want you to do; satisfy our desires, our image of what we want you to be. And that’s acceptable. But at the same time, now, be a genius.’ “
