With his body of work, no one is going to mistake Laurence Fishburne for Jim Carrey.
“I am a tragedian. I am not a comedian,” the actor says, and ticks off some of his films to prove it: “Othello.” “The Tuskegee Airmen.” “Miss Evers’ Boys.” “Cornbread, Earl and Me.” “Apocalypse Now.” “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” for which he won an Oscar Award nomination for playing abusive singer/band leader Ike Turner.
“All these stories have great tragedy in them, and great drama and great pathos. That’s my stock in trade. That’s what I do,” the 39-year-old actor says.
So he thinks there should be no illusions about his latest film, “Once in the Life,” which is scheduled for release on Friday.
“Once” is more a character study than a shoot-’em-up action piece. Fishburne plays 20/20 Mike, a low-level crook with such a knack for knowing what’s going to happen, it’s like he has eyes in the back of his head.
He is reunited with his junkie half-brother Torch (Titus Welliver) after some 20 years, and the pair get involved in “a little flim, a little flam” in the form of a heroin deal that goes horribly wrong.
“If people are coming to see this movie with expectations of `The Matrix’ and bullets [slowing down in] time and kung fu, they’re going to be very disappointed,” says Fishburne. Rather, Fishburne wants audiences to “come prepared to witness something that is outside of the normal movie-going experience.”
The movie is the actor’s directorial debut. He wrote “Once” as a theatrical piece in 1994 during a most unusual writing process.
“The characters told me what was going to happen as I was writing the story. I was just listening to their voices and they told me what happened,” he explains.
“This came out of me organically. It wasn’t like I was attempting to write anything specifically. I wasn’t attempting to write a crime thing or I wasn’t attempting to write a romance thing..”
What comes out is a personal story of three desperate people [“Oz’s” Eamonn Walker plays 20/20’s best friend, who becomes entangled in the botched deal] on a collision course as a consequence of being “once in the life, always in the life,” as 20/20 says in the film.
“I wrote the first draft in eight days, quite by accident,” says Fishburne. “It wasn’t like I sat down to write a play. I was writing in my journals and I started writing in two voices for some reason, and by the end of an hour or two I had a scene. I thought, `Oh, this is fascinating.'”
He mounted “Once” in 1994 in Los Angeles, and the following year it was produced in New York. Welliver, who has appeared in Steven Bochco television series “NYPD Blue” and “Brooklyn South,” also played Torch in those productions.
Fishburne, who was born in Augusta, Ga., and raised in New York City, says it was “Once’s” natural evolution for it to go from the theater to the screen. It was also natural — and logical — that he direct, something Fishburne has considered doing since he was 17 years old and out of work after completing 1979’s “Apocalypse Now.”
“What is satisfying about directing is that it gives me more to do; it gives me more responsibility in terms of telling a story. It gives me the opportunity to tell a story from a unique point of view, which is my own.”
Fishburne issues this warning: “You’re not going to come, pay your [money], be entertained for two hours, and walk out of the theater feeling good. It’s about coming to the theater to have an experience, a shared experience, where you get to be a fly on the wall and observe the unfolding of someone’s life as they are about to make a transition into death.”
The characters of “Once” were the same types that Fishburne says he played early in his career, parts that were only available to him because there weren’t many roles for people of either his color or his age.
Fishburne, who starts work on two “Matrix” sequels next year and who relishes the chance “to be a superhero again,”says “Once in the Life” is a film about “people that don’t make it.”
“This is about the guys that I used to see when I was in my mid-20s, who were 10 years older than me, who were still on the corner. They don’t make it. But it doesn’t make them bad people. They just didn’t have whatever they needed to get off the corner. So they just keep spinning.”
