A German film distributor called Störkanal will soon release a special edition German DVD of WEAPONS. I have been sent a list questions to answer for the booklet. Instead of posting all the answers here at once I will answer a single one each day.

Question #4

Let’s now talk about WEAPONS: When did you come up with the Idea for your second full featured movie WEAPONS?

I originally conceived of the idea a few weeks after my first film BOMB THE SYSTEM premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003. I was living in an apartment in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a room no bigger than a walk-in closet. I had quit my job to dedicate my life full time to making films and music videos. I was gassed up off the premier of BOMB but at the same time I was very disappointed creatively with a lot of things in that movie and wanted to forge a new direction for myself. I absolutely detested the idea of 3-act structure and the conventions of traditional feature filmmaking, based in large part because with BOMB I had set out to fit into those conventions, albeit in a unique way. In retrospect my distaste for the storytelling in BOMB and the stylistic flourishes (quick edits, colorful cinematography, melodramatic acting/writing) led me to make WEAPONS.

I remember very distinctly having a dream of the first scene in which Reggie (Nick Cannon) gets his head blown off. I woke up and wrote the scene down and then from there I decided to tell the story in reverse, trying to figure out how this heinous act of violence happened. It went in reverse order because as a filmmaker I was also learning and figuring it out on my own. It was like an adventure. A 7-day adventure (that was how long it took my to write the whole thing). I loved every minute of it. Also at the time I was reading a book by GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ called CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD. This book inspired WEAPONS greatly. The book is about a girl who loses her virginity to another boy right before her wedding day. The groom-to-be’s homeboys set out to kill this boy who deflowered her. The book opens by revealing in the first paragraph that the boy was brutally murdered. It is very unique from GARCIA MARQUEZ’ other work in that it is journalistic in its approach. And so is WEAPONS. The documentary-style came from that book.

The first draft of WEAPONS was actually called SNAKES & LADDERS. I don’t remember why but eventually I changed it to WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION and then just to WEAPONS for short which eventually caught on and stuck.

The first scene in the McDonald’s has deep meaning because when I was 16 I testified in a mob assault case that happened at a McDonald’s. A kid was beat with a crowbar in his head and I was standing a few feet away. I had gone to back-up some of my friends, one friend in particular. He and I intended to get involved in the fight, which was about 6 on 4 (our side having 6). But they had a couple of really big dudes. Just as the fight got underway the younger brother of one of my homeboys ran into the fight and beat the biggest kid in the head with a crowbar. We just froze. I was stunned. The kid’s head literally exploded. One moment there was no blood and the next minute a huge bucket of blood had flown off his head. A girl next to me started screaming and crying unbearably and then someone pulled out a gun and everyone ran scared who was involved in the fight, even the kid with the gun. I remember walking back to the McDonald’s minutes later to see if the kid who got beat down was still alive. Amazingly he was walking around holding his bloody head and repeating the same words over and over again, “where’s my pager, I dropped my pager, where’s my pager.” It was like he had short-circuited or something. The cops came and we bailed. Ironically I had to testify on behalf of my friend who had not thrown a punch. The cops had tried to charge him with mob assault and I testified that he had not even lifted a finger, which is true. It was a crazy situation. I later found out that the kid who got his head beat in had raped the girlfriend of the young boy with the crowbar. But then later I discovered maybe he didn’t rape her but just took her virginity while the boy was dating her. Then I discovered even later that maybe she was not a virgin all along and had just cheated on her boyfriend with this dude and that’s why dude got beat down. I don’t know, the truth is still foggy but what is undeniable is that a lot of shit like this goes down in McDonald’s in America.