John Singleton accuses Hollywood of ignoring black directors

The Oscar-nominated director of Boyz N the Hood, John Singleton, has accused Hollywood of failing to help black film-makers make their way in the industry.

Speaking to students at Loyola Marymount university in LA as part of The Hollywood Masters interview series, 46-year-old Singleton said studios were happy to cover stories with an African American theme but did not see why they should find black directors to take charge of them. “They want black people [to be] what they want them to be. And nobody is man enough to go and say that,” he said. “They want black people to be who they want them to be, as opposed to what they are. The black films now — so-called black films now — they’re great. They’re great films. But they’re just product.

“They’re not moving the bar forward creatively … When you try to make it homogenised, when you try to make it appeal to everybody, then you don’t have anything that’s special.”

Singleton, who became the youngest ever best director Oscar nominee for 1991’s Boyz N The Hood, said modern Hollywood liberals were not the same as those who helped him get his foot on the ladder. “They feel that they’re not racist,” he said. “They grew up with hip-hop, so [they] can’t be racist. ‘I like Jay Z, but that don’t mean I got to give you a job.’”

Singleton recalled the struggle made by a former Columbia Pictures producer to get that debut – a stark urban drama starring Ice Cube, Cuba Gooding Jr, Morris Chestnut and Laurence Fishburne – into cinemas when he was just 24. “Stephanie Allain kicked and screamed to get Boyz N The Hood made,” he said. “Those people don’t exist any more, whether they’re black, white or whatever.”

The film-maker is set to direct a high-profile biopic of the rapper Tupac Shakur for his next feature. He said the hip-hop icon’s death in 1996 had profoundly affected his attitude towards life.

“It set my life on a whole other trajectory,” Singleton told his audience. “I went and left the country for about a month. I just couldn’t cope … I felt, the danger ain’t sexy any more. I got to change it up, not necessarily just as a film-maker, but just as a person, and kind of grow up.”