Representing the home team
(Credit: Warner Bros./WEA)
A longtime pal of DJ Shadow, Cut has collaborated with the abstract hip-hop guru on the highly touted audio-visual projects “Brainfreeze” (2000) and “Product Placement” (2004), on which the duo creatively mix old-school 45s. They’re currently working together again on the "Hard Sell” tour, with plans for a tour-inspired album and DVD in the works.
A native of Los Angeles, Cut recently had his first big silver-screen moment—with a pregnant teenager, no less.
You made a surprise cameo in “Juno” as a chemistry teacher. How did that happen?
The director [Jason Reitman], well, we became friends when he asked me to do some scoring for some vignette online. That was right when he got the screenplay for “Juno,” and then when he came to my show he asked, “Do you want to be in it?” He has a funny sense of humor, and he thought it would be cool for insiders if I was the chemistry teacher. I get a lot of texts or e-mails about it every day from all around the country, people saying, “Oh my god, I was with my mom and you were on the big screen!”
Are you surprised at how big the film has become?
“Thank You For Smoking,” his last movie, was pretty big as far as indie film, and so I thought it was gonna be another one of those. I thought it was gonna do well even before I saw it, and the buzz was pretty good. When I saw it at the BFI film festival, I loved it, and I think my family is like, “Thank god you’re not a banker!”
It seems like it’ll get a big cult following once it reaches DVD too.
Yeah—they want to put one of my songs on the DVD. Not sure how that will work. We shot a little music video at the end of the shoot, and I’m in it as well.
Did it give you any kind of a bug for film?
Yeah, I totally want to do more, and not do any music. Because it’s so much fun, man! [Laughs] I don’t get any messages from anyone when I put out music, but when I’m in four seconds in a movie, it’s like, “Holy shit!” I’m trying to find a way to hint to [Reitman] that I’m available if he wants me to do any more movies. Maybe I can play the same chemistry teacher in a different film!
What can people expect with the "Hard Sell” project? The DVD was filmed live at the Hollywood Bowl, right?
Yes, we were asked to headline at the Hollywood Bowl last summer, and we wanted to do something brand-new for it. We looked at “Brainfreeze” and “Product Placement” and thought, what haven’t we done yet? We tried to do as much stuff as possible that we’ve never done before. We have eight turntables instead of four, we use loop pedals and portable turntables. It’s a circus!
We figured that since it was for the Hollywood Bowl, it needed to be bigger as far as the real estate we took up on stage. And then there was the whole visual counterpart. Usually we just have backdrops and wallpaper for visuals, but outside of that we had really specific animation to go along with the music we’re playing; we had someone perform them live with us instead of using a CD or DVD. And we had 17 cameras, including robot cameras that were projected on stage. As a production, it was just out of control. We dressed up in designer suits and everything was crazy.
Musically, we went to like doo-wop and New Wave, and maybe at the last minute we decided to put some funk in there. We do hip-hop, but we kind of remake hip-hop with the loop pedals. We do a whole De La Soul section, recreating “Plug Tunin’,” “Jenifa,” “Potholes in My Lawn” and stuff like that.
When we initially rehearsed for the Hollywood Bowl, we rehearsed an hour-and-a-half show, and we couldn’t use a lot of it because of time constraints. The show that we’re doing now on this tour is that hour and a half, so it’s a little bit different. Things are expanded and we go into different areas.
See the amazing "Hard Sell" show with Chemist and Shadow at the Wiltern Feb. 15
Heads in the O.C. can see the show at House of Blues in Anaheim on Valentine's Day
Add a comment