Tyler Perrys Meet The Browns Cast Interview

MoviesOnline caught up with Tyler Perry, Reuben Cannon and Angela Bassett at the Los Angeles press day for their new movie, “Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns.”

Based on the popular stage production of the same name, “Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns” is a funny, moving, romantic drama about the power of love, the joys of family, and the possibility of second chances.

A single mother living in inner city Chicago, Brenda (Bassett) has been struggling for years to make ends meet and keep her three kids off the street. But when she’s laid off with no warning, she starts losing hope for the first time – until a letter arrives announcing the death of a father she’s never met. Desperate for any kind of help, Brenda takes her family to Georgia for the funeral. But nothing could have prepared her for the Browns, her father’s fun-loving, crass Southern clan. In a small-town world full of long afternoons and country fairs, Brenda struggles to get to know the family she never knew existed…and finds a brand new romance that just might change her life.

The movie is produced, written and directed by Tyler Perry and produced by Reuben Cannon and also stars Rick Fox, Sofia Vergara, David Mann, Tamela Mann, Lance Gross, and Jenifer Lewis. It features a return to the big screen by Perry’s beloved comic creation, the indomitable and outrageous Southern matriarch Madea.

Here’s what Tyler Perry, Reuben Cannon and Angela Bassett had to tell us:

MoviesOnline: We love Madea. Where was Madea in this movie? Was that a conscious decision of yours to only have her in one scene? Or was that a studio decision?

TYLER PERRY: Madea showing up for that one scene is just a set up for “Madea Goes to Jail.” I wanted to set it up in this movie because I’ve already written it and we start shooting it in about two months. I just wanted to tease the audience just to let them know that it was coming. That’s all that was about. It’s a little marketing thing I was doing. That’s where it came from.

MoviesOnline: Where is it going to be filmed?

TYLER PERRY: “Madea Goes to Jail” will be filmed in Atlanta.

MoviesOnline: Angela, you portray such strong women in a lot of your roles. How has your life been reflected in some of your roles?

ANGELA BASSETT: Well I think any time, as Tyler has said before, you have a dream and you see it come true, it’s a victory and that’s what I look for and that’s what I appreciate in those characters. They’ve had a dream or they have obstacles that they have to overcome as a black woman. If they survive it, and preferably they do, it’s a victory just to live life and get through life.

MoviesOnline: What was the key factor that made you choose this role?

ANGELA BASSETT: My mama and I, we actually sat and watched “Madea Goes to Jail” and “The Family Reunion.” We had those videos and we watched them back to back and just bowled over and enjoyed ourselves together and enjoyed what we were seeing. Then I had the opportunity to see “Madea Goes to Jail” and to see Tyler on stage and the whole cast and crew and then of course it came out on film with “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” and as I told someone (turns to Tyler Perry), I was really jealous of Kimberly Elise [laughs] and I was like “How come I didn’t hear about that?” But after “Madea Goes to Jail” I met Tyler back stage and he said, “I want to work with you one day.” And I thought “Oh, I hope he really means that and that’s gonna happen one day soon” and it did -- maybe about two years later.

TYLER PERRY: That blew my mind that she wanted to work with me. You see people and you know their work. I’m silly and look at her, she went to Yale. [Laughs] For her to say yes, it meant the world to me.

MoviesOnline: Tyler, you’ve obviously found the formula for success. If you decide to go outside the genre that you’re in right now, do you think you’ll get a lot of resistance from the studio and the naysayers?

TYLER PERRY: Well the naysayers are going to be the naysayers and I’m going to let them keep naying and saying, but as far as the studio, I have a ton of support from working with Lionsgate. It’s been a great marriage between us. I work with them on a project by project basis. I don’t work in fear. I don’t worry about what’s the next movie. Whatever comes to me is the area I move in. If you look at “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” and “Madea’s Family Reunion” and this movie, it’s more of a Madea kind of brand that’s a broad comedy with drama. But if you look at “Daddy’s Little Girls” and “Why Did I Get Married” and the movie I’m working on right now, “The Family That Preys” with Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard, it’s a different kind of brand. There are two different brands of work and both of them are going in different directions. So I’ll spread out and do some other things. I’ve got, of course, “Jazz Man” (“A Jazz Man’s Blues”) with me playing a jazz singer in 1947 and a holocaust survivor. I just was inspired by Barack and Michelle Obama to write a new script that is phenomenal that either I’m going to do with someone or I was thinking Angela could do with Denzel (Washington) so we’ll see what happens.

MoviesOnline: What is the key to being a good director?

TYLER PERRY: I hire people who are capable of bringing it on their own. The key to being a good director -- and I think I’m decent, I don’t think I’m great -- but the key to being a decent one is to hire actors who know what they’re doing and they always make you look good.

MoviesOnline: Can you both talk about the black family dynamic in relation to your own lives?

ANGELA BASSETT: Well there is family or extended family because you know I grew up with a single parent and my mother did the best that she could, but sometimes her eyes were off me for quite a number of hours of the day, so that was the extended family, the neighborhood, and it was okay for the assistant principal to look after you or the teachers would look after you or the choir director of the church to look after you. She caught me once hitchhiking. It was just like a new thing when they bused us across town. It was like “Oh, that’s what you do to get home or to get back?” Save that money and put it somewhere else. So if it weren’t for extended family or the community as family looking out for me, I don’t think I’d be sitting here because they had high expectations of me and they saw potential in me that I was too young and green and dumb to see or know that it was even there.

TYLER PERRY: What I try to do with my work is I always try to bring the generations together because I’ve been so blessed to have so many different generations watching and paying attention to the film so I always try to bring that kind of wisdom because that kind of wisdom you cannot buy into what we’re doing with the younger people and everything and it works really well, especially in this film.

MoviesOnline: A lot is made of the so-called black/brown divide when many of us know just the opposite, that blacks and browns do have a common thread. I was wondering if you made a conscious effort about having a brown woman as a best friend to a black woman?

TYLER PERRY: You know I didn’t give that any thought. I’ve never given that any thought. The great thing about what I’ve been able to accomplish here is that I don’t necessarily see color lines, especially within our own race. I don’t see light skin, dark skin. I don’t see weight. I mean, can you do the job? Let’s do the job. Even when “House of Payne” started, I was getting all of this “Why does the mother look like this and why does the father look like this and why does the son look like this?” And you know when I listened to all of that crap, it’s so much foolishness within our own culture that I try to ignore it. I would hate for people to come to the movie and even go in that direction because that’s so not the intent.

MoviesOnline: For this generation and for some of the kids who have gone astray, what advice would you give them?

TYLER PERRY: Well it was different for me because my mother was trying to protect me from my father so she would take me everywhere with her. She would take me to the salons. I know more about Lane Bryant than any man. And I would hear all of these stories but it really helped me in my writing to be able to speak and relate to women and understand a lot of the things that they go through. My mother was 25 when she had me so around this time she’s about 35 or 40 but now mothers are a lot younger, they’re working harder, like this character Angela plays. She’s really just trying to feed her family so there’s not a whole lot of support there for younger people these days. What eventually I would love to happen is besides just being able to do a movie or a play or something that they can watch is to even get into it with my Tyler Perry Foundation Community Centers that teach acting to give them something to do, to give them something to aspire [to] and inspire them rather than just having it be about this.

MoviesOnline: When inspired the character of Madea?

TYLER PERRY: In 1999, I did “I Know I’ve Been Changed,” my first play and I was doing the second play and that’s when I met David and Tamela Mann. I’d seen Eddie Murphy do “The Klumps” and I said “Okay. I had done my old man and he was very successful and this time I’m going to try a woman.” I never forget telling a couple folks who were like “Are you crazy?” So the first night in Chicago, somebody didn’t show, and I’m putting on the costume for the first time and I looked at myself in the mirror and I’m like “What the hell are you thinking?” We walked out on stage scared to death. I was shaking and it worked. It didn’t work right away. It took us a month or two to really get into it and for stuff to work. And I had only intended to do it that one show and be done with it. It was always gonna be the Madea character but since the other person wasn’t there, the character really had to go out front even further. My Aunt Mayola, she’s Madea.
Madea is the PG version of her. I can’t say the stuff she says.

MoviesOnline: Obviously you’re crossing demographic lines, but do you get direct feedback from Southern families

TYLER PERRY: Well, for me, what I’ve tried to do with these stories is I’ve always thought that they were universal stories even though my audience in the beginning was predominantly African American. I saw it on stage on my last tour, it started to change. I saw the racial make-up of the audience. The most amazing thing was to stand on stage at the end of the night and see every generation represented and see all races represented and it just let me know to stay right where you are and continue to tell these stories because they are universal and people talk about crossover. “What are you going to do to cross over?” I don’t think there’s a line there. I think if you can relate to it, you can relate to it. That’s what I’m finding.

MoviesOnline: Angela, how do you juggle your kids compared to your character in the movie? How do you find time to be with them?

ANGELA BASSETT: I try to work it out. I’m still working with it every day. Some days are better than others. Like today, I won’t see them at all today, but I saw them yesterday and I’ll make up for it tomorrow. Like the movie, she loved the kids.

TYLER PERRY: One day at a time. They (the cast) were on the road for the majority of the time. They like their children. That’s the thing.

MoviesOnline: Reuben, you are producing an amazing amount of content, can you describe what you do to keep this enterprise going at breakneck speed?

REUBEN CANNON: I really can’t. We would have to have our calendar which would cover the walls of this entire room to really lay out current activity and future activity. Just to give you a perspective, it normally takes a year to do 20 episodes of a half-hour sitcom and we completed 100 in 11 months and that was while Lance (Gross) was doing double duty. Lance was doing “House of Payne” in the morning and we’d do “Meet the Browns” at night and Tyler was directing. Tyler directed both “Meet the Browns” and “Why Did I Get Married” while we were doing “House of Payne.”

MoviesOnline: In that process, you have to keep everything going.

REUBEN CANNON: That’s right. I’m trying to stay awake.

TYLER PERRY: [Laughs] In that process, he’s driving me crazy. I said, “Okay, I’m going to schedule a vacation this month.” “No! No! We gotta do this!”

REUBEN CANNON: There’s a different atmosphere in Hollywood versus Atlanta and the best way to illustrate that is I tell people that in the 4 years that I’ve been living in Atlanta, I’ve only gone outside the studio for lunch once. And that’s because here lunch is industry. “Let’s do lunch, let’s take lunch.” There’s no one to try to impress by doing lunch in Atlanta because we’re all in the studio. And the folks that we work with understand that. To refer to it as work is not to describe the joy and fun we have and it starts with Tyler – the atmosphere and how we have fun and do what we’re called to do.

MoviesOnline: Is there a commitment to do anything in New Orleans at this time?

TYLER PERRY: I am actually. We’re doing “The Family That Preys” right now and I’m going to New Orleans. I’m very disappointed with a lot of things that have happened down there and I’m not interested in pumping money into an economy that is completely ignoring all of those people who are still struggling, still living in FEMA trailers. You know, I built 20 houses in Baton Rouge because I didn’t want to build them in the city. There’s still no organization. Nobody has a plan. The taxes have gone [up]. My parents’ house is there and she (his mother) paid about $176 in taxes three years ago. It’s up to like $2,800 dollars now and these people I know cannot afford this. I think they’re trying to drive them out of the city. And I’m really, really annoyed by that. There were about 200 people that were living across the street from the City Hall. They were living in tents put up on the grounds, and they put a fence around City Hall. All those people now live under a bridge right on the outskirts of the French Quarter. So they’re telling everybody “Come back to the city, it’s great, it’s wonderful.” I understand that the money is needed to keep the city going but at the same time there are tons of people who are still in need and there’s all of this talk about the Road Home money where each family was supposed to get – don’t quote me on this, but I think it’s about $150,000 if they lost – to replace. None of that money has been seen. Nobody has seen any of it and a lot of people are still struggling and I’m very frustrated with it. So I am going down there for a day to shoot, but rather than going down there to spend a lot of time there, I just don’t feel that it’s fair to the real people of the city that they’re trying to push out and ignore.

MoviesOnline: Tyler, can you elaborate a little bit more on the Obama project you were talking about?

TYLER PERRY: I’m writing it right now. I’ve told Reuben about it. It’s just an amazing story. I was just watching him in the debate with Hillary and meeting him and Michelle and having dinner with them. They just inspired this amazing story. It’s a love story with a little political twist but it’s mostly about…it’s called “For the Love of You” and it’s about his love for his woman. It’s going to be amazing. If they won’t do it, then I’ll have to do it with somebody.

MoviesOnline: On the cinematography, Sandi Sissel did a great job and you have such diverse areas and locations, how did you base the decision to hire her because a lot of her prior work doesn’t seem to give an inkling as to what she really came through with on your project?

TYLER PERRY: For me, I have a team that I work with that I’m committed to. Whoever I bring to the party, that’s who I dance with. My key people from make-up, wardrobe, hair, producers, they’re all in place and Toyomichi Kurita was my first choice who did “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” “Madea’s Family Reunion,” “Daddy’s Little Girls,” “Why Did I Get Married.” He wasn’t available so we went out, we had to go out and look and seeing her reel, I said, “This is somebody that I think would be really great.” And it was a great experience working with her. She gave a great result.

MoviesOnline: What’s your recipe for success?

TYLER PERRY: Pray. Pray. Talk to God all the time. The biggest thing is just rise above the foolishness. You know, keep your focus, keep your head above all of the foolishness. Don’t believe the hype. I don’t care how many number ones, I don’t care how much they say you’re great, don’t believe it. Just stay in your lane and do what you’re supposed to do. Don’t believe it.

MoviesOnline: Reuben, how do you feel Tyler Perry has evolved as a director over the years?

REUBEN CANNON: Well, take a look at Tyler’s first film, “Madea’s Family Reunion,” which by the way is our most successful film to date, and you look at the work in “Why Did I Get Married” and you can see an emerging director, a very talented director. Tyler has the luxury of having a film in his hand prior to it being made, whether it’s based on his play or on his screenplay. But even the film we’re currently making is also uniquely different just based on the choices and camerawork. And Tyler challenges himself. We’re looking at digital now as a possible means of filming. Last night he fell in love with a digital camera but we’re going to see if we can … I still love film but we’re constantly looking for new ways to break through technologically to tell our stories.

MoviesOnline: How long did it take you to shoot this film?

TYLER PERRY: 26 days. All of the films, none of them have been longer than 30 days. It’s a very tight schedule. It’s a very tight budget and it works. I work with people, again, my core team, they know the rhythm. They know it’s very fast. We work at breakneck speed. And then I hire actors who get it, who I don’t have to spend 20 hours with saying “Okay, let’s try it again, let’s try it again.” I’m a two take guy. If I’m doing three, something’s wrong or it’s really, really great. So we stick to a time and a budget.

“Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns” opens in theaters on March 21st.