LA (Top40 Charts) - The newest hardest working man in show business just started working a lot harder.
Wyclef Jean can add actor, movie producer, screenwriter and composer to his credits with both the upcoming release of Shottas and the work in progress biopic Passport.
Jean's friend Cess Silvera was behind the lens for Shottas, which takes its name from the Jamaican word for gangsters. The first-time director also wrote the screenplay. Jean describes the film as a "Caribbean version of a Reservoir Dogs." A true story, the movie follows the lives of two young men as they navigate between the criminal worlds of their native Kingston and Miami. "I felt connected to it [the script], being that I am from the Caribbean and the first thing I thought about was that, 'Wow, this could really be a cool soundtrack, a soundtrack that represents a mixture of the states and the Caribbean on one CD.'"
The film stars reggae artists Ky-mani Marley and Spragga Benz, who also contribute to the soundtrack. As for the film's score, Jean used the music as a way to temper some of the film's edgier moments. "Because tone of the movie is very street-like, I brought an acoustic feel on top of the whole violence to smooth it out a little." Jean first became involved in the film when Silvera approached him to work on the soundtrack, but a trip to watch some of the early dailies for inspiration turned into another job. Jean plays Richie Effs, who is, according to Silvera, "a Jekyl and Hyde character. One minute he's Mr. Nice Guy and the next minute he could be the devil in a blue dress, so after checking everybody that I know I was like, 'Who could pull this off better than Wyclef?'" The movie, expected to hit theaters next summer, will be Jean's first major motion picture role -- he played the fortune-teller in MTV's production of Carmen: A Hip-Hopera, which starred Destiny's Child's Beyonce Knowles. And while Jean views acting as a natural extension of his already "theatrical" onstage performances, he was humbled after viewing the movie's early footage. "I seen myself," he says. "I be laughing though. I don't take it serious. It's just like when I was a kid - I'm being stupid."
Jean will be seeing a lot more of himself onscreen with Passport, a self-penned, semi-autobiographical flick he likens to Purple Rain. The story is based on Jean and his friend, a fellow Haitian native. "The movie is going to be sort of like coming from the Caribbean and trying to make it in America," Jean says. "We live two different lifestyles, but we're from the same country. I was more into the music and he was into the world of controlling the street. So it's a good story because it's got shoot 'em up, bang-bang [action], music, but at the end of the day it's a real story on two kids that survived through the wrath of the ghetto, which is something that needs to be seen." Wyclef will provide all the music and include some of the early songs he wrote when he was first starting out.
But, according to Jean, laying it all out in film is not without peril. "There's stuff that you don't want to get into," he says, "but it's something that I want everybody to see so it's probably going to be PG-13- or R-rated most likely, but it's just the truth."
