Gno Brand : Blog

Bet you didn’t know Brett Ratner used to direct rap videos as an up-and-coming director? This article by Complex is by far the most entertaining shit I’ve read all week. Brett talks about his days directing videos for Public Enemy, Redman, Wu-Tang, Heavy D, etc.

Here were some of my favorite bits:

“The best part of the Redman story is, three o’clock in the morning, he says, ‘I want a white bitch to roll up and buy some drugs for me.’ This is when you could just do hardcore videos, and I’m like ‘You wanna portray yourself as dealing drugs?’ ‘Yeah, man, that’s real, man!’ The only problem is, we ain’t gonna find a white bitch in the middle of the night in the street. There was no women on my crew, so Redman goes, ‘What about that white bitch?’ And I said, ‘That’s my mom!’ He goes, ‘Well use that hoe! Put that hoe in the video’ So, my mom is in the Redman video, at the end of the video, when the car pulls up, buying drugs from Redman.”

“So three days into the edit, I get a call that Ghost had had been kicked out of like eleven hotels, and I’m like, ‘Why were you kicked out?’ He’s like, ‘I don’t know man, I got fucked up, and I just start breaking shit. Can you come get me? I got no place to stay.’ So I let him stay at my house. Suddenly my phone rings, and it’s Steve Rifkind, ‘Whats going on?’ I go, ‘Nothing, I’m just bringing Ghost over my house ’cause he got kicked out of the hotel.’ Then there’s silence on the other end of the phone. I say, ‘Whats wrong?’ He goes, ‘I gotta call you back.’ Five days later, he calls me up and goes, ‘Are you okay? Oh my God, you scared the shit outta me, man. How can you let this guy stay at your house? I don’t even let these guys know where I live!’ I go, ‘What do you mean? He’s the nicest guy in the world.’ He goes, ‘You don’t know what Ghostface has? He hallucinates, he hears voices like kill your mom, kill your mom. He has to be medicated because he has homicidal thoughts.’ So a month goes by, and I would edit all day, and Ghost would just chill at my house until we finished. A month later, I’m with my girlfriend in the backyard, and the cat starts going fucking crazy and starts digging into the dirt. We dig up a bucket of fried chicken. Ghost buried a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken in the backyard. How fuckin’ freaky is that?”