San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘ Soul’ star Jamie Foxx gets back to his first passion: music.
Jamie Foxx says he had a lot of fun making “Soul,” in which he portrays Joe, a jazz musician straddling the point between life and death. And it’s not just because Joe happens to be the first Black lead character in a Pixar film. For the first time in years, Foxx is in a film that’s about his first love, music.
“That’s what I came out here to do,” said Foxx, referring to Hollywood. “So I know my grandmother, who’s looking down, would be proud.”
His enthusiasm was infectious, his fellow collaborators said during a video chat with the media.
Said codirector and cowriter Pete Docter: “We had a lot of scenes where Joe talks about the power of music and the importance of music. And my hair stood on end when I hear Jamie talking about it, because I know he believes it so fully. It was just so truthful and authentic.”
Added producer Dana Murray: “On Stage B on the Disney lot, there was a grand piano, it was all covered. He’d step back there and uncover it and serenade us on every break. That was the best.”
Codirector and cowriter Kemp Powers’ lasting memory? “You’d always hear him coming, like Batman. Whatever car he happened to be driving probably had like 900 horsepower. ’ Cause you’d hear him three blocks away. You expected him to drive through the wall.”
Foxx laughed uproariously at the stories.
“I’m forever young. Even my daughter is like, ‘ You’re never going to grow up.’ ”
Foxx is 52 and has been fabulously successful for three decades. Yet he knew how to play Joe, who is close to that age but never experienced true success. An accident sends Joe’s soul to the afterlife, and he must find a way to get back to his body and fulfill what he feels is his destiny.
Problem is: Joe doesn’t truly know how to appreciate life. Until he does, he won’t know his true purpose and won’t get back to his body.
“There are cats you probably don’t even know, people from my hometown, these guys who would just play, didn’t even realize they could actually go somewhere and get paid for it,” said Foxx, who grew up in smalltown Terrell, Texas, near Dallas. “Later I was in college at ( United States) International University on a classical piano scholarship. There was a guy named Harvey Fuqua that actually discovered me. He was Marvin Gaye’s manager.
“Our first conversation was about jazz, all of these guys, from Charlie Parker to Miles ( Davis) that he actually had the opportunity to hang out with, and we talked about how great jazz was. And they were talking about, how masterful must you be to rise to the top of the jazz world?”
Foxx was determined not to waste any opportunity, and eventually, his path to success was through his comedy and acting, not music, although he releases the occasional album. He brought his indepth knowledge to his role as R& B singer and musician Ray Charles in “Ray,” for which he won an Oscar, and said getting to know Charles further deepened his love of music.
But he said he has always felt like a bit of a wannabe in the music world. He hangs out with famous musicians but knows he won’t reach their heights, which helped him relate to Joe. He recalled a party he threw in the 1990s, around the time of “The Jamie Foxx
Show” on the WB.
“I had Kanye West at my house — when he was just the first Kanye — and there’s Puff ( Daddy), a young JayZ — nobody even knew who JayZ was. He was standing by the wall on the party, I said, ‘ What’s up?’ He said, ‘ Nice party, it’s crazy,’ ” Foxx said. “And there was a young guy standing in my garage. I said, ‘ Who are you?’ and he said ‘ My name is Pharrell’ ” Williams.
Later, Foxx says he helped discover Ed Sheeran.
“He stayed on my couch for six weeks,” Foxx said. “Here in L. A., I took him to an allBlack night. I said, ‘ Let’s see if he’s really good.’ So 800 Black people, and I call his name and he comes up and people are like, ‘ What’s going on?’ One of my boys, he’s a great guitar player, he’s played with Sting and Mariah Carey, and he’s like ‘ C’mon, you know how the room is, man, you ain’t disrespectin’ the room, man?’
“And it was like right out of a movie: ‘ Let’s just see what the kid’s got.’ And he pulled out a ukulele and within 12 minutes, standing ovation. The rest is history.”
Powers interjected, “When you say ‘ Ed Sheeran on Jamie Foxx’s couch,’ that makes it seem like he’s roughing it. Have people seen Jamie Foxx’s couch? That couch can hold like, 10 people.” Foxx laughs.
“It has withstood a lot of parties, so yeah, it’s a durable couch.”
Foxx, though, turns serious for a moment and says he’s glad “Soul” will come out at a time when people might need an uplifting story about life. He will forever tie the memory of the film with his sister, DeOndra Dixon, who died Oct. 29 at age 36.
Dixon had Down syndrome and was an ambassador for the Global Down Syndrome Foundation. Foxx fans might recall she had a memorable solo dance in the music video of his hit song “Blame It ( On the Alcohol)” in 2008.
She lived with Foxx, and they were able to watch “Soul” together before her death, its message of living a full and meaningful life resonating.
“The one thing about my sister is she lived every single moment to the hilt,” Foxx said. “I have a phrase: The world has been here however many billions and billions of years, so 70, 80, 100 years — it’s a blink of an eye. So I say to everybody: ‘ Don’t waste your blink.’ Live your life.”
past, so that there’s an understanding of what we’ve been through and who we are at the core, but at the same time trying to blow that up a little bit.”
His corporate leadership — his official title is chief creative officer — has been praised by parent company Disney, and Docter says he works well with new Disney CEO Bob Chapek, who was promoted from within to succeed longtime CEO Bob Iger in February ( Iger had been CEO since Disney acquired Pixar in 2006). But like Disney, Pixar is grappling with both the threat and the opportunities that streaming presents as the pandemic has forced an uncertain future on movie theaters.
Disney+, despite attracting 86.8 million subscribers worldwide in barely more than a year of existence, is not expected to reach profitability until 2024 or later, according to industry analysts, and during a presentation to investors on Dec. 10, Chapek said Disney will spend $ 8 billion to $ 9 billion on Disney+ content alone in fiscal 2024.
“It’s obviously a big concern, because a lot of the way we structure our business is built around the revenue stream we get from releasing these films theatrically,” Docter said. “I like to think that though it may slow, there will still be a big appetite for a communal experience about going to watch a movie together, and the thing I can point to as proof is that in countries where they did open up, people flocked back. So I think there’s still a hunger to experience a movie or a story together with other people.”
Docter said during the Dec. 10 presentation that the exclusive Disney+ content would include two Pixargenerated series: “Dug Days,” an “Up” spinoff that will premiere in fall 2021; and a “Cars” spinoff that will debut in 2022.
However, Docter also said theatrical features remain a focus, and announced
Pixar chief Pete Docter
an origin film based on “Toy Story” character Buzz Lightyear, who will be voiced by Chris Evans. “Lightyear” is scheduled to be released in the summer of 2022, after “Turning Red” is released in the spring.
“For us, it’s about balance,” Chapek said. “It’s about following the consumer as they make that transition. And so part of why we did the reorganization that we did is to ensure that we’ve got an organization that’s flexible to read all the cues, whether it’s the cessation of COVID or it’s changing consumer behavior, so that we can very nimbly make decisions as we go forward.”
Given its importance to Pixar’s canon, Docter hopes for an eventual theatrical release for “Soul,” even if it’s a small one. He called his collaboration with Powers “really a great pairing,” and thinks he and the rest of the team deserve it. It would bring the project back full circle in a way Docter couldn’t have predicted when he first conceived of the project more than five years ago.
“At the very beginning it was a very personal story of trying to, for myself, figure this out: What are we going through? What’s the world about? What am I supposed to be doing with my life?”
Five years later, he, and Pixar, have some answers.
“I like to think that though it may slow, there will still be a big appetite for a communal experience about going to watch a movie together.”