Dr. Dre was the first guest on Listen & Laugh, the new podcast from Ice Cube and Mike Epps. During his appearance, a discussion on musical biopics led them to reflect on Straight Outta Compton, the 2015 film fictionalizing the rise of N.W.A. alongside Eazy-E, MC Ren, and DJ Yella.
Cube and Dre co-produced it. At around the 59-minute mark of the YouTube video below, they discussed how tough it was to make it work, and how fans still criticize it to this day.
"You know how hard it is to make a biopic, though," the Listen & Laugh cohost shared. "We still got people complaining about the one we made, not knowing how hard it is to shove ten years into two hours. With four different people, and all the fighting we had to do with the movie company... They didn't want Ren to have lines, they didn't want Yella to have lines. We was like, 'You can't put them in the movie as just background.'"
"Who are you? You weren't even there," Listen & Laugh's guest added, directed to the film executives.
"These are people who've made a lot of movies, and understand there's no way you can follow five characters and tell everybody's backstory," Cube went on. "Sometimes, if you can't tell their backstory, do people really care? We're N.W.A., people care about everybody in the group. People don't understand all the grappling you got to do behind the scenes just to make the kind of movie that it needs to be."
Ice Cube & Dr. Dre On Straight Outta Compton
"I really like the way Universal handled us," Dre chimed in. "Donna Langley specifically. She was amazing, she let us do our f***ing thing... You have to understand, especially as a movie executive, what you don't know."
"She understood that we was super passionate about this story," Cube replied. "We couldn't get it wrong... It's a thousand ways to get a movie like this wrong, and only a few ways to get it right."
Dre went on to tell a story about an executive giving a suggestion for a scene in the film that involved the AI proponent, which made Dre feel odd because he was right there to give his own perspective.
Elsewhere during their conversation, Ice Cube and Dr. Dre debated over hip-hop's best producer and talked about other career highlights.
Per a Complex interview, Cube isn't ruling out a potential N.W.A. reunion that would honor the late Eazy-E. "I don't know. It has to come together organically," he revealed. "And it's all about Dr. Dre, where his head is, you know? If he feel like doing it, we do it. If he don't, we don't. Nobody wants a N.W.A. song without Dr. Dre's production. Who knows? I would love to get together with them dudes. It ain't hard to find me on the microphone. I mean, I'm easy to find."
