Rapper Cube wrestles with Anaconda, his own film and his music career

"I pick my movies," says Cube, who was born and raised O'Shea Jackson in Los Angeles's South Central neighborhood. "I'm real selective." The selection of Anaconda gave him pause, however, during the five weeks of shooting on location in the Amazon River basin of Brazil.

"The mutiny!" Cube exclaims, "yeah, oh man!"

Cube, Lopez and several others were frustrated with being so cut off from society, civilization and home (in Cube's case, a wife and three kids in Encino). "It's like being somewhere you can't leave," Cube remembers. "Yeah, some of the young actors were getting real testy, you know."

The place had its charms to the devoted Californian. "Brazil's a beautiful place, sunsets, toucans flying over your head. That part of nature was cool. But the fact was you couldn't leave, you couldn't go home, and I had so much business going on here. Trying to get through on the phone lines, some days you might get through, some days you might not. Things like that just made it so hard. And the conditions doing the movie! An action adventure movie!"

One scene called for Cube to be wrapped up in the coils of a multi-ton animatronic anaconda. "It's cool," says Cube, not entirely convinced, "because after screaming and holding your breath so long you really start to get dizzy, they squeeze the s... out of you 'til you're just about to throw up. And everybody talks about acting as imaginary, ha!"

Nevertheless, the mutiny died down quickly. Jon Voight's example showed the way. "Jon Voight loved it. He didn't care if we spent nine months at that location." Cube finally figured out: "You're doing a movie, you're getting paid a lot of money, so stop complaining, you know what I mean?"

Cube's movie career, launched by director John Singleton in Boyz N The Hood, is now expanding again, even though he has vowed to maintain his solo rap career ( "I never stop with music -- it's a constant"). Cube wrote his own script and is now directing the low-budget comedic drama The Player's Club, set in an Atlanta strip joint.

"I think I'm good with actors. I'm in a low-budget situation and I think I'm handling that well. With the kind of movie we're doing, we need much more than (the $7 million budgeted), but that's where we're at. It's war every day. Yet, in the midst of all that, we're still getting good footage," Cube says. "I'm proud of it."