As a fan of his work since “Friday,” I have to say it was cool to be able to ask him some questions during the roundtable interview. And for someone who has chosen to avoid making movies these past few years, he came across like he might actually be starting up his movie career again, as he said he wanted to make a stand up comedy movie and a film called “Mr. President.”

If you’re a fan of Chris you’ll definitely enjoy hearing what he had to say. And while I usually post a synopsis of a movie at the beginning of an interview, I think you all know what “Rush Hour” is about.

As always, you can either read the transcript below or listen to the interview as an MP3 by clicking here.

Finally, while I was able to also participate in roundtable interviews with Jackie Chan and Hiroyuki Sanada, I just don’t have the time this week to transcribe them. So if you’d like to hear them speak on the film and what other projects they have coming up, just click on their names for the MP3 of the interview.

“Rush Hour 3” opens this Friday at theaters everywhere.

Q: So Mr. Hughes, what does it feel like to come back?

Chris Tucker: You know it feels good.

Q: Why were you so picky and why did it take you so long?

You know, a lot of things just came my way that really didn’t spark my interest, so I decided to step back and travel the world.  And during my travels a lot of things I got involved in like in Africa, y’know, going on a lot of great trips because people knew who I was, because my celebrity and fame. Going on trips with Bono, Clinton, Colin Powell and went to Oprah Winfrey’s thing of course and it just made me realize that it’s a big world out there. Going to places in Uganda that doesn’t have clean water, because an animal died in the water supply and they need $50, $100 to build a pump to get fresh water. And little girls walking all day to get a bucket of water for their families, those things made me appreciate what we have here in America.

Y’know, I used to brush my teeth with Evian water and Figi water because I don’t want to use the sink water and I don’t do that anymore, because I have seen these things and going to Ethiopia, seeing a room full of infants, babies and some of them blind and most of ‘em was crying and I said, ‘What can I do? This problem is just to big.’ And I remember what one of the nuns said – it was two nuns took care of all these young babies and she used to work under Mother Theresa and she said, that Mother Theresa said, ‘Every raindrop creates an ocean.’  And I interpret what she meant by that, she meant that if everybody just took their part then this problem wouldn’t be so big.  We could solve a lot of these issues in the world. So, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been doing that long before it’s been popular in Hollywood. Now everybody is going.  George Clooney and Don Cheadle is doing stuff in Darfur which is great, because I feel like I get what Mother Theresa was saying, If you do your part, other people will see what you are doing and say, ‘What is he doing?’  And they will use their fame and their celebrity in a much more powerful way than just being famous and get a whole bunch of money for yourself.

Q: So, your priorities have changed?

Yeah, I didn’t know.  I just decided to step back and I think when you step back you open yourself up to a whole other world. And now I have these great friends like Clinton and the King of Jordan and all these great people who I would have never encountered if I had just been for myself.  If I wanted to make as much movies as I can and all the money in the world, I wouldn’t have this great life, because I found out that I get more out of people in Africa then I can give them.  They give me more than I give them. All I do is show up and they say, ‘Chris Tucker! Thank you for coming.  What are you doing all the way over here?’  And they show me life is special, because they don’t have much, they don’t have a lot, but they have a lot of love and they appreciate life because they don’t have a lot.  It’s hard to get a glass of water or food, so it makes me appreciate, when I give, I always receive and even in my movies if I can make someone laugh that’s giving and the same thing with me, when I watch a movie I want someone to make me forget about my problems.

Q: Do you need humor to deal with some of those tragic situations?

Definitely, definitely. Humor and love, because every time I see a kid smile because he’s seen my movie, because these movies travel all over the world, that makes me feel good inside. And I just think that’s natural healing and it makes them feel good because it’s like, ‘Look at this guy, I’ve only seen him on film and now he’s all the way over here.’ It’s like a real spiritual moment and comedy is the same way, because that’s a natural healing, if medicine can heal you then surely music when you hear something good, it changes your mood, then truly laughter and all that stuff is even a greater healing.

Q: So why now?

I didn’t know. I think the timing is great, because this summer all these part three’s are doing great and I guess the timing is just great. It wasn’t planned. But what convinced me was the script, it took awhile to get it together because we never planned on doing a part two or three. I said something in part two which was a blooper outtake that the studio heard and they said, ‘Well, let’s do another one’ because it made a lot of money. And they figured it would make some more money. I said something in an outtake. A guy fell out of a hotel in Vegas, the hotel building and I said, ‘That guy isn’t going to be in ‘Rush Hour 3’,’ and the studio heard it and then the fans heard it. ‘Maybe another Rush Hour is coming?’ So everybody thought we were doing another ‘Rush Hour,’ but it was never planned. So studio came and said, ‘Let’s do another ‘Rush Hour’!’ And I said, ‘O.K., what are we going to do? Where are we going to go? How are these characters going to get together?’  I was involved with this process because I said, ‘They gotta be believable how we get back together,’ because in the last movie we both went on to New York, but it’s been too long a time since New York, so we said that won’t be realistic because we both got older.

I got older and Jackie got older, so let’s have Jackie come back to the states, America and they bump into each other in the alley – that was our idea.  And also, where are we going to go?  And I said, ‘Let’s go to Paris!’ Because we will both be fish out of waters. They wanted to go to Hawaii and this, that and the other and I said, ‘What about Paris?’ So we all agreed on Paris, we all thought that would be the best place. So, it was a process of making our schedules work and also, Brett was doing ‘X-Men,’ Jackie was doing 200 other movies and I was off in Africa with no phone service, so it was all y’know, you got to get us all back together and this movie it takes you around the world and shows you these two guys from two different worlds, from two different cultures, get to know one another and laugh at each other and all these stereotypes of different cultures like the French and Americans and the Americans don’t like French, I think it’s funny because it’s so silly that talking about other people’s cultures and this and that and there is nothing wrong with being different, because of language barriers – that’s what makes it special. 

Q: Do you think humor and getting people to poke fun at it is a great way to get people to say, ‘Yeah, it is kind of stupid.’

Yes. Exactly, because the French to me are not arrogant, Americans think everyone should speak English and the French say that if you’re in France you better speak – I’m not speaking English! And who wouldn’t blame them? So, every culture, we all spar in our own different ways. So, I think it’s funny to see our faults. The French faults, the American faults and to laugh at those different things.

Q: One of the running gags has been how Carter constantly gets on Lee’s nerves.  If you met someone like Carter, how long would it be until you just went crazy? 

Carter is sort of a person who is kind of out there. He likes to have fun. He as used to working by himself, but now he’s used to working with Jackie because they became brothers and friends in this movie and that gave us room to be funny and more action, because Carter in this movie has more action scenes and he has a love interest with Noemie Lenoir, a French actress, and he speaks Chinese, so my character, he’s trying to speak Chinese, so I wanted all those things to try and make him evolve a little bit. Instead of being the same character in ‘Rush Hour 2,’ it just makes him a bit more exciting, but I would be able to get along with Carter.  Carter’s cool, because I always put a lot of me in these characters, a little extra, but I always put a little bit of me.

Q: Well, he also speaks Jewish now because in the outtakes of ‘Rush Hour 2’ you couldn’t get gefilte fish. Have you been practicing?

That’s right. Shalom.  Oh, yeah.  Yeah, Brett helps me out because he’s Jewish, so I practiced a little bit. I tell him sometimes I’m half Jewish too. My name is Chris Tuckenberg. (Laughs.)

Q: How has the relationship between you and Jackie evolved since the first movie?

It’s great, it’s great. Because the first movie we really didn’t understand each other. Just like Jackie may have told you, we met in a meeting, because we had to meet with him so he could meet me and agree to do ‘Rush Hour,’ because he didn’t know who I was, because I was an up and coming comedian and he knew who Eddie Murphy was, people like that, but we was talking the whole – well, I was talking to him the whole meeting, but he didn’t say anything.  And I didn’t know if he spoke English or not, so I asked Brett, ‘Does he speak English? Because he’s not talking.’  He said, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll learn English by the time we start filming.’ I said, ‘I can’t be funny if he don’t speak English.’  He said, ‘I’m just joking, he speaks English – that’s his culture. He’s just feeling you out.’  I said, ‘Alright, I’m in. Whatever.’ So, I took that to the movie, because I didn’t see him until we started filming after that, because he agreed and we went to the set and that’s how I came up with ‘Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?’ And I just played the movie like real life and that’s how our friendship is.  Just like the first movie, he was a fish out of water in America, second movie I’m fish out of water in Hong Kong and we actually went to Hong Kong for the first movie premiere and we did the karaoke in real life at night. I was doing Michael Jackson all night and Brett said, ‘Let’s put that in the movie if we do a part two.’ We put it in the movie and in this movie we’re both fish out of water’s in Europe and Paris and we were brothers in this movie. And of course we get in a little argument, but then we make up.  It’s like real life, I went and surprised him right before I signed on to do ‘Rush Hour 3.’ I just went to Hong Kong. Flew out there on my own, and I called him from the airport and said, ‘Jackie, I’m in Hong Kong.’ And he said, ‘You in Hong Kong! We hand out tonight! I come get you!’ (Laughs.) Y’know, it’s like we hung out and did all that. It’s just like the movie. 

Q: Are you going to be taking another long break from filming movies or is there another project out there you might do relatively soon?

No, I wanna work. I wanna work. And I don’t plan on taking a long break because there are a lot of things I wanna do. One of the things I wanna do is I wanna do a stand up comedy movie, because a lot of my fans haven’t seen my stand up and don’t know that I came from a stand up background. I wanna do like Eddie Murphy did with ‘Raw’ and ‘Richard Prior Live In Long Beach’ and ‘Live on the Sunset Strip’ and I just want to get that done, because every comedian wants to do that and get that out there. And also, I’ve got another project that I’ve been working on, that I’ve been working on for a couple of years now called ‘Mr. President.’ I’ll be playing the first black president in a comedy and since the election is coming up I thought it would be fun and I poke a lot of humor at a lot of things in that movie.

Q: What about ‘Rush Hour 4’?

‘Rush Hour 4’? If the fans want to see another one. If the fans want to see we always have to think about it and work on a script and make it even better than this one if we can do it. 

Q: Not in five years though.

Not in five years.  No, because Jackie told me, ‘I chased you for five, six years!  This time you call me!’ So, if this one does good, what I’ll do, I’ll just go write a script with a writer, I’ll come up with it real fast. I’ll just do it real fast, have it there, a matter of fact, I’m just gonna get a script done…

Q: You’re gonna do one yourself?

Just in case.  I’m gonna write it just in case and I’ll have a script all ready and get it to the studio.  As soon as they start talking about ‘Do you want to do ‘Rush Hour 4’?’ ‘What about that one?’  (Laughs.)