Fishburne In The Director's Chair

"Perception: Our day-in, day-out world is real."

This tag line from The Matrix, the cyber-thriller starring Laurence Fishburne and Keanu Reeves, may also be a launch point to understanding Fishburne's new film, Once in the Life, which he wrote and directed.

While the 1999 box office hit centered on the idea that all reality is merely a perception created by an evil cyber-intelligence, Once in the Life turns a light on the perceptions of life as seen by two brothers whose experiences lead them to conclude that the life they know on the streets is the only one they will ever know.

"My film is a small tragedy," says Fishburne, in an interview with Mark McEwen on the CBS News Early Show. "It takes place here in New York and it's populated with characters that I grew up with playing as an actor: lots of gangsters, sort of small-time crooks, thugs, junkies - people relegated to the edges of the story line."

"I guess I always had a desire to see them as the center (of the story), you know, being the actor that I am," explains Fishburne, who based the screenplay on Riff Raff, a play he wrote earlier on the same theme.

Fishburne says it's a story of "petty crooks...little guys who want to score big and want to feel like they are important, and want to feel like tough guys. Guys you think you know."

At one point in the movie, one of the brothers, cornered, brainstorms for a plan to get out of trouble but winds up expounding on his world view, concluding that there's no way out of "the life," the street existence of cons and scams which is his world.

"Once you get a taste, that's it. Once in the life, always in the life," he says.

Fishburne is no stranger to tragedy. He is mindful of the link between tragedy and comedy, best symbolized by the Greek masks representing the two aspects of theater, and says for most of his career, he's been the character with the sad face.

"That's what I've always done," says Fishburne. "If you look at my body of work, almost 30 years (worth) now, most of the work that I've done - if you watch it, at some point you'll feel really sad."

There are notable exceptions, such as his comic turn as Cowboy Curtis on Pee-wee's Playhouse and his role in Osmosis Jones, the big screen animation set to come out next year, with David Hyde Pierce, Chris Elliot, Ron Howard, Bill Murray, Chris Rock, William Shatner and Ben Stein. Fishburne will play a white blood cell who also happens to be a cop, in pursuit of an evil cold virus inside the human body where they both live.

Matrix fans can take heart, however - there are two more Matrix movies in the works.

Fishburne is "very excited" about that and appreciates the financial power and increased Hollywood clout he's gained as a result of the Matrix franchise.

"Having a hit like that has given me the opporunity to sit back and nurse Once in the Life, " says Fishburne. "It's taken two years to get it to the point where it's about to be released...The Matrix afforded me the opportunity to sit on it like a mother hen, ready to hatch. That's wonderful."

The title Once in the Life most definitely does not represent Fishburne's own life philosophy.

Constantly moving forward and expanding outward is more like it.

"I'm going to write some more things, direct some more things," says Fishburne. "The Matrix burned this Morpheus character (his role in the film) into the consciousness of a lot of people - younger people - which means that I sort of got a new audience to play to. And that's exciting."