Chris Rock must be really successful now because the tabloids have turned to reporting on him. No one ever speculated on his marriage when he was making CB4 and Bad Company. It's perfect PR for his latest movie, I Think I Love My Wife. Rock plays a bored husband who gets tempted by a long lost hottie friend (Kerry Washington), fueling him to vent all his frustrations with family life. Rock wrote and directed, so this is all him.

CraveOnline: This film seems like the closest mesh with your stand-up comedy. Has it been hard to meld the two worlds?

Chris Rock: Not that it's been hard. A movie like this, I'm just never going to get a lot of money for. You just have to learn. I had to learn how to make a movie. I'm still learning but I think I'm getting better at it. Part of learning was just trying to make the biggest possible movie every time. Sometimes the bigger movie is the smaller movie. With my career, the smaller thing tends to work out better for me. I'm on Saturday Night Live, that's good but when I did a little show on HBO, that's better. My stand-up stuff, nobody gets famous from a frickin' stand-up special so little things tend to work out for me. Head of State's a big $40 million movie. This movie's 20 times better than it and it cost $10 million. That's just me.

CraveOnline: Between this and Everybody Hates Chris, you're really exploring family issues. Where do your ideas on family come from?

Chris Rock: I'm from a family. I'm from a two parent household in Brooklyn and I grew up with a pop and all that stuff. Got a bike. I had a pretty normal childhood.

CraveOnline: Does something about it speak to you on a comedic level?

Chris Rock: It's rich because nobody's doing it pretty much. It's one of those things that's an evergreen topic, but most of the comedies, especially the movies anyway are just so high concept, nobody wants to take a simple [idea]. Like this movie's got a simple, simple plot. He's got his marriage, seven years, hits a rough patch, girl walks in, try not to sleep with her. No studio, they want big stupid ideas. They wanted me to do this movie where a NASCAR driver is hurt, he dies and they're trying to figure out who's going to drive this car that's so expensive. They turn on the TV and they see this black guy being chased by police and that's me. "He'll race our car!"

CraveOnline: Are you making that up?

Chris Rock: No, no, that's a real concept. I got offered lots of money to do that and I elected to do this because this is kind of what [I want.]

CraveOnline: But it's based on another movie?

Chris Rock: It's based on a French movie called Chloe in the Afternoon which won the Cannes film festival in like 1968 or something. I mean, it's a French movie with subtitles. If you saw it, it's hard to watch if you're not really into film. You couldn't show it to a kid or anything. They wouldn't know what to do with it. So the big beats are based on that. I saw that, and I was like, "You know what? I want to play an adult. I want to be a man. I want to have man problems in a movie. I want to be grown already." Most comedies are about guys that won't grow up. So I wanted to play a guy who's grown. The movie's like a grown person's horror flick.

CraveOnline: So how much is reality here?

Chris Rock: I mean, some of the little details are like my life. Going to music together, singing, what's the song in the movie? Wheels on the Bus? I don't even know which one is in there now. We did so many stupid songs, sitting in the circle being concerned about how many black kids my kids are playing with, stuff like that. That's my own life. The big beats of the story. I never flew to D.C. with some girl and got beat up.

CraveOnline: Has your wife seen the movie?

Chris Rock: Oh, she's seen it. She was on the set the whole time. She liked it. She liked it a lot.

CraveOnline: Is your family generally on good behavior because it could end up in your act?

Chris Rock: Nah. It's not like they do something crazy and it ends up in my act. It's just somebody does something typical and it ends up in my act. It's never like my wife did something and now I'm talking about it. It's like my wife did something, I told a friend, he told me his wife did the same thing and somebody else's wife did it so five wives have to do it for it to be in the act. It's never like one thing she did. It's just something she did like a bunch of other women.

CraveOnline: There's a lot going on in this film, would you just classify it as a comedy?

Chris Rock: It's a comedy. It's got a lot of drama in it. It's weird because at the end, you kind of wish your whole family would see it. Not during it but at the end.

CraveOnline: What, so you'd take the kids?

Chris Rock: I would not recommend taking the kids to see it, no. When I say kids, I mean little kids but I think you could be probably a teenager and get it. Put it this way, you go see Lethal Weapon, people are getting shot and killed. Kids are seeing that all the time. I was a kid, I saw Lethal Weapon with a bunch of kids. And a bunch of kids are going to go see Spider-Man this year. People are gonna die in Spider-Man. They're going to be dead, for real. The villain is going to kill people.

CraveOnline: Why did you use the N word?

Chris Rock: It fit. It was like, kind of just fit right there. We use it a couple times.

CraveOnline: Does it concern you?

Chris Rock: I'm out of the concern business. I'm an artist. I do what I do. I'm not Picasso but I'm sure he didn't worry about getting the floor dirty. "I need a drop cloth!"

CraveOnline: Does this movie encourage a more casual attitude towards cheating?

Chris Rock: No, I don't think so. I mean, you've seen the whole movie. There's no cheating or infidelity in the movie. There's a threat of, which is kind of like the Cold War. Nothing happened. The threat of that, I don't know, I don't think it encourages anything. Hopefully it encourages people to make more realistic movies.

CraveOnline: The issue of sexless marriages is more serious than a lot of people realize. Do you have any insight as to why people stop having sex in a marriage?

Chris Rock: I don't know. I'm not Dr. Phil or anything. It's not just marriage. People in the United States especially, a country where we're not worried about our food or our shelter, people are bored with everything. You got this job and loved it when you first got it, couldn't wait. Now, every now and then you go, "What? They're flying me where? I gotta sit with who? Sidney Poitier? Okay, I guess so." People you used to be excited just a couple years ago, excited. Marriage is just another relationship. With every relationship you have, you're going to get bored with it in this land of milk and honey. In the poor places, they don't have time to get worried. To get bored when you're trying to figure out what you're going to eat, you don't have time to get bored with your mate.

CraveOnline: So how do you spruce up your marriage?

Chris Rock: I've been married 10 years and it's hard. It's work. It's just work. You spruce it up and you go places. How do you spruce up anything? Artificially. So you go places and you do things. Nothing lives forever. Only artificially.

CraveOnline: What's the best and worst part of marriage?

Chris Rock: The best part is just having a partner. There's no real worst part. I'm not going to say there's a worst part. I'm a comedian. Comedians like to work alone so maybe I'm not the ideal guy to be married to in that sense.

CraveOnline: Do you understand how those comments fuel the reports on your marriage?

Chris Rock: Yeah, I can't live like that. Especially if you're trying to be funny too. I can't think about everything I say. It'd be crazy.

CraveOnline: Are you concerned with the reports, are they wearing on the marriage?

Chris Rock: No. I mean, my kids are really young. Probably when I get older, when my kids get older I'll probably care a little more. I read stuff, I'm in the house with my wife in bed, "Hey, it says we're breaking up." We're cool. It's all good. You can't live your life about reports and stuff. You've got to realize this when you're in show business. If you accept the good, you have to accept the bad too. So I can't sit here and go, "Oh, man, that was a great review. You were so right." And then get pissed because I'm going to actually profit off this. Somebody takes my picture or whatever, there's a part of this that I'm actually gaining something out of this. So when they switch the tables, I've got to take it like a man sometimes. Because it ain't really true that I'm great either. It's like "He's the funniest man in America." I ain't the funniest man in America. But I come out and wave every time they say it. So it just goes with the turf. You can't be happy that fire cooks your food and be mad it burns your fingertips. Celebrities, you have to take the good and the bad. You can't just take pictures of me looking great.

CraveOnline: If you hosted this year's Oscars, what would you say when Eddie Murphy walked out?

Chris Rock: I don't know, I don't know. You've got to realize too a lot of stuff's not on camera so he'd have to walk out while on camera if you're going to make a joke about it. I'm sure he stayed, he lost, whatever. He didn't lose. Another guy won. How do you lose? You just don't win an Oscar. But yeah, if you didn't have a mic here, how long would you be here? If they just took your mic, your mic just got cut off, how long would you hang out and watch them interview me?

CraveOnline: I'd stay.

Chris Rock: No you wouldn't. You'd be like, "This party's over for me."

CraveOnline: What did you think of Ellen?

Chris Rock: I thought Ellen was great. I think it's her job for as long as she wants it.