Allen Hughes (‘Dear Mama’ director) admits how much he didn’t know about his former friend Tupac Shakur [Exclusive Video Interview]
Despite having known Tupac Shakur personally, director Allen Hughes found himself learning so many things about the late rapper while filming his Emmy nominated docuseries “Dear Mama.” “I knew him as a fellow 19-year-old at the time, but I didn’t know about the abject poverty that he came up in. I didn’t know about being a child of a Panther and how the FBI completely obliterated his family,” he admits to Gold Derby during our recent webchat (watch the exclusive video interview above).
He was even surprised to learn that just six months before Shakur was signed with Digital Underground, he was crashing on the couches of friends. “It wasn’t just the childhood and what that does to the psyche, I had no idea. I came out of this project with a tremendous amount of compassion for Tupac I just didn’t have before.”
“Dear Mama” is a docuseries that aired on FX (and can be streamed on Hulu) that examines, in detail, the brief life of Tupac Shakur as well as his mother, Afeni Shakur, and how Afeni’s life informed much of what made Tupac such a powerful figure. Hughes is an Emmy nominee in both of the categories the series received nominations for this year: Best Documentary or Nonfiction Series and Best Nonfiction Writing. He was nominated in the same categories in 2018 for his HBO docuseries, “The Defiant Ones.”
Hughes’s knowledge about Afeni Shakur was also extremely limited going into the filming of this series. “I was as familiar with the touchstones in her life as most of us in pop culture: The song ‘Dear Mama,’ she was a former Panther, she struggled with addiction and overcame it. That’s all I knew about Afeni going into ‘Dear Mama.’” Hughes was surprised to realize that everything that made Tupac so magnetic as an artist came directly from his mother. “The charisma was off the charts, the leadership abilities. You hear spoken word stuff that she did when she was facing 360 years and it’s like early hip hop, you know?”
After initially making his name with narrative films, including “Menace II Society,” “Dead Presidents” and “The Book of Eli,” Hughes has found that he much prefers working in documentaries. “I think it’s more nimble and more revolutionary. You can do more with the medium of documentaries than you can in scripted. You’re flying by the edge of your seat half the time. It’s real people, it’s real lives.” He is especially invigorated by seeing the leaps that the medium has taken in recent years. “It wasn’t until five or ten years ago where you started seeing pieces where you were like, wow, this is really pure cinema happening here. The sight and sounds and the velocity of it started changing.”
PREDICT the 2023 Emmy winners through January 15
Make your predictions at Gold Derby now. Download our free and easy app for Apple/iPhone devices or Android (Google Play) to compete against legions of other fans plus our experts and editors for best prediction accuracy scores. See our latest prediction champs. Can you top our esteemed leaderboards next? Always remember to keep your predictions updated because they impact our latest racetrack odds, which terrify Hollywood chiefs and stars. Don’t miss the fun. Speak up and share your huffy opinions in our famous forums where 5,000 showbiz leaders lurk every day to track latest awards buzz. Everybody wants to know: What do you think? Who do you predict and why?
SIGN UP for Gold Derby’s free newsletter with latest predictions