Eminem is responsible for the year’s top-selling album (“The Eminem Show”) and current No. 1 single (“Lose Yourself”), and he likely can add the country’s top-grossing movie to his credits after “8 Mile” is released Friday.
The progression seems logical: This 30-year-old, barrier-smashing white rapper (real name: Marshall Mathers III) is the music world’s biggest and most video-savvy star, so the big screen would appear just a short leap away.
Yet Eminem’s well-established persona and talent didn’t initially strike “8 Mile” director Curtis Hanson as assets.
“I didn’t care about Enimem,” Hanson said on the phone from Los Angeles. “I was putting my money on Marshall Mathers, the actor in my movie.”
You can’t blame Hanson when you consider recent movie history, which has not been kind to pop-rock superstars trying to transfer their charisma to film–although, perhaps significantly, this may be the first time a rapper has had a broad enough following to fit in that category. Who has made the leap convincingly?
Not Britney Spears (sorry, “Crossroads” fans) or Madonna. Not Michael (“Captain Eo”) or Janet (“Poetic Justice”) Jackson.
Peter Frampton and the Bee-Gees were huge until they stunk up “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Prince wasn’t huge until he made “Purple Rain” (and then came “Under the Cherry Moon”).
“Performance” didn’t make Mick Jagger a movie star any more than “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” did Bob Dylan.
You could make a case for Whitney Houston in “The Bodyguard,” though she quickly faded. The Beatles were great in Beatles movies but never established solo acting chops, Ringo in “Caveman” not excepted.
And Elvis Presley had a few good moments and more bad ones in his fromage-scented film career. After a rough cut of “8 Mile” was enthusiastically received at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Variety film critic Todd McCarthy wrote that some viewers lamented that Elvis never starred in such a convincing, fictional exploration of his musical roots.
“8 Mile,” a “Rocky”-meets-“Purple Rain”-type drama about an aspiring rapper who finds his artistic voice while learning to embrace his Detroit trailer-park roots, likely will meet with broad critical and popular appeal when it opens nationwide as well.
Directed by the 57-year-old Hanson, who made the acclaimed “L.A. Confidential” and “Wonder Boys,” the new movie never seems to strain to be watchable and authentic. The same is true of its star.
The collaboration
Yet turning Eminem into a credible leading man took much work on both sides of the camera. Eminem had to learn how to react truthfully and how to collaborate in a trusting manner.
Hanson, meanwhile, benefited from the verbal dexterity that Eminem invested in the character of Jimmy “Rabbit” Smith Jr., as well as that indefinable quality of someone who keeps your eyes glued to him.
“He’s got this charisma, for lack of a better word, that all terrific movie stars have,” Hanson said. “I can’t create that for somebody. Nor can somebody create it for themselves through hard work. It’s one of those things that you’ve either got it or you don’t.”
Here are some other elements that led to Eminem, movie star:
After developing “8 Mile” with Eminem in mind, producer Brian Grazer contacted Hanson about directing. Hanson then visited Eminem in Detroit so the director and actor could judge whether they could work together.
“It was like an extended blind date where at the end of it you’re trying to decide whether to make an enormous leap of faith,” Hanson said. “For me the big questions were could he collaborate and could he deliver a performance that felt sufficiently emotionally true to carry a movie in which he’s in every scene?”
After they spent time together on the rapper’s home turf (which convinced Hanson to add more Detroit flavor to the script), the director decided the answer was yes.
“Other people were interested in the Eminem aspect [of the package], but to me it was a potential big problem,” Hanson said. “And I think he liked that. It made him trust me. And conversely what made me trust him was that he stated very clearly that he had no interest in being in an `Eminem movie,’ a two-hour video. He wanted to play a part in a really good movie with a really good director.”
The rehearsals
Because Eminem was accustomed to working solo, Hanson said he set up a six-week rehearsal period — very long for a film — to get the first-timer used to performing with others.
“That started with just him and me, and then I actually had him read with other actors . . . so that he would get comfortable with them and also with the whole notion of give-and-take in terms of dialogue and emotion,” Hanson said.
Eugene Byrd, who plays the slick would-be promoter Wink, said Eminem “came in with no ego” and improved as he went along.
“In the beginning it was him just getting it down on his own because I think he didn’t really know how to react or how to deal with [collaboration] right away,” Byrd said from New York. “And then I think it became more and more like he just knew what he was doing, and when we would change up on him, he would change. I think he got used to being in that type of environment.”
Hanson said the breakthrough came when Kim Basinger, the “L.A. Confidential” Oscar-winner who plays Jimmy’s trailer-dwelling mom, arrived.
“Kim came in as a favor to me because she normally doesn’t rehearse, and that just jumped it to a whole other level,” Hanson said. “I think this is probably why she doesn’t like to rehearse; Kim is somebody who is incapable of not giving 100 percent each time, and so the day that she showed up, suddenly it was Marshall and a movie star.”
“We went down to the trailer because that’s where their scenes are and I wanted to rehearse right there, and she just gave it all to him, and you just saw this guy suddenly on the receiving end of this emotional honesty and reacting to it and giving back, and it was a wonderful thing to behold.”
The raps
The action of “8 Mile,” set in 1995 before hip-hop went mainstream and the East Coast-West Coast rivalry turned deadly, is a series of rap “battles” in which the combatants try to pummel each other with brutal yet artful, rhythmic rhymes. These raps became another area of collaboration between Hanson, who mapped out their general content, and Eminem, who wrote his own lyrics (as did most of the rappers playing his opponents).
In one scene by a lunch truck, Jimmy attacks a rapper (Xzibit) for, among other things, slurring a gay man, a situation that might suggest a retreat from Eminem’s own gay bashing on “The Marshall Mathers LP.”
“He wrote the words, but I created the situation of having the other fellow attack and then defend him,” Hanson said. “It does resonate within the story and then outside, because you bring to it the Eminem [personality] of it all. I like that it does that. I wouldn’t like it if it was distracting in a negative way, but within the world of hip-hop, where there has been so much homophobia in the lyrics and so forth, I look on it as a positive thing to have a character that the audience is invested in actually defend a gay person.”
The lasting image of “8 Mile” is the actor’s blue eyes, which seem to burn through the screen.
“The best movie actors connect with the audience in a way that makes the audience feel that they’re literally looking into somebody through their eyes,” Hanson said. “I put the value on those eyes and then encouraged him to use them. We had those discussions of, `How will they know what I’m thinking?’ and I said, `They’ll know through your eyes, and you have to show them.'”
The rapper-actor thing
“There’s an interesting history of rappers in Hollywood in that rappers have been able to make that leap a whole lot easier than rock stars have, whether it’s Ice Cube, Tupac, Ice-T or Eminem now,” said Alan Light, former editor in chief of Vibe and Spin magazines and editor of “Vibe History of Hip Hop.”
“As a rapper people have to accept your authenticity and your reality on your records. Even though sometimes you’re writing fiction, it has to be credible; it has to be believable. It’s certainly proven a lot harder for Mick Jagger or the ‘NSync boys or others to make that jump and have people believe them and accept them.”
Hanson said his biggest challenge was “to thread the needle” and make “8 Mile” feel true and entertaining for hip-hop fans while accessible enough for non-converts.
“I wasn’t hoping to turn them into hip-hop fans, but I was hoping that they would perhaps understand a little better where it came from and why it is what it is, and also why it makes the emotional connection with as many people as it does, completely across color and economic lines,” Hanson said.
Eminem can help bridge such gaps because he already appeals to such a cross-section.
“White kids dig him because, hey, he’s white and he’s really talented,” Byrd said. “Black people who love hip-hop dig him because there’s an honesty to what he does, and you can tell he has honest-to-God skills.”
Blender magazine editor Craig Marks, who has put Eminem on his cover, agreed. “He’s someone who experienced some level of poverty, and being an underclass rocker or rapper gives you more credibility than if you’re a fancy kid from the suburbs,” Marks said. “That seems to be what sets up the whole movie, that there is that `Rocky’ aspect to it: He’s transcended his class but hasn’t forgotten where he’s come from. And he’s had to work hard to get where he is; he didn’t have anything handed to him.”
The end
Even if “8 Mile” establishes Eminem as a huge movie star, Marks doesn’t expect that appeal to change. “There’s no one else who could move as many records and sell as much popcorn in the theaters and still seem like they’re against most everything, which is what rock stars are supposed to be: a thorn in the side of the status quo,” Marks said.
“It was all hard,” Hanson said. “None of it was easy. It was a really long and difficult process for him. It was a challenge for both of us. But he gave me what I look for from any actor, which was diligence, respect and a commitment to the story that I was trying to tell.”
“When we finished, he went `Never again.’ And he meant it. He’ll certainly be invited to do it again, and my hope is that his performance will be received in a sufficiently positive way that ultimately he’ll look back on it kind of like childbirth and forget the pain and remember the result.”
Eminem and Cruise: 2 of a kind?
In a strange way, Eminem bears some similarities to another young actor whom Curtis Hanson directed: Tom Cruise, the star of 1983’s pre-“Risky Business” teen sex comedy “Losin’ It.”
“It’s hard to say how they compared in their acting,” Hanson said, laughing at the reminder of this not-quite-classic. “What I can say is that Tom [had] that thing — call it charisma, watchability or whatever you want to call it. For `Losin’ It’ I saw a lot of guys for those parts, and when I saw Tom, my enthusiasm for him was such that we actually signed him with me having the power to have him play any one of the three parts.”
“That’s how badly I wanted him in the movie. I can’t say I knew that he would become what he became, but I knew he had that thing in spades. That’s where it connects with Marshall [Mathers, a.k.a. Eminem].
“The other thing that they have very much in common is they’re both, or were anyway, extremely respectful. Even going back to `Losin’ It’ and where I was at that point in my career, Tom gave me complete and utter respect as the director of that movie, and Marshall did, too, in that way of almost `Yes, sir.'”
Later in the conversation, Hanson returned to the Cruise-Eminem comparison:
“Another thing that was so similar about those two guys was they were both so inquisitive.
“For example you know that parking structure sequence [in `8 Mile,’ where rival gangs rap and fight]? [Eminem] came to me, `Why did you want to do this here?’ and I explained to him that by [using locations that had] previous lives — like `that used to be the Michigan theater and the party store used to be a bank’ — that that was capturing how Detroit was trying to figure itself out the same way the characters were.”
“He was looking at me, and I said, `Of course, Marshall, the whole idea of recycling buildings is like sampling music. It’s very hip-hop.’ He just went, `That’s dope.'”
— Mark Caro
