By Iain Blair

Allen Hughes, the director of The Defiant Ones docuseries about music legends Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, has done another deep dive into the life and times of a hip-hop legend – Tupac Shakur. Dear Mama, titled after the artist’s hit song of the same name, the new FX five-part series streaming on Hulu explores the troubled relationship between Tupac and his late mother, former Black Panther member and social activist Afeni Shakur.

Allen Hughes

I spoke with Hughes, whose credits include Menace II Society, Dead Presidents and The Book of Eli, about making the film and his thoughts on post. We also had Lasse Järvi, executive producer, writer and editor on the project, join the conversation.

You made the great series The Defiant Ones, and now this. What sort of film did you set out to make this time?
Allen Hughes: I’m a huge music fan and I always wanted to be a DJ at heart. I think music is a superpower, and if you do it right it’s more powerful than any action sequence. The Defiant Ones was more like a highly produced rock album to me. This is not a rock record. This is like a blues record to me and I had to change my whole style and way of thinking. It’s more emotional and I tried to strip it all down. It became what I call a rotating musical mosaic.

His estate gave you their blessing for the project. That must have been huge in terms of all the research and material you were able to access?
Hughes: Huge. It was the biggest gift and blessing to have that access to all his recordings. I got all the multi-tracks, all the lyric sheets and his writings – all his personal notes and thoughts, his desires and ambitions. Then we broke down all the multi-tracks and re-assembled them, and I brought his lyrics more to the forefront, and put his a cappella on top of the score, because in the editing room I always say, “If grandma doesn’t understand it, it’s gotta go.”

What were the main challenges of pulling all this together?
Hughes: Even just going through all the material was a huge challenge and then we also shot all over the place — from LA and southern California to the Bay area and the south, talking to family and friends who were there when certain events happened, and just trying to assemble all the material we needed. It’s taken almost four years of work to finish the project.

Tell us about post. Where did you do it all?
Hughes: I found this house at the very top of the Hollywood Hills and I cut the entire thing there. It wasn’t the most practical thing to do as the Wi-Fi wasn’t great and we had the server somewhere else, and we had to edit remotely, but editing and doing post there during COVID had a lot of benefits too.

Pacific Post provided the Avid Media Composers, and we had four editing bays set up. It was great. Warners MPI did the dailies and then we mixed all the sound at Number Nine Productions in another house where the sound mixer Cameron Frankley had this great home studio that was top notch.

I’ve always mixed on a backlot or at someplace like Lantana, so this was a first, but it was great, and we had a fantastic team including sound designer Robert Stambler and mixers Chris Jenkins and Sal Ojeda. I love working with all the sound and music, and it’s always been my favorite part of the whole post process.

The thing with a documentary like this is, the whole thing is basically post production, and they’re way more challenging to make than a feature film. I love post because you get to refine and refine all the material in a project like this, and then you sometimes discover magic. Josh Garcia was our post supervisor, and he did a great job of overseeing it all.

You worked with Lasse Järvi and several other editors. How did that work and how did you collaborate with them?
Hughes: The lead editor was Lasse. He’s Finnish, and he also co-wrote the whole thing with me and was an EP on it. He worked with me before on The Defiant Ones, and he’s just a brilliant editor and collaborator. And then we brought in other editors to help out, including Alex Chu, Ron Eigen, Aaron Naar and Tom Parsons.  They’d work on different episodes of the show. But ultimately it always boiled down to Lasse and me sitting down and authoring the cut.

I think there’s a difference between editing and authoring. There’s a signature here, and it’s got to feel a certain way. And when you collaborate with a brilliant editor like Lässe, I consider it a performance and treat it the same way as working with an actor.

What were the main challenges when it came to editing?
Hughes: Dealing with all the archival footage is always a challenge, and dealing with it, especially on the Afeni Shakur side, was hard. Initially, it was thought there was no material at all because no one had ever seen anything on her. And that’s where time is your friend in documentary filmmaking, because eventually we did find footage of her in her Panther years. It wasn’t a lot, but it was just enough for our film. We also found images of her, and audio, not a lot, but again, just enough.

Just going through all the material we had was a lot of work, and then making sure that the editing felt “authored,” so that there’s a purpose there and that you’re experiencing the story through the prism of Tupac and Afeni’s relationship. For me, the big editing challenge is always finding the right feeling. Me and Lässe went through so many cuts on most scenes.

For instance, at the end of Episode 2 you see this whole long run that we cut to The Spinners’ song Satan. It was a nine-minute sequence that began as four or five separate scenes, but it worked far better when we cut them all together – the speech Tupac gives in Indianapolis, the backyard scene, him getting bailed out and playing Dear Mama for the first time. But it took a lot of drafts and work to get there.

Lasse Järvi

Lasse, can you talk about the nonlinear approach and the big editing challenges for you?
Lasse Järvi: One of my favorite images of Afeni is a black-and-white photo from a fundraising event in 1970, the year before Tupac was born. Afeni was on bail, facing 360 years in prison, but she looks amazing in a black leather vest with an SLR camera in her hand, and on the camera strap are four film canisters. However, the truth is that the camera and canisters are empty. She couldn’t afford film, let alone a camera. She borrowed it for press access.

The point is, the Shakurs were impoverished revolutionaries often hiding from the law, so documentation is hard to come by, and of course we were hell-bent on painting this archive-based multipart family portrait. Considering how present Tupac still is in our society, it’s easy to forget he’s been gone longer than he lived. I never got to meet him or his mother, but everyone who did says they both radiated an unbelievable energy. They were both poets, not only in how they wrote, but how they spoke, moved, lived and even died. It was all emotion, heart, rhythm and passion infused with an incredible amount of knowledge, and our goal was to channel that spirit.

We felt the only way to do that was to make the viewer feel like they are in the room with the two, so we knew this had to be an immersive experience, and Tupac and Afeni had to be the lead voices. What’s crazy is that time and time again it seemed like they left precisely the right pieces behind for us to tell their story the way we hoped to. And the restrictions inspired a lot of the creative choices, including the nonlinear timeline.

We also knew that a chronological timeline was out of the question from a narrative standpoint, as that would mean Tupac wouldn’t enter the picture until a couple episodes in. And we were blown away by the almost eerie parallels in their stories and wanted to study how the events of Afeni’s past influenced Tupac’s actions. Then there’s the sheer magnitude and historical context of the story. You can’t understand Tupac and his writings without studying the issues he and Afeni dedicated their lives for. He viewed his art as a vehicle for social change, and he was willing to die for it. So there’s no way we were going to shortchange that message, and wanted his writings to be a major narrative driver.

Thankfully, we were blessed with unprecedented access to his entire catalog, and working with it has been an absolute highlight of my career, and a consistent source of inspiration through the process. Couple that with score from Atticus Ross and his team, and I’m in bliss.

What editing gear did you use?  
Järvi: We edited on Avid Media Composer using Jump Desktop as our remote work solution. Interviews were shot anamorphic on formats varying from 4K to 8K.
Allan, in Episode 2 you confront the violent incident with Tupac when you got beaten up after you fired him from Menace 11 Society. That must have been very difficult to deal with.
Hughes: It was, and I didn’t want to do it, but Lasse and the other producers said I had to deal with it. While I was interviewing Tupac’s old managers it came up and they went after me and it was in real time and so real that we just kept it. I hadn’t planned it at all.

Talk about the huge importance of music and sound on this.
Hughes: We began working on it from the very start four years ago and it was all about trying to find that sweet spot. How do you respect the original recording, but also give a fresh understanding of the lyrics? How do we tie this song to that scene? Or how do we use a track like Shed So Many Tears throughout a whole episode, with different mixes and then also bringing in the great score by Atticus Ross, Leopold Ross and Claudia Sarne?

In the mix it was all about finding that balance between all the songs, the score, all the a cappella, and I’m so proud of what we did. Hip-hop docs typically don’t get this level of audio treatment, and Atticus and his team are sound freaks, so they did things with the score that meant we didn’t need to add any effects or anything dramatic. It was all there already.

What about the DI? Who was the colorist, and how closely did you work with them and the DPs?
Hughes: We did it on the lot at Warners MPI in Burbank with colorist John Daro. I’m very involved and go to all the sessions, even though most of it’s very boring to me (laughs). But it’s so important and so hard to get the look just right, especially when you have a lot of archival stuff. But it turned out great.

What did you learn about Tupac that most surprised you?
Hughes: The struggle he had in his adolescence, dealing with his mother’s post-traumatic stress and her drug addiction. It makes you grow up real fast and I’ve learned to have a lot of compassion for him and his journey.

I heard you’re working on a Marvin Gaye project next?
Hughes: That’s going to happen, but first I’m doing a biopic of my dear friend Snoop Dogg for Universal. I can’t wait to start it.

Credit: All images courtesy of FX

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.