“(8 Mile Road) separates the city from the suburbs. “Both side of 8 Mile Road are poor, but there’s a definite dividing line between the black and white sides,” he explains. The film title, which Eminem takes credit for, refers to Detroit’s invisible societal equator, a real spot in the Motor City. If it was based on my life, it would be very limited as to I could do.” “We took some things that happened in my life and maybe twisted them a little,” he says, “and added some things and took out some things. Shortly thereafter, the final script came back to them, and the line between reality and drama was blurred like crazy, the rapper says. If something that you’re acting out mirrors something you went through in real life, you have to reenact that experience in a way that can make it believable.” He told me that anybody who raps should be able to act…. But Ice Cube (who himself jumped from rapping to acting, best known for the Friday films) dropped some science on me once. “Sure, I was worried about the acting part of it,” Eminem says. He and his best friend and longtime rapping partner Proof sat down with another screenwriter, and recalled their past years. Then Eminem checked out the first version of the script, and read it like his life story. He had a meeting that included longtime producer Brian Grazer to discuss the film, still in the writing stages. “What kept me interested was that I knew I wanted to do something authentic,” Eminem recalls, “and something that had a reason for being out there – I didn’t want to just bank my success.” Larry Flynt from being a box-office smash, and Eminem’s story was at least witnessing the same territory, if not entering it. That’s the attitude that probably kept The People vs. This also illustrates a bit of a contradiction in the film world: the tendency of audiences to believe that making a biopic of someone is equivalent to glorifying them, and the stereotype that these films only show the good side of their subjects. Now Eminem and the rest of the crew had to get audiences to buy tickets to a pseudo-biographical film, and the controversy might not have been their friend. His duet with Elton John at the 2001 Grammys may have helped Eminem’s image in the gay community, but he’d still arrived on the music scene with more controversy than most have in their careers, and the level went up over the first few years of his career. As popular as the rapper was amongst his selective crowd – the Mathers LP sold nearly two million albums its first week – he’d been under fire for lyrics laced with profanity, gay slurs, and advocation of violence, especially against women. But 8 Mile had a bit more to work with, or against, than most such everyman flicks.
Indeed, the underdog story, the common man who pulls out the uncommon accomplishment through skill and maybe a tad of luck, has always been pretty safe territory in the film world. “That’s why there’s an advisory sticker on it… I’m not a role model and I don’t claim to be.” “My music is not for younger kids to hear,” he asserts. To be fair, Eminem has always spoken against children listening to his music. “I always believed that a lot of kids would be able to relate to my story, the story of the underdog.”
“Ever since The Marshall Mathers LP came out (in 2000), I’d wanted to do a movie showing something similar to how I came up, something loosely based on that part of my life,” he explains. “It’s not my life story.” Well, not quite.
“The movie is not my life,” insists the man who started out as Marshall Mathers and spent time as Slim Shady. Sounds a bit like the man in the lead role, doesn’t it? But the fellow himself claims that the story that turned into a visualized version of the song it shoved into soundtrack history isn’t a biopic. With no steady home life, no car, no father, he’s trying to break into the world of hip-hop, where being white has never been an asset to something that’s always been a crapshoot for anyone. After all, it’s the story of a young rapper from the mean streets of Detroit, much more intellectual from the streets than the classroom. “It must have been so simple for him to prepare for that role! He’s been living like that his entire life! He grew straight into the character, perfected it on stage, and then brought it straight to screen.”Ĭhances are, quite a few people walked out of 8 Mile making those or similar statements about Eminem.