“The schedule was tight, so using three cameras at once, which is how I’ve been working recently, helped Benny a lot with coverage.” -Peter Menzies, Jr., ACS My crew was like, ‘When are we going to get to shoot some music scenes?’ Cueva was with me on Roots and he did the most amazing job getting the package from New Orleans to Atlanta with almost no turnaround.” But it was demanding on our young star straight out of the gate. “The scenes were key to the story, of course, because Pac’s music changed so much after his incarceration. “Those four days were all dialogue when Pac’s in prison,” Menzies adds. Menzies explains that the production was required to shoot four days in Atlanta before going on a short hiatus and fleshing out the visual template with Boom in preproduction.
“I had just come straight off of Roots and decided to use the same 1.3 anamorphic lenses from Vantage they’re gorgeous lenses and perfect for many of the challenges we faced on this movie,” recalls the Australia-born Menzies, whose credits include large franchise projects like Clash of the Titans and The Incredible Hulk, action dramas such as Four Brothers and Shooter, and more recently the TV movie Surviving Compton, about West Coast rapper Michel’le.” In that song, Shakur, a self-described “mama’s boy,” pays tribute to the grit and fight of all single mothers struggling to raise their sons out of poverty.ĭirector Benny Boom (center) on the set of ALL EYEZ ON ME
(Afeni told doctors to abandon life-support efforts seven days after the shooting.) Sandwiched in between, in a beautiful arc of visual styles facilitated by cinematographer Peter Menzies, Jr., ACS, and production designer Derek Hill, are scenes from a lifelong friendship with Jada Pinkett Smith, a handful of iconic musical performances at L.A.’s House of Blues, the fated connection with rap impresario Suge Knight and Death Row Records begun in prison, and, the most important person in Pac’s life, his mother, whom he forever immortalized in the single “Dear Mama,” from his 1995 album Me Against the World. Hutton.Įyez takes us all the way from the fiery social activism into which Pac was born to the final hail of bullets on a Vegas street that ultimately took his life. Now, a quarter-century and change since his passing, comes the first narrative feature on Shakur, All Eyez on Me ( Tupac: Resurrection, narrated entirely in Pac’s voice, was nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar in 2003), directed by longtime music-video filmmaker Benny Boom and produced by L.T. Rapper, poet, movie star, social iconoclast, ladies man, gangsta – there never seemed to be enough labels to describe Shakur in his short, hectic life, including those auspicious months spent pre-birth in the womb of his mother, Afeni Shakur, a Black Panther activist who was arrested on bombing-conspiracy charges (and later acquitted one month before Pac was born). There were also acting roles in seven films, scores of references to medieval philosophy, poetry and literature in his lyrics, and enough violence and trouble with the law for several lifetimes, including the shooting of off-duty police officers in Atlanta, prison time for sexual-assault charges, and most notably, being robbed and shot five times in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio, where his friend and later rival, Chris Wallace (Notorious B.I.G.), was working. Consider that by the time he was murdered in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas at the age of 25, Shakur had already sold tens of millions of records, including his acknowledged masterpiece, All Eyez on Me (certified 9x platinum less than two years after his death.) He was also a social prophet in his teens Shakur’s debut album, 2Pacalypse Now, released when he was just 20, was publicly censored by then Vice-President Dan Quayle for its scathing attack on police brutality. Now comes a narrative feature brash and bold enough to tell Pac’s story.Įven compared to the long list of the musical artists who “lived fast and died young,” Tupac Amaru Shakur, aka 2Pac, Makaveli, or just “Pac” jammed an incredible amount of living into his brief time on earth. Tupac Shakur’s status as myth and icon has only grown in the quarter-century since his passing.