The Dark Story of Eminem (33 page)

In the UK especially, where only interviews with
The Face
and Radio 1 were granted, and ‘Without Me’ as the lone single for months, the record was left to sell itself, slipping into people’s homes without a noise in the wider culture. The shock-waves of ‘Stan’ and the 2001 tour were no longer detectable. It was hard to tell, for all the CDs being bought, if Eminem did still matter as he had, only twelve months before.

Certainly, he wasn’t waving pistols or making headlines. Instead, the solid authority of his new album seemed based on a sudden maturity in his life, as he neared 30. Discussing the probation conditions which kept him mostly drink- and drug-free with
The Face
, he seemed glad of their discipline. “I almost wonder, do I see a reason to even start back again after I’ve been clean for so long? I’m able to do things that a couple of years ago I couldn’t do without freaking out. You know, trying to take care of a little girl and trying to do the Daddy things, and trying to make the music.” He was almost announcing, without fanfare, the death of Slim Shady, the demon who had made the previously soft, sober Marshall dive into drugs in the first place, back when that derangement did him good.

Zadie Smith, watching him rehearse for a show, found him tired, but utterly professional. Describing a typical day to
Rolling Stone
, it revolved around making Hailie cereal, watching
Power Puff Girls
with her, taking her to and from school, or the studio, where he spent all his other time. He had succeeded at something as important to him as rapping, without anyone noticing, or caring, probably. He had not become his father, abandoning a family. He had saved himself, instead, and become a stable adult, for Hailie’s sake. No more records would be sold on tabloid scandal.

There were still some scraps of new gossip, to be sieved from what reports there were. “Kim is pregnant,” as he told
Rolling Stone
. “I have no idea who the father is. I just know she’s due any day. So Hailie is going to have a baby sister. It’s going to be tough the day she asks me why her baby sister can’t come over. I’ve tried to keep her sheltered from those issues. Of course, she’s going to find out shit as she goes through life. But I really don’t want her to learn all the fucked up shit on my shift.”
The Face
observed the new family unit he’d formed around himself, with not only Hailie but D12, and his half-brother Nathan, now permanently taken from their mother. With his dyed blond hair and pasty complexion, Nathan looked like Eminem’s smaller shadow. What was living with Marshall like,
The Face
asked, catching him on his own. “Better than living with my Mom.” Did he like the album? “It’s good. I just wish we didn’t have to let other people hear it.” Such private attitudes were no longer possible, of course, in Eminem’s world.

In the US, at least, another Anger Management tour helped sustain the rapper’s profile. An earlier live comeback, as part of a festival in Washington, DC on May 25, had been marred when surging fans lost their footing, leading to four hospitalisations as he begged them to “back the fuck up”. But the first of his full shows, in Buffalo, New York on July 18, supported this time by Xzibit, Ludacris and Papa Roach, and watched by
NME
, was a more promisingly dramatic affair than 2001’s chainsaw-wielding flops. Footage of his politician foes – Lynne Cheney and the rest – preceded him. The set this time replaced a mock-up of his old home with a 50-foot Ferris wheel and fairground ride mouth, the broad American carnival of
The Eminem Show
‘s concerns brought to life. ‘White America’ was played to police sirens and glitter showers, with a more radical cartoon in the background than last time, showing Eminem’s army of fans being abused and assaulted till they shot their schoolmates, while Eminem wiped the blood from his face, to reveal dollar signs. A cartoon Hailie to duet with on ‘My Dad’s Gone Crazy’, and the shotgun shooting of a Moby dummy (the techno star seemingly now the new Insane Clown Posse, on the basis of criticising Eminem in interviews) were other highlights. Eminem’s continued lack of live charisma, and tireless wondering if his young fans “popped pills”, showed some things never changed. But by the time the tour finished, in Detroit on September 8, with a five-hour party (staged for a DVD), it seemed a success.

A fresh set was struck for Eminem’s traditional appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards, in New York on August 29. He performed ‘White America’ from the podium of a mock Senate, behind the seal of the “United States of Emerica”, and was pelted with paper planes by fake Congressmen. His nakedly political stance was becoming hard to miss. But real boos came only when he undercut it by calling Moby a “girl”. True controversy and cultural electrifying seemed suddenly elusive.

But the quiet was deceptive. Almost as soon as
The Eminem Show
‘s discernible impact dissipated, he had a second major work ready for release.
8 Mile
had finished filming in Detroit back in January, but took till November to reach the public. It had always seemed the larger test of just how big a figure Eminem could become in his country’s life, what limits there really were to his talent. When I spoke to its director Curtis Hanson in London, in the week of its US release, he recalled how delicate the process of even starting to make the film had been.

“It might have been the incentive of others to make a movie with Eminem in it,” he told me of his initial misgivings, “but to me that was a big question mark – whether he could deliver a performance of sufficient emotional truth to anchor the kind of movie I wanted to make. I knew his work. I knew it was dense and serious and provocative. I also knew there was controversy around him. People said to me, ‘Do you really wanna get involved with this guy?’ My feeling was that I’d been involved before with actors of … reputation [Russell Crowe made his name in
LA Confidential
, and Rob Lowe and Robert Downey, Jnr. had been cast by Hanson when at disgraced lows], and I’d always tried to put that to one side, and see how they dealt with me, one on one. So I said to myself, ‘I don’t care about Eminem. I care about Marshall Mathers, the actor with whom I’m going to work.’ “

When the pair met, after producer Brian Grazer had convinced first rapper then director to consider the project, both men were on tenterhooks, wondering how the other would be. “It was like we were on an extended blind date,” Hanson remembered. “We were feeling each other out, getting a hit on each other, and deciding if we wanted to take a leap of faith.”

As part of this courtship, Hanson asked Eminem to escort him around the landmarks of his life. Over the course of a long day, they toured the places of pain and pleasure that had made Marshall Mathers into Eminem. The fact that he was returning to the sites of boyhood humiliations as a grown man, wondering whether to be a movie star, didn’t seem to phase him. His life had been that unreal for some time. “We went around the various places where he used to live,” Hanson said, “where he went to school, where he met Proof and the guys from D12, where his girlfriend lived, and where they used to perform. None of it made him uncomfortable. He was looking back on it the way we all look back on different things. If there was something he didn’t like, he was more laughing about it. In fact, I remember him showing me the place where he got beat up badly. He could laugh about that now. Or he was saying to Proof, ‘Remember that, where we did dah dah dah … remember where we met on that street?’ The reminiscing was more coloured by nostalgia, than the emotions he had back then.”

Yet Grazer had famously said of his first meeting with Eminem that he felt “damage”. Did Hanson feel those scars were still there – or that his star had hauled himself over them, long ago? “Oh, sure,” he said emphatically. “I feel he’s very strong now. Very focused.”

As the tour continued, Hanson was offered another insight. “As we went around these neighbourhoods, there was always this feeling of good will towards him – from kids on the street, and people who poured out of their houses when they knew he was there. It was very different to how the Detroit media treat him. When we were shooting, they would have these stories: “Eminem Movie Causes Traffic Jam!” “Eminem Movie Burns Down House!” Whereas with the people, there was this feeling of pride, and familiarity. He was one of them. He was in his world.”

And that world slipped under Hanson’s skin. “The degree to which I wanted it to work out with him kept growing, because not only was I getting to know him, I was also spending more and more time in Detroit.” The broken grandeur of the place, its roofless factories and mud alleys and scorched houses and silent streets, had slowly hypnotised him, as they did me. Eminem had brought another convert to his abandoned American home.

“It’s a city of ghosts,” Hanson enthused to me. “Everywhere you look you see reminders of its industrial past, and it’s almost like there was another civilisation there, like Aztecs or Mayans, that vanished without a trace, a civilisation that’s not connected to the young people living there today. And yet while you have this apparent visual grimness, you also have the populace, the citizens, who have this astonishing energy and spirit, and that’s resulted in Detroit’s incredible musical history. I wanted to try and capture that reality, and how Detroit and Eminem are inseparable.”

He had been keen-eyed enough to notice something else about his possible subject, too. “What’s unique here is that at first glance you think you have a story of race. But instead you have a story of class. The character Eminem ended playing, Jimmy Smith, is white, and all but one of his friends are black. But they’re all from the same class. And that’s the truth about Eminem as well. He grew up around 8 Mile, that’s why his voice is authentic. As Future [the film’s Proof-like character, played by Mekhi Phifer] says, ‘Once they hear you, it won’t matter what colour you are.’ And that’s something new in America.”

Eminem and Hanson got along, too. So the deal was done, and work began on the script. Scott Silvers (of indie critical success
johns
and mainstream bomb
The Mod Squad
) had already drafted the sort of updated but standard tale of showbiz struggle Grazer had requested (his “hip-hop
Saturday Night Fever
“). Now Silvers and Eminem sat and talked about the rapper’s life, deciding which details to incorporate into his character. “There were some things that were taken out of my real-life story,” Eminem explained to MTV Asia. “I’ve had a lot of stuff happen in my life that not everybody knows about. I can’t tell everything in my music. Then there are a lot of instances that are made up. Because you know, I’m not playing me in the movie. Just somebody like me.” But those script sessions left the line badly blurred. In its final form, it showed Jimmy living with his unstable, unemployed, often drunk mother and little blonde sister in a Warren trailer park, having been kicked out by his manipulative girlfriend, as he struggles to succeed as a lone white boy in rap battles, supported by his small posse of mostly black friends. Like his records, the story let him draw on his own early days one more time, and add a further layer to what was becoming the most baroque, unreliable, extreme and endless American autobiography. His mother for one didn’t fall for it as fiction. “She was bitching about Kim Basinger playing my mother, and calling the movie people,” he sighed to
The Face
. “They were like, ‘Yo, your mother keeps threatening to sue us.’ I’m like, ‘Does she know I’m not playing me? I’m a kid named Jimmy?’ “

Hanson, meanwhile, added his own touches. He didn’t care if it was Eminem’s story, so long as it was Detroit’s. The production company’s plan to shoot in some more standard American city, with Jimmy as a hotel bellhop, was vetoed in favour of a job in an auto plant, and filming in Detroit’s run-down heart. Scenes expressive of the city – like the symbolic razing of one of its plague of abandoned buildings – were inserted. And one more aspect needed to be changed. “We moved it back to 1995,” Hanson said. “The idea of a white guy trying to express himself in that medium and being questioned doesn’t really resonate in the same way today. We had to set it in a world before Eminem.”

Next, a high quality cast was assembled, including Basinger, Mekhi Phifer (
Clockers
), and Brittany Murphy (
Clueless
), as Jimmy’s new girlfriend Alex. They had six weeks of rehearsals, during which Hanson had to turn Eminem into an actor. “I didn’t watch his videos before we met,” he told me, “they didn’t matter to me, neither did knowing he had another persona, Slim Shady. When you adopt a persona, it’s artificial, you hide behind it. What I wanted was the opposite. I needed him to appear to be naked, and be still, and do nothing, so you would feel you were seeing his essence. I was brutally frank. I told him how long and difficult the process was going to be. And I wanted to be frank, because I wanted him to know, I didn’t want him to enter into it lightly. And as frank as I was, he still didn’t get it.”

“I wanted to dabble in movies, I wanted to see if I could do it. I didn’t realise it was gonna be this big a deal,” Eminem would ruefully admit to MTV Asia after it was all over. “Then Curtis Hanson got involved, and Kim Basinger, and it got massive, it got out of control. All of a sudden it was like, ‘Whoa. I gotta take this seriously.’ I thought when I read the script that it was gonna be impossible for me to remember all those lines. But the truth is, we did a lot of rehearsing, eight hours a day for two months up until we started shooting. It was gruelling. I couldn’t help but become this character. It took me back to that time, to that place. It stripped me of all ego, to before I was Eminem, before I was anybody.”

With rehearsals done,
8 Mile
began shooting deep in the Detroit winter of 2001. For his cameraman, Hanson chose Rodrigo Prieto, best known for his work on the draining Mexico City melodrama
Amores Perros
; Hanson told him to make Detroit look “like a weed emerging from the sidewalk”. Trying to mimic visually the free-styling of its rappers,
8 Mile
was filmed with mostly hand-held cameras, improvising and following the actors. Locations were chosen, too, for their correspondence to hip-hop’s habit of recycling the past, easy in Detroit, where the money to knock down and start again never comes, and everything is gutted or patched. For the central rap battle scenes in The Shelter, the actual club where young Eminem was booed and abused was ignored, in favour of the shattered glory of the Michigan Theater, which production designer Philip Messina found “one of the most bizarre things I’d ever seen in my life. It was literally gutted from the roof down, with a quarter of its proscenium and tattered curtains intact, and the rest is a three-level parking garage.” Understanding the religious nature of Eminem’s devotion to hip-hop, expressed in so many of his songs, Hanson put a cross on his Shelter’s exterior, making it “a church of hip-hop, where people go for a sense of community and hope”. The interior was then styled more like a boxing venue, the site of
8 Mile
‘s
Rocky
-style rap battles.