Today, film-maker Allen Hughes is sitting in the California sunshine with the San Gabriel Mountains behind him and a cigar – or maybe a Snoop Dogg-style blunt? – in his hand. “Pardon my cigar,” he says politely, after sparking up. “I haven’t had a smoke all weekend.”
At 51, Hughes has emerged from a wild youth in the 90s hip-hop scene and arrived at this more comfortable vantage point for reflection. Not coincidentally, this privilege of ageing is also a sub-theme of his new documentary series, Dear Mama, about the rapper and Black activist icon Tupac Shakur, whose own life was cut painfully short in 1996. With extraordinary access – there are interviews with family members and hip-hop superstars from Dr Dre to Eminem, hand-scrawled teenage poetry from his diaries and even video footage of his courtroom depositions – the documentary interweaves the rapper’s meteoric rise with the revolutionary struggles of his Black Panther mother two decades before.
“There’s no way I could have made this even 10 years ago,” says Hughes between puffs. “You got to be able to check your ego and humble yourself … You have to be willing to go: ‘Damn, I was wrong.’”
For a long time, it seemed Hughes was doing everything right. Since his late teens, he’s been on an upward trajectory in the entertainment industry, alongside his identical twin brother Albert. The Hughes Brothers were just 20 in 1992 when they graduated from directing hip-hop music videos to making movies. Their debut feature was Menace II Society, a hard-hitting drama about teen criminals in south LA, which premiered at Cannes, and made its budget back tenfold at the box office. That early success was followed by bigger and bigger Hollywood productions, starring the likes of Johnny Depp (From Hell in 2001) and Denzel Washington (The Book of Eli, 2010). In recent years, Allen Hughes has been more focused on solo projects, such as his well-received 2017 HBO documentary series, The Defiant Ones, about Dr Dre and his Beats business partner Jimmy Iovine. The title was a nod to a 1958 interracial buddy movie starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis). “It sounds good on paper, y’know: ‘The Hughes Brothers,’” says Hughes when I ask how things stand now with his brother. “And we went for a while. But the stuff I’m seeing he’s doing now is way better than the stuff we were doing together. I feel the same about the stuff I’m doing.” Despite their creative separation, the brothers remain close. “He helped me with [Dear Mama] a little bit, actually … But he doesn’t want anyone to know that. He wanted to do it off the books.”
Back in the early 90s, Hughes had a close friendship with Tupac. “It had to be about a year, and it was very intense. Like, it felt like … my brother.” During this period, Hughes co-directed three of the rapper’s early music videos (Trapped, Brenda’s Got a Baby and If My Homie Calls) and cast him in Menace II Society.
“I never had to direct Tupac. I never had to tell him anything. It’s one of the rare times in my 30-plus-year career where you just had to turn the camera on and tell him where he needed to be. He was always right on point … up until the altercation and the misunderstanding.” This 1993 turning point is detailed in Dear Mama when, in a startling inversion of the usual documentary set-up, Hughes steps out from behind the camera, sits in the interviewee’s chair and offers up his own testimony. As he explains, a disagreement over his character’s backstory led Tupac to walk off the Menace II Society set and, some months later, to Hughes being set upon and badly beaten by the rapper’s entourage. Shakur was convicted on assault charges and spent 15 days in jail.
Hughes says he was angry for a long time, but can now see the situation for what it was: a breakdown in communication, exacerbated by fast-rising stars and young clashing egos. “Before I would’ve said [it was] just Tupac, but now I’d say both sides … But with my own brother, I have that problem!” Several of Shakur’s family members have told Hughes that, had Tupac lived, the two would likely have reconciled and collaborated again. “I feel that too. Because we saw a lot of the same things in the same way … It just was piss and vinegar at the time. We were all 20 years old, y’know?”
Even 27 years after his death, Tupac’s immense musical legacy is still felt, while the mainstreaming of Black liberation struggles since 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests has only made his politics more relevant. All this gives a sense of inevitability to the reaction Dear Mama will provoke on social media. But Hughes is braced: “Every now and then, someone will pop up and say something like: ‘Didn’t he beat you up? What are you doing making this thing?’… When people say shit to me or talk shit about me, as it pertains to Tupac, I just think: ‘Did you know Tupac? Have you ever met Tupac? No. Then shut the fuck up.’”
It is the very complexity of Hughes’s personal connection that makes Dear Mama so impactful. There have been other attempts to tell Tupac’s story on film, including the critically panned 2017 biopic All Eyez on Me; Nick Broomfield’s conspiracy-theorist 2002 documentary Biggie & Tupac and the hagiographic 2003 Tupac: Resurrection. But Dear Mama instantly stands apart. Hughes has revolutionised the Tupac legend, by the deceptively simple means of centring the rapper’s relationship with his activist and former Black Panther mother, Afeni Shakur. Hughes masterfully intercuts the often conflicting opinions of his candid interviewees to create this mother-son portrait, from veteran Panthers who shyly report thinking Afeni was “fly” to the roadies of hip-hop group Digital Underground who recognised a Zen mastery in Tupac from day one (“he lived in the moment more than anyone”), and even the rapper’s candid teenage writing that hero-worships his mother. The cumulative effect is rousing and emotionally powerful, a Black Power fist punch to the sky.
Like Tupac, Hughes was raised by a single mother who was also a committed activist for change – “although my mother was women’s rights, Afeni was more civil rights”. He understood how integral this inter-generational, feminist perspective would be. “I wanted answers to a lot of the mysteries and question marks I had with Tupac, and I felt I could find him through his mother … Just listen to [the 1995 Tupac single] Dear Mama. When you hear that song, you’re like: ‘There’s gotta be something there.’”
With the blessing of the Shakur family and the entire back catalogue at his disposal, Hughes and his composers have made innovative use of the original recordings to deconstruct Tupac’s artistry. Part two plays out to Sadie by the Spinners – the 1975 hit from which Dear Mama takes its hook – with Tupac’s vocal laid on top: “It allows you to feel like you can hear him writing the song,” says Hughes. “I was always trying to find opportunities to bring the audience into the process and into his spirit more.”
There are other, more famous Tupac tracks Hughes might have named the documentary after. The 1998 single Changes, for instance, became a Black Lives Matter protest anthem in the summer of 2020. But Hughes wanted to acknowledge that softer, Mariah Carey-listening, poetry-writing side of Tupac that doesn’t fit into the reductive notion of a nihilistic “gangsta rapper”. A cousin describes the Tupac he knew as “conscious beyond conscious … ” We see a teen Tupac wax lyrical about the importance of showing respect to women, before going on to talk of his music’s mischaracterisation. An archive clip shows him cordially explain to a deposition lawyer that “gangsta rap” is a nonsense category, defined by outsiders as “any music other than party music”.
“He’s an artist, and any great artist is going to be in touch with their sensitivities and emotions,” says Hughes. “He’d even talk about being in touch with his feminine side. What men around today are comfortable enough to say that? ”
Making Dear Mama has offered Hughes opportunities to develop a deeper understanding of the man. “I thought I knew why he was paranoid: I was like, ‘Oh, it’s the weed.’ Then you find out the FBI was always after his family and harassing the kids, and when his mother would get a job, they’d run her out of it.” One event was likely particularly formative: “When he was eight years old in Harlem, his mother and some Panthers had him sit on the stoop and watch out for Feds. He’s eight years old. He blew the assignment a few hours in, and he was punished severely … So I thought I knew why he was paranoid and I didn’t … It wasn’t the weed.”
One thing Hughes is clear on is that Tupac was the real deal. From powerful a cappella clips to early footage of him taking a bit part in a movie and his raw power blowing everyone else off screen, it’s obvious that Tupac’s legend was no mere posthumous romanticisation, no invention of a record label intent on shifting units. “The day I met him, I was up in San Francisco to meet Digital Underground. He wasn’t famous. He’s sitting at the end of the table and all I wondered the whole time was: ‘Who the fuck is this dude?’” says Hughes. “You name the rock star, you name the athlete, you name the actor – and I’ve hung out with pimps and hustlers and players too – I’ve never met anyone who had that level of charisma and power.”
Hughes will soon start work on a biopic of another great Black American artist whose music captured the spirit of an activist age – the 1960s “Prince of Motown”, Marvin Gaye. This time it’s a drama, and while Hughes is yet to cast the lead, he has an idea of the qualities he’s looking for: “He’s got to be a tremendous actor and, like, a real sensitive soul; that when you look into his eyes, there’s a lot of stuff going on inside there – which a lot of the youth today don’t have. So, sensitivity, strong inner-life and an impeccable actor. It’s asking a lot …” We fall silent, trying to come up with names for his shortlist. Then Hughes hits on it: “Tupac!” he says, with a laugh that trails off into a wistful smile. “Yeah, Tupac could have done it.”
Dear Mama is on Disney+ from 1 October
