(AllHipHop News) Tupac Shakur would have had a “limetime of films” with director John Singleton according to the acclaimed director. In an interview for The Hollywood Reporters’ Hollywood Masters, John Singleton spoke on the marginization of the Black culture in Black films as well as reveal that Tupac was meant to star in another legendary film of Singleton’s.
Singleton is set to direct the highly anticipated Tupac biopic and worked with the late rapper in the 1993 film Poetic Justice. According to the article, Tupac was meant to be in Singleton’s 2001 film Baby Boy as the director “planned to do a lifetime of films with him”. Tupac passed on September 13th, 1996, five years before the film was released and after Singleton found out of Shakur’s death he decided to make a drastic change:
The lady I was dating at the time told me that he had passed — he had been shot days before, but he [had] just passed. It set my life on a whole other trajectory. I went and left the country for about a month. I just couldn’t cope. … I felt, the danger ain’t sexy anymore. I got to change it up, not necessarily just as a filmmaker, but just as a person, and kind of grow up.
Singleton was also highly critical of how major movie studios are portraying the Black culture and the internal racism that exists:
[Studio executives say] ‘We’re going to take your stories but, you know what? You’re going to go starve over here and we’re not going to let you get a job.’ The so-called liberals that are in Hollywood now are not as good as their parents or ancestors. They feel that they’re not racist. They grew up with hip-hop, so [they] can’t be racist. ‘I like Jay Z, but that don’t mean I got to give you a job.’
Check out John Singleton’s full interview below:
