HYPETRAK 專訪 Nas 紀錄片《Time Is Illmatic》幕後製作人

隨著紐約知名說唱歌手 Nas 的個人記錄電影《Time Is Illmatic》於上週登上銀幕，我們最近也對該部紀錄片幕後的製作人 One9 和 Erik Parker 進行了一次深入的採訪。該部由講述 Nas 從紐約的皇后區成功崛起，成為了現今的 Hip-Hop 傳奇的電影，兩位製作人想通過專輯《Illmatic》的影響這個角度來詮釋整個故事，更多的內容請留意一下的訪問內容，完整的訪問可以登入到 HYPETRAK 進行瀏覽。

When was the first time the idea of the documentary came up?
EP: I was a music editor for VIBE in 2004 and I was working on the story for the 10-year anniversary ofIllmatic, and when that story came out we did an interview with Nas, what people thought about Illmaticand that sort of thing. But it just didn’t have enough weight to tell the story of Illmatic as I thought it might needed it to be told, so I got with One9 here and a few other friends who, One9 is a big fan of Illmatic, and comes from the same kind of world view and perspective that I do but he’s a visual storyteller, a visual artist, and I have a journalist background and we all got together and started shooting interviews. Booking interviews and just started interviewing people about Illmatic.

What made you decide to produce it?
One9: We decided, you know, Illmatic really deserved a legacy story. Something that was bigger than just a music doc — we didn’t wanna make a music documentary, we wanted to create and be able to tell a story that spoke to generations. It was bigger than a hip-hop doc, really. It was a story of survival, a story of being really historical with different cultural backgrounds. His father’s generation, the history of Queensbridge — something that deserved to be bigger than TV. We wanted to tell a long-form story of family, culture, history and legacy.

How did you approach it conceptually?
One9: Initially, Erik and I, we both come from different backgrounds. I come from a street art background, Erik is a music journalist and writer so we both took the best of our talents and looked at how do we both tell stories honestly. So we looked at Illmatic as 10 songs that looked at different issues and the main things we looked at was how can we tell the story of the history of Queensbridge houses? How can we tell the stories of the drug invasions? How can we look at the prison industrial system? They all had themes in Illmatic. “N.Y. State of Mind” looked at a bit of that New York history, looked at how drugs were coming in to Queensbridge. Nas told us he learned the definition of ‘fiend’ from crackfiend from the crack invasion, so he broke those down into categories. “Life’s a Bitch” looks at the family being torn apart; “One Love” looks at Nas’ friends being locked up. So he looked at bigger issues, and then we also deconstructed it from a music standpoint on how it related to him and how he penned those lyrics.