Eminem is working as the executive producer on the soundtrack for Southpaw. He tells Zane Lowe on Beats 1 Radio that he was presented with the idea for the movie about five years ago.
“The script was incredible,” Eminem says. “Everything about it was dope when it was first presented. But seeing how Jake Gyllenhaal just smashed it, it just made sense that you still wanted to have something to do with the project. So we circled back around and ‘What if we did music for it?'”
The Detroit rapper says that he was supposed to play the lead role, but the movie-making timeline conflicted with his music-making schedule. At the time, the self-proclaimed “super boxing fan” was working on Marshall Mathers LP 2.
“I believed in it and wanted to have something to do with it,” he says of becoming the soundtrack’s executive producer.
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Eminem Says “8 Mile” Inspired Him
Elsewhere in the Beats 1 Radio interview, Eminem says that by taking him back to his roots, 8 Mile gave him a new sense of motivation.
“I needed that movie,” he says of the 2002 film in which he starred. “That movie gave a little different, a slight edge of inspiration that I don’t think I had at that particular time. It was good because doing that movie put me right back in certain elements. It made me for some reason feel hungry again, just the whole Battle Rap scene, the whole everything.”
He says that during filming of 8 Mile, he was running around between different trailers on the set and had to write lyrics on his hands when he didn’t have paper.
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Eminem says that he is not sure when he will do a project like it again.
“When you’re doing a movie like that, you’ve gotta commit,” he says. “I don’t have trouble necessarily committing to things, but it has to be something that’s, I gotta be super passionate about, which means I have no problem doing that, but I have to realize, ‘OK, my music that I’m so obviously passionate about, I’ve gotta put this on hold.’ It has to be something that I have to realize, ‘I can’t do my first passion.’ This is everything to me. This is where everything stems from. This is what it’s about to me. It has to be something that I have to be able to, it has to be strong enough to get my interest.”
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