He had a way with pop and movies
Along with his lifelong passion for the art of filmmaking, writer and director Curtis Hanson also had a deep understanding and affinity for pop music. Songs took center stage during his career with his stewardship of the Eminem-starring hip-hop drama “8 Mile” in 2002 and his midlife-crisis exploration “Wonder Boys” two years earlier.
More than a decade before Ice Cube and Dr. Dre brought the story of Compton rap group N.W.A to the big screen with their hit feature “Straight Outta Compton,” Hanson captured the zeitgeist of another pocket of rap culture by casting Eminem to play a lightly fictionalized version of himself in the tale of a white rapper from Detroit who rises to the top of a predominantly African American art form.
It became a critical and commercial hit for the “L.A. Confidential” screenwriter, who died Tuesday at 71, and the rapper who at the time had become king of the hip-hop hill.
Hanson had something considerably more ambitious in mind than just putting the electrifying rapper on screen for two hours in what in other hands might have been an extended music video — a concept that helped him connect with the notoriously suspicious rapper born Marshall Mathers.
“He saw that I was going to demand of him a performance that felt sufficiently and emotionally true to carry a movie without the crutch of the hit tunes, a high bar for someone their first time out,” Hanson told The Times in 2002.
“Working with Curtis was like going into film boot camp,” Eminem told The Times.
The rapper even composed a new song for the film during shooting, one that gave him yet another runaway hit, “Lose Yourself,” further testimony to the bond Hanson had forged with Eminem.
By that time Hanson had worked with another famously elusive figure in pop music: Bob Dylan, whose music played a critical role in Hanson’s“Wonder Boys.”
Hanson elicited from Dylan a new song, “Things Have Changed,” for the film’s soundtrack, which earned rock’s poet laureate the Academy Award for original song.
“Things Have Changed” embodied the air of mystery and existential restlessness that characterized much of Hanson’s work: “Lotta water under the bridge, lotta other stuff too / Don’t get up, gentlemen, I’m only passing through.”