Allen and Albert Hughes were barely out of their teens when they emerged like baby Scorseses with their blistering debut, Menace II Society. Eight years later, on the verge of the release of their latest film, the Jack the Ripper thriller From Hell, starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, the angry young men say they've finally mellowed. But based on their remarks about the way they've been treated over the years, they haven't made peace with Hollywood just yet.
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With the subtlety of a drive-by shooting, twin brothers Allen and Albert Hughes blazed onto the film scene nearly a decade ago with Menace II Society, a shocking look at Los Angeles ghetto kids who expected to die early and violently, and didn't seem too concerned about doing anything about it.
Though as much white Armenian as they are black, the Hugheses were inevitably (and facilely) labeled "black filmmakers." They made for great copy: young, brash, African-American twins with opinions on everything--especially their peers--and they quickly became the go-to guys for comments disparaging Spike Lee, John Singleton, Matty Rich and other filmmakers telling edgy inner-city stories. Though outspoken, they were also colorful and funny, like the time they memoed the crew of their second film, Dead Presidents, asking them not to wear Spike Lee-designed clothing because it distracted them. Unfortunately, most people assumed the brothers really were tough guys whose films depicted their own life experience--which nearly overshadowed their artistic gifts.
Determined to shed their image as the quintessential urban Brothers Grim, the twins have returned with their first feature since 1995's Dead Presidents. Aside from the entertaining documentary American Pimp, the Hugheses spent the last half decade trying to find themselves, and plotting a course out of the urban-film ghetto. The result is From Hell, a London-set thriller that mixes fact and fiction to tell the story of an opium-addicted detective's quest to catch history's first famous serial killer, Jack the Ripper. Shot in Prague and starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, From Hell proved to be a transformative experience. It drained away their anger and bitterness, and might even deliver them from their personal hell--being pigeonholed as filmmakers only good in the 'hood.
MICHAEL FLEMING: You were developing a Jack the Ripper story for years. What grabbed you?
ALLEN HUGHES: We were first introduced to Jack the Ripper through one of our favorite old TV shows, "In Search of...," with Leonard Nimoy. We were young and thought, Whoa, this is freaky and scary. We were fascinated about the time, that he was the first real serial killer, the way he killed, down to the fog and all that bullshit.
ALBERT HUGHES: Then we got into this graphic novel From Hell, which was multilayered, had a royal theme, great class-system characters. Instead of doing movies like Menace over and over and not learning anything, we thought we could learn a lot here.
Q: You chose something far afield from a violent urban movie.
ALLEN: We were fed up with being pigeonholed as black filmmakers.
ALBERT: Someone wrote, "Let's see how these urban filmmakers fare doing a white movie," which pissed us off. First of all, Jack the Ripper takes place in the ghetto of a city, and it's very parallel to our other material of death, murder, mayhem--the underbelly of society, basically. The only difference is it's white, and it's 1888.
Q: From Hell bounced around several studios. What happened?
ALBERT: It started at Disney after Dead Presidents, where they offered us three scripts: Jack the Ripper, Con Air, and something else. We turned them all down, and then my brother read 45 pages of From Hell, and we got hooked. By then, we'd made one of the most violent Disney movies of all time [Dead Presidents], on purpose, and they knew if we did Jack the Ripper they'd get a bloody movie from us, so they didn't want it. So we went to New Line, where we'd always had problems because of our pay on Menace. Then we had a little falling out with [New Line Co-Chairman] Bob Shaye, because I had protected him in an interview with Premiere magazine, and they took one quote in which I had protected him, and he wrongly associated all the off-the-record quotes to me. I sat with a reporter for an hour, defending Bob against sex allegations, drug use and everything, and he basically kicked us out. Killed the project. I put myself on the line defending that company against those allegations, and he turned around and fucked us for it. We got kicked out, and we went to Fox.
Q: Your depiction of violence has always been head on, more realistic like Martin Scorsese than stylized like John Woo. Given that Jack the Ripper's handiwork was so gruesome, you must not have been able to show much this time.
ALBERT: It's funny you bring up John Woo. For the shootout scene in Menace, I had watched a lot of Woo's films and learned how to cover action. But I did a terrible job at it, it was nowhere near his. From Hell, because we had this tag on our backs that we specialized in bloodletting, was a proving ground to show that we could handle violence in a non-direct way. We studied a lot of Hitchcock, trying to figure how to put it in people's minds that there's violence that's not really shown. I think we did too good a job of that, because people are saying it's too gory, when it really isn't. You only see one throat cut in the whole movie--everything else is indirect. We were designing things, making everything red, different things that had to do with style, and that we had to pull back on, because it was too much.
ALLEN: We showed some things, but nothing near Hannibal, which was a lot gorier. As with every other one of our movies, the MPAA has issues. Despite the fact that Saving Private Ryan and other films show heads being lopped off, bloodletting galore. ALBERT: The funny thing about the MPAA and black movies is that they won't allow exit wounds, the squibs, bullets coming out with blood on it. Look at a white movie with a comparable level of violence, you'll see the difference. When we went to arbitration with the MPAA on Dead Presidents, we cut a reel of movies with violent footage they had let go by, and they wouldn't even let us bring it in. They don't deal in logic at all.
Q: Was Johnny Depp your first choice to play the inspector trying to catch Jack the Ripper?
ALLEN: When we were at Disney, we liked him, but he'd just come off Sleepy Hollow and we thought, Damn, we can't use him. When we finally met him, we found him to be one of the nicest guys we've ever met, period. He's got extensive knowledge of the subject matter, has all these books on it, and we sat for hours, talking about life, about movies, and we knew this was the guy. His performance was so different. There's mystery about Johnny, which helps. And he's kind, and when your star is that way, it spreads to everybody on the set. We learned a lot about acting, and how to act on a movie, from him.
Q: You followed Menace II Society with Dead Presidents, and, except for American Pimp, didn't work for five years. What happened?
ALBERT: We decided to take a year off, and it turned into five. But we don't regret it now because we wanted to mature, to get into our 30s before we tackled bigger subject matter.
Q: Many people would feel insecure checking out for so long. How did the time away from the business mature you?
ALLEN: I don't want to make it sound like we haven't been treated well in Hollywood, but a lot of stuff we went through, a lot of the people we met, were disgusting. And the scripts we were reading were shitty, evidenced by lack of quality in films coming out right now. We just needed to get away. We did Menace II Society when we were 20, everybody responded well to it and, looking back, it was too much, too soon. They were rushing us into a lot of stuff. Dead Presidents had a script that wasn't ready, but Disney had advanced us a lot of money, and we felt we had to go make the movie. We were young, and we hadn't figured out that it takes time to get the script right. We took four years to develop this one, hung out with our kids and figured out who we are.
Q: Menace II Society cost around $3 million and grossed nearly $30 million. Were you instant millionaires?
ALLEN: Not by a long shot. We walked away with about $45,000 apiece, before taxes, and never saw another dime--not to this day. There was a rumor about Bob Shaye at New Line giving us more money, maybe in a deal for another movie, but it never happened, and we got fucked on the soundtrack we'd put together. Someone at that studio said, "Well, the big deal you have at Disney right now, that's because of Menace, so all that money you're getting from Disney is in fact from Menace. So cool out."
ALBERT: If you want talent to stay at a studio, you treat them properly. We said to Bob Shaye and [New Line Co-Chairman] Michael Lynne, "You guys are screwing us." They had built in an option for a second movie, and the budget was $4.5 million. They tried to stick us to that option, and we just up and went to Disney, We're cool with New Line now, but we call them a halfway house for filmmakers, where directors come, but don't stay, because they don't treat artists well at all.
Q: It's hard to believe you only got $45,000 each for that film.
ALLEN: This is the first time we've gone on the record with that. We were too embarrassed in the past to tell people.
Q: As filmmakers, what's the biggest difference between you now, as opposed to when you came on the scene with Menace?
ALBERT: The confidence level has definitely improved, and that helps on the set, the way you deal with people. One of the biggest differences at age 29 is we're a lot less angry than when we made our first movie. We were really angry back then.
Q: At whom?
ALBERT: This might sound harsh and juvenile, but we were mad at white people. For not understanding why gangstas behaved the way they did, for not understanding poverty. We made that film for white people, not black people, to show them. Maybe it had to do with us growing up biracial, and not being accepted by either whites or blacks. We were angry at some black people, too. We went to Europe to do [From Hell], and that was really positive in changing us. There, they don't give a shit about slavery or racism. If they're a little prejudiced against you for being black, they get over it real quick. Whereas in America, it's so ingrained. We still get bad service in restaurants, things like that. But we're not as angry about it as we used to be.
Q: When you look back at Menace, how does it play for you?
ALLEN: Not well at all.
ALLEN: We watched it the other day, because a friend was in town, and he hadn't seen it in awhile. We put on the laser disc, and had to walk out of the room every once in awhile, because it was really embarrassing to watch.
Q: But critics hailed the movie. Did you resent having to defend it?
ALLEN: Some things made it seem like a college-student film. And yet the write-ups went on about its truths, and how it was not preachy. Nice compliment, but there were a lot of preachy elements we now wish we had the foresight to take out. There's so much corniness and preachiness in black movies that make social statements. It's almost like the Spike Lee/John Singleton prerequisite for black moviemaking. I'm talking shit now, but Above the Rim, Who's the Man? and Matty Rich's first movie [Straight Out of Brooklyn], there's a lot of crappy films, and I hate to go on record like that, but they got thumbs up because they were black films and a lot of critics went, "I'm not going to touch that, I'll just give them a free pass."
Q: Given all the faults you find now with Menace, didn't those critics give you the same pass?
ALLEN: They gave us a big pass, but I look back and I know understand there's an energy and certain elements that are unique to that movie.
ALBERT: That's the thing about Spike; the critics go, "That's a good Spike Lee movie." It's like, "Well, it wasn't a good movie, but it was a good Spike Lee movie." So now you're judging on scales, grading on curves. We never wanted to come off that way as filmmakers. There were hurdles we had to jump because of Spike's legacy, and we're still jumping those hurdles now. That's probably the reason we did From Hell. Most people probably don't realize we're half Armenian, raised by our Armenian side, so we've got white sensibilities as much as we do black sensibilities, and they're just starting to come out. Even though we've got a lot of respect in town and were treated well compared to filmmakers who came before us, there's still that stigma.
Q: What stigma?
ALLEN: The thing that has always disgusted me about the town is that, in all these meetings, a lot of these executives and agents really thought that we were carrying guns and knives because of the movie we made. Scorsese and guys like that can make movies about the Mob, and take a meeting without people worrying, but when you're black and you make a movie like that, they feel that you had to have lived it because you don't have artistic blood running through your bones, you couldn't have just done a movie effectively without living the lifestyle.
ALBERT: A big producer stole a project from us recently, and my brother called up his assistant and said, "You better have him call us back in an hour." We made it clear we weren't making any physical threats against the guy, we wouldn't hurt him, but he had to know we were pissed off. We went to great detail to tell him what a slimeball his boss was, and the way he relayed the message to his boss was, "These guys threatened your life."
ALLEN: No, no, no, Albert. His boss took it that way. He had relayed the message effectively, I think. The next day, [the producer] tried to get restraining orders, hire an investigator, all because we were feeling pissed off that he had stolen our project. Had it been the Coen brothers, it wouldn't have been an issue.
ALBERT: That part of the movie business still goes on every day for us, where people think we're going to physically harm them when we're angry. We've never personally put our hands on anybody since, like, going back to the schoolyard, where we got our asses kicked a couple of times. I hate to pull a race card, because I don't really believe in that stuff, but I have to say, the town is really racist. There are guys who don't like you because they don't know you, and fear what they don't understand. Or you're at the Ivy at the Shore [restaurant], and some white person comes over and gives you their valet ticket to get their car.
Q: Did you get wealthy at Disney on Dead Presidents?
ALBERT: We did better, but to this day, we live modest lifestyles. We've never been wealthy by industry standards. We don't really care about money, which isn't so great. People come into our lives and we make sure they are taken care of. Somebody comes over and likes something on a shelf in our house, it's theirs. The biggest thing we learned in 10 years is that we've got to stop being so generous, willing to give everything away. We aren't broke or anything, but we're not rolling in cash.
Q: You can be hard on yourself for making a bad deal, but Menace preceded the period where people headed to the Sundance Film Festival and made piles of money selling their first films.
ALLEN: We went that route with our documentary American Pimp, and it was the worst experience. We took 10 minutes of the movie, put it on Super 8 and shopped it around, got a couple of million-dollar offers, and thought we would wait until Sundance. And what we found was a bunch of bitter distributors who were angry at us and screwed us. They were making us feel like we were the first people to come there and try to sell a movie. They were so bitter at us that we didn't sell it to them early that they trashed us.
ALBERT: That was the lowest point of our careers. Now, they're all calling us, but then, we couldn't even get our phone calls returned from people we knew for years, at big positions at big studios. We've said a lot of things in the press that reflected our goofball sense of humor, but I think the town thought, These shit-talking motherfuckers, we're going to show them. They didn't break our spirits, but they stomped on us when we were down, and I've got to say that in five years and the lessons we learned, the lowest point was being at Sundance when people we thought were our friends just turned their backs on us. These were the same people who'd gone crazy for us after Menace, and who are calling us all the time now wanting to talk deals. It's a head-fuck, but I'd never give that experience up for anything, because it was the best learning experience.
Q: You guys are wiser now, but if you feel anger for business setbacks like that, aren't you in danger of falling into that old trap, where you were thought of as the angry young black filmmakers?
ALBERT: I'm not angry at all. That's the other thing about Europe, which changed everything for us. In Prague, Amsterdam, London, people are people, and race or sexual orientation hardly matter. It was refreshing, and we got off on that. So now we come back here, and I'm not mad at any of these guys. I just recognize what they are. If they didn't want to do business then, fine. We now know that this is all about business. We know now never to trust these bastards again in our lives. Never talk to them like people again, because real people don't treat you like they treated us.
ALLEN: It can be the same when you sit down with a journalist; they lay all this stuff out, and they screw you. Like, an interviewer would start by saying, "Let me read you what Halle Berry or Alfre Woodard said about your film." We'd be like, "Well, fuck that bitch!" I don't take the bait anymore, and I'm not bitter. I thought it was cool to personalize it, but I completely understand now that it's all about dollars and cents.
Q: Should you have avoided getting into dissing contests over Spike Lee and John Singleton?
ALBERT: What happened was, every time we sat down for an interview, the first question was, "What do you think of Spike Lee?" "You have a black film, just like John Singleton." We were like, "You know what, fuck them all." It wasn't that we hated them as much as having them brought up. How many times does there have to be a black-filmmaker article where they want us all in one picture? We think it's great to have black filmmakers working, but we don't think we should have to be clustered together.
ALLEN: We were consciously trying to keep that image away from us because, like we said, we've had to live down a legacy that has been very destructive to us. It's not about dissing black filmmakers, it just shouldn't be a clique thing. You don't see a bunch of Italian guys, a picture of a bunch of Jewish guys, you don't see that.
ALBERT: We have no beef with John, period. Spike, there was some personal stuff where he treated us badly. He never apologized about it, and when asked, we were just open about it.
ALLEN: A lot of people have ripped us off, and we're thinking, Why are these people doing us this way? The guy who ripped off American Pimp and did it as a documentary at HBO, he was a friend of ours. One of our best friends in the business told us our problem is we come at everything with love in our hearts, expecting that everybody has the same quality. People might think we're negative, and we're cynical people, but as far as human beings, it's all love and generosity and trust. We used to openly discuss script ideas, only to watch them get taken away and ripped off. Now, we realize why high-profile directors are so guarded in what they say. And when Industry people talk how someone has a big ego, but you meet them and they're the nicest person. You realize they use ego as a tool, to communicate, because it's the only way those types understand not to mess with you. We've been taken advantage of for our openness; our sweetness has been mistaken for weakness.
ALBERT: That's part of the reason we want to move to Europe.
Q: You're moving to Europe?
ALLEN: We're going to Amsterdam, and it's not for the women and the drugs. I just don't think we should change our personalities for this industry. I think we should move away so we can be who we are, and then when we come to do business, we can do it. Before we went to Europe, we loved New York because it embraced the arts a lot better than L.A., the people are more loving and when you're down in the dumps, there's more positive energy and support. It's even better in Europe, where they embrace the arts completely, whether it's poetry, singing, writing or moviemaking. We fell in love with Amsterdam, where nobody looks at you twice, nobody's freaked about who you're dating, or what your color is. We had been living out in L.A., but about 35 miles outside of town. We never hung out, went to clubs or premieres. We used to get flustered when too many people walked up to us. We were really scared of crowds, paranoid for 10 years. And it just dawned on us that you gotta get out there, because they do fear what they don't know. Part of the fear factor was that people didn't know us.
ALBERT: We have kids, so we can't really move, but we can go there for a couple months at a time. We each have one child. We would definitely make movies, we want to work now. But we'll take a month or two at a time and go there, feel free to be ourselves. L.A. is such a tension-filled town.
Q: I don't think I've seen two movies with more depressing endings than your first two films. Has this road trip made you both feel more upbeat to the point where you might actually be able to make a film with a happy ending?
ALBERT: Oh, yeah. We're pessimistic by nature, even cynical, but the European thing helped. I was very introverted--we both are, but I'm worse. I wouldn't go outside because I was very paranoid about people beating me up, people shooting me, people confronting me. So one thing Europe made me feel is, if it's meant to happen, it's meant to happen. I was missing out on life because I was so paranoid. Also, the biggest mistake I see big directors make is, they don't go out in public much, and lose touch with reality. Your observation skills diminish because you don't go out and mix with the crowds.
ALLEN: We go out when we have to, so don't make it sound like we never do. The difference between him and me is, after Dead Presidents, I got out and went around the world fishing. Being around people was never a fear of mine, but I had a fear of death, a fear of people dying around me that I cared about. And the thing about Europe that changed us both is it did instill some love in us.
Q: Given Europe and your experience with Johnny Depp, it sounds like you might be lightening up.
ALLEN: When any drama goes down, I feel like I don't want to be part of anything negative anymore. If anybody I know fucks me, I'm not going to hold a grudge. I'm not harboring anything anymore. I want to be happy, and it wasn't until three years ago that we both got happy. We'd never really been happy before.
ALBERT: We were very hard on ourselves about everything. Recently, he got a Mercedes and I got a Porsche. We still feel guilty about it, and we were avoiding that for years because of the perception that people might have of us if we had nice things. Now we think, Why should other people's perception keep us from being happy? There's still guilt, but we're getting to the point where we can appreciate life, and have things and not feel like somebody's looking at us all the time. I don't see us being angry anymore. Anger only fucks things up for us. It's hard to grow if you're angry.
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Michael Fleming interviewed Heather Graham for the September issue of Movieline.