Mack Daddy Maestros - Allen and Albert Hughes - Interview

Interview, April, 2000 by Ed Morales

ALLEN: When you deal with the underclass, whether it's black or Jewish or Italian or whatever, most of those communities don't want that dirty laundry to come up. They want these positive images, because they've been depicted negatively over the years. For us, you can learn more by breaking down the underclass or the criminal. Those are a lot more interesting characters than watching Cosby.

EM: Are you working on something new now?

ALLEN: Finally, yes. It's called From Hell, and it's a Jack the Ripper movie based on this graphic novel. We're in pre-production right now. It's not a black Jack the Ripper. It's Victorian, the real deal.

EM: Do you have a feeling for what you want to do with Jack the Ripper?

ALBERT: I think that's why I've been looking at a lot of Hitchcock. I've not been a major fan of his as far as his '40s-'60s work but the stuff he did in the '30s was so bold and stylistic. We're not going to try to go the same route as our other work, where the violence is so graphic or in your face. There might be moments like that but I want to shoot it more stylistically, where the audience has to imagine what's going on more in their own minds--which everybody says is more scary, which is true.

EM: How do you deal with the mixed-race issue in your lives?

ALBERT: We always felt like outsiders. Black people don't like you because you're part white and white people don't look at you cause you're still a nigger. We always had the outsider's look at everything, so we always viewed everything like a movie. We spent a lot of time making home movies, but we never knew that "Hey, you can direct a movie," until Spike Lee and Robert Townsend made their movies in 1985-86.

EM: Your movies don't seem like they were made from the outsider's perspective.

ALBERT: When John Schlesinger did Midnight Cowboy [1969], he was an outsider when he was coming in to New York, and I've never seen a New York movie capture it like that. I think even Scorsese could do a great movie, but there are things he takes for granted about New York that another filmmaker wouldn't and I think there are some things black people take for granted that we didn't.