Heralded as one of the greatest hip hop movies of all-time, “8 Mile” depicted a young white rapper on the rise in Detroit city. Obviously, there were some auto-biographical elements between the B-Rabbit character, and the actor playing him, Detroit’s own, Eminem.
To commemorate the ten year anniversary of the film, VIBE magazine was able to reunite the cast and they had Marshall Mathers on the cover. In the interview they talk about what part of the B-Rabbit character was taken from Em’s life, and the process in developing the epic freestyle battle scenes.
Check out excerpts and the cover featuring Eminem below.
Eminem: When I look back at
the movie, one of the cool things is we all became friends on the set. The film
carried over to how we [eventually] interacted in real life.
You always said this isn’t your life story.
Does it matter that everybody thinks it is?
It doesn’t really matter to me. People who really listen to my music probably know what’s real in that movie and what’s not. There were bits and pieces that were taken from my life [1], but for the most part, it was the story of the underdog. We rehearsed so much before we even started the film, and I was in every scene. I was there every day from 6 a.m. until—half the time—5 in the morning the next day. It became a point where I felt like I am this person. I’m fucking B-Rabbit because I was living this movie. I had no choice but to be him.
...
How were the battle scenes
written?
I think Curtis had a lot of the guys write their own things, and then I would
see what they were going to say. I might sit there with some of the guys and be
like, “What if you changed this?” The hardest thing for me was trying to figure
out what that last [rhyme] was going to be. As I was going back and forth with
the other guys about what they were going to say—“Okay, if you’re going to say
that, then I’ll write this”—the last one was [challenging
