September 26 [7:55 EDT] — „Gang Related„, the last movie Tupac Shakur made during his lifetime, opens nationally on October 10, and to promote it, one of the last interviews Shakur did has been released.
MGM, the company releasing the film, is sending out what’s called an Electronic Press Kit (or EPK) containing a promotional interview Shakur did for the film in August of 1996 just a few weeks before he was shot in Las Vegas on September 7.
MTV News obtained an advance copy of the EPK, and found Shakur talking about his potential as an actor and as a musician.
„I can’t explain why I shine and no one else shines,“ Shakur said. „I think everybody shines in different. things, and a lot of things I can’t do. I can’t play basketball like every other black person in America. I can act. I know how to go to that true spot in myself, because I go there everyday. I can be me. I can be whoever because I’m true to me. I can go to neutral easily.“
„A lot of people, black, white, Mexican, young, old, fat or skinny, have a problem being true to their self. They have a problem looking into the mirror and looking directly into their own soul. The reason I sell 6 million records, the reason I can go to jail and come out without a scratch, the reason I can walk around, the reason I am who I am today, is because I can look directly into my face and find my soul. It’s right there. It’s not sold. I didn’t sell it. It’s still within me. I still feel it. My heart is still connected to my body, so any character, I’m going to bring that intensity, that truth, that honesty to it, because I have to repay for that blessing.“
Talking about what the future might hold, Shakur said, „I could be the best actor anybody’s ever seen, given the chance, the opportunity and the experience and the lessons from people. I could be the best, but right now, I don’t even wish to be the best, I just want to be one of them.„
As with Tupac’s other posthumous film „Gridlocked,“ there will be a Death Row Records soundtrack for „Gang Related,“ for which he wrote several new songs.
„I did a song for it already called ‚Fortune and Fame,'“ Tupac explained in the interview. „The hook goes ‚Something we all adore/The one thing worth dying for/Nothing for pain/Stuck in this game/Searching for fortune and fame/Something we all adore/The one thing we dying for/Nothing for pain/Stuck in this game/Searching for fortune and fame.‘ That’s what I hear. It’s so basic that we all want to be famous and noticed and watched, and money and riches, and we all want the most out of life from the roughest gangbanger to the most virtuous police officer.“
No word yet from Death Row on whether that song will end up on the „Gang Related“ soundtrack, but the film opens on October 10.
