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Roundtable Interview With Allen Hughes On Broken City

Allen Hughes, one half of the Hughes brothers who gave us Menace II Society and The Book of Eli, goes solo with Broken City, a crime drama he directed which stars Mark Wahlberg and Russell Crowe. The film follows an NYPD cop named Billy Taggart (Mark Wahlberg) who follows the Mayor of New York's wife to find out if she is cheating and while doing so, stumbles upon a much larger scandal.

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We Got This Covered: Mark had told us about how you first met at a screening of Menace II Society in New York where everyone was smoking pot. What took you two so long to finally find a project to work on together?

Allen Hughes: Quite frankly Mark is an interesting dude because he’s constantly been evolving just to overcome some of the bad boy stuff in his past, not to mention his career in music and the whole Calvin Klein thing. So there’s all this morphing going on with him, but the through line with that is he is so focused and so good at the business and the ethic. I would see him from time to time though whether it was at that screening the first time or whether it was when he used to be at a nightclub which I rarely ever went out to. He would come up and embrace me and literally hug me, so it was like five times over 20 years that he would do that. There’s a conversation being had but not with words, so I was always struck by that. I liked him, but there was this image of him to a certain point where you go “is he violent?” There’s this unpredictability.

So what really happened was I hadn’t seen The Fighter but I think that any great talent in this business whether it’s an agent or a manager or a filmmaker or anybody, you’ll see right before they blossom that they are ready to come into their own. I was clocking Mark, and this was a year before The Fighter came out and that was when I read this script and for some reason Mark Wahlberg’s face kept popping off the page, you know? By the time I got to the end I said this is perfect for Mark because it plays into all his strengths, but also there’s this new level to him which I liken to a Steve McQueen quality. There’s a salt of earth quality to him, and I was like this is it. So I went after him, didn’t know if I was going to get him, but because of that love over the years I was banking on that (laughs). But he really loved the script and that’s why he got involved.

We Got This Covered: Can you tell us more about the screenwriter Brian Tucker? It seems like he knows a lot about life at a very young age and his script for Broken City was on the black list for some time.

Allen Hughes:  I had a meeting set with Brian Tucker at the Palm Restaurant in West Hollywood, and I got there early which is rare and I said “I cannot wait to meet this 58-year-old white man. I can’t wait for him to tell me about scotches and what his process was in writing the script.” This was like Hemingway to me but different and I couldn’t wait to meet this great white man. And I’m sitting there and this very skinny, looks like he’s 17 or 18 years old, black kid comes to my table and I’m looking at him and I’m like “I think you’re of the wrong table,” and he says “Brian Tucker” and I said “oh shit!”

He was at Julliard as a playwright, dropped out and then got into writing screenplays. He’s a scientist in that he studies and absorbs quickly, and he’s almost too smart, which is the same problem I think Russell Crowe has. Their intellects are so far off the charts and it’s very challenging to work with people who are that intelligent.

We Got This Covered: You’ve assembled a great cast here. Is the key to directing just to cast really good actors in the right roles and then just let them do their own thing?

Allen Hughes: Yeah, and really great actors can be like “you know I was working on my character and…” And you’re just like, “that’s your shit baby. Let’s just roll and see what you’ve got.” I’m not going to tell you what I was doing last night or what my process is. Not that I’m not interested in your process, but when you get to a certain level and you’re a great actor, you just agree about who this human being is, who this character is, and then they go off and they do their own thing and something happens. Process is personal I think. My job is to make sure they are relaxed and I’m not a screamer or anything like that. I make sure that they are comfortable and that they are confident to where they can do a couple of takes and then you can go “let’s just try something f**king crazy. Who cares if it doesn’t work?”

That concludes our interview but we’d like to thank Allen for talking with us. Be sure to check out Broken City, in theatres this weekend.