Artist: Charlie Ahearn
Interviewer: Alexander Fruchter

Charlie Ahearn just wanted a movie he could show at The Deuce in New York City. 25 years later, his film Wild Style has been shown throughout the world, and is regarded as an essential piece of Hip Hop culture. Lines and routines from the movie have been sampled or reshaped by artists such as the Beastie Boys, Mos Def and Talib Kweli, and Nas, while even more have sampled the visuals used in the film's logo and artwork. The sampling has allowed the movie to remain relevant throughout Hip Hop's growth, and is always a tool for remembering where Hip Hop came from. Although the film is a fictional tale about a graffiti writer wrestling with identity and expression, the story is life-like given the fact that the 'actors' were all pioneers of Hip Hop culture.

SoundSlam caught up with Ahearn, the film's writer, director, and producer to talk about the makings and motivations of Wild Style both in its inception, as well as its present day re-release. In this interview, Ahearn shares his goals for Wild Style, speaks on Hip Hop's growth, and discusses the themes expressed through the story's plot and characters. Check it out cause it's Fantastic, and the Fantastic is the Romantic.

SoundSlam: Let's start talking about Wild Style. Just for those that don't know, what was your role in the film?

Charlie Ahearn: I was the writer, director, and producer of the project, which is sort of a full suite. The film was made with Fab Five Freddy [Bathwaite]. Fred Bathwaite and I came together to make the film in June of 1980. But I made films previously, and he was often working by himself as a painter and doing other things so I took up the reigns of the traditional responsibilities. He was around during a great deal of the production. He helped a lot with the music, and he also was one of the lead characters in the film.

SoundSlam: Going back to making the film, what was your goal when you set out and started writing and had this idea for Wild Style? What did you hope to communicate through the film?

Charlie Ahearn: I think we were thinking about bringing this Hip Hop culture to the world. I think right from the very beginning our career was very local in the sense that I wanted to show this film on 42nd street in New York City, which is called The Deuce. It's the place where Kung Fu movies are shown. It's a place where crews from all boroughs would come to see Kung Fu movies and other action movies. My goal was very local that I wanted the film to be shown in Times Square in 42nd street. In a way we accomplished that when we premiered the film there in 1983 in Times Square. But in a larger sense, right from the very beginning we started to get interested in the film project from England, and Germany, and later from Japan. So, there was definitely a sense like Hip Hop was going to be a world culture. I wanted to make a film that communicated its completeness as a culture in the sense that it had a visual component being the graffiti writing. It had a music component in the Deejaying. It had a dance component in the b-boying, and most importantly, the emceeing was a whole rhythmic and lyrical art form that had been developed there in the Bronx, in a way that was very original. That was the main thing, just to bring the whole picture of it as a culture out to the world.

SoundSlam: Now, with the re-release there's probably going to be people checking the movie out for the first time that are younger than 25, and like you said, Hip Hop now is not just a local thing. It's worldwide, and people see it everyday. What is your goal now in the re-release and how it's going to be received in 2007?

Charlie Ahearn: Well, there's many things to it. One of the things is to provide for people that haven't seen the film a real glimpse of what it was like when Hip Hop first started. The film is not a documentary, but by the way that the film was made in the sense that I cast people who really were the pioneers of this culture and who had made significant contributions each of them, and if you want, we can go into who those people are such as Grandmaster Flash, and Lee Quinones, and other people who played starring roles in the film. Because a lot of people might not have an idea of how it really looked and felt in that sort of innocent time before it became a big business.

SoundSlam: Speaking of that, in the film there's a reporter who goes into to document the graffiti scene there. She's met with a sort of skepticism, but also people are excited at the possibility of what the exposure will bring. How does her role in the film compare to what it was like for you to go into the South Bronx with a video camera and do a similar thing?

Charlie Ahearn: Right. Well, that's sort of a fun question. When I made the film I never actually went into places with a video camera, first of all. The film was a collaboration with the artists involved. Things were organized well in advance of making the scenes. Scenes, like the basketball scene, required a lot of pre-production and organization with the talent. People made up rhymes specifically for those scenes. So it wasn't like I went in and brought a video camera, we were shooting film by the way, not video.

I tried to have a very sort of self-deprecating humorous take on this journalist. And you're right. In a way it was a reflection of how I saw myself in the sense that rather than picturing her as heroic and as if she was exploring and discovering something, I pictured her as bumbling and people around her look much more intelligent-the people around her that are part of the culture-than she looks. I don't know if you've seen other Hip Hop films that picture journalists, but they're often pictured in this kind of semi-heroic fashion. I thought it was more fun to make fun of her.

SoundSlam: Going deeper into the story of the film. Something that I found interesting was that the film is very community based, and as you said, the actors that you cast were not necessarily actors, but people in the Hip Hop scene there. In the film itself everyone knows each other, they all know what's going on, but the main character in a sense feels alone and is afraid to really let people know that he is Zorro and has these talents. Was that contrast intentional?

Charlie Ahearn: That was the most important part of the story of the film. What you're describing, and you have to understand that Lee Quinones' role in real life was to shield himself from people knowing who he was. There were a lot of police that would have like to have caught him and arrested him for things he had done. In a way it's kind of like The Harder They Come. We didn't patterned ourselves after that film, which I have the utmost respect for, but in the sense that the character is an outlaw. That was real to Lee's life. It was important for him. Doing this film was an act of incredible conflict. If you ever check into the book I made, "Wildstyle The Sampler," it does go into depth of what this conflict produced for Lee. While we were making the film, he often didn't show up for some of the most significant scenes like the one with the writers in the subway yards. He didn't show up that night because of his inner conflict, his very real conflict. And it really screwed up our film.

In other words, the kind of things I'm talking about in a sense are more real than some of the things someone could talk about in a documentary. This went right to the heart of the matter and it played out in real life while we were producing the film. Which is also true of his relationship to this woman, Lady Pink, who was in fact his girlfriend and a writer at the time. I was using a lot of things like that that were real in the course of the story. We got more in-depth...That's true of the basketball scene which is a rivalry between these two street rap groups, the Fantastic and The Cold Crush. They were playing out something on the basketball court that was life or death in their real existence. If you could have interviewed them at the time I'm sure they would have explained how much this scene meant to them. They knew that whatever was being recorded on film could either dissuade or persuade people as to whether they were the greatest rap group.

SoundSlam: Continuing with that, were there people you approached that did not want to be included in the film? Did anyone like Fab Five Freddy, or Grandmaster Flash, or Busy Bee say, "I don't know if this is going to project me in the light that I want?'

Charlie Ahearn: Sure. There were some graffiti writers who I could tell did not want to be exposed in that way, so I chose not to work with them, which is OK. It's mutual respect in those regards. As far as emcees that were in the Bronx, that was pretty rare. Most emcees really wanted the exposure. There isn't that much to talk about in terms of emcees that didn't want to be in the movie. Mostly, if you went out and talked to people that did not end up in the movie they felt really mad that they were not in the movie.

SoundSlam: Speaking on that same theme, another interesting point that was on-going in the film was exposure vs. money. All these guys are known throughout the Bronx, getting known, and hope this article shines light on them because they hope it will translate to making some money. But the film ends at the end of that big concert. Nobody knows what happens with Ray or Fade, if they succeed and make a living off this, which also goes into how the music industry is now. We see a lot of things on TV, but that doesn't necessarily translate monetarily.Charlie Ahearn: That's right. What I was trying to do with that, remember the scene where he was painting on this little canvas? I was really forcing an issue by saying, 'here's someone that's used to painting on a large train. Now he's painting on this little canvas and it doesn't work for him. He's trying to do it, but it's not really working.' When he goes to paint the backdrop for this outdoor event, he's back to his original scale and you can sense he's grappling with questions of self-expression and meaning on a grander scale again. It comes full circle. It's like he has reinvented himself as a public artist. Likewise, by creating this star on the building, he's making a kind of mark for a kind of nation. It's a kind of national symbol, or a nation symbol, which is a symbol of unity. He's absorbing himself into the nation in a sense. The concert becomes, as you said, it's really about the community. An artist can sometimes find themselves by absorbing themselves into the community. In a sense they lose themselves but become a better or bigger force.

SoundSlam: Speaking of becoming a bigger force. How do you feel about how Hip Hop has changed since Wild Style? What do you think of its natural progression to its point now?

Charlie Ahearn: Well, of course it's had 25 years of development, and for the most part the development that people are most aware, and that the public sees, is the way that Hip Hop is a multi-billion dollar industry, MTV, VH1, that kind of thing and the way that artists portray themselves. But there's a whole really important picture of Hip Hop that's right below the surface. That appears in communities in Brazil, or Africa, in communities where Hip Hop has become the voice of people that need to be heard and don't have the where-with-all to get that voice. Hip Hop has become an incredibly important vehicle visually because of the graffiti movement, and lyrically in terms of the emceeing that's going on in languages all over the world where there's a whole kind of culture that represents people that previously have been deprived because of visibility. That's really the big story. I'm proud that the culture functions. In that scene at the end of the movie is a pretty good blueprint for the way Hip Hop has been able to function in the world of today.

SoundSlam: What else are you doing? Where is your career now? Most people in Hip Hop know you from Wild Style, but what else do you have going on?

Charlie Ahearn: Now we get to talk about the DVD...I had complete control over the way the DVD was shaped. One of the things I wanted to do with it was provide a platform where people could see creativity that was 25 years ago today in new forms. There are at least 6 short films in the DVD that reflect the present-day creativity going on in Hip Hop. And I'm proud to say that they're short films that I directed and produced myself, which star people like Busy Bee, Grandmaster Caz and other artists from Wild Style in a context that people might be surprised at, but show how this culture has evolved.

For instance, there's a short there called "Bongo Barbershop" which portrays an emcee from Africa who has come to the Bronx to look for real Hip Hop and finds it in a barber shop when he is confronted by Grandmaster Caz. The emcee from Africa is rhyming in Swahili in this scene. So you have this kind of great circle where the music, which really in a sense came from Africa and developed what we think of as Hip Hop in the Bronx, and now you have a person from Africa who's come to America to look for real Hip Hop, and has discovered one of the original pioneers who is Grandmaster Caz, who by the way wrote the theme song for Wild Style. This is the kind of full circle that I'm trying to portray here through the medium of film.

SoundSlam: One of my favorite things when watching the movie is to hear certain rhymes that they do, or certain routines or dialogue and then realize, 'oh, I heard that when I was 12 on a Beastie Boys' album.' Or, 'Mos Def and Talib Kweli switched that up on their Blackstar album' That for me was most enjoyable, being someone that was not around when the movie was made.

Charlie Ahearn: The book that I made, which is called Wild Style The Sampler- the word sampler is all about how Hip Hop is this hall of mirrors in which you hear reflections of something you've heard before in a new context. So, what you're expressing is a lot of what I've gotten into with this book, which is the fact that not only is Hip Hop a hall of mirrors, but Wild Style entered that hall of mirrors and has been reflected by various artists like the Beastie Boys, or Public Enemy, or Nas or other people. But it's also been reflected visually. The logo has been repeated by dozens and dozens of people in other forms. The general thing is of course worldwide, the visual culture. That is what word 'the sampler' is referring to.