The Lucas Brothers On Switching From Law School To Film, Comedy, 'Judah The Black Messiah' + More

wake that ass up in the morning the breakfast club morning everybody it's tj envy angela yee charlemagne the guy we are the breakfast club we got some special guests with us today that's right we got the lucas brothers welcome what's up man what's up how are you i'm glad to see y'all still looking very militant even though y'all nominated for an oscar you know you can't change it to change it up too much no no okay if y'all don't dress like this at the oscars i'm gonna be disappointed all right good person has to wear tuxedos man really yeah well we might keep our military jackets over the tucks all right you know maintenance which one is kenny which one is keith i'm kenny okay and maybe i'm keith yeah no i'm kidding good job what do the military jackets represent for you it's uh the invaders you ever hear the invaders yeah from l.a it's like no i'm tripping no it's from memphis okay you know so they were like the black panther equivalent right before oh yeah mlk now yeah yeah exactly exactly okay so we got these things made in la and we thought they were cool and so let's go back for people that don't know who the lucas brothers are i know you guys are from newark new jersey so explain your journey man it's been crazy so we were born september 13th 1985 at umd and j yeah new jersey uh during the height of the crack epidemic you know sharp james was the mayor right uh you know we lived in uh you know garden spires i don't know if you guys familiar with foreign spires first street brick city right and uh you know it was a turbulent upbringing yeah drug war drugs shootings killings killings in the 80s 90s stealing cars it was crazy we were the carjacking capital of the universe you know what i mean what was that movie um made people mad you know but it was still the only representation of newark right right so we when our father went to prison when we were like six or seven he was like caught up in that gang [ __ ] and you know doing what he had to do to survive got caught and so we kind of grew up but not kind of a single mom you know [ __ ] like that poverty moving from like different places and you know seeing [ __ ] that we probably shouldn't have seen when we were like [ __ ] kids when we were kids it was wow it was wow uh but you know i we feel like you know even though our upbringing was tough it made us who we are today you know i mean like you know but that doesn't justify tough living but you know you got to do what you got to do so we moved around a bunch i struggled in high school he didn't really struggle with that i was pretty good he was a pretty good student now wait a minute see now there's no way i got an identical twin and i'm struggling yeah that was the problem like you could just be like yo bro take the thing is we hadn't seen sister sister yet so we didn't have like a like a sitcom play that we could do so i was just like beast in class and he was struggling i was like dude just i was struggling so much and he was doing so well i was like i gotta turn this [ __ ] around because like it's on me like it's not i can't blame it on my upbringing this dude's killing it so yeah right around my sophomore year i started to like shift and uh start studying hard and we were able to get into college by the grace of god and uh we studied philosophy in college and we thought we were going to get our phds in philosophy like we were convinced that that's what we wanted to do right you guys had the same major yeah and that's that's interesting because you said your dad studied philosophy in prison right yeah that's made up everything everybody studies philosophy okay i just got to check because i was like how y'all study philosophy but then made fun of him right we were trying to incorporate philosophy into a joke so it just made sense to you know yeah the punchline worked better when we said he was the philosopher instead of us because there's a lot of philosophy that's right that's right so we studied philosophy we were going to go to get our phds but we you know we needed money man like we were broke as [ __ ] like i mean philosophers don't make that much money and then they were telling us like graduate school for philosophy it's tough it's hard to find a job eight years i'm like eight years for philosophy that's great some philosophers do make money but some philosophy derek jackson made a lot of money right until he did okay right and cornell was you know he's a brilliant philosopher yes absolutely he's uh made a huge name for himself so it could have been done but we're not cornell west side right uh we we thought maybe we can do something a bit more practical so we went to law school right i went to duke he went to nyu yeah uh he wasn't passionate at all about it i thought that i really wanted to be a lawyer right uh but it just didn't work out i mean law is [ __ ] brutal i don't know if you've ever been to a law school i've been like sat into a class but it's it's it's rigorous yeah and then right around that time in law school i started experimenting with drugs like i started smoking i started doing adderall i was drinking and like i was starting to like because the stress of law school i never felt anything like that before and i'm i'm [ __ ] from newark i've seen that's violence i've seen like people using drugs they never wanted to touch a drug right then i get to law school i'm like damn i can't take this [ __ ] exam like i can't take the stress of people wanting to [ __ ] out do me like that that that competitive nature i've never been in anything like that have you ever did you do didn't you do three years of law school right like i'm almost finished we're almost finished we did like with two years and like 98 of our third year we had about two weeks left before our exams and we were like [ __ ] it man we went let's go do stand up right right it was really like lebowski when it was like [ __ ] it let's go bowling we just we just had a we just had a moment right of clarity moment was blown away i want to go back to the law school thing have you ever unpacked that like like because you know the hood i guess because you came up in the hood so that seems so normal the fact that when he was in law school he was like fish out of water kinda that's exactly what it was yeah that's exactly what it is it felt like alice in wonderland like i had never seen people use drugs so openly from like privilege because i've been around white people in north carolina and they mean it was drinking and there was tobacco use but it was never like coke and never like mushroomed and i know those drugs i had no idea what they were even though i was in newark doing the drug war i just didn't touch those opioids i mean my mom did a good job of like shielding us away from all of that [ __ ] so once we got to law school we didn't really have that protection right so it was just us integrated into this world where we just weren't familiar with and uh yeah that pressure man you know white folks are i mean we're all competitive but you're in that that just that classroom and that the schools and you're focusing on credits and you're focusing on you know making it to the next level you know it's super cutthroat and that you you can't even the hood doesn't even prepare you for how cut through the white world can be right it's gotta [ __ ] with you as a black man right because you see people in the hood they're usually leaning on drugs for for trauma reasons right exactly right y'all doing this [ __ ] for fun and not going to jailbreak exactly dude like it blew our minds like how how can they especially at law school you know these guys are the people who are going to be writing policies right right and they're breaking the rules and these policies are going to affect you know black people so it was like a weird sort of uh uh situation where you're like how can i study this and know that these these people are going to write these laws that affect my people but they're they don't even care about the rules of the law so yeah let's get back to it so y'all decided not to finish law school yeah emptiness and stand up and let's do comedy yeah y'all working on comedy or did some family members say y'all funny y'all like nobody in our family they don't think that we're that funny no they don't think we're funny at all i mean we're not cause we're not the funniest people in our family no no we're like maybe like 10th down like right there's just too many funny people in our family to even compete with them but uh i think it was just like i went i did some stand-up in new york i went to like a club i did a club and it was just i sucked but i liked it like what makes you do that like you know what let me try comments i was losing my mind i was i think i was losing my mind like i was literally like drinking doing drugs and i was like [ __ ] it man i'm not i'm not gonna do this law school [ __ ] anymore and i was just losing i was breaking up with my girlfriend at the time she was breaking she was breaking up with me at the time [Laughter] and i was just like i was on one man like it was crazy but i was on stage and that was the only time i felt normal like that's the only time i felt like i was myself when i was on stage and when i was offstage it felt like everything was [ __ ] eroding and you went to his first show no he sent me he sent me a clip of him i was in north carolina he was in new york right he sent me a clip of his the first show and i was like yo this is terrible all right the worst sex i've ever seen and i thought that he i know i knew he was having like a crisis of mental health and i was like dude man like just do it a few more times but you know get back to the books because this ain't it yeah but he kept with it like he still kept going to the open mics and he still he still kept uh you know trying to get better at it so after like a couple weeks uh he called me again it was like yo i think we need to quit law school i think we need to all right and i was like [ __ ] crazy i want to be a lawyer all right i didn't put three years into this i'm not going to just drop it for comedy but he was very persuasive and and then that's when i had that moment of clarity like [ __ ] it man let's just do it let's try it i don't you know so he would have been a good lawyer because he was treated that's what i'd say i used my three years of legal education just to convince him to drop out of law school so now what did your mom say your mom you know struggled to get you in good school worked hard for you yeah yeah she's so excited my my boy's about to be attorneys and he's like mom now we're dropping down we're going to become convenience i mean she thought we were losing our minds like she didn't she i mean she knows like our whole story so she's familiar with our father not being there she's familiar with the drugs she's like you know maybe you guys should go to therapy or something like that make sure you think about what you're doing before you're doing it just being a mom being like being but she but eventually when she saw that we were serious about it right right and we were gonna made us happy he was he was completely on board right dad you know he thought that he was gonna get some free legal advice once we dropped out he got a little upset he's been super supportive i love how he said my mom knows our whole story like people like my mama's my day one oh really i mean she can't lie to her like you know what i mean you can lie to pretty much anyone else not your mom you can't lie to your mom she just sees right through that [ __ ] and i'm like all right she knows that we're using she knows that we're doing all that [ __ ] so you know what i love man i love you know how comedians are always able to tap into darkness and heavy topics so easily your backstory explains why right you know what i mean right right i mean you know you grow up you're young you grow up in the inner city you see all this you see death you see murder your father gets locked up you just have a distrust of institutions right uh and you know for us at least it made us really depressed and so we we we needed ways to figure out how to probe the darkness um one of the best ways to do that [ __ ] on stage is to dress like another dude who looks like you and just like it just lowers the like people like oh these these [ __ ] are silly like you know i mean like it's it's just like it makes the act silly so you think you can go into like heavy [ __ ] i feel like you're you get away with it a little bit more i mean yeah you guys y'all do definitely push the line and i notice one thing that you can do in order to say something that might be uh controversial you kind of say okay this joke is terrible but we're gonna that's our way out that's that's a defense mechanism are there times that you've been like okay this might be pushing it too much i don't know if we could do that yeah we've we've had some jokes where we're just like yeah maybe this is a little too distasteful or perhaps it's it's not where we want to go but we feel like you know if you want to be the best comedian that you can be you got to just put it all out there you got to try and see what happens you may get some blow back but it's like it is what it is do you think censorship or this uh world culture that we're in right now is that is that going to dilute the art no i don't think so i think that is going to make uh make us even more uh it's going to make us even more uh uh what's what i'm looking for make us like i think creative creative you have to be creative you have to be a little bit more uh considerate of because i think about i look there was a period when blackface was like you know the the top style of comedy and people were like and people like you can't do blackface anymore i'm sure the people who were doing blackface were like [ __ ] this is ruining comedy this is hurting the purity but it's like no you just have to you know adjust and work around those parameters and make better comedy i think that's how evolution works it's like you just have to if people are like they don't make fun of trans or don't make fun of gays and now we can't do those things i think it makes our comedy fresher i think it makes it uh purer because now you're you're no longer punching down you've got to be a bit more inventive you've got to just be a bit more creative and clever and i think that's what's going to happen i think we're going to get way more voices and way more clever voices you know making jokes that don't just punch down but does it really reflect reality meaning like art should get a certain type of license to reflect reality right right if you're not able to reflect reality without people offending people saying oh that that shouldn't be in the movie it's offensive like but it's a movie i'm trying to tell a story here right right right no i i see what you're saying i guess i just think like you know you know comedy serves it's not just about you know telling the freest form of comedy but there's also like a moral and social uh component to the comedy that we do right again you can choose to to be offensive you can choose to say whatever you want but you have to be prepared for the backlash you can do whatever you want yeah all right so but for us it's like you still got to take risk but you got to you have to i mean that's art all right it's risk-taking right you get away with a lot more when it's funny too and when it makes sense because the word is when people tell try to tell a joke about something that's controversial but it's not funny right and when it's smart right like if you again clever smart yeah if it makes sense but if it's like something that you're just saying just to be shocking for the sake of being shocking i feel like that doesn't work right i totally agree i just think that again i think it's incumbent on comedians to take this as a it's a challenge it's a challenge to you know push ourselves to tell jokes that are risky tell jokes that are you know can be controversial but also make it clever make it funny make it smart be a little bit more inventive uh and i i see it as an opportunity i see it as an opportunity to be a little fresher because i like that anticipation like when you do the oj jokes and you're like all right we have three oj jokes i'm like oh man where is this about to go because certain things you're like how okay what's gonna be funny about this but that's how you really pull it off as you give that little warning and then right oj's been funny for 30 years he's a billionaire and he's a billion dollars how is it not funny now to make oj jokes i mean you know people people are in their feelings you know and people have a platform to voice right their their discontent and they have a right to voice their disconnect yeah everybody has a voice everybody i i think that that's strange to me like it's never really been like that in history where anyone can say some [ __ ] and it could potentially topple or take down or or strike at anything so sometimes the even the the powerless have more power than those who are powerful it's crazy yeah it's really crazy yeah i mean you guys are doing a remake of uh revenge of the nerds i heard with uh seth macfarlane right that movie would be considered problematic toxic reinforcing rape culture and it was probably it was problematic you know in the 90s yeah we didn't notice right right right how do you remake that for this era you know times have changed i i feel like we have an opportunity to to comment on the film in the 80s right you know i i think that like they did in 22 jump street 21 joe street right they took an approach where it allowed for them to you know create a new story but also comment on the past and i think that's what we want to do like we don't want to just do uh every minute yeah like yeah we don't want to do that we want to critique the movies from the past but also tell uh a more original yeah like we have like now we have disney at our behest so we can tap into like real nerd [ __ ] like marvel star wars etc and we can uh you know tell a story that's not as offensive but still funny because see that's my thing nobody's acknowledging the shift in culture right right there was a shift in culture the stuff that you used to couldn't get away with in music music movies whatever you just can't anymore but we haven't acknowledged that yeah it sounds like we just started handing out retro after speeding tickets right right it's weird i think i think there's been a shift in a number of things i feel like there's been a shift in science we've gone from you know straight einstein sort of relativity to sort of a quantum sort of perspective of science and i think that that's reflective of in the internet where everyone has a point of view and everyone feels like their reality is real like like everyone says we're speaking out truth everyone's truth is sort of legit even if it contradicts someone else's reality and that's quantum [ __ ] you know what i mean like everyone's perspective is legitimate so i think that even flat earthers even flat earthers even flat earthers like if they believe it why is it not you know like they truly believe it's true even if you put forth evidence that you know their beliefs are erroneous they're still going to believe what they want to believe right so you're putting yourself at a disadvantage trying to use reason to a person that doesn't even use reason right it's not even worth the discussion what do you think about putting the disclaimers you know how they've been putting disclaimers like on movies and tv shows just to give people like okay this was filmed during this time i mean i think that that's a more effective approach than just completely banning something i mean i think that maybe that works but again it's just like we're we're we're i think we're assuming that audiences aren't intelligent we're we're assuming that they can't differentiate between what's offensive and what's not offensive it's it's very internal right yeah yeah i think people can differentiate whether they want to watch something and if they're offended by it they won't watch it and then you're going to have a small minority of people who go online and say take this [ __ ] down but i think what's happening now is people being very reactive to those minority voices i feel like eventually hopefully that there will be like a leveling out where we're like okay maybe we shouldn't be that reactionary maybe we should maybe we should have some sort of due process in assessing what we do with a particular piece of art because it's a very slippery slope like i even saw what they did with a yg this weekend with the meet the focus record right and i think they took it down but then they put it back because they said if we take this down then we're gonna have to do this all across the board it's so many things people could be offended by like it's like you can't go down that road when it comes to art i think we need to make a distinction between offense and harm right i think we need to i think when we're assessing how we uh limit someone's liberty like is that is that exercise of liberty harming a person or is it offending a person if it's harming then i think we can take a more you know proactive approach to the piece of art and maybe say hey maybe we should consider taking it down if it's just offending someone like but everybody's upset about everything like you know they were man exhibit because he has a new strain of weed or his company is called napalm right napalm is a type of gasoline right but people were saying no it it triggers me because it reminds me of this that and the other yeah is that right though because napalm in the dictionary is a type of gas sure so he should be able to name his company but that's like saying we were saying earlier britney spears said slave said i said i get mad because it's triggered because my right i think you have a right to get mad i think you have a right to be offended i'm saying i don't think that that offense should equate to you know completely eliminating a work of art i think we have to i think we have to be able to process offense and have honest conversations about that which offends right but i think that that shouldn't result in you know a boycott of someone's uh work of art that they've put years into like if it's harmful if it's causing violence if it's like causing like blatant racism then you got like blackface for example that that was harmful to black people you know i mean like birth of a nation what's directly harmful to black people so it should be removed i mean i don't think that that's a problem yeah i don't i don't have an issue with that but if it's just offensive i'm like yeah we gotta have thicker skin can we go back to revenge of the nerds what did that movie mean to you guys because that is a classic movie even though there's some things like when they had the video cameras spying on the girls or when he was dressed up as you know when she thought he was somebody else and ended up having sex with him in the movie those are the things that you're like damn i can't believe you know that was considered okay but aside from that with revenge of the nerds did that movie mean a lot to you guys like growing up why did you decide to do this yeah the movie came up before y'all were born 84 we can't we were born in the first five years that's great right yeah you know being twins you you're instantly uh uh different from everyone else you're another uh we've been it's been that way since we were kids and we got bullied and we got bullied but it's like so revenge of the nerds sort of just like spoke to us you know it's like these guys who are outcasts who are socially awkward uh you know banding together to try to take down the jocks i mean it's like it's a story as old as time and it right it really really spoke to us because we were you know others and we were nerds and we got bullied and you know and we also loved the little giants and if they had approached us to make a remake we would have done it without questions yeah yeah aaron benjamin is like the first time a lot of us saw titties on tv right right between now and porcupines total recall it was three of them it was kind of yeah you know what's so funny y'all talk about disclaimers i was watching pinocchio this weekend i'd like to get high and watch like old stuff like that and they gave a disclaimer the old one and they gave a disclaimer at the beginning of it and it was like this movie has tobacco use yeah i'm like what the [ __ ] that's weird is that the arrow we in now it is it is but how do we smoking in pinocchio pinocchio i don't remember yeah oh yeah the pipe yeah no he didn't have a pipe no pinocchio smoked when he went to the bad school right before they got shipped to pleasure island didn't know that and before they got all turned into donkeys him and the dude was smoking cigars they were smoking drinking beer so smoking cigars is considered an offense that's what he said on disney plus watch that by yourself i was in the basement my daughter was down there maybe maybe it's because he was a kid so much life lessons in pinocchio are you serious no maybe it's because he's a kid right wasn't he a kid oh yeah i don't know that was the whole point they were bad the whole yeah the reason they didn't that's my it didn't need a disclaimer because the whole point was he was doing this in a place where they were allowed to do anything they were bad but let's say let's say a kid watches that and picks up a cigarette let's say you know what i mean like i think that that is they're not going to read it but they turned to donkeys and got shipped to pleasure you know what i mean they turned to donkeys because they were smoking cigarettes they were doing bad things so that's why i'm saying it didn't need a disclaimer i think your point is also right like they're not reading that kid and be like you know what i just got to be careful because you know pinocchio's smoking low tobacco like but you're watching the movie and you know that if if pinocchio's smoking he's going you could turn into a donkey they made smoking bad in the movie is that what i'm saying but i think it's just the visuals i think i think people say you see pinocchio smoking by man that's kind of cool it's pinocchio yeah right it wasn't alice in wonderland on shrooms she was but they never explicitly state that she's on drugs but but it's implied so you could someone wonder something she's on something she's crazy how was your shroom's experience i love it you know we've had different experiences yeah the first time we did it it was pretty chill second time we did it losing our [ __ ] minds yeah but i don't think you should do shrooms in green point new york in the winter right right like that's not that nature yeah we started doing it in los angeles so much better much better experience how often do i do shrooms uh i mean we used to we used to micro dose right isn't as powerful as you know just taking shoes but we don't do it that often we did it much more speak for yourself i've been doing it uh really i've been doing it a lot lately what's it really what's the crazy experience on shrooms oh man i mean definitely a festival you go to and kids disclaimer don't try shrooms but yeah don't do this we don't do shrooms as a child but when you get older you know do it by all means it changes your life man i mean we went to this one festival in uh california which one uh no no not coachella which one what was the name rolling loud rolling what was it no it wasn't ruling out it was like a lot of lasers i remember a lot of them a lot of lasers oh it was it may have been broken it wasn't working out yeah yeah and we were streamed up and i think kendrick was there or not not kendrick you know cringe was there yeah yeah it was a couple people but yeah we were streaming out of our minds and uh we just started floating around now when you say floating around do y'all running like the mosh pit and jump around stay in the side from station to station you just like you're just like oh flying lotus flying luna oh yeah yeah his show was it was fine yeah lasers everywhere streamed out of our minds uh yeah that was probably the best experience yeah you just reach a level of just like you you four yeah yeah yeah it's like you have just clear thoughts and uh you know it's no worries i don't know i i love shoes i was supposed to do it in cobble but i punked out did you point it out um because the healer was saying to me that she was like you know you already have a lot of uh psychic abilities and you would really get into the psychic realm if you did these two grams of shrooms and i was just like two grams yeah i'm not already in a setting [Laughter] but i mean it's been studies that that have shown that you know shrooms have that definitely helps in terms of like treating mental health issues yeah right i'm always like i wish i could write this down but i'm not capable of doing this right now because you want to like write certain things down so you remember it later right right but then you're like i just can't i'm gonna do it i just need to i need to be i know where i want to be when i do it where do you want to be uh angola that's my strengths you want to do it with a group of people or you want to go it's a few i mean when i when i was gonna do it in cowboy i was with a group of people these are people that i trust right you know what i mean but i just want to do it in this that type of setting right i would i would you should micro dose first cause you you might start crying you don't know what definitely i'm definitely gonna cry that's like point five grams yeah yeah it's a smaller uh good concentration they do point five you would do two grams you would have been that's what you tried you may not be here right you know let's talk about some of that genius all right like uh judas and the black massage well first of all you've done a lot more than just in black inside i remember you all from friends of the people you know what i mean you little real if you think about it now that show should have been a hit it should have been but you know you know sometimes things fail to launch i mean you think about okc the thunder they had all the talent in the world yeah they couldn't get a championship but you know i feel like that show certainly like we cut our bones together man we were in the trenches with some of the most talented comedians in the universe and you can see now like jermaine isn't coming to america rails uh uh and get out and just you know taking over the world so like that's where they that's where they started basically we're all just like working together not knowing what's going to happen in the future right but you know just being able to shoot those sketches and learn from them and watch them perform instrumental in our group and i love that like you know i don't remember what network that was without true teaching true tv how do you go from tv to oscar nominated oscar nominated what are the steps what's the process it's a grind man like it was crazy for us because like it was we were going nowhere fast the sketch show gets cancelled and we were like let's just go to lucas lucas bros move and go gets canceled like so we got two cancellations under our belt we're five years then we're like [ __ ] man we gotta figure this [ __ ] out so we we uh escape from new york and uh humiliation in our minds and we go to la and we're like all right we're gonna figure this [ __ ] out here we're gonna you know we're gonna figure out our act we're gonna write some [ __ ] but before we went to la we were already like thinking about judas you know we were already right right right brainstorming like some of the beats of the story right we were just doing a lot of research around 2012 2013 right we started doing a ton of research about hampton we didn't know how to turn it into a film but we knew like this is something that we would like to potentially turn into a film so we went to la with the goal in mind of either getting a script deal right to write judas or to sell the pitch somewhere we just we had ambitions going into cali right uh but we were still so focused on comedy that it was sort of like a balancing act trying to get judas made but also trying to like you know get our comedy uh career you know back on the right back on track so we're in l.a we're pitching the story around town getting no traction people like this [ __ ] doesn't make any sense it's not gonna make any money it's not it's a period piece about a black revolutionary socialism what are you guys crazy and we're like yeah all right [ __ ] it i guess maybe we are crazy so we we kind of went away from the material for a bit went back to comedy uh we were doing this pilot with fx killer mike uh it was for him and that eventually went to netflix it didn't go to fx trigger yeah right so we did the pilot for trigger warning for effects and uh shaka king was directing it and that's how we that's how we uh met shaka we we heard about them we've we didn't really watch any before we heard about them people always praised them and talked about them and so when we got an opportunity to work with them that's when it was like wow like this dude is a visionary right he just understands uh how to control the set right uh and then after we work with them that's when we started like watching all this stuff so we watched a bunch of short films and this dude's truly a genius right and uh we knew that after we got rejected from all of our uh pitches we were like i think we need to work with a filmmaker who can can take this idea and make it into a film right and so that's when we uh we're like we got it we got it we got to reach out to shock right and then we hung out with shaka in our apartment in hollywood listening to music just vibing on cinema vibing on just like life like just talking about [ __ ] and we sort of pitched in our idea and he said it was [ __ ] great and we started to develop a beefier outline and then but simultaneously will burst in the other co-writer and oscar nominee was uh you know working on his own script and jermaine fowler our boy from fotp he knew he made the connection he knew well he knew that we were working on our thing and he just brought us all together and uh uh you know we we uh we use our story outline that we worked on with shaka and so shaka and will went together and basically rewrote will's script using our story outline right and they they wrote a brilliant script and uh it went they sent it to uh ryan coogler we didn't know that shaka knew ryan yeah they had past history 2013 at sundance right we didn't even know that right but once i mean once ryan got it that's when things started to like pick up because i love the script and he definitely wanted to make it and he wanted that to be his first project for on his new uh production company proximity right and so ryan joined and then they sent it to charles king right you know power broker and uh macro macro hollywood and he loved the script and he wanted to finance half of it right things just started to like get crazy yeah at first it was like we were nowhere and then shaka will ryan charles i'm like what how did all in a year that [ __ ] just started happening we were like what the [ __ ] uh and then we went out with you know the script with macro with ryan with shocker or will and us macro finance in half macro financing half and the white man still said no white man still said no we have our stars we have a brilliant script we have these great producers and still you know it's a [ __ ] struggle right think about that [ __ ] all of that already attached right daniel ryan money shocker macro half the money lucas brothers and the white man like no no no no and i don't think people realize how hard it is to get a movie made right and especially when you have a dream team like that and you still can't get traction like that's how hard it is and it's ryan after black panther after blackness [ __ ] billionaire black panther ryan you know the hottest producer in the game and and still you know you know we can't we had some struggle but fortunately enough warner bros you know they they they put up half the money and they they wanted to distribute it they love the script right you know once [ __ ] shoot it right they green lit it they let us shoot it and i mean i mean it just came out as perfect as i thought it could come why did warner brothers get it i need i need white people to understand how clueless they can be so i want to know why did warner brothers get it over every other black executive you know you tell a story about fred hampton you're going to need a person that looks like you right other side right because they know the importance of fred hampton so no idea really like she was the the key what's her last name how do you pronounce it i don't know how to pronounce it well salute to you nigel kaikendoll i think i've read i may have mispronounced that but uh yeah she's she's a brilliant executive and she was the one who sort of he saw the importance of the film right she loved the script and she was the one who sort of just powered it through right now yeah that's why diversity matters that's why it matters that's exactly why that's what it's like because you're telling these stories and if you're sitting across from a group of white people they you they just don't even hear it they don't know the language they don't know the why it matters why this is how we have to describe fred hampton to white people like fred hampton is the velvet underground of civil rights leaders we thought perhaps that they'll see the connection they did they was like you know how many white executives like okay ryan coogler's coming here to talk about doing black panther another black panther really that's a billion dollars that was that marvel but maybe we could probably like try to finesse around it again why fred hampton why not exactly i mean of course but i mean i mean once you learn about fred you you never forget him right i mean he's he's he was such an instrumental figure to to our community and he was an instrumental figure to to to marxism and socialism and and just you know just being a good dude right and uh obviously the nature of this story is so [ __ ] tragic and the fact that the fbi and the local chicago police department conspired to assassinate uh a young black man i mean that that that story that alone is enough to be like this story needs to be and it's evidence like it's evidence whenever we talk about martin luther king we always say we think hoover has something to do with it we think the fbi probably facilitated his murder we we we know in our heart of hearts that that's probably what happened but we have no direct evidence we have direct evidence that the fbi killed a black man after king so i'm like if we if we're if we're retroactively applying the same methods and process we have more evidence that they probably kill king and and x and it has something to do with garvey it's like it's a it's a history evans yeah it's just a history of you know local police and the fbi working in concert to oppress african americans and you know once we learned about fred hampton and 04 we were just stunned that not a lot of people knew who he was right not a lot of people knew about this story the fbi killed this [ __ ] like this is a crazy story it's insane right uh but even like even when we uh figured out about the fred hampton so we knew nothing about william o'neill nothing about william and that [ __ ] that's the thing that like oh they used our own people against us to take us down and that [ __ ] like in 69 it wasn't like some slave revolt and they used slaves to bring down other slaves they used like a young brother who had a criminal record to take down another like it's just like and they're probably and they're probably still doing it you know what i mean absolutely still happening yeah i think i think that's what happened with the noi too of course of course of course of course i mean so that's why we felt like this story needs to be told because you know if you don't know your history it's going to repeat itself right and after trayvon got murdered and and you know that's when like we were like we got to do something we got to we got to tell a story that that not only speaks to the times but speaks to the history right and so it became imperative for us to try to get this movie made right how do you make this [ __ ] from writing comedy to writing a drama like this see i think it's all the same like i don't i don't think it's like different i think that i think that it comes from the same source and if you if you think about greek tragedy uh at the same time the the greeks were developing tragedy and comedy simultaneously and i don't think that that's by uh accident i think that aristotle recognized that uh both uh both forms have a similar process they just have different intentions and different results you know what i mean like in aristotle's poetics he talks at nauseam about tragedy and they lost his uh his portion on comedy but i think he'd probably say something similar that the structure is the same it's just the intentions are different right right right and um you know we again we were fortunate enough to write work with two writers who were also from you know from comedy so it's like i think that comedians are uh very very um capable capable of writing dramas and that that we have those uh skills i mean look at jordan pill yeah you look at jordan no there's just a lot of talent on the comedy side and i think a lot of times people tend to underestimate the the abilities of comedians right yeah hollywood has this like fascination with putting people in boxes like black you got to be this person if you're if you're a stoner comic you got to be this person if you're if you're asian you got to be that hollywood's so just like committed to categories and i'm like i think our uh operation has been to sort of dismiss that and do whatever we want and operate in different spaces and say look we can do this we can do we can do a stoner animation we can do high drama it doesn't matter like i don't know it comes from the same place it all comes from the same place i think the limitations are artificial when it comes to getting judas and the black messiah done but also getting your netflix special how easy was it for you guys to get the netflix deal done to do stand up so so we pitched that in 2016 right right and uh it wasn't too tough for that one because you know people you know netflix was just you know throwing money to everyone so i mean i think that's stopped now but we got in pretty early so we were fortunate uh we probably should have waited a little bit before we did i think we should have we probably got more money it's okay i'm not thinking about money i'm a committed marxist that's a good i wanted to talk about that can you be a supporter of marxism and fred hampton and still be a capitalist i mean that's the that's [ __ ] damn man i was hoping you didn't ask that question it's a challenge i think uh i think you can i think you i think you can respect where hampton stood politically and socially and economically and philosophically and use the things that you've acquired in hollywood to help to you know augment his message um but it'll be disingenuous to say that you know you're a committed marxist if you're working in hollywood like i mean i'm guessing there are some marxists in hollywood but i think it's kind of weird i don't know yeah i mean it's it's weird because it's like i don't think there are i don't think there's any country with just like a pure political system i think everything's sort of a hybrid so even even even in like even like karl marx like he was obviously a committed uh socialist but you know he needed he needed to work with someone who had money to get his [ __ ] out there all right how are you going to spread the message without money you got you if you want to spread the message of fred hampton it's you got to use the tools that you have i mean like even even marx had publishing like he had to you know work with publishers and he worked with angles like he had money to support his message i think it would be foolish for marxists to you know not use the capitalist system to help augment their message like it yeah you need to use the tools at your disposal i mean it's the panthers sold newspapers right right but put it this way like you know before you know the movie came out you know fair hampton was still a kind of a marginal figure now this movie's out we use the the capitalist tools to spread his message and now more people are talking about friends and daniel is going to get an oscar to play in fred hampton how crazy is that right it would be the first time i think in academy history where we play we had a person playing a civil rights leader and they won an oscar you think so martin luther king didn't get an oscar kingdom no he wasn't nominated but i don't think he won't he didn't win for michael merrick now you said you know real quick though because um uh damn i lost my train of thought about the oscar i don't know he'll come back to me good now i see you tweeted if you guys wouldn't ask cause you are retiring from stand up and you're cutting off half your family yeah but we're going to do that before yeah i mean we got to figure out what's going on how do we figure out who we're going to cut out yeah yeah what family members you cutting off oh man uh just the ones who haven't talked to me in years and like hit me up for money like the ones who like didn't know i existed like like oh you i'm your cousin from your father's side can you let me borrow three hundred dollars like ah man you get that yeah man it's crazy it's crazy it's like uncomfortable because they think you got money because you got an oscar nomination like you don't get paid for this you got to pay your way for all this [ __ ] like you get extra money for an oscar nomination it's it's expensive are you close with your dad while he while he was in jail were you close with your dad we were close at first you know we we went to go visit him a bunch and then we moved to north carolina our mom remarried so we sort of uh became distant we grew a little distant because we couldn't visit him as much and we weren't really calling him and that was like that must have been like five to six years and then once he got out uh we we we started to work on our relationship but you know it was a lot to unpack i mean yeah you know as we got older we started to feel the the the ramifications of not growing up with a father but more importantly a lot of anger the ramifications of growing up with a father went to prison so it's like you know you just have rage it's rage and and you hate institutions you hate the law you hate the government you hate all that [ __ ] and you're trying to figure out ways to uh uh co cope and uh it was tough it was tough it's it's still tough sometimes to to to speak with our dad because of so much we missed out on so much you know what i mean you can never forget how much you missed out on right like even like to this day i go to the park and i see a dad like throwing the ball with their son and i tear up a little bit i'm like man that's kind of i wish i had that [ __ ] like like it's it kind of sucks to know that it's sad man i don't know if you're joking my emotion right now man like i can't even like scroll on instagram when i see people like saying i'm like girl it just it hurts yeah it hurts yeah it's rough man it's rough but you know you want to play catch now shut up shut up i mean look man you want to go play some cats you might be here you know what i wanted to say about fred i think we forget fred was 21 years old so a lot of times we embraced these ideologies that these people had i'm pretty sure fred would have evolved in his thinking to understand that there is a lot of benefit to economic empowerment right you know what i mean he's he's a very nuanced thinker um i think he he he he he put capitalism and racism on the same playing field i i think that and but he was he knew how to raise money he wasn't like he was a great fundraiser he they sold newspapers right he gave lectures across the the country right uh i think he would have eventually written a book i think even have it you would have got money for your book dude right and he was going to use all the money to support the calls right you know what i mean it's how you use the money like he was effective in using the tools of this country to to create a movement right and i think he just would have he would have become more sophisticated in in figuring out ways to make money and to continue to spread the the his word right and that's why they were terrified because they knew he was just beyond his years as an organizer yeah and i think he would i think he he was media savvy too like the way he looked the sunglasses and everything about him was just cool and i think that that frightened the fbi like he was different from king in the sense that he just was hit like he was just like just the way he talked he was just like he just had a he's just he just he spoke to the streets right like he knew how to communicate to the streets right and and i think that that terrified uh the fbi because you know there's a lot it's a lot of poor people in the hood and and if they're thinking if this capitalism [ __ ] ain't working we need to you know overthrow the system you have this lee you have this guy by the name of fred hampton who's just riling people up uh you know the fbi was like we got to take this [ __ ] out right you know he's going to he's they were so afraid of this guy they thought that he was the one that was going to to lead the rebellion like castro did in cuba right that's how afraid they were and that's what that's why a lot of these new artists are very confusing to me like these artists who scream that they're anti-capitalists right right because it's like you don't give away your music for free right you don't do shows for free you're not doing you're not you know giving away merch for free right and you're not taking all the money and donating 90 of it to other causes and you're not ready to pick up a gun and go overthrow the government so what are you talking about i think there needs to be some clarity i think people are anti-exploitation i think they're i think they're like they're i think they're anti uh aggressive capitalism where you know it's it's profit by any means necessary right i think that that's what people are against uh but i also think i think like these systems these isms are tough to understand you know you can't just paint one system as this one thing like i said i think it's a hybrid of of so many different kinds of systems even in america itself there are socialistic policies that have been uh implemented in in this country it's not it's not purely capitalist uh and just like uh you know china isn't purely socialist it's a mixture of different things so when you say you disagree with something you have to be clear in what you're saying you disagree with because otherwise you're committing a straw man you're saying it's one way and you're responding to something that's a fantasy you know what i mean right because i i subscribe to the honorable elijah muhammad unity and group operation group economics pooling your resources like that's what i subscribe based on race are just just in general well amongst each other right like you know let's let's get this money and let's let's use group economics to build up our communities you know what i mean like i want to see more macros right of course of course i mean look you got to be realistic you can either say you want to overthrow the government and fight against one of the the greatest militaries of all time or you can work within the system to try to you know re rebuild our communities right uh uh you know and but that's the thing about fred you know people think that you know he was all about overthrowing the government he was just about rebuilding the community right he was building schools he was building hospitals right he was trying to feed babies like he was all about working he was all about working within the system to to to rebuild communities uh you know what you need to do all those things you need cap capital money you need nothing you need capital yes absolutely and again i think fred was he and again i don't like to speak or think for fred but he was intuitive he was very very uh a sophisticated banker if he was talking about overthrowing the government and fighting the military like that's crazy that's crazy but he was talking about defense and protecting the community he still believed in the community he wasn't trying to eradicate his community right you wanted to rebuild it yeah because if you're talking about striking the american military apparatus you're basically that's a suicide mission it's a suicide mission why would you do that that doesn't make any sense makes no sense i agree what i want to ask what's the difference between writing what's the difference between being a writer of a screenplay versus being a writer of the store of the story yeah so it's like um when you write the story you know you you work on outlines you work on uh different story beats and that's when we work closely with shaka we we had an outline we had a pitch deck right you know certain story beats with the screenplay you you you rely on that outline or those story beats to flesh out and then you write the screenplay right uh what was interesting about our situation was that you know will had already written the screenplay right he was he was completely done right and we were just starting to to work on our screenplay and once we got wills we were like this guy's a brilliant writer right uh this is going to make our process a lot easier all we have to do is rework his screenplay with the story that we worked on with shaka right and we go from there so we we used our story uh when will used our story to rewrite his screenplay yeah he did the first vomit draft of his of a screenplay and then he sent it to shaka and shaka reworked uh reworked his screenplay so it was a lot of like back and forth in one state once they did all the reworking they sent it out to the producers right so that's when we came in we gave some notes uh coogler gave some great notes uh proximity macro so it was just like a it's a it's a very collaborative effort to get the script where it needed to be right how difficult is that because sometimes you have something that's like your baby your project and i've heard so many writers talk about how different the finished product is than when you first submit something so is it ever something that you're like this is so personal to me i mean that's a good i mean i was concerned like you let something go and you're like i don't know if it's in good hands and this could be it but no no i mean shaka was perfect yeah he just he understood our vision right immediately and obviously he had his vision too and he took it to the next level but he understood what we were trying to do right immediately so i just had complete faith in him right and uh once we were at will's screenplay i had complete faith and will it's like we were working with some very very talented people and they deliver and uh i think that apart when you're collaborating with people if it's going to work you have to have trust in your partners and i think that there was a lot of trust between not just us and our writers and shaka and will but also trust between the writers and the producers i mean i think we were all committed to making sure we uh honored fred's legacy yeah we just put our egos aside like it's it's for fred hampton we wanted to do what was best for the film right and uh it was for fred hampton so once you go on it go into a project with that mentality your ego gets pushed to the side oh y'all did that y'all did a phenomenal job i don't want to you know i don't want to be a prisoner at the moment but i'm look like when i felt watch this movie i felt the same way i did after i saw the autobiography of malcolm i thought autobiography but the next movie back in the day like i literally felt the same exact way like yeah i thought i knew some stuff about the panthers but it just made me want to go down even deeper rabbit hole you know but i had so many questions i'm like i wonder what fred and huey's relationship was yeah yeah you know i mean qe was locked up for a bit so i wonder did you read anywhere where they had like a lot of interactions i don't know i don't i know fred went to uh l.a right he was going to be made the deputy chairman for the the entire branch before he got killed but he couldn't have met huey maybe we went to visit him in prison maybe he went to he could have been but yeah i know he was close to the oakland chapter and he was certainly inspired by him and influence right um but that would be interesting like story to see like what was what was hugh and fred like because they were they were different they were they were very different they yeah cause i read this great book called blood brothers and it was about the relationship between ali and x so it just makes me just wonder about you know even movies like one night in miami it just makes you wonder how much did those guys like intermingle with each other i mean i'm sure they had substantive conversations they were different dudes though they were different but but they were the same in the sense that they were fighting the white power structure together so i know he was deeply influenced by you word we appreciate you brothers for joining us i do have one final question how do y'all maintain your own identity as twins oh that's a great question that's a great question that's a great [ __ ] question uh we don't [Laughter] no you know what's crazy is that uh for a while we tried to like establish our own identity right just like i want to be keith he wants to be kenny we went to law school we were just trying to do our own thing and we just had a breakdown and uh i think we realized like we're just stronger together right um and why do you need an individual identity like why why do we why do we emphasize that so much like why is that such a thing that we place an importance on because it's supposed to be normal like normal normal is being a singleton and being an individual and i think that's why people get so stressed out why is that normal but everyone's like has a desire to get married so are we to have a desire to have a family or we have so there's this notion that the individual is supreme but we we rush to these group identities so quickly we have sports teams we have our family we have you know uh religion religion any political party political party we've rushed to these eternities exactly exactly so i think we have to readjust how we see what normal is it's not necessarily about the individual it's not necessarily about you know willing yourself to greatness it's really a community type thing and i think that our he and i kind of see that and we're like we we we have a group identity right right right and we just so happen to look exactly alike right we're a group but a group nonetheless well i hope y'all win the oscar man man i think you're all gonna give a phenomenal speech i really think y'all gonna give a great speech and i want to see y'all up there with the military jack the military jackson and the tigers at least the pins you gotta have something i think we'll keep our pins off i'll keep the free hurry thank you for joining us thank you guys for having us it's the lucas brothers it's the breakfast club good morning [Music] you

Channel: Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM

Views: 134,006

Rating: 4.8783135 out of 5

Keywords: the breakfast club, breakfast club, power1051, celebrity news, radio, video, interview, angela yee, charlamagne tha god, dj envy

Id: XEETmZA1pjU

Length: 55min 5sec (3305 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021