Tekashi 6ix9ine, born Daniel Hernandez, is a picturesque and somewhat vile character. A man made famous by gang affiliation, a gang he later reported in court and controversial social media videos.
He is a man who started to attract attention after creating his own outfit with the word ‘HIV’, pleading guilty to using a child in a sexual performance after posting a video showing the alleged assault on a 13-year-old girl , beat his girlfriend and mother of his daughter, Sara Molina, and pleaded guilty to nine criminal charges, including conspiracy to extortion, possession of weapons and armed robbery, as well as the aforementioned Nine Trey Gangsta Blood complaint that helped to become famous.
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How Supervillain: The Making Of Tekashi 6ix9ine, directed by Karam Gill, highlights, he is also a man who has very little respect for the art form that capitulated him in the spotlight. “I didn’t like rap, I always liked rock,” says the Brooklyn-born man who didn’t know the lyrics to the Notorious BIG song.
However, Showtime’s three-part documentary series, produced by Imagine Documentaries, Rolling Stone and Lightbox, does more than just outline its history and define the timeline of these events.
He questions how Hernandez was successful. Each episode, subtitled Identity, Power and Truth, shows how society now empowers someone like Hernandez and how he became a “supervillain” like Joker or Donald Trump.
The film begins with a new tape of Hernandez, fresh out of prison, discussing his situation, and also includes interviews with people close to him, including Molina, and former collaborators and former Nine Trey gang members Billy Ado and Seqo Billy .
Narrated by Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito, the series, which opens tonight, February 21, was assembled by Imagine, Rolling Stone and Lightbox before Gill embarked. Gill, who previously directed G Funk, the story of Warren G, Snoop Dogg and Nate Dogg and whose featured document Ice cream about materialism and race in hip hop is set to come out later this year, tells Deadline how we wanted to make a film that was bigger than Tekashi 6ix9ine.
TERM: How did you get involved?
KARAM GILL: Imagine, Rolling Stone and Lightbox partnered on this and sought me out. Initially, I didn’t want to do the project … he is not a person I wanted to do a project at the beginning, but when I started thinking about it, I felt it was a very important story to tell because it fits a lot of really dark things that are happening in our digital culture and in our world right now. I got on board and started thinking about it – the last thing I wanted to do was create a saga or direct story about it – that’s not what it should be. You need to make people think about who we are becoming, the people who are gaining prominence and what it means about us.
I saw social media from an interesting perspective; I wasn’t raised with this, I grew up in it and I saw it as a really fun place to interact and then I saw it become a place where people were doing more and more crazy things and the world changed. I have always been fascinated by digital culture and wanted to do a project that captured that. And then through the political landscape of our ex-president being someone who has gained prominence as a bizarre Internet personality and those digital tactics that are so attention-focused, caustic and vile. I started to realize that his presidency was getting more and more crazy in 2019, when we started working on it, that’s what made me want to do that. This kid is a taste of what’s going on and when it clicked on my head, I knew that this was an opportunity to talk about a much broader problem in our society.
DEADLINE: Were you eager to tell a broader story than just the Tekashi 6ix9ine story?
GILL: Not a doctor of music, I said that to the whole team from the beginning. I made musical documents and I am making musical documents, for me this is not a musical document and it is definitely not a hip hop movie. What inspired me was the Joker, it is a reflection of our society, it is a black film and many people will not watch it and that’s fine. But the people who watch it, I think they will take advantage of it.
TERM: Did you struggle with the fact that making a film about him is probably exactly what he wants?
GILL: Yes, but we are not glorifying him. Although, yes, all attention, good or bad, is attention, I think it is extremely important, as a society, to analyze the villain and analyze what goes on in these people as a cautionary tale. I think it will be extremely important for someone to make a comprehensive Trump documentary in five or ten years that explains everything. This is a supervillain piece. That was my justification. If I were to go out and make the movie asking if he’s a good guy or a bad guy, with his crazy shock factor, that’s not what I wanted to do. As I saw it, this is the story that people need to see because it’s a cautionary tale and the next supervillain is coming. If we understand how these people create themselves online and how we contribute to it, we may be able to see the signals coming to the next crazy son of a bitch.
TERM: You achieve this through those moments by essentially using an action figure and breaking it. Did it come first or did you tell the story and then insert it?
GILL: My process is that they happen simultaneously. I looked at Takeshi’s story and the timeline and all the things that happened in his life and then I looked at real and fantastic supervillains, the Joker story and the timeline and Donald Trump story and the time and then the serial killer timeline. Different versions of extreme supervillains and less extreme supervillains, and I pointed to these fundamental elements that prevail in all of them. I looked at what the main things are in all these people. It helped me put it all together to make a broader social comment.
TERM: The series starts with a tape of him talking. Where did that come from?
GILL: In fact, they are tapes that we acquired from an unprecedented interview that he gave out of prison. I did not conduct an interview with him. These are tapes of him just out of prison, so he is captured in a very vulnerable and interesting place.
TERM: Did you try to talk to him?
GILL: We toy with the idea. I’m not sure, I would need to talk to the producers. Our whole thing wasn’t necessarily giving him a platform. Some musical documentaries are written in a certain sense by the artist and this is not a criticism, while his story can be told through the people who were impacted and this is a much purer story. If you were making a Donald Trump documentary, would you interview Donald Trump? Probably not. You would probably interview everyone around you to find out exactly what happened.
TERM: You speak to many people who were close to him. Were people willing to talk?
GILL: Certain people, yes. The reality is that so many people were so scared of this guy, a lot of what we did was approaching people from a human perspective. Many people with whom we sat in New York and drank, before Covid and built relationships. People realized that I wasn’t trying to do this flashy thing about this guy, in fact I want to know what they went through and, once they were reassured that I wasn’t trying to take advantage of their story, they said ok. I also explained to them that this is a warning story so that another vulnerable girl who falls in love or with other people does not happen. I think that after people understood this and built trust, it was much easier, but yes, everyone was reluctant at first.
TERM: Considering that some of these people have an improper past, was that a challenge?
GILL: The challenge did not necessarily come from the fact that they are gang members, but these are genuine human beings and have children and families and have accepted it. Many of them come from rights-deprived communities and have seen [him] as an opportunity or way out to legitimize their lives. There is a humanity behind everyone, so the characters weren’t really the tough challenge. The challenge was that much of this was being done during Covid. We only did one or two shots when things were open. A lot of production happened right before we closed, we shot it in the first week of March 2020. That was the most difficult thing. I’m a very practical person and I love hanging out with the people I’m interviewing and meeting people and it was very difficult to do that as much as we wanted to.
DEADLINE: You also have a lot of footage that you haven’t seen. What was that a challenge?
GILL: It was, but it is about building relationships and trust. We got images of him that no one ever saw when he was a teenager, when he was becoming a monster. Much of this was provided by his former cameraman at the time, and it came only because I had dinner with him in New York before the pandemic. He had already been approached several times, but he realized that this was not any other 69 project, this is not doing what everyone else has done, going out and doing a doctorate on a madman.
TERM: There have been a few other projects on it, including another documentary and a podcast series. Did that worry you or were you confident that you were approaching this from a different angle?
GILL: I always thought there was something bigger to say and I’m not criticizing any other project, they are all interesting in their own way, but I wouldn’t have done it if it was something I had seen before. There were podcasts and short and long format projects and articles, but nothing for me spoke about our social change, specifically the idea of manufactured celebrity and how it happened and that was fascinating to me.
DEADLINE: Don’t you think the music industry was one of your facilitators?
GILL: I disagree. What allows these people to really climb are the platforms we use, they are democratized. It doesn’t matter who the executives are, it matters because everyone has their own platform now and that’s what I think it allows. If everyone has their own platform to say exactly what they want, whenever they want to millions of people, there will be no more guardians. It is not as if the phonographic or film industry were more the guardian. If you want to release a song that curses another rapper, you can do that on Instagram.
TERM: There is a very sad point at the end when he gets out of prison, and it seems his popularity is waning.
GILL: Exactly. What I was trying to achieve with this idea about supervillains in general, they stand up because we allow them to stand up. Everyone loved Trump when he was in the debates mocking Jeb Bush and then he started to get bigger and then he became a supervillain. So what happens, and what happens in this film, we eventually become insensitive to them because they operate with hype and attention. The statement at the end of the film is that we were insensitive and they became pathetic.
TERM: Is there a danger, as in the movies, that just when you think a supervillain is dead, he comes back for another death? What’s next for him?
GILL: This is largely the goal of this film, to show the cycle and show where we are. This film will have a bigger role in setting the final nail of his career. I think he’s at that point where he’s irrelevant. Yes, he can release a single that is crazy and people can hear it once, but the fascination is over. We’re on the next one. I think his career is over. He’s kind of a loser now.