S. Samuel
In honor of the upcoming tenth anniversary of Big Pun's passing next year, Big Pun: The Legacy director Vlad Yudin recently spoke on releasing an additional film project called Big Pun: The Lost Files.
According to Yudin, the film will consist of extra unreleased footage from The Legacy.
“I decided to do something special for February 7th, 2010, which will mark the tenth anniversary of Big Pun’s death,” Vlad explained. “We’re putting together a project which is Big Pun’s Legacy: The Lost Files and it will consist of interviews that we were unable to use in the actual film. We shot a ton of footage for the film, it was so many interviews not used at all. When you make a film, you have to follow a central story line, you have to keep the phase going so we were unable to use some of the interviews at all. So in this project, we will be able to show things that were not shown in the film.” (SOHH)
West Coast rapper Xzibit also spoke on Pun’s overwhelming impact outside of New York.
“Big Pun didn’t really make a big impact in the West so to speak until he put out ‘Still Not A Player,'” Xzibit said. “Once he hit the radio, once he hit the mainstream, it was just overnight. It wasn’t just in the West, it was everywhere. We have our heroes out here in the West but Pun came through as undeniable.” (SOHH)
Yudin previously spoke with SOHH about the story behind Legacy.
“We definitely focus on different aspects of his life, before he became Big Pun, when he was Chris Rios,” Yudin explained. “We focus mostly on his career in music but we definitely touch base on him growing up, him struggling to get into music and he was facing a lot of difficulties in his life. He was going through a lot of different things with his family and they were moving around the Bronx a lot. The main focus on the film is his career, accomplishments of course. And we definitely go into detail with him creating the albums, working on the music, collaborating and all the way up to his death and then we focus a lot on what his legacy meant to the people in the film…This film is not being used by anybody for any reason besides telling the story of Big Pun…As far as the footage, primarily interviews and locations, that was like over 100 hours of footage. Then we had separate footage that was collected from different sources which was around another 30 hours of footage alone. [This included] concert footage, interviews, things that were never seen by anybody.” (SOHH)
The original documentary was overseen by Pun’s widow, Liza Rios.
Big Pun: The Legacy is by Vlad Yudin and will be released through CZA/Vivendi/Universal accompanied by the Big Pun CD. The disc, which is called The Legacy: The Best of Big Pun will be released under Loud/Columbia/Sony. Both projects will drop on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009. Liza Rios is a film consultant for the movie and proceeds from this project goes to her and Pun’s three children. (Press Release)
Cover art by: Urbanista Graphix/Hoopla Media Group
Check out Vlad Yudin and Xzibit speaking on Big Pun below:
