Allen Hughes's friendship with Tupac turned violent. Now Hughes has directed 'Dear Mama,' a 5-part series about the late rapper.

With the new five-part series Dear Mama, Allen Hughes tells what is arguably the most riveting, most comprehensive, deepest-cutting cinematic exploration yet into the life and times of late rap legend Tupac Shakur and his revolutionary mother, Afeni Shakur.

But Hughes is hardly just a biographer when it comes to Tupac, who died in 1996 being shot by still-unknown assailants in Las Vegas, Nev. The filmmaker is also a key part of Shakur’s story.

And it wasn’t always pretty.

Allen and his twin brother and longtime directing partner, Albert Hughes, first encountered the New York-born, Baltimore-raised, Bay Area-schooled poet and musician in 1990 at a San Francisco Waffle House, when the duo met with Digital Underground — the “Humpty Dance” party outfit who brought a pre-fame Shakur into the fold as a backup dancer, roadie and eventual featured artist. The Hughes brothers, who would become Hollywood’s Next Big Things when their gritty, gripping street drama Menace II Society opened to raves in 1993, had made some short films that had drawn attention at the time, and were expanding to music videos. They had been hired to shoot visuals for “Throw Your Hands in the Air,” a single from the Digital Underground spinoff group Raw Fusion. “And there was this kid at the end of the table that was just snapping on everyone, roasting everyone, the funniest dude I ever encountered. And it was Tupac. He was unknown at the time. I didn’t know he had an album in the can [his 1991 solo debut, 2Pacalypse Now], and he had a movie [1992’s Juice] in the can. He wasn’t famous yet.”

Shakur had seen the Hugheses’s short films, and told Allen in the restroom that he wanted to hire them to direct his first video. “I thought he was just talking,” Allen admits. Still, the filmmaker was so taken with Pac’s energy, they made sure he was front and center at the start of Raw Fusion’s video. “We waited 30 minutes until he showed up before we started rolling.”

Says Allen, perhaps lightly, if you already know this story: “Then began an intense friendship and working relationship.”

Shakur followed through with his “talk,” enlisting the Hughes to direct his first two music videos, “Trapped”and “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” the latter of which made the rapper a bona fide star.

And then things went awry. After Shakur’s acclaimed acting debut in Juice, “he was kind enough to take a role in Menace that wasn’t a starring role to help us get our movie made,” Allen says. “But Tupac was becoming a little unpredictable. He had mood swings, I think the pressure was getting to him. And it became pretty untenable at a certain point. I had to let him go because it was just getting too disruptive in rehearsals. Unfortunately [after that], he caught up with me with some gang members later. And it got violent.”

The Hugheses were filming a shooting a video for one of the tracks off Menace’s soundtrack, Spice1’s “Trigga Gots No Heart,” when Shakur turned up with his aforementioned affiliates. Allen was badly beaten, with witnesses claiming Pac ordered a crew of almost 30 gang members to attack the filmmaker. The Hughes brothers filed assault-and-battery charges against the rapper-actor, and Shakur — who admitted to the crime on Yo! MTV Raps — served 15 days in jail in 1994.

Now, nearly 20 years later, Allen has become the artist’s biographer, which, the director says, hasn’t sat well with some of the beloved performer’s faithful.

“There’s some internet chatter and some of the rabid fans — or so-called ‘fans’ — are like, ‘What's he doing directing [this]? Didn’t Tupac hate him?,’” Hughes says. “It’s like, listen, a**holes, Tupac apologized several times for his actions, and was looking to reconcile. We just weren’t in a place where we got to physically come to that. But I’m not a petty person. … I love Tupac. I take a lot of pride in our shared journey and what he became, an international icon. There’s no way I’m gonna ever dream of s***ting on that.

“The only thing I was looking for was answers and understanding. 'Cause there’s too much misunderstanding when you see his image. He’s such a global icon. You see him in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America. He’s all over the place. I’ve never seen anything like it. And I didn’t understand a lot, and I think there was a lot of confusion. So I was searching for the meaning to his journey, his story, and that’s why I began with his mother.”

Still, Hughes admits he had some reluctance when Shakur’s estate first approached him about directing a Tupac docuseries. There was the personal baggage, yes, but he also felt spent from his 2017 HBO series The Defiant Ones, which focused on the relationship between music moguls Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine (“That took everything out of me, it sent me to a mental institution,” he says, figuratively).

Three days after their meeting, Hughes agreed to it — so long as the focus of the piece expanded to include Pac’s relationship with Afeni, the celebrated political activist and Black Panther member who struggled with drug addiction as the rapper rose to fame. (The series is named after Tupac’s hit 1995 single, which paid tribute to her.)

“When I think of one of my favorite films, The Godfather Part II, I look at that dual narrative where you learn about the sins of the father and how they fall upon the son and why Michael Corleone is how he is and why Don Vito got that way,” Hughes says of his desire to alight the son-mother relationship in Dear Mama. “So if that holds true for the father, what about the actions and thoughts of the mother, and single mothers [especially]? 'Cause I was raised by a single mother. So I was interested in her story because I knew we would discover the riddle of Tupac through her. And boy, I had no idea how similar they are.”

Dear Mama spends five approximately hourlong episodes exploring the parallels between the lives of Tupac and Afeni, but Hughes offers to summarize them.

“Right down to their experiences,” he says. “She was a poet. She was a performing artist as a high school student. There’s all these similar trajectories. She went to trial in 100th Centre Street [a Manhattan courthouse]. He went to trial in 100th Centre Street. And they were the same ages. There’s all these intersecting twin parallels.”

The series also challenges certain narratives about the Shakurs, Hughes says. “One with him is obvious that he was some kind of gangster. I think that’s just a massive misconception about him. I don’t think there was a lot known about her. We hear she was a Panther, and we hear she was addicted to crack and eventually found her way to recovery. But that’s all we heard. We don’t know anything more. … I think it's just very thin, the narrative, when it comes to her.”

Still, music fans will want to know that the series ultimately veers far more heavily in Tupac history and lore, exploring the mind-numbing output the hip-hop icon left behind his 25 years (four solo albums, one collaborative album, seven films, seven posthumous album releases). “He lived eight lifetimes in three months,” an interviewee says in the first episode.

And, yes, Hughes does address his own history with Shakur, warts and all, in the second episode.

“I think when we all started working together, me and my brother and Tupac, the one thing that wasn’t there wasn’t a lack of passion,” Hughes reflects in our interview. “We were very loud, very passionate, and he was very loud and very passionate, very emotional. We all were, but it worked. There were no real disagreements in the early days. They started coming later.

“When I look back now, we were all 19. We were all young Black boys in these grown man-ass jobs that a generation before us [didn’t have]. We would be lucky to be in college, let alone a budding movie star/recording artist and film directors.”

Dear Mama premieres Friday, April 21 on FX.

Watch the trailer: