Photo Credit: DMX/Instagram
DMX was an inspiration as a rapper to many. From his prayers at his concerts and generally being a trailblazer in the genre. A new HBO Max documentary DMX: Don’t Try to Understand debuted this week and its director Chris Frierson spoke about it in a new Rolling Out Magazine interview explaining why he pursued covering DMX’ life.
“You know that thing when you meet somebody famous and you’re super disappointed? It was the complete opposite of that,” Frierson said. “It was like everything I hoped for in a human being, I saw over a couple days. And I think possibly he saw something in our coverage that he wasn’t necessarily used to in the questions we were asking.”
Days before DMX checked himself into rehab, Frierson said he himself had just gone into rehab for substance abuse himself. “That was hard [for me],” he said. “I partially owe my sobriety to him, to a certain extent, because the last thing he said to me was that I was going to be alright.”
He said he originally pitched the idea for a documentary titled Mass Appeal back in 2018 around when X went to prison for tax evasion. He originally planned to film inside the West Virginia Federal prison where X was sentenced but because a warden denied the request, he was forced to put off filming until he was released in 2019.
Click here to read the rest of Frierson’s Rolling Out interview
