Stans director Steven Leckart was gushing over music legend Eminem at the world premiere of their new documentary on Monday, kicking off the inaugural SXSW London.
The festival, founded in 1987 in Austin, has pledged to showcase industry leaders and emerging talent from the world of music, film, tech, arts and fashion in the U.K. capital after first expanding into the Asia-Pacific region with SXSW Sydney last year. SXSW London is officially in full swing and runs through June 6 from the trendy east London neighborhood of Shoreditch.
SXSW London’s opening night premiere hosted hundreds of the rapper’s fans at brutalist venue the Barbican Centre in central London, where men donning bleach-blond buzzcuts and white tank tops took photos before the screening.
Twenty-five years after the release of Eminem’s iconic song “Stan”, about an obsessed fan who takes his admiration for the rapper too far, Leckart flips the music documentary format on its head with Stans.
The film follows not just the musician’s artistic trajectory but that of his most loyal superfans, with the doc “offering an entertaining and vibrant look at the modern nature of fandom and how social media has irrevocably changed the relationship between artists and their audience.”
Leckart said after the premiere during a Q&A: “I was raised on hip-hop in the ’80s and ’90s, and I grew up on MTV. So I witnessed [Eminem’s] rise’s first hand and I was a fan, but I think I just kept coming back to the song ‘Stan’ and really thinking about how unconventional it was and still is.”
He continued: “I just saw an opportunity to make an unconventional doc … We’ve seen a glut of docs that are just so straightforward and standard. And so this is a beautiful opportunity to do something different.”
“Being a documentarian is amazing,” he said about being able to convey Eminem’s stratospheric rise to fame in a single project. “You just pour through footage, you do research, you read article after article, and so to do that on a subject where you remember pieces and parts, but not everything, was like a dream.”
Stans will be available on Paramount+ internationally later this year.
