Eminem Exclusive!

Can Eminem be taken seriously in Hollywood? It's been a long and controversial road for the rap artist, and now he's talking about those early days. Eminem chose to do just one television interview to promote his film 8 Mile, and that one was with Access Hollywood. Pat O'Brien went to Detroit and talked to Em about life before he was the real "slim shady," life before the money, life before the fame, before the controversy, and long before his life was the inspiration for a movie.

Pat O'Brien: What was your reaction when you found out that Kim Basinger was going to play your mom?

Eminem: I was excited. I was geeked up. I was geeked, first of all, she's beautiful. Second of all, she's an incredible actress, and like, that's when I really knew that I had to step up to the plate. That this movie was not a joke. Then, when Brittany Murphy was cast, and Mekhi Phifer was cast, s--- started gettin' thicker. The pressure started getting like, ‘This is a real movie.'

Pat: Did you ever want to do a movie? Did you ever say to yourself someday I want to be in a movie as part of my scheme?

Eminem: My only scheme was to be a rapper. My dream was like, let me get a record deal, let me go gold, and I'll be happy. Let me make a living off of what I do.

Pat: What was it like being a white rapper back then in the late '80s-early '90s? Did people say, "White rapper -- is this possible?"

Eminem: There was a lot of cats that I seen as I was coming up. That, you know, were trying to come up at the same time as me, who never made it or haven't made it yet. But very few I would see in the same spots I was in. I would go the clubs with my tapes. I used to literally make my own tapes, go to Kinko's, press up, draw my own covers, press the covers up at Kinko's and sell them out of my trunk, go into these clubs where I'm literally like the only white person there and try to sell my tape or my CD.

Pat: How close were those battles in the movie to the battles that you were in?

Eminem: Exact same intensity. That's one thing that I want this movie to get across, is that people who live in this world of hip-hop -- how seriously we take this, how seriously we take our music and battling and the sport of it and the competition and everything.

Pat: How close to your real life do you want people to think it is, or how close is it?

Eminem: It's symbolic. It's just symbolic. I mean, basically, you know, like obviously everything that happened in the movie didn't happen in my real life. I've lived in trailers, but I didn't grow up in a trailer. So, there's different things, but the basis of it is the same idea -- a lower-class, poor kid coming up wanting to do music, getting tugged every different which way by his friends and not knowing which way to go.

by Pat O'Brien - MSN Access Hollywood