A few months back, we announced that Antoine Fuqua, the director of the gritty cop drama Training Day, was going to be at the helm of biopic of late gangster rapper/hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur. As if having Fuqua wasn’t enough of an ace-in-the-hole, via HipHopDX.com, the production recently added Stephen J. Rivele and Chris Wilkinson, Oscar-nominated screenwriters of Ali and Nixon, further demonstrating that this film is going to be a big deal.

The movie, which starts shooting in November, still doesn’t have a lead actor attached, but in an interview with New York Magazine, Rivele and Wilkinson did reveal that the film would focus on the day the rapper was killed. Skilled at tackling larger-than-life characters, Rivele said he saw Tupac as a “19th century Romantic poet who found himself in the 21st century.”

As for how they’ll handle Shakur’s actual death, Rivele commented that they’d be focusing on the “senselessness” of it, adding, “He saw the contradiction between the musical persona of ‘Thug Life,’ and his essential nature as a gentle, sensitive person. And that was partly responsible for his murder: He was not a gangster, but the people around him were.”

As always, stay tuned for more news on the production as it’s announced.