Frederick Brathwaite AKA Fab 5 Freddy, concept, actor, musical director

I was part of the New York graffiti artists the Fabulous 5, who were primarily known for painting whole subway cars on the Lexington Avenue line. Lee Quiñones was the group’s Michelangelo. I’d been running with Jean-Michel Basquiat and wanted to take graffiti art into art spaces. I thought that an underground independent film could tell our story in the way we wanted.

At an art show in Times Square I met Charlie Ahearn, who’d made an underground kung fu film, The Deadly Art of Survival, on Super 8. Charlie loved the movie idea and I explained that we could tell the story of an emerging new culture: graffiti art, breakdancing and rap. We wanted a movie with a narrative but a documentary feel, so alongside real rappers from the Bronx we had graffiti artists playing themselves, but as characters. Lee became Zoro, a kind of masked superhero. We wanted Phase 2 – a giant of a graffiti writer who was making flyers for hip-hop parties – to represent the connection between graffiti art and hip-hop. However, he preferred to stay in the shadows. Charlie said: “Fred, you can do it!” So I became an actor, basing Phade, the club promoter, on Phase 2.

Charlie insisted we make our own music. I knew Blondie’s Chris Stein and Debbie Harry because they’d bought art from me as well as Jean-Michel, so Charlie, Chris and I hooked up to do the score. Everybody said that Patti Astor, who plays Virginia the reporter, looked like Debbie Harry, and Blondie let us use their song Pretty Baby for Virginia’s big entrance. Blondie were very supportive. When I heard Debbie sing “Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody’s fly” in Rapture I thought: “That’s me!”

Although the Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight was a big hit, most rappers weren’t making records yet. They’d just get on the mic for ages, so we edited the music scenes but kept their meaning. The film captures what was a very underground culture in a few ghetto neighbourhoods: the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. I could never have imagined it would become this huge global thing.

Charlie Ahearn, writer, director, producer

One of Lee’s murals had appeared in The Deadly Art of Survival, which I made for $1,000. I’d been trying to contact him but he was elusive. I think he thought I was a cop, or would lead him into situations where he’d be arrested. So when I was approached by Fab 5 Freddy, who’d seen my kung fu film and knew Lee, it was perfect.

I wanted to make a movie that would play in theatres to teenagers: a romance about a subway graffiti outlaw character being chased by the police. Lady Pink [artist Sandra Fabara] was hanging out with all these young wannabe graffiti artists. I took one look at her and thought: that’s the character who we named Rose “Lady Bug”. I approached Channel 4 in London and ZDF in Germany, sending each an envelope with a Xerox of a subway train, a cassette of a hip-hop club and a sheet outlining the idea. Each sent me $25,000, my only source of funding.

When I went to a hip-hop jam in the Bronx with 10,000 kids, a gun went off and I thought we should do something like that in the movie. I saw some guys leaning against a wall and asked them to be in a stick-up scene. I handed one a starting pistol but he said, “That’s a pussy gun,” reached into his car and took out the sawn-off shotgun you see in the film.

When I approached [rapper] Busy Bee Starski at a jam he was smoking a joint, led me on stage and said without taking a breath: “Here’s Charlie Ahearn. He’s my movie producer.”

Eventually I met Grandmaster Flash, who was already a star. I shot an amphitheatre scene with him performing with his group, the Furious Five, but I couldn’t use it because the sound was distorted. I had to restage the entire concert without Flash, who was away touring so couldn’t appear again – so his live show never made the film. Shit happens.

When Wild Style opened in Times Square I paid some kids $25 each to distribute flyers in their schools, so at the first screenings they queued around the block. When it was shown in Japan, they thought it was a science fiction movie and that I’d invented this new culture. It’s been called the greatest hip-hop film ever made. It was certainly the first.

• Wild Style is available to stream on the Arrow Video Channel and to own on 4K UHD and Blu-ray