'Everyone of these people has got their own fucking weather pattern," says director Allen Hughes when asked about lining up interviews for The Defiant Ones, his upcoming four-part HBO documentary of the careers and incredibly fruitful business partnership of Jimmy lovine and Dr. Dre. Individually and together, lovine and Dre (born Andre Young) have provided the double-helix backbone upon which a staggering portion of American popular music released since 1975 stands. Take away their work as producers, and Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks, Snoop Dogg, and Ice Cube surrender crucial portions of their respective catalogues. Strike out their roles as record executives, and who's to say if Nine Inch Nails, No Doubt, Eminem, or Kendrick Lamar ever crosses over? You get those sorts of subjects on camera when you get them, Hughes says with a laugh. But, he says, "everyone who sat down, whether it was Springsteen or Snoop, they sat down and they were in no rush to go anywhere... I just looked and said, 'Damn, these people really love Jimmy and Dre.'"

Hughes knew both of his subjects separately even before lovine's Interscope Records inked a distribution deal with Dre's Death Row imprint, in 1992, kicking off their quarter-century collaboration (and opening a major front in the 90s culture wars). The film plots the iconoclasts' paths to that point and beyond, culminating in the $3 billion sale of their Beats Electronics to Apple, in 2014. Among the greatest challenges in telling their stories, Hughes says, was working through a shared attribute that's allowed lovine and Dre to make such an outsize cultural impact. "The thing that they both have in common is that they literally don't look back at anything they've accomplished," he says. "They don't talk about it. They're not nostalgic at all about any accomplishments or things they've been through. They just keep moving. They don't have a rearview mirror."

Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine, and Allen Hughes, photographed at Iovine's house, with African-American Hag (1990), by David Hammons, in Los Angeles.