Interview: Leif and Brittany Bristow of “Peter the Redemption”

Posted on August 5, 2016 at 6:16 pm

Lief Bristow produced and directed “Peter the Redepemption,” the story of the last months in the life of the disciple who denied Jesus before he was crucified but then endured torture and imprisonment rather than deny him again. Stephen Baldwin plays the Emperor Nero and Bristow’s daughter Brittany plays Susanna, a healer, the devoted servant of the Empress, and a secret Christian. I have a copy to give away! Send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with Peter in the subject line and tell me one of your heroes. Don’t forget your address! (US addresses only) I’ll pick a winner at random on August 13, 2016.

Both Bristows answered my questions about making the film.

What is most important to you in the projects you take on?

BRITTANY – In any of the projects I take on, I look for strength of character development and definite moments of transition and change. I believe that it is so important when portraying someone on screen that you are able to give them a fully formed life. That you know what has lead to the very first moment the audience meets them, to what is happening when they aren’t present. Every person spends their life listening, speaking, reacting, feeling – it is important that the character be developed in a way that allows for that kind of work.

LEIF – I have always looked for character driven scripts which, generally ask to understand the human condition. Characters who must rise above their own personal adversities and become willing to sacrifice their personal wellbeing for the benefit of others. Sometimes this is displayed through youth protagonists willing to protect an animal, sometimes in the case of Peter it is knowing that in the face of extreme adversity, under Nero, death is likely but the importance of sacrifice to give voice and purpose to the followers is a greater calling.

What did Peter learn from his denial of Christ and how did he change?

BRITTANY – Peter learned that in running from your word, you only have your own guilt to live with – but he also recognized that his influence was meant to exist beyond the time of Christ’s death. That he was meant to live longer and be able to teach others how to love and what it meant to be strong.

LEIF – Peter knew that he was to be the Rock and the foundation for which so many followers could depend on. His doubts and fears caused him to deny Christ. I believe of great significance to Peter was, the necessity to atone for this and truly live up to the needs of this very young flock. History tells us that Peter may not have been the gentlest of the Apostles but his relationship with Paul would cause him to again rise up to propel the church through his teachings and kindness. It is a very wonderful moment when Peter in a moment of doubt is lifted by the words of Susanah.

How did Susanna decide she could trust the guard named Martinian?

BRITTANY – Susanna always saw something in Martinian that was unlike the others of the Roman empire. She saw empathy in his eyes and in his soul. The moment he looked in her eyes and told her that her secret was safe with him she knew without a doubt in her mind that he would stay true to his word. She could see his compassion for the situation and watched as he began to see that love is what triumphs, not anger, violence and Hate.

What made Brittany right for this role?

LEIF – We looked at reels from over 30 young actresses, however Brittany possesses an innocence and level of empathy that is evident in her smile and eyes on camera. Too many young actresses focus on having a sultry look for today’s market. Brittany has done challenging leads and shown her capacity to be a leader on set. She has studied with and takes the seriousness of the craft to heart and has the depth of emotional range. The essence of Susannah was easily recognized by everyone when we looked at Brittany’s reel.

What was the director/actor relationship like?

BRITTANY – My dad and I have been very lucky to work on a number of projects together to date. He has directed me 3 times. First in Sophie, then in a show we created together with my mom called Wildlife Quest – a live action wildlife show, which I am the host of, and thirdly in Peter. It can be difficult at times because I know my dad sees potential in me and as a result he pushes me, but I can’t’ think of anything greater than a director seeing what someone is capable and working with them to allow for the best performance possible. It’s a win-win situation. On Sophie – the last day of shooting there were still two heads of departments who didn’t realize we were father and daughter – to me that says a lot.

LEIF – Brittany and I have always had a unique bond and an immense trust in each other. It is always fair to say that we have our moments on set where there is a dad/ daughter moment like when directing a kissing scene. Lol the challenge is really that for Brittany she doesn’t want people to think she gets a role because of me, so the pressure is greater for her. From her discipline as a professionally trained ballerina to having Larry Moss as her acting coach (he is DiCaprio, Helen Hunt and Hilary Swank’s acting coach) Brittany knows the importance of preparedness. It is easy to direct her because she comes to set with every line, each predecessor scene emotional understanding, the intention of the scene at hand and a developed character fully developed and ready to be guided.

Brittany has acted with some great actors like Christopher Plummer, John Rhys-Davies, Debra Kara- Unger, Stephen Baldwin and others and has learned how to graciously and powerfully bring her character to the screen.

What is the best advice you ever got about making films?

BRITTANY – No matter what is happening, don’t jeopardize the work that goes in – stay true to your artistry, your gut and your work ethic.

LEIF – It was more about the advice I received as an actor when I was young. If you aren’t willing to commit fully to the project and make it the best it can be then you have cheated yourself and the audience.
Film is the only medium in the world in which everyone who is involved gets to have their name forever etched on the final product. As a director, I am fortunate to be the person who steers the ship during production and till delivery. My greatest resource is all the people who come to give the best they know how to every day and collaborate to help elevate the project even beyond what I might have imagined.

What themes from this story are more compelling for modern audiences?

BRITTANY – I think the theme of love and compassion are the themes that draw an audience in and keep them enthralled. There’s a bad guy, action and a love story – what more could an audience want?

LEIF – Think Brittany said it well. Empathy is a timeless quality. In a world so filled with hatred at the moment and so many people of different faiths being murdered, becoming refugees and trying to survive, this 2000 year old story is completely relevant today. In the face of complete disparity there are those who find a positive moment or a way in which to sacrifice of themselves to assist and lift up the strangers around them. The simple acts of Love, Charity and Empathy are needed now more than ever.

Interview: Mike Birbiglia and Gillian Jacobs of “Don’t Think Twice”

Posted on August 2, 2016 at 3:51 pm

Writer/director/star Mike Birbiglia calls his new film, “Don’t Think Twice,” “The Big Chill” of improv. Like the all-star 80’s classic, it is a bittersweet and often funny story of the stresses old friends face as the hopefulness and sense of endless possibilities of their 20’s hits the reality of their 30’s. Keegan-Michael Key plays one member of a small improv group called “The Commune.” When he gets a chance for breakthrough success on a “Saturday Night Live”-type comedy series, it forces the rest of the group to think about what matters to them and whether they will be able to achieve their dreams.

Birbiglia and co-star Gillian Jacobs spoke about the film in an interview.

The Commune leads off their show by asking the audience who had the worst day and using the details of their story to provide the premise for improvising a scene. Where does that come from?

MB: I do an improv show in New York called Mike Birbiglia’s Dream at the UCB Theater. I came up with that prompt one day as an idea because I feel like we can prove in real time the old trope that comedy is tragedy plus time. We had one the other night at the Del Close Marathon where a girl, 19 years old, said. ‘I just realized that my dad was cheating on my mom with prostitutes because we share an iCloud account.’ And so we were all empathetic and sympathetic and trying to create scenes that were respectful of that but also were comedic scenes and it was hard. For about 15 minutes there were not a lot of laughs at all and then eventually we found the laughter, and she found the laughter. Tammy who plays Lindsay in the film, was in that show. She called me the next day and she said, “Wow! That show yesterday, that was wild.The woman who made the suggestion thanked you on Twitter so you should respond.” That was really rewarding. We have to fund that hinge point, that pivot point.

GJ: I remember one show we did at UCB during rehearsals. Someone told us about his friend who had died recently and he was a very young man. For the first couple minutes there was nothing funny but then you realize, “Well, we’re not documentarians.” You’re not telling the story of that person’s life. You’re using that situation as an inspiration. Once people give themselves permission to let themselves be free to associate around any detail in the story, some absurd coincidence or detail about it, and build from there, maybe rather than tackling trying to make raw pain funny then you can sort of laugh around the incident as well.

MB: But also like in the film the scene where something happens to Bill’s dad and they are driving home and they are joking about it is an example of how with friends you can joke about things that are really sad and have it be cathartic. And I think that that can happen in theater also, I think it can happen in film also. You can express love by calling out the truth out of the situation as opposed to dancing around it.

Because The Commune is built on teamwork — the last thing they say to each other before going on stage is “I’ve got your back” — the struggle with feelings of jealousy and competition is especially painful.

MB: I wrote this thing on my wall early in the writing process: ‘Art is socialism but life is capitalism.’ It’s not in the film because it would be too on the nose. One of the guiding principles in the film is that in a lot of ways what you do with the group you’re collaborating with is more idealistic than the actuality.

GJ: I don’t come from an improv background but I really relate to the story in other ways. I went to Juilliard and in your third and fourth years of school there, agents and casting directors and managers start to come and it is really kind of what happens in this movie where some people start getting a lot of appointments and other people don’t. You try to sort of keep it quiet but they would put these yellow envelopes on the board and everybody knew that that was a meeting request and it would start to shift the dynamics because up until then it’s all about the group and much like the improv world. But then you realize you are all about to be set forth into the commercial world of this business and not everybody’s going to have the same career and even if somebody is deemed more talented within the confines of the school it doesn’t mean they’re going to have the most successful career. So I’ve just now start to remember how that starts to affect all of your dynamic. After you do a showcase for agency managers and casting directors and you get this folder and some people had a folder that was thick and some people had a folder that was thin. And there’s no fairness to it because it’s not a fair business.

MB: In a lot of ways, that’s what this movie is about. Life is unfair and improv is a great metaphor of that. My wife said that when she saw my improv group one, “It’s funny that everyone’s equal on stage but offstage that person is a movie star, that person is on “Saturday Night Live,” that person lives on an air mattress in Queens in a one bedroom with five dudes. And I thought that really hit me hard, I was like, “Yes, that’s a movie,” that’s a nice tension to explore.

What the difference between what makes somebody good at improv versus what makes them good at a more structured traditional theater performance?

GJ: I think in theater it demands that you say the same words every night and make it feel fresh and new. Improv demands that you be operating at the highest level of your creativity intelligence. So these two skills are both very important but I’ve seen people who are very skilled at one area struggle with the other. Either improvisers feel constrained by having to say the same thing over and over again or people who are really good at doing scripted work feel intimidated and exposed doing improvisation.

MB: You’ve got to remember that improvisers are writers and actors and directors all simultaneously. That’s what’s happening in real time because you’re writing on your feet, and you are acting out the words and you are directing what the staging is. You’re deciding what staging is. When I’m taking the subway to my improv shows I will be writing in my notebook different actions that I see people doing on the train whether it’s eating yogurt or looking at where their stop is, or tripping or holding a baby. It’s not preparing scenes and ideas as much as it is stoking your brain to think observantly. Just to place observations in your head, so that they are available somewhere.

Why is ‘yes and’ such an important part of improv?

GJ: Without agreement you just have people arguing. I think that it is important to establish a world of place for the characters in improv and there is nothing to be gained from disagreeing about that. So you have to establish the principle that if some person establishes one thing we’re all going to go along with it and that we are all building from it. Also it is important to stop being critical and judging ideas as good or bad because I think if somebody doesn’t have a lot of experience you worry their idea is going to be bad, it’s not going to be good enough, if not going to be active enough and so you can start to think critically about people’s suggestions or what they bring to it but once you get out of that and think whatever they come up with is the right thing right now and so I’m just going to build on it just makes everything so much easier and better. But I think we are used to being critical and evaluating ideas.

MB: And our fear leads us to say no all the time.

GJ: Or you came up with an idea and you can’t let it go because you think your idea is the right one and the good one. You thought you were coming in as a duck, you thought it was very clever that you were a duck, and they thought that you are a dog and now you are a dog. And now you are dog and it’s better that you are a dog. I also have learned as an actor, this ties in the principles of improv, sometimes someone gives a piece of instruction and my first reaction is “I don’t want to do that.” I’ve always learned that every time I just say yes and go for it something happens. Whether it’s what the intent of the direction was or not or something new happens. It’s just remaining open to other people’s ideas. And I think Keegan-Michael Key is in such a playful open place as a performer that he makes it fun to come along for the ride.

Related Tags:

Actors Directors Interview Writers

Interview: Clay Tweel on the Steve Gleason/ALS Documentary

Posted on July 28, 2016 at 8:00 am

Clay Tweel was presented with hours of footage prepared by football star Steve Gleason and his family and was challenged to make it into a feature film documentary about Gleason’s struggle with ALS, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He had been a New Orleans Saints defensive back who won the hearts of the community with by blocking a punt to win the game in the team’s first time back on the field following Hurricane Katrina. It was a welcome symbol of resilience for the city and a signal to the world.

He faced a more daunting personal challenge when he was diagnosed with ALS. Six weeks later, his wife Michel learned she was pregnant. Steve began to record what would amount to more than 1300 hours of videos while he could still talk and move for his son to watch when he got older. That was what Tweel had to start with when he made the new documentary “Gleason.” In an interview, he talked about what it was like to try to tell this story honestly with new footage and the most compelling of what Steve had recorded.

“For the first three or four years it was pretty much under Steve’s purview to come up with the content for this movie. So he was recording videos for Rivers his son and also he had a couple of guys who came on to help him film when he would no longer do so because of his loss of motor skills. These two guys, Ty Minton-Small and David Lee, who became part of the family and caretakers and babysitters, they are the reason that the footage is so intimate and personal. So it was such a great thing to have Steve who was thinking like a filmmaker, who is framing up shots and is drawing on these trips and adventures to Alaska and shooting sunsets and car ride. He became very passionate about documenting his life, whether it’s for Rivers or eventually for the world to see. So I feel like I got pretty lucky in coming aboard the project when they were about three or four years in, there was all this great footage captured by the team already.”

Tweel acknowledges that the film had “excruciating moments” as Steve’s abilities became more and more diminished and had to allow others to take care of him. “Those excruciating moments were mostly shot by them. My job was to come in and distill the story down to find the through lines to this giant amount of footage and keep it compelling. And so we did have to go back and film a few sit down interviews to tie them in together because in those four years of filming and no one ever really asked, ‘What’s happening?’ or ‘How do you feel about it?’ So we had to go back and add a little context. But we tried to keep that to a minimum and really leave the the experience the film as in the moment and verite style as possible.”

The progress of the disease dictated a chronological approach. “ALS is a degenerative disease and so we felt like it was important to keep pretty tightly to the chronology because if you show Steve in a wheelchair and the next scene he’s standing up it’s going to not really jibe and it’s going throw people off and be distracting. So we held to a pretty strict timeline of keeping the footage in chronological order, so that gave us somewhat of a restriction or a box to play in and then in sequencing out what were the kind of strongest moments in the footage. So the story kind of revealed itself. The father and son storyline was very strong, and then what was a great surprise to me was I actually found these moments that were really amazing between Steve and Michel. We get to delve into her role through this whole thing which I really personally enjoyed because with all the focus on Steve, Michel doesn’t get highlighted that much. It was an interesting way to show a further background to their journey. She is more than any documentarian could ever ask for in terms of someone who wears their heart on their sleeve and is completely open and honest. We really have to first and foremost take our hats off to Steve and Michel for being as vulnerable and open and honest as they were and allowing us to tell the story that is this personal and intimate. So Michel, she pulled no punches, she held nothing back and it really made for some compelling footage.”

One of the hardest scenes to watch is when Steve, by then talking through a computer like Stephen Hawking, tells the exhausted Michel how devastating it is for him when he does not get his “Rivers Sandwich” kiss goodnight. It is painfully intimate to hear that argument with a mechanical voice that does not express the feeling of the words. “That was Ty and David. They were filming but if you notice at a certain point in that scene it was kind of tense and they just left the room. But they left the cameras on. I loved that scene. That’s one of Michel’s favorite scenes as well because she’s like, ‘That night I was so tired that I just could barely keep functioning.’ What I love about it is, yes, it’s a scene between a caretaker and a patient but it is also just a fight between a married couple and it’s done in such a raw way that I feel like any married couple can relate to that kind of conversation where one person is sick of dealing with something and doesn’t really want to talk about it and other person does. So hopefully there are lots of moments in the movie that go beyond the experience of ALS patients.”

At one point in the film, words on the screen tell us that almost all ALS patients choose not to get a breathing tube, meaning that when they can no longer breathe on their own they decide to stop medical treatment and they die. But Steve chose to continue. “One of the more powerful sentiments certainly in the movie is that issue with mortality and the will to live. There was really no discussions on camera of Steve and Michel talking about that but I think at that point Steve had discussed it and decided that he wanted to try to continue to live for as long as he could to be a part of his family’s life. So being around for his son was paramount to him and whatever he could do to be there he was going to try it. And it was a risky surgery and it worked out he hasn’t had too many complications with it so it seem like he is going to be able to, if things go well and he can avoid infection, be around hopefully for a good long while to get to know Rivers even more.”

There are two important father-son relationships in the film. We also see Steve and his own father struggle over their different views about God, and how important it is to Steve that his father accept him even though they disagree. Michel’s warm and understanding relationship with her own father provides contrast. “There are so many things that the film says about fathers. I think one of the more interesting sentiments along that dramatic thread is this idea of passing yourself on to the next generation. There is an interesting dichotomy between what Steve’s dad said in one scene where he is talking about generational sin, you know that you pass on your flaws to the next generation, whereas Steve at the end of the movie says that you passed on the best part of yourself. I think that you get the good and the bad and that is important to know I guess as an overarching statement. It is important to know where you come from because that is a part of what you are for the rest of your life.”

Related Tags:

Directors Documentary Interview

Alex Gibney on the Stuxnet Documentary “Zero Days”

Posted on July 8, 2016 at 7:00 am

You will not see a more purely terrifying movie this year than “Zero Days,” a documentary from Alex Gibney (“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” “Going Clear,” “We Steal Secrets”), one of my favorite filmmakers. He spoke to journalists along with Eric Chien and Liam O’Murchu, two of the film’s most important figures, the men who discovered what they dubbed the Stuxnet computer virus, which turned out to have been developed by the Unites States and Israeli governments to unleash on the nuclear facilities in Iran. As an expert in the film explains, for centuries countries had armies and navies, and then in the 20th century they had to have air force capacities. But now, in the 21st century, wars will be fought through computer networks, probably more frequently and more devastatingly than on battlefields.

As a filmmaker, Gibney had a challenge to present a non-cinematic story in a dynamic visual medium. “It was mostly men sitting in rooms with suits on. The main character was a piece of computer code. Talk about challenging. You’ve seen ‘Enron.’ Back then I broke rule number 1A of the filmmaking manual which is never make a film about accounting.” He worked with a special effects company to “design a code, with the help of Eric and Liam, to be able to make it both accurate and also make it feel like it’s a living breathing thing. So it really was like entering the Matrix or something like that. That was key — it was to come up with a visual design for the film and then also a narrative design for what is basically a detective story. It’s kind of a spy thriller and Eric and Liam were the detectives.”

Chien provided some historical context. “I think the internet itself sort of changed how we function, our economy, a lot of growth, and the ‘internet of things’ will grow equally as well…It is very insecure and a bit worrisome and I think we fear that we will repeat mistakes that we made in the past. When we started computing it was quite open and free which was great and you could hack the computer in the old traditional sense of hacking the computer and that allowed the sort of insecurity where we are at today. We did not design computer and networking with security in mind at the start. We designed it so anyone can use it and it would be completely free. We sort of learned a lesson that you needed some level of security and that lesson currently is not being applied to the internet of things. That’s what worries us the most the right now. There is a lot of push right now to get internet of things on board with some sort of standard with some sort of default security.”

In the film, Chien and O’Murchu, in evaluating the Stuxnet virus to protect their commercial customers, quickly realized that the code was vastly more powerful and robust than anything they had seen before. The obvious conclusion was that it came from a government. But that does not mean they stop trying to find a way to stop it because it may be coming from “the good guys.” O’Murchu said, “It’s funny when you say bad guys can do this, how do you define that? The whole problem is that there are no good guys and bad guys here.” “In our world the good guys are us and the bad guys are anyone else,” Chien added, “anyone who is writing malicious codes to get unauthorized access to a computer that ultimately we normally are in charge of protecting. That is our view so we don’t ignore code because it looks super sophisticated or might be from a nation state. We have customers all over the world in countries like Germany and Belgium that Western countries have attacked equally as well and we’re responsible for protecting those computers. I would say in some sense fortunately code doesn’t come with a marker that says this is from this particular country and even if it did you can’t say that anyone would put in their code ‘Welcome from so and so.'”

The film begins with a sequence of witnesses saying some variation of “I can’t talk about it.” So how can Gibney be sure of what he is reporting? “Obviously, there are false flags. People lie to you all the time but over time you develop patterns and you try to convince yourself that actually you got the story right.”

The most candid (to a point) and compelling witness in the film is an unidentified (until the end) insider portrayed as a disembodied face made of cascading pieces of code, created for the film by a company called Scatter. “We wanted to create a character that would be in the kind of code world of the film but would also be a means of protection. So what we did was, we shot an interview with a woman, and we shot it in a way that was very much straight on but it was like we were mapping her in a 3-D space. And then it allows you to go in after the fact and both render camera moves and also break down the image into points, lines and flesh and recombine them in different ways so that they both mask the identity but also create that kind of interesting sort of hacked computer look of the character. And as you move around to the side because they were mapping only 180° in space, suddenly it starts to trail or get messy and if you go all the way around actually in the first rendering of the character we were able to literally jump outside the room and then track in, that was all after-the-fact. So it was really a wonderful device and it also helped us in terms of convincing sources to come forward that we would have a device that would be so otherworldly that it would mask identity.”

In this movie about secrets, Gibney was especially careful to protect his sources. “One of the things we did for protection was the combined testimony of a number of different people. While the New York times would frown on that technique within the context of the film I think it’s perfectly appropriate and also frankly it was key to persuading the sources to come forward and that was very important to us.” He believes that in documentaries “form follows content.” Some stories require more narrative shaping and commentary. With his Lance Armstrong film, “The Armstrong Lie,” “we hung out with Lance, we follow Lance, we don’t comment in addition I did interviews but we film for 21 days at the Tour de France. So it depends. In a lot of the films that I do tend to look back at recent events and understand them in a different way. Usually knowledge narratives get built around them and then I go in after the fact and say is this really what happened. It’s like cold cases. Is this really what happened or actually is it different than we thought it was? Is very hard to use cinéma vérité in the past, impossible in fact. I’ve got nothing against it; for the right film I love it.”

This movie can be seen as a companion piece to Gibney’s documentary about Wikileaks, “We Steal Secrets.” “It’s a matter of momentum. So far the momentum on the side of the government has been to make more and more things clasified. It becomes almost a default policy and to read more and more people into these secrets so that they are unable to talk about this. Well if you create a mountain of secrets and a huge number of people who hold these secrets it shouldn’t be surprising that there are leaks. Despite the Obama administration’s insistence on prosecuting people who leak more than all other administrations combined, you continue to get these big leaks in part, I think, because there is a belief that what the government is doing is hiding either misguided, immoral, or illegal behavior behind those secrets and therefore not being held to account. You are seeing that in the torture debate, you are seeing that in the drone debate and now you are seeing it with Stuxnet. So at some point they’ve got to wake up and understand that if they are misusing secrets James Harper lied before the Senate regarding the operations of the NSA, there’s going to be blowback and the blowback is more leaks.” Chien called it “rough justice.”

The movie calls for some international negotiations on the use of cyber-weapons. “I think the point is if we start then we’ve got a shot at it. To just throw up our hands and say ‘well, it’s impossible so let’s not worry about it,’ I think that’s just the wrong answer. We have to embark on that and part of it also is that these technologies that these weapons exist because then all of us as citizens can say well is this what we want, a complete Wild West world where everybody is launching weapons at each other all the time and we don’t know when they might launch or who might launch them, not a good thing. Someone in the film says, ‘Right now the norm is do whatever you can get away with,’ not a very good norm.”

Related Tags:

Directors Documentary Interview

Interview: Gary Ross on “Free State of Jones”

Posted on June 27, 2016 at 3:37 pm

Gary Ross, best known for the first “Hunger Games” movie, spent years researching the real-life story behind his new film, “Free State of Jones,” about a group of deserters from the Confederate Army and runaway slaves who declared their independence from the legal and economic oppression of the Confederacy. You can see more about the story in the “Free State of Jones” website. His commitment to authenticity included filming in the actual locations where the events took place, including the swamp where Newt Knight (played by Matthew McConaughey) and his group hid from the Confederate soldiers. “We were in the swamp for a long time but it was worth it. We were shooting where the true story actually occurred so that was kind of inspiring.” There are several books about the historical events, but Ross reviewed the original documents. “I did a lot of primary source research. When you go to the website you will see that most of the things that we cite are not secondary historians but are primary sources. I studied for about 2 to 3 years before I ever even started writing the script….There’s a tremendous amount of original sources that survived. We use a ton of sources from what was called the OR, the Original Records of the War Between the States which is the most reliable source. And we used a lot of letters to corroborate this evidence from former Confederate soldiers they were writing about the rebellion to one another as it was going on so there’s a tremendous amount of actual primary sources that exists, I mean hundreds and you can see them on the website.”

The film is set in the Civil War era, but some scenes show us Knight’s descendent in a 1948 miscegenation trial. Ross said, “I think that we need to see some perspective. It was a way of almost trying Newt in absentia a century later. These issues that were necessarily unresolved. It also let us explore what happens to memory when you lose connection with your past. This is a century later and it is still going on. I think that the fact that there was in fact this real trial which was still bizarre was an important thing to include.”

He talked about seeing the jobs of writer and director separately. “I don’t see directing as an extension of writing. It is to certain degree because you are storytelling but it’s its own thing. But you are never afraid to keep writing when you’re a writer there so I actually have more flexibility on the set, I don’t see the script as such a lock or rigid thing. And directing informs your writing. When you’re directing you think of it the more cinematically, you think, ‘Are they going to be able to actually do it?’ There is less waste in the writing. There is more of a cognizance of the cutting pattern. There is more even awareness the things like sounds design, so yes I definitely think it informs how I write now.”

There are some common themes between this real-life story and the allegory of “Hunger Games.” “Individual and personal liberty is tremendously important to me and I think that this has been somethings that has been expressed through a lot of the work that I’ve done one way or another. Newt used Scripture to justify his actions. It began as an organic rebellion. It was anti-tax rebellion at the outset but it grew into a larger meaning of freedom and it broadened out into a bigger definition of what freedom was. Once he glimpsed what true freedom meant he couldn’t tolerate his wish for personal freedom and then accept unfreedom for other people so I think that Newt expanded and grew and in his worldview and that led him been an advocate for African-Americans in the postwar period.”

Ross wants to make sure that audiences see the oppression that continued after the end of the Civil War. “The war didn’t and in 1865. The conflicts of the war went to 1876. We can see this as a continuum in the fight for freedom. I think that the only movies that existed prior to these were the original “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With the Wind” so the record needs to be set straight because they are very misleading about the reconstruction era. I hope people who see this can talk about interracial reliance and interracial alliance. I think that’s tremendously important. Newton Knight as an ally of African-Americans in the postwar era is a tremendously important thing to celebrate. Only when we unite in America will we ever make true progress.