Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casel on “Blindspotting”

Posted on July 18, 2018 at 8:00 am

Sometimes it takes forever to get a movie made and then it arrives at exactly the right moment. Longtime best friends Daveed Diggs (“black-ish,” “Wonder,” Tony-winner for “Hamilton”) and spoken word poet/academic Rafael Casal began working on their extraordinary film, “Blindspotting,” inspired by their experience growing up in the uneasily gentrifying Oakland, California area long before either became successful. It took about ten years before they got the financing, and when it premiered at Sundance it was immediately acclaimed as a remarkably assured first film with exceptional performances a gripping story, and a nuanced, sometimes poetic portrayal of issues of race, class, and friendship.

Diggs plays Collin, three days from completing his parole and under enormous pressure to make it through without any infractions that would send him back to prison. He sees a policeman kill an unarmed black man and says nothing because he does not want to jeopardize his parole. Casal plays his best friend Miles, a loving father and husband but also a volatile man quick to fight who may lead Collin into danger.

In an interview, Diggs and Casal talked about their on- and off-screen friendship and why it was important that the movie — like life — combine comedy, drama, family issues, and poetry.

In the film, your characters play movers who come into contact with a wide range of customers, including a photographer who shows them photos about the oak trees that can no longer be found in the city named for them, and he asks the two of you to stare into each other’s eyes. Tell me what inspired that and what you were thinking about in that scene.

RC: The exercise was stolen from one of my mentors, Chris Walker, who made us do it when I was teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He would have the students do that and then there were all these mimicking games and stuff. It was about getting the giggles out and establishing intimacy between two actors or two performers. That’s also just a very hippie thing to ask someone to do something you really love. I think the Bay Area is so hippie in that way and the idea of making two grown men try to connect in an intimate way was a way to display how uncomfortable that is for two guys who have known each other their whole lives. It just felt like a fun thing to do early in the script. Performing it — we have a different level of comfort than Miles and Collin do so that was easy for us. There were a few moments during the photoshoot for the film where they had us so close together it was so funny. For the photo we were within an inch away and I go, “This is alright but normally only a girl or my dog could get that close to my face.”

DD: There were all sorts of different versions of who the character was but they were all a particular Bay Area energy that we didn’t have represented other places in the film, somebody who despite being forced to interact with capitalism in the way that we all have to would much prefer to peddle understanding as opposed to paintings. He would rather give all of his pictures away and just be able to promote these moments of true honest understanding with each other. So he sees an opportunity here and one of the things he gets to bring out is that we get to see how difficult intimacy even on the basic level is for two male friends despite being friends their whole lives. There is something awkward about just being this close together and actually looking each other in the eye. Most of the time you don’t look at the person you are talking to. But that is where all of the cues for how somebody is feeling are.

Why is it that your characters can live in a community of interracial relationships that seem completely accepted but as the movie shows, the world around them is still having trouble dealing with racial differences?

RC: I don’t know that no one notices the differences. I think we’re presenting a reality where those conversations have been had already. That melting pot does not happen without a ton of talks about it. That’s why I think a lot of the conversations that do happen on screen happened a few steps into the conversation. We assume that any place that has gotten to a point where these are the kinds of relationships that are around didn’t skip forward and get to something like racial harmony. The world is not there, but they’ve had those conversations or some degree of those conversations with each other. It’s not like Miles and Ashley have never talked about the fact that she’s black and he’s not; they’ve definitely had that conversation.

DD: I’m mixed, a ton of my friends were mixed. By virtue of being mixed I’ve almost never dated somebody who was of the same race as me in a relationship, so growing up that wasn’t a thing. That was normalized to a degree that nobody batted an eye about it and so I didn’t know until I left that that it would be a thing anywhere else and I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand any of the hang-ups with it. I felt like we were having a discussion that I was born already having had and it was pressuring in me in a certain sense but I think the fact that communities exist under the fact that people are able to interact in a lot of ways within a community has really nothing to do with what’s happening in the country on a grand scale.

One of the themes of the film is the struggle with gentrification of the neighborhoods.

DD: I think it’s natural to be fearful of somebody literally taking your resources and removing you from them. That is what’s happening to a lot of the folks in that community it’s what’s happening to Miles and Colin. The green juice isn’t the problem; the fact that it is reasonable for the green juice to be priced at $10 leads you to beg the question of who is that for and why did it never exist before we started seeing these new people coming in. It’s not like nobody in this neighborhood has been health-conscious before. Val loves going to SoulCycle and she’s so excited that that is part of this community now. She uses it all the time but it didn’t exist until very recently and the thing that comes along with its existence are raised rents and a difference in policing. Police are being called to events that they would not normally be called to. That recent story about “barbecuing while black” is this beautiful example of where here is something that’s been happening in the same place for over a decade every weekend and because the neighborhood changed, somebody called the police on it, on a bunch of black people just having a barbecue.

I know you’ve been working on the film for 10 years and yet it seems like it just seems like it has come out at exactly the right moment. How did it evolve to reflect some of the Black Lives Matter events and the crucial plot element about “the talk” that black parents have with their children?

RC: Yeah the evolution that we bring up a lot is just the nature of the conversation around how communities are prioritizing issues and it’s just changed. It was shocking 10 years ago when we would hear about a police officer murdering somebody now it’s here and gone so fast. The list is just so long of names of young men and women of color who are being murdered by police officers. So the movie had to change. The movie had to become about that, about the fact that it’s not a headline anymore, that Collin is the only one who seems to care when he sees a black man being killed by a policeman. Even his best friend knows about it and doesn’t ask about it again after the first day. He sees it on the news and processes it and goes, “but we know what this is; this will not be the one that moves the needle so let’s move on from it”.

What makes Collin and Mile friends? They seem very different, more like family held together by ties unrelated to what they have in common.

DD: Oh I think they have the entirety of their lives in common. They essentially grew up with each other.

RC: The way that they joke; the way that they see the world, their shorthand of references.

DD: And they also need each other for different things. I think Collin doesn’t activate nearly as much without Miles around and sometimes over the course of the film that becomes a problem. But also think about how many times it was probably a good thing. How many jobs did Collin get because of Miles and how many other opportunities did he have?

RC: How many times did they bail each other out of dangerous and violent situations because there are two instead of one? Their whole relationship is based on massive loyalty and understanding and family; Colin is like a second surrogate father to Miles’ son. There is so much shorthand support and it’s a poor neighborhood, so survival is the key; loyalty is key. That’s why you have guys who grew up together and they’ve known each other their whole lives. Sure they’re totally different in the group but they are a group. You are only aware of their differences if you’re in the crew. But if somebody throws a bottle at them you will see how they all respond the same. It’s like a sports team — watch how quick they fall in line.

One of the things I loved about the film was the range of tone. You’ve got just outright funny stuff, you got very heightened stuff, you’ve got very realistic drama. Did anybody push back on you and say “hey pick a lane?”

DD: We heard that early on a little bit, but I think philosophically for us we wanted to portray the Bay area honestly. It had to be in the DNA of the film so it wasn’t just swinging wildly it was actually intentional. This is how we all laugh one second and cry the next and I think that is not Bay Area specific. I’ve never felt one thing at a time. Nobody has. We are often pushed in art to focus on one thing, to mine all of the available material out of one lane. For us to try in order to be true to life as we could which was the premise of us making this film I couldn’t find a way to do that.

RC: That tonal specificity is a fear-based constraint of studios, not a capacity of the audience. Our job is to push the medium. We don’t just want to make a film within a medium; we want to move the medium. The excitement was to go, “Well, the great news is we didn’t go to film school. We don’t know any of those rules. All we know is honesty.”

What is it about hip-hop that makes it so vital a part of today’s expression?

RC: Heightened language is just the mechanism that tells you how important information is. It is an attractive thing to listen to that functions the same way that musical theater does. When a feeling or idea crosses over to be too emotional to just talk about it, something elevates, so you sing. You could put it in the hip-hop bucket but that’s just songs and poetry and it predates all of that. There is a cadence to the way in which we use hip hop, as well as the concept of disenfranchised communities using verse to shout from the mountaintop when they’re not being listened to otherwise. But the idea of verse as a way to elevate language has been in the arts since the arts began. So I think we both were allied on the very contemporary mechanism that has its roots in something that has a very feeling mechanism which was creating dense and beautiful language to tell you what’s important about the moment.

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Interview: Jason Reitman and Mackenzie Davis on “Tully”

Posted on May 4, 2018 at 8:00 am

For Rogerebert.com I interviewed Jason Reitman and Mackenzie Davis, the director and title actress of “Tully,” a new film written by Oscar-winner Diablo Cody (“Juno,” “Ricki and the Flash”). An excerpt:

Jason, I loved your montage that so bittersweetly evokes those numbingly exhausting first months of motherhood. Tell me how you put that together.

JASON REITMAN: I’m so happy you asked about that! That’s something that was on our call sheet every single day and it was really important to us that we get that right. There are so many movies that examine and portray parenting and it often comes across as slapstick. Parenting is one of these odd taboo subjects in a time when we share our most intimate details. We will describe what medication we’re taking but we still won’t share the intimacies and struggles of parenting in a real way. So we gave a questionnaire to twelve mothers and asked them to give us anything they were willing to share about the first three months of being a parent. It was through these questionnaires that we got these odd details like putting the baby on top of the dryer and the amount of moms and dads that drop their phones on their babies. We were constantly shooting it and there was an editor who worked only on that montage throughout the film.

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Interview: Writer/Director Ron Shelton and “Just Getting Started”

Posted on December 12, 2017 at 1:40 pm

Writer/director Ron Shelton understands the way that people — especially men — communicate through competition that can be both amiable and cutthroat at the same time. And he knows how funny it is to watch. In his new movie, “Just Getting Started,” Morgan Freeman, Tommy Lee Jones, and a cast of great character actors play residents of an idyllic retirement community in Palm Springs who try to top each other in golf, poker, and the affections of a new arrival played by Rene Russo. In an interview, he talked about the differences between men and women, spending Christmas in the desert, and And he quoted one of his most famous characters, “Bull Durham’s” Annie Savoy.

One of the funniest characters in the film is the mob wife played by an unrecognizable Jane Seymour. What did you have in mind with the look of her character?

She’s supposed to be outrageous. Jane said she wanted to come in and have some fun, and she told me she had two different wigs; one blonde, one brunette. I said, “Bring them both and wear one in each scene.” She’s a woman who married into a criminal wealth and we wanted to have fun with it.

It’s unusual to see a movie with Christmas in the California desert, no snow, no pine trees.

I’m a native of Southern California so I grew up with Christmas at the beach. I looked it up and Southern California is on the same latitude as Bethlehem so I’ve always joked about that but half the world has hot Christmases. I was in Palm Springs one time around Christmas and it was one hundred ten degrees and there were dust storms blowing and Johnny Mathis was singing “Let It Snow” and everybody was perfectly happy so I thought it was a good backdrop for not your normal Christmas setting.

Your films often feature guys and their relentless competition, even in the smallest of ways. Why do they do that?

Obviously if I knew I wouldn’t keep trying to explore it in dramatic ways. Honestly, I think it might be chemical. It is supported by conditioning and the world. Writers are storytellers and forever we have been exploring the why of all that without ever coming to an answer. I think on the other side of guys and that alpha male thing, guys also forget and forgive much quicker than women. All my women friends in life completely agree. Men say, “That’s over; let’s play golf, let’s have dinner, let’s have a drink.” The women go, “Oh, wait aren’t there unresolved issues?” As Annie Savoy says in “Bull Durham,” “It’s wonderful how men get over things.”

Is it different to write for older characters?

It turns out to be the same because I’m an older character and I don’t think of myself as older, so they don’t either. You and I are still thinking about what are we doing next, about doing what are we doing today, what’s my next job, my interview, my script, my movie, whatever. I’m more active than I’ve ever been. I can’t jump as high or hit a golf ball quite as far, but I think I’m a lot wiser. I don’t make as many of the same mistakes. I’m a better parent and grandparent. I wanted to treat them like people and not go to all those usual sort of go-to default reflex Viagra jokes.

They’re toasting the Christmases to come, looking ahead, not back. So are the actors. Morgan’s eighty, Tommy seventy. Nobody in the movie was under sixty except the two young kids and everybody was active and vibrant and full of energy.

You have made some classic sports movies, and of course there is some golf in this one. We don’t get those adoring portrayals of athletes you see in Turner Classic Movie films like “The Stratton Story” and “Pride of the Yankees.” Why is that?

I think we know too much. Television and iPhone and video cameras and paparazzi and confessions mean we cannot pretend that these people are anything other than the brilliantly talented and flawed people they are. Back when those movies were made there were no televised sports. People didn’t know what the athletes looked like. All I try to do in my stories is put the camera and the story where the television cameras can’t go.

Do sports build character, reveal character or both?

Both; without question. I’m a big believer in sports. It’s great training for people, I know it’s a cliché but it’s true — you learn life lessons. People ask me “what did you learn from sports?” because I went to college on a basketball scholarship and played professional baseball. I say, “you learn to lose” You never win in sports. You have good years and bad. You deal with disappointment. You learn to figure out, “How does that make me stronger? How do I put it in perspective with everything else going on in my life?” So, that’s a great life lesson. It’s what you keep in your heart and mind as you play, whether you are eight years old or thirty or sixty.

Originally published in HuffPost

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Interview: Terry Fator

Posted on August 15, 2017 at 12:32 pm

Terry Fator is pure entertainment. His act, including more than a dozen puppets and an astonishing range of impressions and characters, is non-stop fun. There is something to make anyone laugh, but, even harder to find, there is a lot to make everyone laugh. In this divided world, Fator manages to find a way to make everyone in the audience feel comfortable and welcome, and to leave his audiences astonished by his versatility and delighted with his gentle humor. He is one of the most popular performers ever to appear on “America’s Got Talent,” where he won the top prize, and is now a headliner at The Mirage in Las Vegas. In an interview, he talked about getting started in grade school, the only thing that made him nervous on “America’s Got Talent,” and the trick to doing Donald Trump.

Have you always loved performing before an audience?

Yes, I was always an entertainer from the time of about two or three. I could always impersonate everything and anything. I was the kid that probably was incredibly annoying because I could be at K-Mart and then they would say, “There’s a Blue Light Special in the Boys Department.” And I would go, “There’s a Blue Light Special in the Boys Department” in exactly the same voice. When a siren went by I tried to impersonate the sirens. I was one of those kids that just knew how to copy people and things and animals and everything else.

I remember standing on a table, singing to an audience and they were cheering and laughing. I remember distinctly thinking, “I really like this feeling. This is a great feeling.”

You appear in the wonderful documentary about ventriloquists, Dumbstruck. Some of the families are not very enthusiastic about ventriloquism. What was your family like?

I was always kind of a weird little comedy kid anyway so I kind of brought laughter into the family. We had a difficult childhood. My father was very abusive and we worked a lot. I was always the kid that could find the comedy in whatever situation so you know we also worked a lot. My parents had a janitorial business. Because there were no other workers other than the family there were times when we had to work thirty-six straight hours with no sleep. We would clean apartment complexes and we would have to do two hundred fifty apartments in a weekend and so we would just work, work, work a whole weekend without any kind of rest or sleep. I was that kid that was always finding the comedy in whatever and cracking jokes. So I think when I started doing ventriloquism, it was something new but I was making them laugh so they didn’t really care.

My dad was never supportive but my mom was supportive and my brothers and sister were. One time, I was maybe eleven or twelve, and I told my family. I said, “I can’t seem to get a rapport with my puppet. It doesn’t feel like it’s a real person so I’m going to carry my puppet when I’m around the house and bring my puppet to dinner. And don’t think I’ve lost my mind. I’m not losing my mind. I’m just trying to learn to talk with my puppet as if it’s a real character, a real person.” So I would sit there and I would have the puppet interject at the dinner table and I never did cross a line. I felt like they were family members – the puppets you know. And no, I’m not afraid for a puppet to sit alone in the room with me at night. They don’t come alive unless I’m holding them.

What kind of an adjustment did you have to make going from relatively small audiences to the kind of audiences that you get now?

The odd thing about the “America’s Got Talent” thing, the only time I got nervous was when I was when I wasn’t sure if I was going to go through to the next level or not. That was when the nerves were but it was more of trepidation. “Oh my gosh, is this the end? Am I going home or am I going to get to go through?” It never even occurred to me that I was on television in front of millions of people. I totally forgot that there were cameras there. All that mattered as soon as I set foot on that stage was the live audience and the judges.

An audience is an audience and I do it for the love of the audience and for the love of the craft. Being famous has its perks and being successful is great. But the only reason, the real drive for me and the reason I want that fame is because it translates into people in my audience that enjoy what I create. The rest of it just doesn’t matter to me at all. It really matters that for every person that’s there to give them the best show that they can and the fact that somebody is enjoying what I create is what drives me.

What makes someone a great ventriloquist?

I think the real key is creating characters that people fall in love with and identify with. We are kind of magicians in a sense in that we make inanimate objects talk.

How long does it take you to introduce a new character?

Every character is different. It depends on who that character is and the characters also evolve over time. With Donald Trump I tried really, really hard to get the voice but it’s really physically impossible to do Donald Trump’s voice without moving your lips and the reason is you have to purse your lips in order to get that certain tone. So I really didn’t focus as much on trying to get a real legitimate impersonation of his vocal tone and more just to keep the bigness of his character. I don’t do political humor, I don’t bring politics at all into my act. I’m one of those people that just feel that you know we’re entertainers and it’s not our job to try to convince one person, any one of our political opinions one way or the other. They are there to be entertained. The reason that I never had a Barack Obama or George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton puppet is because those people are known specifically for politics. With Donald Trump, he is an iconic person that we all know of for several different reasons, whether it’s a reality show or the guy who owns the Miss Universe pageant or the Trump Tower or a casino owner. I don’t make fun of Donald Trump because I don’t want to irritate half of my audience. I just have fun with the bigness of his character, with his personality. I just want to have fun and make people laugh so I am a very positive person and all my comedy is very uplifting and positive.

Originally published on Huffington Post

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Interview: Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon on “The Big Sick”

Posted on June 18, 2017 at 3:45 pm

Emily V. Gordon wants you to know that her father did not cheat on her mother. You might think that he did because in the movie Gordon wrote with her husband, Kumail Nanjiani, about their romance, movie Emily’s father, played by Ray Romano, confesses that he had an affair. But Gordon and Nanjiani explained in an interview that the overall story is true, and Nanjiani plays himself, but some elements were compressed or heightened for dramatic purposes.

This part is true: Gordon met Nanjiani when she was in grad school studying psychology and he was a stand-up comic. Very early in their relationship, she suddenly became critically ill. This is probably the only romantic comedy in history to have its female lead spend half the movie in a medically induced coma. And that’s not even the couple’s biggest obstacle. Nanjiani’s Pakistani immigrant family wants him to marry a girl from their religion and culture. Gordon’s character, Emily Gardiner in the movie, is neither. He hasn’t told her about the parade of eligible girls his mother has “dropping by” the house when he is visiting his parents. Movie Emily, played by Zoe Kazan, breaks up with Nanjiani just before she gets sick, and then he meets her parents (Romano and Holly Hunter) for the first time at the hospital. The second half of the film is a different love story, between Nanjiani and Emily’s parents. “And then we get to really, really play and create these really fun people,” she said. “My parents are lovely but it would have been a more boring movie.”

“This is obviously very, very autobiographical,” Nanjiani continued. “I would say my character is probably closer to how I was then than Emily is.” “I would say your character is pretty clueless, and you’re not as clueless,” Gordon added. “We had a lot of fun arguments like: character Kumail is a lying asshole, but the real Kumail is just a liar.” “Yes, just a liar. And clueless. Judd would ask me what I thought was going to happen, what the plan was when I was dating Emily. And I was like, ‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.’” Gordon, whose terrifically funny and wise book Super You: Release Your Inner Superhero reflects her training as a therapist and her insight as a writer, said, clearly not for the first time, “Not deciding is a decision. People don’t realize that not making a decision is a decision in itself.”

Nanjiani and Gordon worked on the script for three years, sending drafts to Apatow, who guided them on tempo and character. “We would write down the truth of things and then he would advise us: ‘You could really turn up the drama here, you can change the situation here and kind of make this resonate more.’ So we would show him what the truth was and then he would help us figure out ways to make it more cinematic, ways to make it more dramatic, more funny,” Nanjiani said. The biggest departure was in the portrayal of Gordon’s parents. Apatow was especially helpful in providing feedback on the story’s structure. “He was like: ‘this much will be Emily and Kumail, this much should be them separated, this much should be the hospital, this much should be the surgery.’ He just drew these lines separating each section and we took a picture of it. And then when Michael Showalter came on as director, he said, ‘Kumail in Emily’s room, that’s the center of the movie so everything has to come before come after it.’ So we moved everything around that point because that’s the point of no return. That’s when I realize that I’m in love with her and that I had made a huge mistake.”

Gordon described working with Showalter. “He’s all heart, that’s what’s great. And he wears all his emotions on his sleeve. That’s his strength in a way. He is so amazing to watch because he’s passionate and invested in the story. And he was always very open to collaboration. It wasn’t like he was ruling with an iron fist, ever. Everything felt like a collaboration. He had no ego about collaborating. That made me feel so safe and confident in giving him our story.” Nanjiani said that Showalter showed them how he was subtly using different color palettes for the different characters, even different camera movements. “And Mike is very good at guiding you between movements of the movie, with silence or just following a character for a little bit or whatever it, is he’s very, very adept at switching gears for the movie in a seamless way.” Showalter is especially gifted in casting even the smallest roles and because they shot in New York they were able to find superb performers from theater whose faces were not familiar to movie audiences.

Nanjiani said that writing the film helped him to appreciate and understand his parents’ reaction to his wanting to marry Gordon. “When people from a different culture come here you want to hold on to your own culture but you also want to be your own person. It’s a complicated thing and you do lose something going against the wishes of your parents and your culture. But ultimately it has to be a personal decision.”

Nanjiani is an experienced performer, including three seasons as Dinesh on “Silicon Valley.” But this role presented some new challenges for him, with some dramatic moments and with the difficulty of reliving some of his most painful experiences on camera.

“I hadn’t ever taken any acting classes so I started taking acting classes to sort of prepare for this. I just knew that there was this big thing coming up and it was going to be very difficult and challenging. I wanted to take some of the guesswork out of it because what I knew was comedy acting, where you can go on instinct and as long as it feels funny it works. I knew this was going to be different, especially separating the reality from the movie character and also dealing with some very painful memories. I wanted to get the tools to be able to go into different emotions because I knew that this was a very low budget movie and we had to learn work really fast. If I had to be sad in the scene knew I knew that I had to figure out how to do that like quickly.”

“And if may say,” added Gordon, “Old Kumail from the movie would not have done that. He just would have been like, ‘I’ll figure it out.’”

Originally published on Huffington Post.