The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Ricky.

Let’s start with the script, because it’s so beautifully rendered. It’s co-written, and I don’t believe the short film this grew out of was co-written. Can you talk about that?
Rashad Frett: This was during COVID, 2020. Lin Que Ayoung was a classmate at NYU, a year ahead of me, and she became the co-writer. Initially I was just going to graduate with the feature script for King, another film I’d been working on. Lin Que was like, “Why not make another short and graduate with as much material as possible?” I knew so many Rickys growing up in Hartford, Connecticut. It was a huge Caribbean community. I’m Caribbean myself. So we did the short. I had no intention of this being a feature at all. I kid you not.

The first person to say it could be a feature was our professor, Mick Casale. He teaches screenwriting in grad film. Simultaneously, while I was waiting to shoot the short, Cary Fukunaga started a grant at NYU. I submitted, and ended up winning. Normally you write a thank you letter and that’s that, but he actually wanted to meet and talk about the script. I was like, “Oh, man.” He gave a lot of great notes. From there he posted me on his Instagram, and his agent at William Morris, Craig Kestel, saw it and reached out. When I had a cut of the film, I sent it to him. I’m an editor, but I edit real slow… like, frame by frame. As soon as he watched it, I got signed to William Morris.

Then Michelle Satter from Sundance heard about the short and invited me to apply for the Writer’s Lab. I didn’t have a script. Like I said, I’d just made this film to graduate. Lin Que and I work so well together, so I asked her to co-write. Michelle skipped us around because I guess the first round had already passed, so she gave us three weeks to submit a script. We wrote every day for three weeks. We were like, “We’re not gonna not write.” A couple weeks later we got interviewed, and then it went dark again. Then another interview a month after that, and we found out we got into the Writer’s Lab. But simultaneously, we got into the Sundance Film Festival for the short. I’d been trying to get into Sundance for fifteen years, so it was a shocker. Truly grateful for that experience. From there, it just kept getting bigger and bigger. I’m still trying to catch up with it even being out in theaters. You know when you walk a dog and the dog is pretty strong, and it’s dragging you? That’s the analogy.

Who’s walking who?

Yeah, pretty much.

I wanted it to feel as authentic as possible

Sheryl Lee Ralph plays Ricky’s parole officer, and she caught me off guard when she code-switched. I had to Google her, and I was stunned to learn that she’s Caribbean. I never knew that about her.
RF: It’s interesting. When we first met on Zoom, within the first three minutes, our accents… you know when you talk to somebody from where you’re from and your accent unknowingly switches? We were speaking in soft patois and I didn’t realize it until afterwards. The majority of the cast were of Caribbean descent. Where I’m from, Hartford, it’s a huge Caribbean population. It wasn’t ironic… It was preordained.

I noticed the Artery logo in the credits. Were there invisible VFX shots?
RF: For sure, tons of VFX. Perfect example: I’m ex-military, and I’m big on safety. We shot at my cousin’s house, the scene where Ricky is cutting my nephew’s hair on the porch, and my cousin’s actual address was on the slab. I was like, “We gotta get that out of there.” People will take one little thing and go check it out. So we made up a street, Creek Street, whatever it was, and put that on instead.

We had a 20-day shoot, so everything was go, go, go. I don’t like to be rushed, but the film was making itself tight. I’ll tell you a story… About a month or two before shooting, I had a dream. I walked onto set, and the film was being made without me. Imagine, as a director, you walk onto set and they’re just making your film without you. I was like, “No. No, you’re not.” I woke up, called my producer, I was like, “I had this crazy dream.” And then there were situations on set… similar. I was like, “Wait a minute, this is the dream.” I said it out loud: “This is the dream.” But we worked it out. We smoothed it out, diplomatically.

Talk more about Hartford as a Caribbean community. I had no idea.
RF: At one point Hartford was… well, New York City was number one, then I think Florida was number two, and Hartford was number three. The reason was Hartford was known for picking tobacco back in the day. Even Martin Luther King, as a teenager, went up there to pick tobacco, in Simsbury. That’s how people started settling, back in the 1940s. My family came to this country in the late ’70s, and I was born right when they came up. A lot of history up there.

Can you discuss the inclusion of other consultants in the film itself?
RF: All right, I’m gonna keep it real. I’ve known Felix Soto for a long time. Go back fifteen years. 2010 is when I met Mark Manson, who was a Hartford cop at the time, retired now. Mark wrote a TV show with Felix. Mark had arrested Felix. Felix was part of the Hells Angels, and when I met Mark, Felix was doing fed time for robbing a bank. He got out in 2019. He changed his life. He’s in the church now, has his own carpentry business. I really wanted him in the film. There are certain things I saw growing up, or I knew people who went through it, but to actually speak to Felix… and from the police side, Mark, and my father, the corrections side, and judges, attorneys — I wanted it to feel as authentic as possible. Lin Que and I made sure of that. Our biggest fear was for it to not feel authentic.

So this past fall we got invited to screen at the San Quentin Film Festival. It was me, Mrs. Ralph, Lin Que, and we were in a chapel with eighty, ninety inmates watching the film. I was like, “If we didn’t do it right, we’ll know.” I almost had a panic attack. I think it started mentally. I was like, “Wow, I’m literally in here with…” But by the end, so many of them came up and said, “Wow, this is literally my story.” I was at a loss for words. So much of what I’ve seen out there glamorizes this stuff. Anything I do, I want it to have truth in it. Even if I’m doing genre, some kind of truth in it.