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THE NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW TO ANNOUNCE AWARDS RECIPIENTS WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2024

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NBR Awards Gala to Take Place on Tuesday, January 7, 2025
in New York City

New York, NY (September 4, 2024)  – The National Board of Review will announce the recipients of the 2024 NBR Awards on Wednesday, December 4, 2024. The NBR Awardees will be fêted at a gala event on Tuesday, January 7, 2025 in New York City, hosted by Willie Geist; host, NBC News’ Sunday TODAY and co-host, MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

The National Board of Review’s awards celebrate excellence in filmmaking with categories that include Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Actress, Best Original and Adapted Screenplay, Best International Film, Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary, Breakthrough Performance, Directorial Debut, Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography and Stunt Artistry. Additionally, they award signature honors such as the NBR Icon Award, NBR Freedom of Expression, and the William K. Everson Award for Film History.

ABOUT THE NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW
Since 1909, the National Board of Review has dedicated its efforts to the support of cinema as both art and entertainment. Each year, this select group of film enthusiasts, filmmakers, professionals and academics participates in illuminating discussions with directors, actors, producers and screenwriters before announcing their selections for the best work of the year. Since first citing year-end cinematic achievements in 1929, NBR has recognized a vast selection of outstanding studio, independent, foreign-language, animated and documentary films, often propelling recipients such as Peter Farrelly’s Green Book and George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road into the larger awards conversation. In addition, one of the organization’s core values is identifying new talent and nurturing young filmmakers by awarding promising talent with Directorial Debut and Breakthrough Performance awards as well as grants to rising film students. With its continued efforts to assist up-and-coming artists in completing and presenting their work, NBR honors its commitment to not just identifying the best that current cinema has to offer, but also ensuring the quality of films for future generations to come.

Join the conversation @NBRfilm

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Press Contacts:
Shawn Purdy / Alicia Mohr / Lindsey Brown – SLATE PR
shawn@slate-pr.com / aliciam@slate-pr.com / lindsey@slate-pr.com

Q&A with Austin Peters

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

Can you talk about the decision to set the film in 2013, and why that specific year was the right choice for this story?
Austin Peters: If you think about where we, as a country, were at in 2013… It was such a different time. The sort of depths of the darkness that exist online we were aware of, but not in the way that we are now. And it didn’t feel as dangerous, these social media platforms and the things that we know about them now, what they do and what sort of scams are run on them. That was really outside of our line of vision at the time in many ways. And especially for someone like Hope, who’s so… offline, and has built her whole career on face to face relationships, and being in person and all that sort of thing.

When she starts thinking about putting herself online, building a brand, that entire idea is like a foreign language to her. And so you know, it felt crucial to set this story in the modern era, but not quite in the time we’re in now. It felt that if this story happened in the present day, it just would not play the same way because we know so much more about the internet and we have so many more tools, and falling into this dark underbelly of the Internet and the city like she does would require almost different pathway, I think, for that to happen now because we know so much more.

we sent her the script almost as a gag

How did Elizabeth Banks get involved in the film?
AP: Well you know Elizabeth was the person who signed on to this movie, she was our first choice to play Hope Goldman and we thought there was never a chance in hell that she was going to do this movie, which is so small and dark. After all, she’s a very successful producer and director and also a movie star! And all of those things led us to believe that she would never be interested in this. And we sent her the script, almost as a gag. And she responded to it, and we talked about it. And then once that happened… This movie became a real thing that people could see in the script, because you could understand what kind of part this was for Elizabeth.

And for me, just as a fan of hers, this is the movie that I wanted to see her in, you know? And she blew me away every single day: she would be jumping between scenes in the beginning and scenes at the end of the movie within the space of a few minutes. We shot for 18 days, so some of the days we would have to do, you know, six scenes that were from all over the timeline of the story, and she would just go between where this character was … it was kind of breathtaking to watch, honestly.

And our producers Jonathan Schwartz and Logan Lerman had worked with Lewis Pullman on a previous film, and they really loved him. I’m so grateful that we went with Lewis because I think that he brings so much to that character. You know, and, and obviously Michaela Jaé Rodriguez is so amazing. And so we just went for all these people that we thought were not going to do it, and they agreed to do it!

The work done behind the camera was exceptional as well. Can you discuss building the team? The music, makeup, camera work… all of it was just phenomenal.
AP: Oh, I’m so glad that it worked for you. The Director of Photography is Christopher Ripley and he’s amazing. And he’s sort of a mad scientist that I had shot some music videos with, and he is constantly working. He’s done videos for some of biggest artists, their most exciting videos. Megan Thee Stallion, Bad Bunny, Harry Styles… And he got wind that I was making this movie and he called me and he said, “can we talk about it?” And he read the script and he immediately stopped doing everything else while we were in prep, turning down all the jobs, just coming to my house every day: talking about the movie, looking at photos, looking at movies, doing page-turns for the script…And so he really was an amazing collaborator.

The score is by Fatima [Al Qadiri], who I am a massive, massive fan of. She did the score for a film called Atlantics in 2019 that won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and when I watched that film I was so smitten by the whole movie, and I thought the music was such amazing an part of it. I had sort of known about her then, and I wrote down her name because I thought maybe she would be interested in doing an American movie—and this is her first American film. So we got connected and I loved the score that she did here.

And Laura Zempel, the editor, is an enormous talent. This is her second or third movie, but she does a lot of TV. She did Euphoria, and Beef, and Lessons in Chemistry… and the costumes by Angelina Vitto were really important to us, obviously, to set us in 2013. And because this character is someone who is constantly thinking about how she appears and what she looks like, even when her life is crumbling, and even when her sanity is crumbling, she is constantly trying to present herself in a certain way. So we just knew that every outfit had to be a very specific look. She always had to be giving a look. And Angelina was an enormous talent. Liz Toonkel did the production design: she had a huge stack of architectural digests from 2008 to 2012, to get a sense of what places looked like, and she bought a book by Kate Somerville, who was one of the first celebrity facialists circa 2013. So there’s all these photos of her studio and what it looked like because it’s sort of… now we’re almost getting there, but 2013 is sort of long enough ago that it feels really jarring and out of date, but it also doesn’t feel like a period necessarily. You don’t immediately register that this is a time period thing, you know?

What was it like to direct a narrative feature for the first time, after directing TV, music videos, and documentaries in the past? Were those skills transferable to this project?
AP: What was transferable was working on set and collaborating with people. Doing music videos, I think what you learn is that you have to get it done, you know, you have one day with the artist and if it doesn’t come out right, it’s your fault. There are no reshoots, and that’s what it is. And there’s never enough money on music videos. And so, you have to sort of train yourself to get the strongest image you possibly can, and know when you have to compromise, and know when you can push.

And so those sorts of learning experiences were helpful, in terms of going on set and bringing that to it. That said, I had never worked with actors. That’s different from working with musicians on a video, you know, because musicians create something in a studio and then the video is the supplementary part of it… whereas with actors, the moment of creation is on set.

And so getting to be a part of that and, and doing that with them was really thrilling. The thing that was the most confusing for me, even having done documentary, was the absolute scale of it in prep and really in post. I just could not… it sounds so stupid to say now, so I should stop saying it, but I could not believe how big it was when we got into the edit. I could not believe that we would spend all day working on one scene. And the next morning look at it and be like, “is it better?” And it was so uncertain, and that was something that I didn’t know was coming, and I was lucky to work with Laura, who is a genius, and I could lean on her because she only lives in narrative. She’s never done a commercial, she’s never done a music video, even though I would love to see her do both of those things! But she is only in storytelling and so, she was someone that I could lean on in that in that process.
 

Q&A with India Donaldson and Lily Collias

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

It’s such a beautiful film. Did you always want to set it in the Hudson Valley?
India Donaldson: I actually wrote it for California. Growing up, I spent most of my time camping and hiking in the Sierras. I live in LA now, but I had been living in New York for 12 years. And before that, I was at college in upstate New York, and I realized that all of my collaborators—everyone that I could lean on to help me make a low budget film—lived in New York. I spent a lot of time in this area and kind of reimagined it for the Hudson Valley, mostly because of the people.

Their closeness adds a layer of betrayal

That area is really welcoming.
ID: Oh yeah. A park ranger at a state park is how we found this woman that let us use her 300-acre property for the majority of our shoot. Everyone was so generous. As we scouted, we tried to share the story of how we were making the film. Various larger productions had been through before us, like Severance. Those productions have more resources than us, so we had to explain, hey, our crew is fifteen people, we are not going to touch anything. The film commission there was also very helpful. 

Lily, how did you prepare to shoot in the elements?
Lily Collias: I knew I would be dealing with an environment that was entirely foreign to me. I never thought about camping growing up. I had tried to mentally prepare myself for the unawareness that I was about to experience. I was going embark on this journey not knowing but pretending to know!

How did you cast Lily? The role of Sam is so important, and her performance is tremendous.
ID: We’d been trying to cast Sam for months. And we were having a really hard time. My younger sister was, at the time, an eighteen-year-old senior in high school. Almost as a joke, I asked her, do you know any actors? Like, help me out here! And that was how I found Lily. I still can’t believe that’s our story.

LC: We grabbed a coffee, and then afterwards, you asked me to do two sides. One of them was the confrontation with my dad towards the end, and the other one was the vegetarian scene, which was really fun.

ID: I’d been sourcing auditions in different ways. You know, through friends of friends, and occasionally sending tapes to Taylor [Williams], our casting director, to ask, what do you think of this person? And I sent her Lily’s tape with zero context, not telling her the story, and she called me immediately. No joke, she was like, we can stop looking. It really blew us both away. She had seen many, many audition tapes. It was so exciting to finally have that feeling, to follow that instinct.

What do you think she saw in those tapes?
ID: Oh, a lot of things. Taylor’s husband is a wonderful actor, and I remember Taylor told me that she showed the tape to Danny, her husband, and he’s in his fifties, and he was like, damn, I’ll never be that good. But I think Lily has an incredible confidence for someone so young. She was so grounded, so present, so subtle. She was the character. It’s almost mysterious when you see a performance that doesn’t feel like a performance. It seemed effortless. And Lily has an incredibly expressive face where you can just hear what she’s thinking.

Yeah, there are so many shots of your face, Lily, holding the frame for like ten seconds. Did you ever overthink it?
LC: No, I had a lot of trust in India throughout the whole process. She’s very intuitive and knew exactly what to say and what needed to be said. It was very much understood. Even reading the script, I was like, okay, there’s not much dialogue for Sam. What do these moments of silence mean to her? And India said, this is about you, and even though you’re not talking, there are still things going on in your mind. That was fun to play around with because I got to mess with the dialogue that’s happening between the men. Sometimes when you’re with someone for an extended period, you tune out. And then there are moments, between a dad and a daughter, where you can tune out for so long and still be listening, like a snap. You hear one thing and you’re like, yeah, I’m back. I’m going to say something.

Sam’s a fairly internal character. How did you prepare to get inside her head?
LC: I had fun doing little activities like writing diary entries. That wasn’t on set. I wasn’t reading or listening to anything. Once I memorized my lines, I was able to have fun with these moments of creating more of her life… before the now. It was a helpful tool for me to get to know her because she’s so internal. I felt like her diary would be so interesting, and it was fun to play around with what that would look like. I didn’t try to take it too seriously. It was just a tool to get to know Sam better.

Sam’s queerness is an interesting element, because it’s not really highlighted but it’s an important part of this story. Can you talk about the choice to leave that in the background?
ID: For me, I love it when I see queerness on screen, and it’s not a huge part of the story, it’s just an aspect of the character’s experience. I think there’s a line in the movie where Danny McCartney’s character references her queerness, telling her father, you’re lucky she likes girls. As if her queerness will protect her from bad experiences with men. I was also interested in how her queerness is yet another area where she and her father’s shared experience don’t overlap. He can be as accepting and warm as he wants to be, because I think he is those things, but to really listen to her and connect with her is a whole other thing. It’s another layer of disconnect. I actually don’t think Lily and I talked about that aspect of the character much at all. I provided these clues in the script for Lily to then take and do what she wanted to do. I wanted to give her the space to find her way into the character, and in her collaboration with James [Le Gros], who plays her father. Lily would ask really good questions throughout the process, mining for information and ideas.

LC: Yeah, I don’t think we did talk about her queerness. It’s just a part of her life. Her parents are accepting, but they do find weird pockets to kind of make conversations that don’t need to be had about their child’s sexual preferences. And we see that in a couple of scenes that demonstrate how Sam is not being seen and heard. I think the aspect of disconnect is important, but her queerness is very subtle and it’s not a big part of the story. It’s just, Sam likes girls. Women are beautiful, no question.

You shot for only twelve days, is that right?
ID: Yes, although James always corrects me and says eleven because we lost a day to thunderstorms. But I did make use of all the time. Whenever we were losing time to weather, I would try to come up with something else to shoot.  On the thunderstorm day, we set up the tents on the porch of our Airbnb and shot some stuff in the interior of those tents, things that weren’t in the script, but that did make it into the movie. I don’t think that anyone can ever do everything according to plan in a film production, regardless of the script or how much time and money you have. So I tried to approach it like, let’s embrace this thing we didn’t plan and shoot some things we didn’t plan—let’s see what this exact time and place in this environment gives us along with all the specificity of that.

When did you shoot that campfire scene? It’s such a quiet but significant scene.
ID: The campfire was the last thing we shot. I learned this recently. One of the producers on the film, Diana Irvine, her father is a career first AD. And when Diana and I were first trying to figure out how much time we needed to make this movie, we asked her dad. He’s retired, but he was so sweet, he made us a schedule, and he put that scene last. I was talking to Eliza Hittman about it, and said she always schedules the hard emotional scenes late. So I asked Diana, did your dad do that on purpose? She was like, of course, he did everything on purpose. I didn’t understand the value of that before, but now I really do. Was that helpful to you, Lily?

LC: It was so helpful, because at that point, Danny and I had known each other, and we felt very comfortable rehearsing. It was so important for me to shoot that later in the process. I think it was really helpful.

ID: And the characters do know each other so well. He’s known her since she was a child, so it was important, as actors, to give them time to get to know each other.

LC: Their closeness adds a layer of betrayal. 

What was at like working with Danny and James?
LC: I feel like Danny kept to himself a lot on set and was just reading and rehearsing a lot. James would kind of talk smack with me all day long and we would just get into it! Which worked really well for our triangle dynamic in the movie too. In a funny way. Danny’s much more, I’d say, theatrically trained.

ID: Danny is an incredible theater actor and that’s the reason he was very loyal to the script. To the point where I need to be like, Danny, it’s okay!

LC: It was nice. It wasn’t every man for themselves.

It’s funny that James often takes these intense roles, because I’ve met him and he’s a super funny guy.
ID: I feel like we got so lucky that James agreed to do the movie, not just with his performance, but he helped us make the movie in every way. He knew exactly what he was signing up for, he knew the challenges that were ahead. He was always aware of what everyone was doing, and he always the first person in front of the camera saying, okay, let’s go! He was always helping us get there.  And with Lily, I observed a natural chemistry with James that I wanted to foster. 

LC: He such a mentor to me. It was incredible. He would talk to me about things I needed to understand about film and and how to go about things in a way that I needed to know, things you don’t get taught in acting school. It’s like how you go to high school and they don’t tell you how to do your taxes. I was like, wow, this is a whole other world, thank you! I needed to know this. The entire time he was such an wonderful role model.

ID: One thing that Lily told me that I loved and, correct me if I’m telling this wrong. In the scene where you confront your dad, you asked James before shooting, what HE would do, right? And he said, well, we’ll talk about this after the shoot.

LC: Yeah.

ID: Then we wrapped the movie.

LC: And then I was sitting down with James after the shoot, and I asked him again, so what would you do in that situation? And he said, I’m never going to judge any of my characters, and I don’t even want to think about that judgment. When he said that, it was so understandable. I have so much respect for that perspective.

Q&A with Rich Peppiatt, Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara, and DJ Próvaí

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

The tone that you set from the very beginning lets the audience know that they’re going to see something that’s serious, but you’re not going to weigh them down with it, and I appreciate that so much about this film.
Rich Peppiatt: Yeah, that was something that was important to us, to make sure it was entertaining. And there’s been so many films about Belfast which can stray sometimes into a turgidly serious tone. And we couldn’t really make a film about Kneecap that was going to be deadly serious, could we? Although maybe we’ll try, someday! “Kneecap: The Drama.” But also, I don’t think it could have been a straight comedy, you know. It is a weird film in the sense that people say it’s like a drama… or a “dramedy,” which is a horrible word… Is it a comedy, is it a black comedy? I think someone even called it a musical. Some people say it’s a documentary (I definitely don’t think it’s a documentary), but, you know, it doesn’t really sit anywhere perfectly.  But surely we can have films that don’t exactly fit into a box, can’t we?

it is one of the oldest languages in Europe, and it was driven nearly to extinction

Can you discuss the songs that were used in the film?
Móglaí Bap: Yeah, so, we don’t just confine ourselves to the Irish language, because that’s just not true to our reality. Like, I mean, English has such a big presence in Ireland. The language, even in the Gaeltacht regions, which is the Irish speaking regions around Ireland, they’ll drop in and out of Irish sometimes because, you know, English is on the TV, it’s on the radio. So, we don’t confine ourselves to one language, which is actually quite helpful when writing songs. Because if I run out of things to rhyme with, I can just get a whole new dictionary, um, to help me out. So, basically we talk about our experiences, just like, you know, youth culture of partying and stuff. I’m sure you’ve seen what I’m talking about in the film. 

And and then obviously talking about the importance of being Irish in territory that is under British occupation still, and the fact that the language is one of the oldest languages in Europe, and it was driven nearly to extinction after 800 years of like brutalization. So it’s just it’s a miracle that the language survived, and we talk about that in our music… basically talk about the language, and partying and stuff, and we try not to be too serious, even though we’re talking about serious subjects. We think it’s important to sprinkle comedy throughout. People are sick of being fucking preached to all the time. So yes, we have a lot of serious things to say, but we do it comically .

I wonder if you could also speak about how you decided what would be in the Irish language, what would be English, what would be captioned, and what wouldn’t?
DJ Provai: Whenever the three of us are speaking, it’s always in Irish. And then whenever someone else who doesn’t speak Irish comes into the conversation, comes into the scene, then that’s when it switches. So I don’t know if people notice that when it’s happening. 

Mo Chara: Yeah, I mean, we wanted the film to be realistic in that way. We didn’t want to do a film in Belfast entirely in Irish that is, you know, about the Irish language. Because I’d say 99 percent of shops or bars you walk into, the people behind the bar won’t speak much Irish, if any Irish at all. So we didn’t want to do the whole film in Irish because it wouldn’t be realistic. So, wherever it was realistic for it to be in Irish, it was in Irish.

MB: And I think there’s a very interesting technique in the film (and I had to reach for this) is that there’s this constant power dynamic with the language. For instance, there’s the scene with me and Fassbender, and I’m speaking Irish to him, but he refuses to speak Irish to me, and that’s him trying to have a jab at me, or to get one over me. And then you’ve got, uh, when Fassbender’s talking to his on-screen wife: He speaks Irish to her, and she refuses to speak Irish to him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in any movie, where language is… kind of weaponized on like such a small level, on a personal level. 

RP: I also think in the interrogation scene, which is one of my favorite scenes, language is such an important part of the dynamic. There’s a three-way power struggle, where [DJ Próvaí] is sort of in the middle of it. Whose side is he going to be? But the language is kind of the battleground, you know, because they’re able to talk to each other and exclude one person from the conversation. In that way, they’re able to weaponize the language. You know, I just remember that scene being something that was really fun to write, because you realize that the minute one person of a threesome can’t speak the language, you can have a lot of comedic fun with who understands what, and when.

Two of the things that resonated with me were the references to the American Civil Rights Movement, and to American hip hop music. Many audiences would probably not have made those connections on their own, to Irish culture.
MC: I don’t think a lot of people know that in 1969, the way it worked for voting in the north (where we’re from), is that you were able to vote based on how much property you owned. So all of the unionist and loyalist Protestant communities owned maybe four or five houses that they would rent out, so they had four or five votes per person, whereas the Catholic communities didn’t have enough money to own their own property… so basically they couldn’t vote. And that was obviously done that on purpose; that was by no means a mistake. So the republican catholic community saw what was happening in America with the black civil rights marches, and took a lot of inspiration from that and then started the civil rights marches in 1969, was it? 

DJP: 1969 in Derry— they were out doing the peaceful civil rights marches and they were beaten off the streets, bloodied, and then someone caught it on camera and it got cast worldwide and people saw what was happening then, and more people around Ireland were like, “right, they’re not giving us a fair shake here.” And they went out in droves and, yeah… Because of that then, we got one person, one vote.

MB: I think American politics has been a big inspiration for Irish politics for a long time. You had Frederick Douglass, of course, who came and did a tour, a lecture tour of Ireland. And also the Black Panthers were a massive inspiration to Ireland. For example, when Bernadette Devlin McAliskey got the key to the city of New York, she went and gave it to the Black Panther Party in ’69.

And also, of course, Angela Davis. She came to Belfast one time to the school that we went to, the Irish Secondary School. Because when the school was started, the first Irish secondary school only started in 1991, and the British government refused to give it any funding. So it was all community funded. By the people, by the parents. And Angela Davis came to visit the school one time. You’ve got the rest of the story…

MC: Yeah, there’s a funny story just of how Angela Davis came to see the school because she had heard about, you know, that it was grassroots and community level, and she came in and it was after the school had closed—  and there was just a couple of kids sitting around and she was like, what’s this? And they had to say, “oh… detention.” So Angela Davis got these three kids out of detention! It was a great story. I mean, I don’t think the principal’s gonna stand up to Angela Davis. So, she freed the three students.

Q&A with Colman Domingo and Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin

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

Mr. Maclin, I’d love to start with you. Can you tell us how you first learned about the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program?
Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin: One night, I was going into the yard, but it got closed down, so everybody got directed to the theater. And while I was in the theater, there was a play going on—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I believe, with my brother Dino Johnson. I got to witness these brothers doing some creative work that I didn’t expect, because I know them from the yard. I’d seen them in the yard, I’d seen them in the gym, I’d seen them everywhere. But when I see them up on stage, the camaraderie that they had with each other was a beautiful thing to witness and I wanted to be a part of that. I actually had to wait a year because you have to have no infractions, no tier three tickets or anything like that. At the time I was still kind of rough around the edges, so I had to wait a year to get in. And once I did, I cherished the program.

It’s not about what these men have done. It’s about who they are going to become

How did the filmmakers gain your trust to tell this story?
CM: We first met at Brent Buell’s [writer] house over breakfast, and we just talked about everything. How we see the world. We didn’t really talk about the movie, about the play, not really like that. It was just getting to know one another. We had breakfast, we went to dinner, and we walked around my neighborhood together so that they could get a feel for who I was. We had other people that came to us wanting to do something with RTA from the outside, but they felt like they were trying to use us for the story. Or like they were just trying to help some poor prisoners so that they could get a good night’s sleep or something. We didn’t want that. We didn’t get that feeling with Greg Kwedar [director] and Clint Bentley [producer, writer]. We felt that they were genuine and they were true about what they wanted to do. And then when I met Colman, we started over Zoom. Believe it or not, we started rehearsals over Zoom. I seen a dedication and commitment in the brother because while rehearsing, he was in a car driving, and he would pull over in LA to go through lines with me. That type of commitment is commendable and that’s what I was looking for. I trusted him after that.

Mr. Domingo, you’re also an EP on the film. How did you go about getting this made?
Colman Domingo: I got involved with this through Clint and Greg. They had been wrestling with trying to make a film out of meeting with these guys and being involved in the program at Sing Sing. Being teaching artists, they wanted to tell these stories. Everybody had such an incredible story. They wanted to capture the work that this program was doing. And they went through this for six, seven years, and they kept getting stalled because they felt like they were making a bastardized version of what they experienced. Then they reached out to me to say they had an idea. I said, well, what’s this? Do you have a script? They said, no, we don’t have a script yet. I said, okay. Well, what’s this idea? And they said we’re going to send you an article from Esquire Magazine that talked about Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code and getting to know these guys. They also sent me some clips of some of the productions. It was so cool. I really felt like I got to know these guys. They also wanted me to meet Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin—they thought he’d be interesting to talk to, and that he could be a co-star. Then we all got together and started crafting this together. The filmmakers really wanted both me and Clarence—who is also an EP—to help shape this. It wasn’t just like we were artists for hire, but they wanted to know what made sense to both of us as human beings and men. I came in and brought everything I had. They wanted me as an actor, director, writer, and producer. I brought every skill that I had to help shape the room in whatever way we were in. I feel like we vibed off of each other and really helped each other out. Everybody had their own superpowers, you know what I mean? We gave it all to this film.  And I’ll use this word because I think it’s rare to use this word—I’ve done a lot of films, but I think this film was done truly with so much sincerity. That is the word from start to finish. Whatever you’re experiencing in this film, sincere heart went into it from the beginning, from our producers to every artist. When the producers talked to me, they said, hey, we have two ways to do it now that we have you attached. We can go out to studios, since you have relationships with a lot of them. Or, they said, we can do it in a different way. We can keep the budget low and build it in a very community-based model where everyone above and below the line shares in its profits. And we take care of everyone. Everyone’s paid the same rate. Everyone benefits, and everyone, especially my colleagues, absolutely own their stories. I think that’s rare, and it starts with Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley and Monique Walton, and it just trickled down. I wanted to be a part of that.

I read about that, and I thought it was remarkable. I’ve never heard of that in the industry, right? How does that influence the actors on set?
CD: I think it influences every single person—you feel like this is your film. You’re not an actor for hire, or a designer for hire, or a transpo. You’re like, this is my film. Let me take care of it. Let me do exactly what I need to do to get it done. There’s still a breakdown of the days you worked and that basically goes into the pie and the pie is divided in a certain way based on what you delivered to it. Everyone wins. How beautiful.

CM: Being that this is really my first film, I thought that everyone did it this way!

CD: Until I was like, no, it doesn’t usually happen like that!

I read that during your research process, you weren’t interested in what these men that were incarcerated for, but how they were afterwards and how they are now and how the program impacted them.
CD: I’m somebody who does a lot of research for any role that I do. And I thought, okay, I need to meet people where they are. Do I need to know a lot about the prison industrial complex? Do I need to know all of that and have stats in my head and all that? No, I don’t. I didn’t need to know any of that. It’s about this RTA program. I knew the movie we were making was not a prison film, at all. I thought, oh, that’s just the container. It’s about human beings. It’s about the transformational power of art and the effect that it’s had on people. And possibility. Which makes it a bit broader, it’s about all of us instead of this limited view of a prison movie. That’s the movie we were making.

And I wanted to meet people. I’m not somebody who, especially when it comes to real people, I’m not that person who sits down with John “Divine G” and interrogates him and asks him to tell me everything about his childhood and his trauma. I didn’t do any of that. What I did do is have dinner with him, and we had a conversation. We talked and got to know each other. He told me that he went to the High School for Performing Arts and he wanted to be a dancer and DJ. I asked him about the dancing, and he said, yeah, I wanted to do Jazz and Ballet. I wouldn’t have imagined that! And he said, yeah, I’d take the train back and people would want to beat me up anytime I was doing that, so I stopped. But when he talked about dance, he lit up. Knowing that, I wanted to see how I could incorporate it. That’s where that pirouette comes in. When I’m waiting while this knucklehead [Clarence] goes in and steals my role. He goes and takes Hamlet from me! So that’s how the pirouette comes in. Because I downloaded information that I thought could be useful. It’s just getting a bit more of a person’s soul and knowing who he is today. That’s what the film is about—the process these men are in. It’s not about what these men have done. It’s about who they are going to become.

I’d love to hear about the process of combining real people, playing versions of themselves, along with professional actors.
CD:  That was Greg Kwedar’s stroke of genius. He thought, well, there are folks who’ve gone through this program and they’re actors, right? Why shouldn’t they play themselves, a version of themselves? They’re playing aspects of themselves.

CM: My character is a culmination of a lot of the experiences that I’ve witnessed and the behaviors that I’ve seen. And a bit of me as well. But it’s a lot of experiences that I witnessed. I did almost eighteen years in prison, so I saw a lot and I poured all of that into that one character. I think it was Brent that gave them the information. If you really want to know the story, you might want to talk to the men who lived it. And that was when Greg and Clint really got in contact with us and talked to us individually. They must have figured out there was no one that could play the Divine Eye but the Divine Eye!  

CD: You know, I agree! I don’t know an actor that could play the role that you played. The process was pretty organic in that way, too. They had auditions. They auditioned all these guys who went through the RTA program and cast them based on whatever qualities that Greg and Clint were building with this. And they wanted me to help anchor this as an actor who does film as well. Every day was like molding clay. We would always have a private rehearsal, to talk things through the scene. He did it in a very collaborative way. We all have an opinion on what makes sense or doesn’t make sense. Let’s stage it there. There was one scene we agreed to throw out because it didn’t make sense anymore. Then they wanted a scene of us guys just all bonding together. I said, oh, well we were doing that when were doing break dance outside. You got some cardboard? So that’s how that scene came about. We rethought the whole scene. I’m a playwright as well, and I get obsessed about lines, and thinking words can do everything, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it’s something physical. Sometimes you’ve got to capture something organic in the moment and build something that can only last in that moment. Which is what we think the essence of this whole film is—theater. You had to be there that night or you’re going to miss it. That’s why it feels that kinetic and organic because sometimes it happened only on that one take. And that’s the take they used.

From what I understand, you shot in a decommissioned prison. It was a real space. How does that influence the performances?
CD: It makes it even more real. The fact that we shot at a decommissioned prison that was just decommissioned two weeks before we got there helps you feel the reality of that space… the way the air flows or doesn’t flow, how tiny the cells are, just everything about it. You’re like, oh, this is a house of corrections, but this is not a place for human beings. This isn’t human. And it’s perpetuating a system that’s going to keep going. It didn’t feel like a place where you can do the work and be on the path to being better. The moment we were done with a take, I would go outside. I was always outside. I couldn’t be in that environment. The air felt different. I always had to get somebody to take me back and forth to my literal holding cell. I couldn’t tell where I was because it’s designed that way. For  me, it’s intentional. You think about all the things that it does to the psyche. How it’s wearing and tearing on you. How it’s breaking you down instead of helping you do the work to rethink.

CM: For me, there was a lot of apprehension. Especially the scene where I’m in a cell by myself and I reach for the script—I’m actually in a cell that was right downstairs from a cell I actually was in, when I was in this prison. And it was that way for all of us because everybody, every one of us came through this prison. It was a reception prison, downstairs. You get everything you need and then you get sent to whatever prison you’re going to stay at. So all of us had been in this prison before. Sometimes you could catch us in the corner, just talking, because we had to decompress ourselves. We had a psychologist on set as well, in case there were any anxieties that we needed to talk about. I don’t even know who that person was but I may have talked to them! Because I talked to everybody on set. I was interested in the cameraman’s work, I was interested in Ruta’s [Kiskyte] work, the continuity. I’m interested in everything, in front of the camera and behind. But we found more peace just dealing with it on our own and talking to ourselves because there are some things only we understand. That’s how we got each other through it.