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Q&A with Jim Archer, Rupert Majendie, David Earl, and Chris Hayward

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

This project started as a radio sketch, became a live show, and now it’s a mockumentary. I’m interested in the differences between those and what you needed to consider to make this film.

Jim Archer: I didn’t do the radio show, but the evolution of that was totally different in regards to characters. The backstory changed completely. With mockumentary, you really have to consider the crew and the logics of how they would cover Brian’s story and where they would be when something unexpected happens. They have to run after these moments and stuff like that. We were always trying to think through the brain of these mysterious documentarians. With the car chase, for example, they probably would have known that was coming because they knew Brian’s plan. So they could fix the GoPros to the car. We were always thinking about how it would look and feel the most realistic.

If I watch it with the sound off, I’m like, this feels and looks like a doc

And what was the evolution of Brian and Charles through these different incarnations? You’re a great vaudevillian act.  

Chris Hayward: When we did this live, they were much more adult in nature. I was dressed as Charlies, David was Brian, and our producer Rupert was voicing Charles in the back of the comedy club. And to survive in a drunken comedy club, they had to be much more chaotic and aggressive. We still had lots of dancing and stuff in there. When we came to do the film, the characters changed quite a bit; they softened. Charles, as you saw, goes through a bit of progression from childlike to angsty teen.

Rupert Majendie: Naturally, Chris can’t see anything in there, so when we did the live show, he’d always be knocking into stuff. I remember at a festival he knocked over a big sign in front of 300 people.

CH: Yeah, at this big festival, they had like a big sign at the back of the stage and I completely lost my footing and just fell backwards on the whole back of the stage. Flat out on my black and I think someone thought I was really injured. I look back and I think, what were we hoping to do?

David, as a comedian, was it challenging to hit the more emotional marks of Brian?

David Earl: To be honest, I wanted to pull out a month or two before we began. I asked if we could get someone else.

RM: Come on, that’s just your default for everything!

DE: Well, it was serious because I was panicking. I was really worried about carrying the movie and just trusting this guy [Jim] to give me the direction. But I really enjoyed playing opposite Chris as Charles… I found it much easier playing off a dummy head than a human being!

RM: David would get the giggles when the more dramatic moments occurred.

JA: But once we started watching the dailies, David really settled in and that definitely shows in the performance.

What were some of the things you discovered in the edit that helped shape this film?

JA: One of the biggest tips we got was to start rearranging the movie. We were in full script order at first.

RM: Our goal was to focus on Brian and Charles’ journey. We had been focusing a lot on the external characters and their journeys too early. I think that really helped shape it. 

CH: We swapped two scenes. Originally, we had the first time Brian meets Hazel being when he went around to her house, with the parrot. Then the second time he meets her is in the street, after he built Charles. Amazingly it worked better to switch those two around.

JA: We wanted him to meet Hazel in the first 5-10 minutes, and that scene just fit in there more smoothly. Then we rearranged loads of stuff after that, but not in huge ways… small cuts here and there that really helped the narrative.

The aesthetic of the movie is very particular. It doesn’t necessarily feel like a comedy, it feels like an elevated documentary.

JA: That’s great to hear since it was meant to feel exactly like that, like a real doc that is a bit moody and super cinematic. We wanted that to make a silly story even funnier. So we treated it super seriously when engaging with the characters like Charles.

RM: Also, Gabby [Yiaxis], who did costumes, and Hannah [Purdy Foggin] from the art department, from their pitch they really got that we wanted it to be as real as possible. All the references they were showing us to fit in the world came from so much research. They understood the approach we wanted to take.

JA: If I watch it with the sound off, I’m like, this feels and looks like a doc. Like genuinely real… except for Charles, obviously!

What was it like working with Jo Walker, your editor? Comedy is so dependent on pacing.

JA: She was amazing. We tried to focus on the story first, and once that was right, we tweaked the comedy as we went. With Charles, we could rewrite all his lines if we wanted to because we could just plug in the voice. Towards the end, we did a lot of tweaking of the delivery of certain lines or rewording.

RM: It was all very collaborative. She even pitched a few lines for Charles that got in there. Jo has great instincts.

Is it hard to maintain a sense of style when you’re doing a mockumentary?

JA: You do have to give up some stuff because there are some things that just don’t fit in that world. But at the same time, you get to shoot stuff that you wouldn’t normally shoot. And we discovered a lot of things, like I actually loved the framing of shooting from the backseat of a car. There’s no crane shots or dollies or anything like that, but I think learned things that I would take into non-documentary films.

And what about for the performers? Is that any different?

CH: Not for me, because I can’t see anything in there. I’m just told to turn Charles’ head!

DE: I’ve done other mockumentaries. When I’m not doing a mockumentary, I’m always looking at the camera and getting told off while I’m doing it. But I really like playing with the camera to give some insight about what’s going on behind the character’s eyes.

Q&A with Andrew Semans

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

What goes into fully developing characters like Margaret and David?  

Andrew Semans: I don’t have any brilliant insights into that, I don’t think. I think it’s just a matter of building up characters bit by bit, little by little, stealing from anybody you know, or any experiences you’ve had that seem to be relevant, and of course stealing from other films and other stories! I think, with me, I just try (when I’m developing characters and writing characters) to keep asking myself, “does this pass the ‘smell test?’ ” In other words, does this feel real, or does this feel psychologically consistent? Does this feel compelling? And I try to monitor myself to guard against getting lazy with my decisions, and to prevent myself from falling back on cliché. I just try to minimize and eliminate any beats that feel false. And it’s just a gradual process over time. But I have no system, I have no great insights into that work— it’s just a matter of trying to live up to my own standard, really. And then when it comes to the actors, it’s true that these characters were not written for these actors at all. It was just a matter of trying to identify actors who I felt were a good, intuitive fit with the characters… and just try to cast the movie well, really. When we got Rebecca [Hall] and Tim [Roth] onboard, the script changed almost not at all. It wasn’t significantly rewritten, the characters weren’t adjusted; they weren’t adapted to meet them. They felt they could embody the characters on the page, and they did! The only change we made was to make them British (they were written as Americans).

they said, “no! Stick to your guns!”

How were the fight scenes choreographed? They were very impressively done.

AS: Thank you, that means a lot to hear you say that. Because it was brand new to me— I’d never made anything where there was fighting, where there were stunts and stunt doubles… all that was brand new to me. And it was quite intimidating. It was a matter of… how do we do this? I had visualized the scenes fairly clearly in my mind as I was writing and shot listing the movie. And it was really a matter of trying communicate what I had in mind as clearly and as explicitly at possible to the stunt team, so that they could then choreograph that and turn that into something that was actually playable by the actors and by the stunt doubles themselves. But I was really just kind of doing my best to either fake my way through it, or simply trying to communicate clearly so that the people who really knew this stuff could bring it to life. It was a lot of trial and error, but again, the idea was to come up with scenes of physical conflict that felt messy. That felt… that didn’t feel choreographed, that felt like these were people who were not accustomed to fighting! These people don’t know karate or anything. So it had to have a high degree of savagery, but a low degree of competence when it comes to the actual battle. And so that’s what we were trying to do.

Can you talk about how you used color in the film? It was beautifully monochromatic, except for pieces of colors here and there.

SAS: The idea of the color scheme of the movie was that Margaret’s world would have very cool colors: a lot of black and white, a lot of blues and grays and things like that, because Margaret is this character who is consumed with control… controlling her environment, controlling herself. And so we felt that she would just sort of be naturally attracted to, or best be reflected by, colors that didn’t announce themselves… that kind of conveyed a sense of restraint. And then when David comes into her life, he brings warmer colors. When he’s first introduced there’s a lot of green (which of course isn’t a warmer color, but is a very vivid color), and he wears browns and oranges, and more autumnal colors. We just liked that he brought with himself more of a sense of nostalgia, or academia, or a sense of a kind of… honey-toned past that he’s trying to attract her back into. And so that was the idea there, and also with Abbie, the daughter, we wanted to give her one piece…one color…that she had on her person almost all the time that was meant to be in defiance of her mother’s color scheme. So she wears a little something… it’s not a loud color, but she wears this sort of lavender sweatshirt all the time, which is meant as kind of a “FU” to her mother, saying, “I’m not onboard with your world.” We tried to adhere to that as much as we could, although sometimes certain locations got in our way and messed up our color scheme.

I’m curious about when in the writing process you decided on the ending of the film. Was that the only ending you wrote?

AS: Very early on, that was the ending I wanted for the film. I wanted the evisceration of David and the emergence of a live baby. I was drawn to that, it felt very “Grimms’ Fairy Tale” to me, and I liked bringing in this fantasy element in what was otherwise a fairly realistic or naturalistic movie (hopefully). But it is, obviously, an unrealistic ending. It’s a strange ending. It’s a potentially alienating ending. Some people reject it, some people embrace it. And at a certain point, I did get nervous, and I thought that even though this ending is what I want it to be — it is something that I find satisfying — I was worried that people would reject it. Very early on (as I was looking for producers and other collaborators), I wrote a version of the script where nearly the same things happen: she cuts open David and she tries to free…liberate…her baby, but there is no baby. And I wrote that version, and I didn’t like it, and I felt like it was bleak, and it felt like it was somehow a betrayal of my protagonist. But thank goodness the producers on the film read both versions early on, and they said to me, “this version where there’s no baby… we’re not going to make this movie. We’re not interested in it. We only want to make the version with the baby.” Which is the version I wanted to make anyway! So, you know, god bless them for doing so, because I was  on the verge of compromise, and they said, “no! Stick to your guns!” And in the years after that, it was always some version of how it is now.

Q&A with Baz Luhrmann, Austin Butler, Olivia DeJonge, and Yola

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

Baz, I read that you were not setting out to make a biopic. Tell us a bit about that approach and how that informed the film we saw today?

Baz Luhrmann: I love a good biopic as much as anyone, but they tend to be formulaic… someone is born, then this happens, then that happens. I’ve also been much more drawn to the notion of say, Shakespeare, who will take a historical figure and he’ll explore a larger idea. Probably a more contemporary example that I can think of is Amadeus. But it’s not about Mozart, it’s told from the point of view of Antonio Salieri. The most famous composer of his time, but the film is about jealousy. America in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, seemed to be a great canvas to explore. The question was how to get into that in a way in which we’re telling Elvis’s story, revealing the humanity behind what the younger generation today sees as a Halloween costume, or what the older generation may see as God. We were using Elvis’s story to explore a larger idea.

You don’t have Elvis without Black music

Austin, what’s it like to play such a God-like character, larger than life? How do you make him a human being?

Austin Butler: In the beginning, it felt impossible. There was nowhere to look but up. To me, I watched him perform and I thought he looked like a god. It’s hard to not feel really small compared to that. But there were keys that sort of opened up these doors into his humanity. Learning the information that we both lost our moms around the same age was helpful. You get past all these larger views of Elvis and just get down to the idea that he was a little kid who grew up dirt poor and was inspired by the music he was hearing around him. You don’t have Elvis without Black music. He’s one of three White houses in this Black neighborhood and he’s ending up in Gospel tents and Juke joints down Beale Street in Memphis. This all put his story in context. It opened up so much so I could start feeling what life was like for him back then and that he lived an incredibly rich life and wasn’t just an icon that exploded out of nowhere. You do all this meticulous work to try and find his soul, and that’s what I was setting out to do.

Was there any point where you felt like you were getting really close to the real guy?

AB: I had so much time to prepare. I tried so many different things. It was a year and a half that I had before we actually starting shooting. During that time, I tried everything. It was kind of like looking at a blurry picture that slowly starts to come into focus. Elvis started to feel closer and closer. Then you have the moment of truth—after doing all this prep and research, you actually have to go out there and do it in front of the camera. Suddenly you’re aware of all the brilliant hard work that everyone has put into to the film, from the designing the sets to creating the costumes. And the first performance I shot was ’68, one of the most iconic performances in rock & roll history. I was so nervous; it was the moment of truth. I felt like my career was on the line. And the truth is, Elvis’s career was on the line. I know how much he cared about it. I could take all that fear I was experiencing and know that he was feeling that too. When we went out there, I was standing on the stage and looking out at the audience, looking down at the leather on my arms and the rings on my fingers and it was a complete out-of-body experience. I felt like I was looking out of his eyes at the most authentic thing I could imagine. It was a day unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. That was a key moment for me. I went back to the dressing room afterwards and felt a feeling of awe, like that’s what this is going to be. It was amazing.

BL: To add to that, the first day of shooting this, we had meticulously matched everything, even the camera lens. By then, as the outsider, as the representative of the audience, I was already convinced that Austin was completely capable of reproducing this moment. But we went out there and could feel the tension in the air. The tension of the shutdown of the film [due to Covid], of having it almost go away, struggling to pull it back together again, Tom bravely coming back and saying if you can shoot this by Christmas we’ll do it, everything felt like it was resting on this moment. And Austin went out and I remember I wasn’t worried about him so much as I was about whether we’d get the camera shots the right way. Austin, you went out and had an out-of-body experience. I have a crew that have worked for me for thirty years—there’s one guy Brett, who handles the dolly, maybe he’s said fifteen words to me in thirty years, you know? The shot begins and we didn’t call cut, we ran it like the show. The only note I had to give afterwards was to the extras, they were overreacting. Not overacting, but they were losing their minds becaue it felt so real. Brett comes over and he goes, “well boss, I’ve done the Star Wars, I’ve done the Supermans, I’ve done them all, but I’ve never seen anything like that. What just happened?” That’s how real it was. Everyone was just stunned. Austin is being very humble about his work ethic. I had to go to him at one point about and say, you need to back off, you’re going to break yourself. Instead, he stayed in Australia and went harder at it. I don’t think I’ll ever have an experience like this again.

Olivia, can you talk about how Priscilla connected with Elvis? I thought it was really interesting that they met in Germany instead of the US. Like it was a haven for them.

Olivia DeJonge: Absolutely. I think one of the special things about the connection between the two of them was that while millions looked at Elvis, I think she was one of the few people that really saw him. In order to do that, you really have to strip away the fanfare of life and the world to really see somebody’s soul or to feel somebody on an organic level. The ability to remove the craziness of his public life was what enabled them to create something beautiful and real.

The challenge of playing Priscilla in this film is very different because she’s still living, and while she’s world-famous, she’s not the icon Elvis was. Did you two speak at all?   

OD: I didn’t speak with Priscilla before we shot the film; Covid complicated all of that. It was a little daunting. I knew when I came onto this project that she’d eventually see the film. While we were shooting, there were definitely feelings like she was sitting my shoulder and watching the decisions I was making. We did get to meet afterwards and she’s since been with us on the tour and in Memphis and Cannes. It’s been really special to have her energy and support around the film.

Yola, as a musician yourself, what was your experience with the music in this film? Did you come to this film steeped in Elvis lore, or did you bring your own personal musical insights into this role?

Yola: I came to this movie principally by the soundtrack. We were in RCA Studio A with Dave Cobb, who is a superhero producer. There was this really great energy. I’ve been in that room before with a group called The Highwomen. So there we are, recording. I had grown up on Sister Rosetta [Tharpe], maybe less so with Elvis, but my kind of relationship with rock & roll and songs like Hound Dog came through Big Mama Thornton. I was always trying to find the Black women of rock & roll because I felt that was a part of my aesthetic. I think that shows in my album even though I identify as “genre fluid,” which is a term I coined because people would try to put me in a tiny box. That happened with Sister Rosetta. They tried to put her in this church-y box, although she was inventing rock & roll. She didn’t get the credit even though everyone came through her stable in that way. My kind of experience of Elvis was something that was tangential to the narrative of rock & roll and its origins. The process of tracking and showing that lineage between how Elvis interprets music and these originals, that was something that felt like a really necessary process for people to see that line. It’s sometimes a missing part of his narrative, this kind of musical steeping, his running home from school—I learned this from Baz—to listen to Sister Rosetta. He was raised on her. That really helped me get into the character to deliver those vocals. I had to be delivering those vocals as if I was birthing a generation.

Q&A with Daniel Geller, Dayna Goldfine, Alan Light, and Sharon Robinson

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song

Can you discuss the archival material you have in this film? It’s incredibly comprehensive. 
Daniel Geller: One of the things, I think, that came later in the process — as we began to develop a relationship with Robert Cory, who was Leonard’s manager, and who got him back up and running when all that money was ripped off, and then helped him get on the road, and is also a trustee of the family estate — Leonard began to understand what Dayna and I were trying to do with the movie as we showed pieces of it to him in process. As such, he began to open the door to the archives. The Cohen personal archives. Because at first, the remit was, “don’t ask for anything.” They were giving a tacit blessing to the film, but don’t ask for anything. One of the things, for me, that was a great surprise was that Leonard was using his Polaroid camera to take all these selfies! All along! And they’re beautifully composed… they’re really moody and really interesting. And in some ways, that was just the tip of the iceberg of what he and different people were attempting to do in an age where not everybody had iPhones. The difficulty involved in doing that kind of documentation required real deliberation. Real effort.

He absolutely loved writing

Dayna Goldfine: And Leonard… I mean, I remember calling Sharon about this… one of the joys of finally getting to go into Leonard’s archive, after spending years working with the audio material — would be to find a piece of Leonard’s writing that exemplified what we were listening to. And Sharon had told us about this dialog that she’d had with Leonard when they were in the middle of working on Ten New Songs, and I saw his journal page from that day. And I took a still of it and I sent it to Sharon. And I said, “Sharon… this is the documentation of what you talk about in your show,” and Sharon just said, “yeah… he was a ‘journaler.’ ” He was one of the original “journalers.” And you kind of get a sense of it in the film, when he says that, at age nine when his father died, his urge was to sit down and write what he thinks about as his first liturgical piece of writing. He was just committed to — as he would say — “blackening the page.”

Sharon Robinson: Yes, absolutely. That was his first, and maybe really only, love. He absolutely loved writing. And it was the thing that I saw him doing whenever there was any downtime, whenever there wasn’t anything else going on… he was writing. It was, you know… I guess a calling, for him. I think he knew that he was good at writing, and he knew that he could find the words for almost any human experience or emotion. And he did it all the time.

Dayna Goldfine: And then in terms of the other types of archival… you know, the best skill one can have, I think, is to just be… to have ears that are just constantly hearing all these different things that you don’t even know you’re taking in. For instance, with [Larry] “Ratso” [Sloman], who had that incredible font of cassette recordings, starting with his very first telephone conversation with Leonard… we were in the middle of wrapping up an interview with him, early on. I was wrapping up my sound equipment, and he said — just sort of out of the corner of his mouth — he’s like, “you know… I think somewhere in my house I’ve got all my cassette tapes with all my Leonard conversations.” And it just… I stopped everything and said, “what? Can you repeat that?!” And then it took about two and a half years, but literally every few months I would send a note to Ratso, and I would say, “hey Ratso, have you gone through that closet yet?” And he’d always say no. And then, a couple of years later — on my birthday! — I got a note on Facebook, saying, “Dayna Goldfine, I’ve got a gift for you.” So a lot of it is pestering people! It’s listening to hear someone say something like that… and then following through, not taking ‘no’ for an answer… and not letting someone convince you that their closet is too jumbled up to dig through.

What impact did working on this film have on you, in terms of your understanding and relationship to Leonard Cohen?.

Sharon Robinson: I think Leonard saw religion as a necessary part of life, but that… most religions sort of lead to the same place. And that in many ways, there wasn’t… or there isn’t, rather, ultimately in different religions. And he respected all religions— he used to tell me, “you know, the word ‘Islam’ means peace.” And he had representations of all the great religions (as he called them) in his home. And he was a scholar of all the religions. Even though he was inherently and deeply Jewish himself, he respected the world’s religions.

Alan Light: I feel like I started all of this with a funny relationship to Leonard, because my father and Leonard were classmates at McGill! Same year… my dad was two months older than Leonard to the day. And so, you know, I grew up with Leonard’s college yearbook on the shelf at home! So any time it was, like, the dark brooding Leonard… I’d be like, “oh, come on man— I know what you guys are like!” So it was always a little bit of, like, “Ok… that’s some guy, a lot like my Dad,” you know? And I think what’s been so much fun watching, and being involved in helping with this film (which is a different project than the book I wrote; I really honed in on only the song “Hallelujah” itself, it was intentionally not a deep-dive into his person, it was about one song), I did a short version of what is really explored much more deeply in the film in terms of what in his life leads to this song. Act three in the film is sort of what the heart of the book project was, which was interesting to watch on screen

Q&A with Stefan Forbes

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

The film took place in my old neighborhood—I lived a block and a half from where those events took place, right on the J line. It’s a major intersection, a very busy hub.  To me, this is story of survival, full of miracles. Tell us about developing the film.  

Stefan Forbes: Yeah, this central space in Brooklyn where this all happened was described to me by the cops as, this wasn’t Broadway with the big lights and the stars, this was the Broadway with the dead rats and the dirty needles. I originally thought, that’s dramatic, what an epic framing for my film. When I started making this film, I went there with my friend of twenty years, Fab 5 Freddy, and he was like, this was where we did our shopping, this was our community, I got my Boy Scout uniform in that store. There were storeowners holding on against the urban blight of the 70s and it was a place where everyone congregated. That started inoculating me against these other narratives to the story. When I first discovered the story, I thought, it’s The French Connection, it’s Dog Day Afternoon, it’s Serpico, all these gritty movies that I loved from the 70s, but I wondered, can we tell this in the manner of the 2020s? Can we make other voices heard and listen to everybody? We pay a lot of lip service to pluralism in this society so I thought, yeah, that’ll be easy! But when you actually try to construct a narrative, it’s incredibly challenging. The story was so long and people kept contradicting each other so much. I couldn’t help but feel, well what did happen? We had to do so much work and show so many cuts and really labor in the edit to create balance between these different voices and really welcome people in and to somehow find a way in the filmic space for these stories to co-exist, and for people to talk cinematically in a way they don’t normally do in real life. In Harvey’s [Schlossberg] book, we got a cop point of view, and it was terrific, but I knew I had to go even deeper and talk to all the people involved. I was going up to Attica to interview Dawud [Rahman] and I had thought that Shu’aib Raheem was dead. There was a lot of legwork to put together these conflicting perspectives.

Would we believe Shu’aib if there weren’t a white guy backing up his story?

Jerry Riccio contradicted himself at times … the things he said he would do, what he was aiming to do, what he actually did and how he looks back on it now really speaks to the complexity of human beings. How confident were you in his recollection? It’s all about “the way we saw it,” regardless of what actually happened.

SF: I was leery of Jerry’s point of view and had only seen him in the press as someone who had detested the gunmen and wanted them locked up forever. I was shocked when I started talking to him that he didn’t carry a lot of rancor towards them. One of the moments that everyone comments on is when Jerry learns that Dawud had been in prison for forty-seven years. He’s shocked and responds with empathy. And I wondered, why did I get such a wrong picture of him? One of the things I learned was that victim impact statements are completely stage-managed by the police union. What you see in the paper is planted by the PBA and they make sure that everything is basically a PSA for punitive criminal justice rather than restorative, and rather than victim-centered. They don’t care what victims want; they believe in punishment and they believe in this dominant patriarchal hierarchical masculine model of punishment and violence from policing through criminal justice. It’s not what communities want and it’s making our whole country less safe while not holding perpetrators of violence accountable in any way. Jerry was fascinating to me on many levels, but also, I was shocked at how much he critiqued the police. He said, “they told you they were shooting high, but that was a lie.” Again and again he contradicted the official version of the story. I was amazed because I knew that Shu’aib, as a man of color, his word needed to be verified by someone else. And here’s a hostage who you think would be his enemy, but you’re seeing him support Shu’aib’s point of view—Riccio is co-signing what the Black guy is saying against the cops, who are supposed to be the white guy’s ally. When we talk about race in this country, we often just do it on the surface, especially for white people. We know how to be sort of crafty, and avoid it while putting a black square in our Twitter, and we use a couple bits of lingo like “allyship” and then get away from this conversation as fast as we can because it’s not a safe place for us and we worry we can only do wrong. I really believe in messy conversations, in engaging people a little deeper, where they can’t just put a label on something and they need to search their soul about race and masculinity and who we believe. Would we believe Shu’aib if there weren’t a white guy backing up his story? I’m trying to get into some more nuanced and messy stuff with all of my interviews.

A lot of people have discomfort with this film because there aren’t easy answers. I’m asking the viewer to put a lens of empathy on it and to see that some of the people causing this violence epidemic in our society come from unexpected places. Research shows that the way they police can be a driver of violence. We need to look past this good guy/bad guy rhetoric that the cops themselves love. They love calling people bad guys. A lot of times the progressives call the cops bad guys and see them as evil without acknowledging that officers of many races and cultures are working for change and don’t have a voice in this authoritarian top-down institution. We need to look at people as individuals, and hold them accountable as individuals. Many cops are driven by trauma, and they say in the film, “first you grieve, then you want to go shoot someone.” This is cops in their own words and I thought it was very important to show their emotional wounding so we can begin to unpack some of what’s gone so wrong in America.

Was there any reluctance on the part of Shu’aib to participate in this film?

SF: I didn’t even ask to film him until we had known each other a while. We would go out and talk and I’d hear stories. At one point he turns to me and asks, “when are you going to start interviewing me?” I asked him if he wanted to me and he said, “I’m not getting any younger. I’ve been waiting forty-seven years to tell my side of the story. Let’s start.” He had seen some of my other work and wanted to get into it. My goal is to really let people talk, let them speak and engage in dialogues we’re not really having in America. He watched my last film, Boogie Man, and he said “I see how you let these conservatives talk, and you create a dialogue between them and people on the left that isn’t happening in society.” That’s what I’m trying to do. We’re not having these conversations. I see the film as a conversation between these warring elements that can break up the established head-butting we do in the media and add some nuance and really let people talk. Shu’aib was really interested in being in part of that.