A Conversation with Kevin Willmott - filmmaker - Interview

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by Jeff Loeb

However, Hollywood isn't particularly comfortable with this fact; it would just as soon call it and show it as something else, something more limited or isolated. Rosewood is the only Hollywood film to really explore this period, and the message they got from it was that this sort of thing doesn't do well. A former agent told me this right off the bat, and this is the reason he's former. Hollywood people have a tough time even talking about the subject of systematized white violence against blacks. The whites start feeling guilty and the blacks angry. There's no progress; everyone just clams up.

Loeb: So you don't have any takers right now?

Willmott: Well, I've had several people show some interest, but they'd like me to tone down the violence. That's also true of the Birmingham story. There are lots of cliches when it comes to slavery--hounds, whips, singing. We try to use examples outside of those. We're trying to make the horror horrific on another level, the psychological.

Loeb: Tell me, if you will, about any plays or films that influenced you.

Willmott: Well, playwrights more than filmmakers, I think. A couple of the playwrights that influenced me were David Mamet and Charles Fuller--Soldier's Play, especially. I like Fuller's historical emphasis there. I think that one of the films that really influenced Ninth Street was Nothing But a Man by Michael Roemer, which came out in 1964. Abbey Lincoln and Ivan Dixon are in the film. It was a real breakthrough at the time because, although Roemer was a white director, the film showed some images of blacks that people had never seen. It was a very small, very intimate movie, and it let me know that something small could be very profound; that's one of our objectives with Ninth Street as well. I also went to a lot of Blaxploitation movies when I was a kid, and they influenced me in knowing that you could make independent films. You know, Sweet Sweetback and some of those things that came along before Spike Lee regenerated interest in black independent film.

Loeb: So what you're working on is not in the mainstream of black filmmaking, in your estimation?

Willmott: I don't think so. There are probably moments that look like other movies, but I think the philosophy that's behind the film, the approach, is very different. That's not to say that we're special, you know; it's just different. In so many of the films that Hollywood makes right now--and this doesn't necessarily refer to the directors, who may be black, but all the people who really make the film and sell it, the real power--you get to see this kind of filtered image of black people. A lot of people think there are a lot of negative images of black people, and obviously there are, but even the ones that aren't particularly negative are still filtered.

Loeb: What do you mean by filtered?

Willmott: I mean that basically Madison Avenue and Hollywood--I include Madison Avenue because so much of Hollywood is about selling--know black people, but they know them through a filter. They know certain types of black people: For instance, they know a hip-hop black kid, now; they definitely know that. So when they go in to do something like a Kool-Aid commercial, they say, "Okay, I need a hip-hop type of black kid to play this part." When that kid comes in and auditions, they know what they're looking for and go, "That's him." Now, that kid may have nothing to do with black life in reality, but somehow there's this kind of image that's been created through movies, television shows, whatever that's produced this hip-hop kid. And so Hollywood embraces that; that type of black sells, and that type of black seems to be one that people are really interested in. Specifically, in movies right now, the hip-hop black is also the bad nigger that is the killer, the guy that's out of control. So if you make a movie with that type of character or image right now, audiences have been trained by Hollywood to recognize it as a type and identify with it, whether it's accurate or not.