“I don’t know any project I did that had nothing really organic with me, my own life, my engagement, my political engagement,” said I Am Not Your Negro director Raoul Peck. “And Baldwin is somebody who has been with me my whole life.”
During a round-table discussion with UPTOWN and five other writers, Peck explained why he made the Oscar-nominated documentary based on author, activist, orator James Baldwin. In his opinion (and I agree), no Black person should go through life without ever reading Baldwin. In addition, he put forth the film as a mirror to the inequality and injustice the U.S. continues to refuse to address. Baldwin himself challenged white America to see him and the rest of Black America and to look them in the eye, and to ask themselves why they created the word “nigger” and that myth.
“When you are on the ‘good side,’ the ‘right side,’ you don’t need to question yourself,” said Peck. “That’s what people call white privilege today. It’s your everyday life.”
Contrary to popular belief, Peck didn’t use Baldwin’s 30 pages of notes that were entitled, Remember This House, for the majority of I Am Not Your Negro. In actuality, he used the notes when presenting the friendship between Baldwin and Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. Baldwin’s sister Gloria Karefa-Smart gave Peck access to everything Baldwin ever wrote — published and unpublished — for 10 years, which is rare in the filmmaking industry.
It’s also unusual that no talking heads appear in the documentary. Samuel L. Jackson lent his voice to present James Baldwin in his own words, and it’s quite a powerful technique. “There are no talking heads in the movie, nobody explaining anything for you. It’s really the man talking to us. Blunt. Raw. And direct,” explained Peck during our discussion.
I Am Not Your Negro was released on Friday, Feb. 3rd, and made $709,000 its opening weekend, which puts the Magnolia Pictures documentary on track to becoming one of the highest-grossing non-fiction films of 2017, according to Deadline.
Like Baldwin, Peck is best understood in his own words. Here is the filmmaker speaking about the process of making I Am Not Your Negro and why, his thoughts on racism today, and an assessment of Hollywood’s impact on racism.
Did you attempt to primarily make this a continuation of Baldwins 30 pages of notes that was entitled, Remember this House? Or was it something you wanted to involve contemporary issues, elaborating on today’s racial tension?
Raoul Peck: Well it’s totally the contrary. I don’t know any project I did that had nothing really organic with me, my own life, my engagement, my political engagement. And Baldwin is somebody who has been with me my whole life. I read him very early on; I was probably 16, 17. And he never left me. I always go back to Baldwin. There are very few authors who are that important in your life, and Baldwin is one. You know, when I meet a lot of young people, we start talking, I ask did you read Baldwin. If they say, “no,” I say, “Well, read him first and then let’s have a conversation.” Because you cannot not have read Baldwin if you’re a Black person or if you are someone who is trying to understand what this country is, and by the way, what the rest of the world is. So it’s key. It’s like a classic, a certain thing you need to know. So for me it was always about when do I find a way to bring it back. I was a young man towards the end of the Civil Rights Movement, and I saw how most of our leaders have been killed, imprisoned, or went into exile, or bought through different ways, you know. And then we lost the tradition of engaging. We lost the tradition of organizing. We thought that when we had Black History Month that we made it. You know, we don’t need to do anything; we just consume our own history year after year. So I felt it was time for Baldwin to just come back and help us. In the film there was a sentence that we cut out, where Baldwin was just saying, “We really need a Malcolm now” and I use it like we really need a Baldwin now. Once that idea was there, the question was first of all to get the rights. I didn’t have a particular book where I could say, “I want to use that book for a film.” I knew I wanted BALDWIN for the film. It was how to break his words in the forefront, in a way that was direct, raw, and how he would himself do. Artistically that was already a very complicated thing to imagine. I wrote to the estate, and everybody told me, “Forget it, they will never answer. They are known for being very closed up.” And they answered me within like three days. They told me, “Come to Washington,” and meet with us. I did and I met Gloria Karefa-Smart, James Baldwin’s youngest sister, who had been working for him since she was 21. She went with him to Africa for the first time as a young girl. And then I knew because she told me, “I saw your film, in particular Lumumba. For her, that was an incredible film, something that was dear to her because it’s her own history as well. She knew a lot of those young African leaders, and it was the story of her generation. And she opened the door for me. She just gave me access to everything. It’s something that never happens in our industry. Never. It’s always about money. It’s always about, you know, you get an option for one year, you pay money for that option, and after a year you have to renew the option. With them, it was never about that. I had access to everything published, unpublished, screenplays, theater plays, everything for ten years.
Did Karefa-Smart see the final product? What was her reaction?
Peck: She was the first person to see it. Well, she didn’t have to say much. We sat after the screening. There were three people in the room — her, my brother, and myself. She sat in the middle of the two of us and we just sat 15 minutes crying in the dark room. There were no words necessary. You know, it was a huge risk because when you say you make a film not only about a man but about his thinking, and you try to make it from the inside of his head. There are no talking heads in the movie, nobody explaining anything for you. It’s really the man talking to us. Blunt. Raw. And direct. So taking that risk I had to make sure that I am not talking as a filmmaker. We are great manipulators. We can do a lot of things: how you do an edit, how you do a cut, or you tone down the music. Everyone of your choice is a great manipulation. I had to modestly put myself, my ego in the background and make sure that every single decision is Baldwin. You can do that not only by knowing his work, but by having some sort of complicity, I can call it that, because I learn of him very early on, so my own life experience. Also being abroad at the time and looking back at this country from the outside but also being on the inside. I grew up in Brooklyn, you know public school, so I learned. You know how young people can be tough, so I went through that, the whole drill. I woke up to Soul Train and all those things, so I felt it very organically. At the same time, when I’m outside I can look here with a distance. I say sometimes that while the film project was 10 years, but in fact it was longer than that because it’s my own biography. It’s my own confrontation with the images of Hollywood, you know, Tarzan. Before I went to Congo as an 8-year-old boy, I was already infested with those images of this white man in a cloth, and Black Africans with their pigs. That’s how when I arrived at the airport, I thought I was going to be welcomed with a lot of savages dancing on the tarmac. So very early on I started deconstructing whatever I was seeing. Hollywood is great for that because as a young boy, you don’t want to be the Indian when you’re playing, you want to be the cowboy. You have the technology, you have the shots, you don’t have the very heavy thing to arch. And so reading Baldwin was like wow. Discovering well-thought analysis on what you have organically felt, you know these contradictions, these absurdities. You know, Hollywood invented the Negro basically. And when Baldwin writes about Sidney Poitier, what they made him do and the pressure they put on us; when you watch Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, basically they are telling you that you have to be a handsome Black man, well-dressed, educated, not just educated — you can’t be a taxi driver — you have to be a doctor, working with an international organization to get the white girl. You can hold hands with the white girl, but you can’t kiss. So imagine a young person watching that, you get all those subliminal messages. You might not be able to interpret, to understand, but layers, after layers that’s what you get. You are mystified by stuff that is not you, that you believe are you at some point. Commercials. Stepin Fetchit and all that. So reading Baldwin is like rediscovering your own history. And that’s why the film is a confrontation with each one of us because you don’t just watch the film, you unroll your whole existence, your whole belief, your whole. You say, “Oh, wow, I remember that. That’s what I thought at the time.” And now today, I’m older and I say, “Wow, that’s the trip.” That’s the confrontation. By the way, white and Black can have the same confrontation.
How do you think Baldwin would receive your film if he were around today?
Peck: I hoped this would not be a question because I felt that I did something that he already did, you know. I can’t separate that. That’s why when people ask me, I’m just the messenger. This is all Baldwin. There’s nothing of me where I sat down and wrote. The whole takes you here. This is all Baldwin. We went out of our way to make sure that every single sentence, everything single word is Baldwin. The only correction I made sometimes for purpose of comprehension is in the writing it said Bill Miller, but he said Bill. He didn’t say Bill Miller, but I made sure that people know it’s his former teacher Bill Miller. In the paragraph before, he explained who’s Bill Miller, but the phrase I took did not have the word, so I would add that kind of thing. Besides that, it’s untouched; it’s edited. The more I edited the more I felt free to build a more complex story. It was really about this is Baldwin. This is the big puzzle of Baldwin’s words. How do I put it together in a dramatic structure with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and tell the story?
Did you create the film with a particular audience in mind, and if so, which?
Peck: For one thing for sure, I wanted this film to be generic American, generic Black, generic Baldwin so that it could go in the rest of the world with its legitimacy. That’s for sure. Other than that, I find the film is for everybody, white and Black, and probably more important for white than Black because most Black people know a lot of this already by their own experience … I saw white audiences being shocked, really like, “Oh, my god. I never saw it that way.” When you are on the “good side,” the “right side,” you don’t need to question yourself. That’s what people call white privilege today. It’s your everyday life. So if you’re on the right side, there’s no need to ask whatever good is happening to you. It’s just normal. It’s how you grew up. And so for some people, and even I watch that colleague filmmakers like me or people in the industry and people who love classic cinema, and something they see Picnic in the Park and Pajama Game, and they see all those white people picnicking and there’s not one single dark face. And it’s a film about workers, unions, and all that, and at some point you see something else, you see the reality. But you can go your whole life living in Manhattan and see it as normal. So the film does promote this shock and Baldwin looks you straight in your eyes in the film. He addresses the camera. Those are choices, of course, I make to make sure what I take is really a direct conversation or direct address to you. I use a lot of photos where people are looking at the camera all the time. It’s also to play with that idea that you never look at me. I have to look at you. And nothing can be solved without you facing it first. So it’s the whole idea. There’s nothing in this film that just has no reason. It’s all connected on many different levels. It’s like a big puzzle that you put together. And I play a lot with those images in color and the black and white and the video and the 35 mm images. All of these were part of interpreting those words and giving them life and giving them reality.
So many contemporary documentaries have all these talking heads explaining what’s going on and the context. Was there ever a concern that people wouldn’t be able to keep up or did you have that much faith in Baldwin’s skills as a communicator to say all of these things in a way that the viewer would understand?
Peck: I think it’s a political choice. All my life, I’ve made films I want to make. I never did one single film for money. My motivation was always how do I make the world better or how do I make it more understandable, how do I bring all of our voice to the forefront and also to us. How do I learn from our own history? How do I make sure that we know where we come from? And from that thing is, of course, I have to learn to be didactic. When I make a film like this, I want to make sure that the film will survive. We can see it in 30 years and go into a story. Because the danger is when you are direct. You know if I were a journalist, it would be different. I would have a network behind me. They might say, “Raoul, people are not going to understand this or this,” and I would have to address that. For this film, my concern is that you may not see this by the first viewing, but you’ll come back and you’ll find the other layer at some point. If you watch the film 30 years from now, it will still have the same strength because you’re watching a story. You’re not watching a piece of news. You’re not watching a didactic thing. A didactic film, you see it once and you don’t have to go back. It’s going to be boring. It’s too much information; you’re bothered. This film is about something else. It talks on so many different levels. So it’s you who connects it or not to those levels. But I make sure, of course, that you get at least a few of them, so that whatever the level of what you bring into the story, because you bring something too, that you get one level. And then you watch it a second time, you see almost a completely different movie because you start paying attention to other stuff that as you say might look concentrated. Then, by the third time, you’re relieved from all the other stuff and then you can concentrate on that particular part. So that’s how you make a film more richer and that film can resist time. So that’s how I make movies.
You mentioned the structuring and layers. One chapter had to do with heroes. Did you think about elaborating on some of the other heroes because he had a kinship with Richard Wright? Did you consider putting any emphasis on the people he gained influence from?
Peck: The thing with Richard Wright was the typical father-son relationship. You’re a young writer. Richard Wright was the king at the time. He had to “scratch” the father to become a man himself, so I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on that. In the film, heroes means much more than that. In one of the interviews, [Baldwin tells Dick Cavett,] “You are the one telling the story. That’s why Malcolm X or Nat Turner is not a hero to you, but he’s a hero for me.” That’s it. Who owns the narrative? So in that sense, the same thing: John Wayne killing the Indians; John Wayne is the hero. And that’s the magic of cinema. When I was young, of course, I’m with John Wayne. There’s no way I want to be dead by the end of this movie. And that’s ideology working with your head. What it means is that you forgot that the Indians are real people being killed and that this American dream is built on a genocide … How can we have a dream if the very soil we are on have been not only the Blacks and slavery and the millions of people who died, but also the people who were there before us? That means we don’t know our history. That’s the thing about heroes: Who gets to write the story?
Did you find it difficult to expand on Baldwin’s opus since it was only 30 pages?
Peck: No because the work on the film, for me, is much more than those 10 years. It’s all the 30 years prior. So all the books that I underlined, the ideas that I underlined that I put aside, all this came back on my table. I knew what I needed from those 30 pages was just a trick to go inside to tell the story. That was the organic reason that I needed. Once you’re in front of this incredible amount of work and gems, you better find a good way to tell the story. And not just didactic, I’m going to tell you the story of whatever James Baldwin wrote. No, you go into his own methodology and you find the story in the story to tell it. I wanted this to be original, and for filming, what else is more original that to say, “Well, there’s a book that was supposed to be written. It was never wrote”? When I got it, automatically everything came to piece together. Wow, he never wrote it, but knowing Baldwin, he had to have been taking notes. I got part of those notes and I got where he wanted to go, but then I know most of his work. I can’t see what else he could write. So the idea was he wrote it, he just didn’t put it together. So I had the whole [of his] work to go through and piece it together. That’s an idea that motivated me. I had a red line to follow. That’s what I was looking for. That’s what the letters did, those notes. As an artist, or as a musician, or as a composer, you need that little thing that you can look for a long time. You can find it in a month or you can find it in five years. And when you have the luxury, that’s what I had, to be able to wait. I didn’t have an estate calling me every year saying, “Raoul, you’ve had the option for one year. Are you renewing it?” Or after three years, “Raoul, it’s been three years now, where’s the film?” After five years, “C’mon, we don’t believe anymore in this film.” So when you have the luxury I had, I was producing it myself so I was my own master. So it’s a luxury we have in our industry. The film is the very result of that. Otherwise, it’s an impossible film. Nobody will give you the money for that. No one will wait for your that long. So when I had that, I better make sure that when I come up with something it has to be original, it has to strong, it has to make sense in the whole body of work.
What do you Baldwin would’ve thought about what’s going on today? There’s not been that much of a change regarding people of color. We’re still the underdog.
Peck: Again, whatever the question could be about this country, the response is in the film. That’s exactly what the film is; it’s a response to what you are saying. He would say, “Well, you need to face it. As long as you don’t face it, nothing will change.” Fundamentally, you can change the colors, you can change the style, you can invent a Black middle class, but now what we need is to have the same access as the white rich people. But that’s not the issue. The issue is inequality. The issue is justice. The Black middle class can have wealth, but does it change fundamentally what the country is? Does it change the balance of power? Can a Black Hollywood mogul decide I want to make a big $100 million movie on James Baldwin, or Nat Turner, or Samuel Jackson, or whatever? We can’t. So that means nothing has changed. Cosmetically, yes, there are rights, there are laws. But are those laws respected? So whatever the question is, that’s what Baldwin is dealing with in the film. That’s what he’s telling us about the Black President. He’s basically saying it’s not about who will be the next Black President, but what country he will be the President of. That’s the real question.
It seems with Black movies there’s not that same sincerity that something has been done wrong and let’s try and fix it, like you have with films like Schindler’s List. And we glamorize our plight, but are there results?
Peck: Well, I’m not sure the industry allows you to do exactly the movie you’re talking about. A movie that would say the whole truth, where you would come out and enrage and start burning cars, that’s a movie that would never be made. The very people who control your writing and your decision, they wouldn’t let you. Or you wouldn’t have the right amount of money to do it properly. That’s the system and the system knows how to protect itself.
But whenever there’s a crisis, we burn our own neighborhoods?
Peck: That’s why in my film I don’t say, “Go and burn the neighborhood.” I say first of all intellectually, historically, politically, first learn who you are. First, know your history. And in the film you can also see it means also working. When Baldwin says, “I did not participate in marches. I didn’t participate in fundraising,” he’s telling you all the same things you need to know in terms of a movement. That’s the story of the movement as well. That’s what he’s telling you. “I’m not confronting the sheriff everyday. I am a witness.” But the witness is telling you what you need to do in order to have that fight. He’s telling not only to you, the fighter, but also telling to the other side, “You need to do your own work as well. You need to look to me in the eyes. You need to wake up in your world of everything is OK in your Hollywood mythology. In you calling me a nigger, you need to ask yourself why you needed to invent that word or to invent that story.” He addressed everybody in that movie. And that’s the way it can be, it will be, because there’s no way that everybody can be on his own side making a battle. He’s addressing exactly the write issue and hoping that it will not be a continual going in circles. And that’s why this film is for me is like Baldwin says it and I also paraphrase it. If you don’t see that today 2017, seeing this film, hearing those words, reading those words again and again, if you don’t get it then you are just a monster and you’re their accomplices because you cannot be innocent today. After all those things, you can’t say, “Oh, I didn’t know.” Baldwin says it in a way that if you don’t react to that, you know what, that’s your own problem, but I’m not going to wait for you. And for me, that’s an active stance that you’re taking and it’s about time.
