Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here. BLACK DYNAMITE has been kicking around at festivals since its official premiere at Sundance in January, and it's finally making its way into theaters this coming weekend. The critical reaction, even just among people that I know who have seen in over the last nine months, has differed about as much as you can imagine. Some people say it's a masterpiece that isn't so much a parody as it is a full-blown tribute with a few jokes thrown in to acknowledge some of the ridiculousness of the blaxploitation genre. Others seem to hold it against the movie that it takes itself seriously, but I honestly don't get that at all.
As I mention to star and co-writer Michael Jai White (best known for playing SPAWN in the film version of the Todd McFarlane comic book, and appearances in THE DARK KNIGHT and a fantastic cut scene from KILL BILL) and director Scott Sanders in our interview conducted last week, the film could have gotten away with just being a kick-ass action movie, without any jokes, and I would have thrilled. But it's the humor that informs us that its creators are well versed in so many of the great films that they are honoring with BLACK DYNAMITE. I don't think too much more is required in terms of introduction; most of what you need to know is covered right here in our conversation. I'll have a full review of the film on Friday, but know that I really was impressed with the attention to detail and the creation of a fully realized character rather than simply a caricature. And Michael Jai White's skills as a martial artist really sell the whole package. I had a fantastic time watching this movie. Enjoy Michael Jai White and Scott Sanders…
Capone: So who is the bigger fan of the blaxploitation genre out of the two of you? Who is the one with the passion even before this whole thing got started?
Scott Sanders: More of a passion than the other?
Capone: Yeah.
[Everyone Laughs]
Michael Jai White: That would have to be me. I used to love watching some of the old blaxploitation movies. I had “Blaxploitation Night” at my house every now and then, and I just thought it was fun to celebrate these things. It was a unique time where these people were making these movies. These filmmakers had very little money to make movies, even though a lot of them got stuck with the stigma of blaxploitation, there were a lot of great movies and at that time there were these wonderful movies, like THE MACK and SHAFT and CLEOPATRA JONES, these really great action movies and then there were the ones that, because these movies started making so much money, there were a lot of movies like the DOLEMITEs or whatever and like MEAN MOTHER, BLACULA…
SS: SOUL SISTER’S REVENGE [aka EMMA MAE]…
MJW: Yeah, the kind of cheesier ones that were the exploitive ones, and unfortunately the exploitive nature of some of those movies kind of gave birth to that blaxploitation moniker, but we wanted to do justice to all of them and have the great qualities and some of the idiosyncratic moments and do homage to the whole genre.
Capone: It does feel like if you just tweaked it just a little bit in one direction, taken a few of the comedic things out, you would have had a solid action movie. It’s just barely over the line. And what’s there is funny, but at its core, there's a genuine action film.
MJW: Exactly! That’s the tone we wanted to set. We wanted it to be able to be right there, not far from the tone of if you watch one of those movies right now; it wouldn’t be far from your experience if you saw one of them right now.
SS: Mike did a photo shoot of himself as the character before anything had happened, and to me what was great about the photograph, which pretty much is the picture for the movie now, it’s the same outfit. It’s that BLACK DYNAMITE has a gun and nunchucks. He looks like a total badass, but the nunchucks is just one step too far, which is why it’s funny, but it’s still badass. It’s like it’s just one piece of badass-etry too much to make it funny. That picture set the tone for the movie, you know? That’s what we wanted to do, blaxploitation with just an added touch of badass for funny. You know what I mean?
Capone: Michael, you’re not playing it for laughs. There are some people in the film that are definitely going for laughs, but you are playing it straight. So that photo that you are talking about, that’s in character with pretty much the look that we see in the film?
MJW: The very outfit I am in on the poster and the very outfit that I'm wearing in the movie in is the very same outfit I took the picture in.
SS: In the same pose.
MJW: It’s not even a recreation of another outfit, it’s the very same outfit. It still has my DNA from the first time I rented it.
Capone: Were these characters in the original films, to you, were they heroes? Were they role models? Or were they a joke or some kind of combination? What do you remember when you were younger?
MJW: They were mostly heroes. They couldn’t be anything but. Prior to that time, all black people in film were depicted as servants and buffoons with the slight exception of a few people like maybe Sydney Poitier who was kind of like…he wasn’t even from this country. It was such a source of pride for the first time to see people of a darker hue as heroic. Like I said, a lot of these movies were straight up great movies, like THE MACK to me is just as good to me or better than HUSTLE & FLOW, even though HUSTLE & FLOW was a dramatic movie. THE MACK actually has more political drama and internal conflict within it. I think the movie right now would be an Academy Award nominee if he did it today. There were the absurdities. There were the rich costumes and ways people were. There was the hyper-sexuality of the times. Though it was misogynistic back in the '70s, I think it was an incredible time. It was a time of the best music and the best films we've ever seen. They had their own voice and their own identity. I would say it’s very tempting to go politically incorrect and to do that now, when things are so formulaic, it was palatable to do something that had it’s own life and looking at a time when I think things were the sexiest and the most lively.
Capone: You just brought up the political overtones--and they were overtones, there was nothing undertone about the politics in some of these films--but your film reminded me of that. A lot of these films are about one man or woman on a journey through the city, and they come across the drug dealers and just people living day to day, but they always come across the political types, like The Black Panthers or some other organized group. Your film reminded me of that.
MJW: Yeah, there’s like a checklist that you go through and like 98 percent of those movies. You have got to have your chase scene with running. There’s always some chase scene, which I guess is as homage to the first blaxploitation movie or one of the first ones that started the whole thing off, SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG, and it’s like there are just so many other elements.
SS: The chase scene in SUPERFLY, we have something that’s very similar.
MJW: Yeah, that’s right.
SS: He’s jumping over fences and stuff like that.
MJW: [laughs] We kind of one upped them a little bit, we had Black Dynamite jump over a higher fence.
[Both Laugh]
SS: The militancy is funny, because. I love militancy, like in THE SPOOK WHO SAT BEHIND THE DOOR. The whole idea that five guys can overthrow the government, I just think that’s the funniest thing in the world, you know? That’s why I was so excited to do that scene, because they have such a crappy little set with this living room with two guys working on punches. “What are they going to do?” These two guys are just practicing punches and it’s like “Okay…” There’s almost like a sweet naiveté about it, like this American “Can do” attitude, like “Of course the two of us can get together and overthrow the government!”
Capone: That’s just part of believing you can do anything!
SS: Exactly! I would imagine… [Laughs]
Capone: There’s always a nice big banner on the wall with some symbol that usually incorporated a fist. So tell me about how it all came together. You had these evenings at your house where you watched the films with your friends. How did that become BLACK DYNAMITE? How did you create that character?
MJW: I always knew it was a fertile breeding ground for humor, especially when you look at movies like SUPERFLY and things like that. As an adult, I look back and I’m like “Wow, he was a hero, but he was a pimp!” I thought that was quite funny to look at it again. But yeah, what happened was one time I was shooting this movie, UNDISPUTED 2 in Bulgaria, and I was just listening to my iPod and on comes “Superbad” [by James Brown] and that was the trigger. But then I had this whole idea of the movie, and that’s when I came home and did my own photo shoot. Scott got involved and we contacted Jon Steingart, our producer. He was a producer for THICK AS THIEVES, the other movie that we did together.
SS: We shot a trailer. We shot a fake trailer! It’s still on YouTube.
Capone: I was about to say I think that got out. I remember that vividly.
SS: Yeah, right. That got out even before we even finished the movie and people were like “What the hell is this movie?” We were using old footage from other things…
Capone: It does feel like a film that I have been hearing about for a long time, even before Sundance.
SS: It was actually like six months before Sundance, and it was actually before we finished the movie. We had Mike shoot in Super 8 and it looks really gritty and grimy as Black Dynamite and all of this old footage from other movies. We just cut something from here and there and mixed it all together. We had Adolph Ceasar, who did all of these radio spots, and it sounds like he’s talking about the same guy the whole time. It doesn’t matter, it could be from BLACK STREETFIGHTER [aka BOGARD, aka BLACK FIST] or it could be from SHAFT GOES TO AFRICA, and he’s like “He’s the baddest Motherfucker.” We just chopped it all up and put it together in like a Cuisinart and then showed it to our producer, Jon Steingart. I showed it to him and was like “So what do you think?” He goes, “Why are you showing me this old blaxploitation trailer?” I was like, “That’s Mike!” He was like “What?” I was like “Yeah, we want to make this movie!” He was like “Okay, I can raise money on this trailer.” That’s how it kind of got going, and then we had to actually get a script going…
MJW: I really enjoyed that, in fact I would show people the trailer, and they would have no idea it was me. Even our newest trailer, I had friends from other places send it to me, because they thought it was funny and they had no idea that that was me.
Capone: You mentioned the music before, and growing up in a suburb of D.C. like I did, I discovered these movies from the music.
SS: Where did you grow up?
Capone: In Maryland, just over the border from D.C. But I remember hearing “Superbad” and James Brown’s soundtrack for the first time.
SS: "Superfly," "Shaft,"…
Capone: Then Marvin Gaye did TROUBLE MAN. All of those soundtracks were playing on my turntables before I ever saw one of the movies. Tell me a bit about putting the music together for this movie then, because it’s a pretty good score.
SS: We all loved the music, and in between the movie that we had done together, I was a DJ and I had met this guy who actually cut our very first trailer and he’s my good friend Adrian Younge. He’s also the film’s editor. He was collecting all of this old equipment to make some record from the '70s. I was like “If we do this movie, then you would be good for this, because you are just collecting all of these old instruments and just playing Marvin Gaye riffs…” That’s his thing, he would actually collect the tapes that Marvin Gaye would record on. “I want two inch analog tape, because that’s what Marvin Gaye would use” and so he did all of the music that was… all of the literal things, like if Jimmy is about to die, he'd do “Jimmy’s Dead” and all of those songs.
[Everyone Laughs]
SS: And then the second half of it came from KPM funk libraries in Europe, because they made all of this music for funky cop shows in Europe and our music supervisor is David Hollander, who played Little Earl on "What's Happening!!" Do you remember Little Earl?
Capone: Sure, yeah!
SS: So Little Earl grew up and became this huge funk collector of all of this British library music, and they did an NPR story on him and I was like “I’ve got to find that guy.” It was really hard to find him, because he was in Marfa, Texas. So we got together with him and it was great to go threw all that British library funk stuff. It’s crazy, you know? It’s very stingy and stabby, and it kind of gave it a real '70s feel to it, like I really love doing that stuff like when you are going into the hospital and you hear this “Doo doo doop do doo…” It just felt so '70s to me.
Capone: Tell me about the look. You said you shot it on…
SS: Super 16 Color Reversal stock.
Capone: It looks old!
SS: I know.
Capone: It’s gritty, old, and looks exactly right.
SS: Yeah, our director of photography Shawn Maurer did a color test for me, and I was like “What the hell is that?” I didn’t want to do it in the post phase, because there’s something about adding stuff on later that just didn’t seem right. When he shot it, I was like “Wow, that’s exactly how it should look!” He was like “Let me just warn you, the problem is once you shoot it, that’s it, and you are stuck with it.” The great thing about our producer Jon is I was like “Look, this is how we should do it.” He’s like “Okay, go for it!” It’s like “Okay…” People always want as many options later that they can have, like “Well make it look like that later,” but you can’t really make it like that later.
Capone: "Shoot it in color, even if you want it in black and white."
SS: Right. “What will make it look black and white later?” It’s not the same thing as shooting in black and white, you know?
Capone: When you were putting the story together, were there certain trappings of the genre that you wanted to embrace and were there a few that you wanted to add to the caveat of this kind of film?
MJW: We had to really pace it in a modern type of pace, because if you watch a movie in the '70s, they brushed their teeth in real time, so we couldn’t do that. That feels infinite in today's movies, so we had to do it in that ADD type of manner, so our pace it a lot faster than the usual. We had our incident level set way up, but we wanted to really pay homage to most of those stories and make them very accurate and try to do these things and get all of these nuances to make you feel exactly like how people felt when they watched them originally. Even if you hadn’t grown up on those movies, as we are finding out, you still will come away with that similar feelings of why that genre was successful in the first place. The incident level, the way there was no real line that they had to stick too. There was something that just felt very genuine about those movies, and they have a certain heart to them. Most of the things still existed in that '70s realm with those movies, and I think what might be a little bit different is like our martial arts, it’s a little bit more like the Hong Kong movies. It’s a far cry better than the DOLEMITE fighting.
Capone: Some of those guys don’t look like they could even fight. They could barely get their leg up at a 45-degree angle.
MJW: [Laughs] Exactly, right. There wasn’t too many of the blaxploitation movies that were really that efficient in terms of the shooting of the action.
SS: I feel like did it honest, because if they could of, they would have. Do you know what I mean?
MJW: More so the Jim Kelly stuff, so we are going on the high end as far as that’s concerned, because there really was only one or two guys in that era that really did that, Jim Kelly and Ron Van Clief. Ron Van Clief was doing movies in China, so it’s a lot more like the Ron Van Clief type.
SS: Wasn’t the Ron Van Clief stuff a little later?
MJW: No.
SS: OK, so like HOT POTATO…
MJW: That’s not Ron Van Clief.
SS: It’s not?
MJW: HOT POTATO is Jim Kelly. Ron Van Clief was doing movies before Jim Kelly did.
SS: Oh, okay.
MJW: Well before. He did like almost 30 movies in Hong Kong.
SS: Those aren’t really blaxploitation movies, are they?
MJW: They played them that way, yeah. There are some that absolutely qualify. BLACK DRAGON, you know?
SS: When they added “Black” in front…
[Everyone Laughs]
MJW: That’s what they did a lot of the times. If they had a successful white movie, they’d just add “Black” to the title. There was THE BLACK GODFATHER, DR. JEKYLL AND MR. BLACK [I'm going to guess Michael is referring to DR. BLACK, MR. HYDE], remember?
SS: Or the classic is BLACK SHAMPOO. That’s about as far as you can take it!
[Everyone Laughs]
MJW: It’s like, “They have SHAMPOO, what should we call this one? BLACK SHAMPOO!” They had BLACK FRANKENSTEIN… “Just throw ‘Black’ in it!”
Capone: I was about to say you move a lot faster than the guys in most of those movies, the original films I mean.
SS: We paid homage to that other style, thought with the Bullhorn character. When he fights, he fights like DOLEMITE.
Capone: I like the little touches, too. There have been films that have sort of tackled the '70s thing, but they always set it in the present. It’s kind of a bold move to set it as a period piece.
MJW: Yeah, I don’t know how you do a '70s movie and not set it in the '70s.
Capone: Well you have I’M GOING TO GET YOU SUCKA or UNDERCOVER BROTHER.
MJW: Yeah, they kind of did a hybrid type of thing there with that one. I guess it was just their own thing, but I don’t know.
SS: We get compared to those movies a lot. They are fine in their own right, don’t get me wrong, it’s just like blaxploitation is a very specific time with a specific set of attitude, so if you set it up like “I’m going to do a Western, but my Western is on Mars…” “Okay, it’s a Martian Western… You know what I mean?
MJW: Or like a disco movie.
SS: Yeah, like “I’m going to do a modern SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER!” “Okay, is there disco in it?” "I don't know." It’s like “What are you talking about?” It’s such a specific time, and I think I know what it comes from, and it’s just my sort of wider idea, but just black people as a culture go through changes real quickly and when they go through stuff and are done with it, they are done with it. It’s like “Boom, we have blues now… Okay, we are done with the blues, we are on to rock and roll…” I think with the general larger culture, like white culture, they are like “Well wait a second, we like the blues!” Go to a B.B. King concert, how many black people are there? It’s all white people, you know what I mean? There are no black people going back, so it’s kind of like each thing is it’s own little complete thing, and then it’s like “Okay, move on to the next thing.” It’s really quick and it’s really brutal.
MJW: The exception is this damn rap thing. That’s lasted way too damn long. [laughs]
[Everyone Laughs]
SS: Even the incarnations of rap, like let’s say…
MJW: The style of the rap.
SS: Exactly, like if Public Enemy were to play somewhere, how many black people would be at a Public Enemy concert? They don’t want to see Public Enemy. You know what I mean? That’s just what I’m saying. I read this observation in this book called WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF NO CONTEXT, by George W. S. Trow, a great writer, he’s white, but his observations about black people is like “Once black people are done with something, it's gone!”
[Everyone Laughs]
SS: Like rock and roll! That’s black music! How many black people want to go see Chuck Berry? There’s not a single black person at a Chuck Berry concert, you know? So it’s like that’s what’s so weird about it, it’s this complete little thing and then disco comes around and JAWS comes along and all of this other stuff comes along and the whole thing changes. It’s just sitting there, this four- or five-year period that was very intense and has this very strong sense of aesthetics.
Capone: Even blaxploitation films, there are still places that will pull a dozen of them together for some sort of little festival, and it’s like it’s all white people in the audience!
SS: Of course!
Capone: But part of that might be that white people never saw them when they originally played.
SS: It’s anything. Motown. Any time there’s like a Motown review, there’s going to be a lot of white people there.
Capone: I’ve got to ask about the look of the character from the neck up, the facial hair, the afro, how long did you take to really craft his look?
MJW: That was the look from day one. When I took the first pictures of myself it was basically that, I just had to refine it to withstand close ups. The first outfit was just a wig that I plopped on my head, and it looked okay in a distant photo, but if I’m going to be blown up, I cannot have it possibly look like that hair is not mine. That’s one of those things that it’s just an absolute no-no. My hair and my facial hair had to look organic.
SS: I think the basic look of Black Dynamite was there from his photographs and from our early trailers, but if you see our early trailers it’s a lot different. It’s like watching like the first "Simpsons" episodes, and then you see the later ones. In the first they are a little jerky and then you see how it gets all fine tuned with everybody and they put the wig on and the professional… It looks different. The Black Dynamite in the movie, his afro is just perfect. It’s hard to maintain an afro, that’s like a whole thing, so when you are kicking ass and having a perfect afro at the same time, that’s another thing. Afro’s get busted real quick.
Capone: Isn’t there a scene where you had just kicked some ass, and then you fix your hair a little bit?
MJW: Yeah, right when we are taking off in the helicopter.
Capone: That’s right! This certainly leaves open the possibility to do another one of these if people seem to dig it. Is that something you would be interested in?
MJW: Absolutely! Shoot, this is our baby!
Capone: Do you have ideas of where to take it?
MJW: Oh God yeah.
SS: Yeah. It’s just too much fun, you know? It’s such a fun, loose thing. The whole world is kind of your oyster, to get stock footage here or do something there. You can just pull from so many things and it’s just a fun set of tools to work with.
MJW: There are so many creative things that we didn’t even get a chance to do in this one that would open up. My imagination would go crazy on a sequel.
Capone: I read something today about a cartoon version. Is that for real?
SS: Yeah. It’s just moving ahead. We're working with Adult Swim and [producer] Carl Jones from "The Boondocks."
Capone: Cool.
MJW: The only thing really holding it up is two of the principals are on a press tour.
[Everyone Laughs]
SS: It’s fun. It’s exciting.
Capone: And you would do the voice still?
MJW: Yeah.
Capone: Michael, I’ve got to ask, because I assume I will never get an opportunity to interview Tyler Perry, so whenever I get someone who has worked with him, especially someone who has worked with him more than once. You shot the second film or are you about to?
MJW: I have done episodes of his TV show and two films with him.
Capone: One of which is a sequel to WHY DID I GET MARRIED?, right?
MJW: Yeah.
Capone: I think that’s his best film actually, and I heard he was making a sequel. Tell me just a little bit about what it’s like working with him on set, because I’m really curious about the way he works and how he is able to produce so fast.
MJW: God yeah. He’s got it down. I think with so many of his years directing his work theater has given him an insight. There are certain influences I’ve learned from him, at first he would direct in a style where like say if all three of us were in a scene, you would be sitting here and Scott would be sitting here and we could still conduct this interview, right? But we are all facing that direction and so you light it one way and you don’t have to shoot over-the-shoulder shots, so his block sometimes would emulate the stage. Sometimes that influence is kind of cool.
It’s very much like in television shows, it’s pretty much stage direction as well, so he would move very fast and he basically, we think a lot alike in a very direct way about getting the performance out. Say, you don’t get the performance, you keep rolling the camera and find it. Sometimes when you say “Stop” and you say “Cut” and you start all over again, it puts the performer in a different headspace, so it’s like you get a number of chances to do whatever you need to do right then.
Capone: He just keeps it rolling? He doesn’t stop?
MJW: Yeah and everybody is comfortable. You can mess up a line and just go back. You restart yourself. You can get halfway through a monologue and just start all over. It’s absolutely cool. You might say “I forgot about this,” and it’s no problem. On another set, you might get stressed out, and it builds to your stress to hear “Cut! We’ve got to do this again. Okay, here comes make up” and you are like “shit shit shit, okay let me try to remember…” You have all of this stress, so it’s a very easy working environment. He’s very friendly and very collaborative as well, very collaborative and especially in the ones that I have worked on with him, yeah.
Capone: Did you shoot your DARK KNIGHT stuff here in Chicago for that, or were you able to do that somewhere else?
MJW: We ended up shooting that in London.
Capone: That was really fun to see you in that, because I didn’t know you were in that when I went to see it.
MJW: [laughs] I was surprised too, man, because after KILL BILL, I’m surprised…
Capone: With KILL BILL, though, that’s a great scene--deleted or not--and at least Tarantino included it on the DVD. Everyone knows that scene, because it’s the only outtake out of that movie so far. You’ve got nothing to feel bad about with the KILL BILL thing! Anyway, it was good to meet you, Michael.
MJW: You too!
Capone: Good to meet you, Scott.
SS: Take care!
Capone: Thank you.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com
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