After writing and directing a series of shorts over the last eight years or so, Justin Simen has finally cracked the feature film world with his sharp (some would say painfully so) and quite relevant look at the current state of race relation in the United States, using a college campus playing field/battleground. Simien went through many drafts of DEAR WHITE PEOPLE before landing on the version that he actually shot, and taking that time certainly gave him a perspective he might not have had were he able to shoot the film much earlier in his career, and the resulting film feels like it comes from a far more mature filmmaker with perhaps a few features under his belt.
I got the chance to sit down with Simien recently just before DEAR WHITE PEOPLE opened across the country last week. One thing that I didn’t realize when we met was that we had communicated infrequently for years when Simien worked for the publicity team at Paramount Pictures, as he brings up as we’re getting settled in. Always happy to see someone see have this kind of luck changing jobs. Anyway, please enjoy my chat with Justin Simien…
Capone: Hi, Justin. Great to meet you.
Justin Simien: What’s going on, man? I feel like I’ve emailed you for years.
Capone: Is that true?
JS: When I was at Paramount, I was always begging you guys to do various things.
Capone: Oh my god. That is absolutely you, and I did not even make that connection.
JS: Oh, it’s all good. [laughs] So funny.
Capone: That’s hilarious. And there’s our icebreaker.
JS: I love it!
Capone: You set this film on a college campus. Do you see college campuses as the place where these conversations happen with this level of ferocity? And is college the last time that most people get this passionate about their belief system?
JS: That’s funny. I never really thought about that. I think what it is is once you leave college, it’s inappropriate to have that conversation.
Capone: You can’t join 10 clubs after as an adult.
JS: Yeah, there are equivalents of say black student unions or different alliance groups and certainly work environments. But to outwardly have that conversation in a dining hall or something, that doesn’t come up as much. That’s the thing about college: you’re around everybody, all the time, every single day. That’s not what adult life is necessarily like if you enter the work force. There are certain friends of mine that were able to PA after college and they got to keep the fun going longer than I did. But I think that’s a really great question. I never thought of that before. But for me, the appeal of college is such a good movie microcosm. It’s so great, and movies like FAME and ELECTION and ANIMAL HOUSE is obviously.
Capone: ELECTION’s a great one, yeah. That’s not about college, but I see your point.
JS: FAME is about high school as well. Obviously, SCHOOL DAZE is one. I love the way in a school setting you can get all the ingredients in the same room, so to speak, and get into some stuff that would be much more complicated if you told the story in a city or real life. It’s possible. But even Spike with DO THE RIGHT THING, he had to find a neighborhood where it could all boil up. And the school, you don’t ever have to explain it. They’re all in the same school.
Capone: With DO THE RIGHT THING—which I’m sure has come up once or twice in these interviews you’ve been having since Sundance—Spike was looking at two very specific two groups that were not meshing well in a certain community. But here you’ve got a little bit of everything. There are definitely a few people in this film that are speechifying, some that are pontificating. But on a college campus, that seems real; out on the street, maybe not so much.
JS: I remember having very verbose conversations, and I think it being on a college campus particularly—I think someone said it’s an Ivy League-ish campus, which is more accurate, because it’s a very intentionally the movie version of an Ivy League campus—where that sort of thing is believable. I just really love NETWORK, and it’s something I keep referencing because it’s also a satire, although for whatever reason it’s not regarded as such anymore, but it’s a satire, and it’s got that Patty Chayefsky thing, where every character sounds like they’re written by Patty Chayefsky, and it’s brilliant because of that. And the fact that you’ve got Faye Dunaway and this amazing cast delivering it with this sense of a slice of life. I love that, because it immediately lets you know that you're in a hyper reality, and this is a movie about ideas as much as it is about characters. And that was an important distinction for me. In many drafts of it, I struggled with that. Should it be slice of life, or should it feel written? And I decided that satire for me, with my abilities and my interests worked better if it was written.
Capone: And I don’t think it suffers because of that. It might feel written, although I can vaguely remember from my college days having lengthy conversations just sitting in the hallways, not even at organized events, that took off when somebody would take a position, and no matter how many times they got punched, they would just stick with it. You alluded to it before: were there encounters or conflicts or experiences that you had in those years of your life that you lifted more or less directly?
JS: A lot of the antidotal stuff in the film is stuff from life.Yeah, the plot points in the film, particularly the things that really change, that move the narrative in a different place, that stuff didn’t happen to me, per se, but the experience of having people always touching my hair or arguing that “Star Trek” was technically a black show, those moments are definitely moments from real life. The “Star Trek” one actually was a fairly recent argument that I found myself engaged in. But even the scene with Sam and Gabe on the bridge, when she’s explaining her upbringing, that was something that came out of my life. I’m not bi-racial, but my mother is Creole, and she doesn’t look what people think a black woman looks like. So often times, I had this sense of wrongness imprinted upon me at a very young age just because of the way people very outspokenly didn’t understand why we were together. As a kid, you notice stuff like that. It was recently that I realized how much it impacted me really through the writing of the script. So stuff like that found its way into the script.
Capone: One of the unique aspects of this film is how you use the dominating presence of social media on college campuses. It’s really has been adopted as part of the conversation. Someone’s putting something out on Facebook or Twitter, and it gets a reaction almost immediately, and you can gather hundreds of people at the spur of the moment.
JS: It allows you to create your own mini tabloid culture. And it also is a great way to get into identity, because that’s what I see the movie as being about, identity. It really forces you as a person to condense yourself into the most popular, easily digestible, palatable version of yourself. I forget the term, but the depression people get when they look at Facebook. There’s a term for that now. And they get it because when you’re on Facebook, you only see the best of people’s lives, and people start to believe that everyone else is having a fantastic life, but it’s only because we’re always self editing. I have friends to this day who, you’ll go and be with them at some amazing event, and all they are doing is Instagraming it. And it looks so much better than it is, because if they only knew you were just on your phone the whole time. The identity gets all the focus. The actual moment gets none of it. I just thought that was a really great way to get into identity issues as they look and feel in the hands of kids that age.
Capone: Speaking of identity issues, you were talking about the character Sam. She is the most fascinating female character that I have seen in a movie all year. She just has so many things going on in her head and her life that are almost all conflicting in some way, and yet, about most things, she has a very clear idea of how she wants to proceed, and how she thinks things should be, but she’s not afraid of taking in new ideas. That speech, the one that Coco gives her at the party that she films, Coco has some really interesting ideas in that speech, and Sam incorporates that into her film at the end. I think it’s to say, “Look, there’s a whole lot of ways of thinking right now.” Where did Sam come from? Where did her mind come from?
JS: Sam is one of those times as a writer when the character is just born like almost fully formed. I knew what she looked like, and I knew that she had something to say that sounded similar to Huey from The Boondocks and Angela Davis, but she also had a softness like the Lisa Bonet character in “The Cosby Show,” and that’s always who she was. There was a moment in the writing process where I asked myself if she really needed to be bi-racial, especially because color is such an issue when you get into black films, or films about people of color, and I thought that the issue of being bi-racial is never actually addressed in the film.
You have black films with like light-skinned women in the leading roles, but they’re never complicated, they’re just pretty. This argument is because they fit the European standard of beauty, and that’s why their the lead. And I thought, well, let’s actually get into that issue, because I’ve had this conversation with so many bi-racial women. I’ve had this conversation with my mother about how complicated that is, and how there is this pressure to pick a side. And she just came out of that. And I just thought it was so interesting, and all of them to me were such interesting intersections with which to talk about identity, and she was always among the loudest of the four.
Capone: And someone in the film accuses her of over compensating. But that’s what you’re talking about, picking a side.
JS: Feeling the need to double down on a side, and I might be misquoting her—forgive me if I am—but I feel like I read an interview where Rashida Jones openly said, “I identify more with the white part of me.” And I remember when someone first told me that was Quincy Jones’ daughter, I was like, “What? She’s bi-racial? I had no idea.” It’s real, and I have heard that from girls before who looks vaguely ethnic, but you don’t know what they are, and they’re saying, “Yeah it’s easier to be a white person with a tan than it is to explain to everybody what I am.” And I’ve seen people that make a point to let you know what they are, and it’s a real pressure. I hadn’t ever seen it really done before.
Capone: Another reason she’s a fascinating person in my mind. What has been the range of reactions to the film? It’s mostly festivals up to this point, but has there been any outrage, or has it mostly been positive?
JS: I haven’t had any outrage. I’d say it’s been mostly positive—really sweet, glowingly positive—but there are also people who, because it is a multi-protagonist story, and what I love about multi-protagonist stories is you decide which movie you’re watching each time you watch them.
Capone: True, and it depends on what you bring to it, who you identify with.
JS: Absolutely, and some people will focus on one character or the other. Some people will just focus on Kurt, and think that that’s some global statement about all white people. Some people will focus on Sam and think that she is a statement about all black people. I think it’s par for the course when you make a movie like this, but I also think it’s cool because there are a lot of people who haven't seen a multi-protagonist story in so long, and they’re trying to process, how do we even watch the damn thing? And I think it’s part of the process. If there’s any dissonance, it comes from people wondering if the movie is making a global statement, and I love that, because if I wasn't there giving a Q&A, you’d be forced to go to the lobby and have that conversation with each other, and that’s what I wanted to create because those are the movies that I love. I love—and I’m just pulling this up because I just saw it recently just sitting in my hotel room—BLACK SWAN. I remember in BLACK SWAN going into the lobby and needing to take a good half an hour to talk that shit out. I love movies that—they entertain you, sure—leave you with something that’s unsettling. And I wanted to make a movie that did that.
Capone: You made a point though, some people are going to think you’re making a very specific statement about each group—black characters, gay characters, or white characters. Did you feel like you had to, in your own way, over compensate to not do that?
JS: I wanted to make sure I was being honest. That was something I had to check myself on. Am I being honest? Am I letting this person get away with too much? Am I holding this person to task too much? I really wanted to try to take any personal agenda I had as much out of the equation as I could, with a couple of exceptions. I think thematically, the film is about identity versus self. I just believe personally that being true to oneself is the most important thing, but that also comes with its problems.
I did want it to be fair, in the sense that for every point I wanted there to be a convincing counter point, and I did want when characters said things that are kind of true, maybe they don’t even fully mean it, and they’re just using it to defend themselves. And when they’re saying something that’s a complete lie, they’re being authentic in that moment. I wanted to bring about the complexity of that experience, as much as one could realize human complexity in a film. I wanted to get it as close to life as I can.
Capone: By including the Lionel character in the film, I don’t think you’re making any universal statement about gay characters, but you could have made a whole other movie about how every race treats gay people. That’s almost too much to wrap your brain around.
JS: Yeah, and sometimes I’ll get wanting to go more into the queer experience, which I say “Listen, there’s a movie that a lot of people didn’t go see. It was called PARIAH, and it was brilliant. Go see that movie.” But yeah, it was intentional. I wanted the nave character, the character that hadn’t decided, hadn’t picked a side, I wanted him to be original and I wanted him to get into an experience that is not ever talked about, which is being gay as well as being black and not living up to either stereotype and therefore feeling like you don’t belong in culture.
That more than often is the story that I commiserate about. It can be easier when you can play into the expectation, but if you’re none of those things, what do you do? And I just thought, like Sam dealing with her bi-racial identity, it was just something I had never really seen even touch upon. Particularly with black films, unfortunately, the gay characters are always just given the shit. They are the most exoticized, ridiculous versions of that experience. I really wanted to do something that was more honest and neutral, but in the way that is about this human being that’s really trying to figure it out, not for any political reason, but just because it was honest.
Capone: You worked in the Hollywood system for years, and now you’re having your film distributed by a fairly large indie house. And this is that same system that in a lot of ways has contributed to part of the problem. Since you’ve chosen this to be the subject of your first feature, do you feel like you’re willing to be this touchstone for doing it right?
JS: Yeah. What else could I do? You can’t really change a system unless you engage with it. There were many different versions of this. If self distribution were the best option available to us, that’s what we would have gone with. If complete studio financing from start to finish was the best version of this, we would have gone with that. But in terms of what this movie means to the industry, I have a lot of hopes for the film, and I have a lot of hopes for it opening the door for other films and other filmmakers.
But to be honest with you, I just consistently did what I thought was best for the movie and allowed me to move forward and not stay with an unfinished film or a movie that didn’t get made. We were offered a really bad deal from a great studio before we took independent financing, and if that independent financier never showed up, we would have made that bad deal. I needed the movie to get made. I couldn’t go another year not getting this movie made, and that’s really what compelled us. After Sundance, like Roadside-Lionsgate was just clearly the best way to put the film out.
Capone: Well best of luck with this, seriously. It was great to finally meet you.
