Capone addresses speaking the truth about race with BLACK OR WHITE writer-director Mike Binder, and stars Kevin Costner and Anthony Mackie!!!

Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

For those who actually go to see it, writer-director (and former comic actor) Mike Binder’s BLACK OR WHITE could end up being one of the most divisive and controversial films of the season. It’s the story of an older man played by Kevin Costner whose wife has just passed away. The couple have been taking care of their mixed-race granddaughter since their daughter died giving birth to her, and they had a truly happy family dynamic. But now Coster’s Elliot is at a loss how to raise this young girl and still maintain his law practice. Enter the girl’s paternal grandmother (Octavia Spencer), who already takes care of an extended family in her South Central home and offers to bring the girl to stay with her to be surrounded by a loving family—an idea Elliot rejects outright.

Complicated by both Elliot’s hard drinking and the girl’s father’s history as a drug addict, a custody battle bubbles up between the two grandparents, and it doesn’t take long (thanks to Spencer’s crafty lawyer, played by Anthony Mackie) for someone to play the race card, and that’s when things get interesting, and things are said that can’t be unsaid, and maybe they shouldn’t be. I’ll admit, I’ve never seen a drama quite like BLACK OR WHITE, and there’s a searing honesty that I truly appreciated.

I had a chance to sit down with Coster, Binder and Mackie recently to cover the origins of this story (which sprung from events in Binder’s life) and the state of prejudice in the United States. I wish we’d had more time to really dig into these subjects, but we still managed to cover a great deal in out time together. Please enjoy my talk with Kevin Costner, Mike Binder, and Anthony Mackie…





Capone: Watching the movie last night, I noticed you had a very specifically worded title card at the beginning that said “Inspired by true events,” which is not the same as “Based on a true story.” And I remember thinking, “I wonder what that means in this case.” And then you explained it in the Q&A, and I was bowled over by how this is very close to what happened. Not so much the events, but the set up.

Mike Binder: The world. I always thought it was a great world. It was a great garden to grow a conversation out of. First of all, it was a little boy. Second of all, there was no acrimony. We were two families that had so much love for this little boy, and we got along very well, actually. It was really nice.

Kevin Costner: Reggie [the girl’s drug addict father] is the realest character.

MB: That’s true. Reggie is the realest character in this situation. My nephew’s father wasn’t in his life. That line that Mackie’s character says, “There’s a chromosome missing in you.” I always wanted to say that to him. “You’re someone’s dad, and you have no connection to it. Why am I raising your son when you’re here?” And he was just missing that synapse. Something wasn’t firing. So that was very real.

Capone: That’s the beauty of being the writer. You can say things you can’t say in real life through your characters.

MB: That’s it exactly. When I was a comedian, some guy would heckle me, and I wouldn’t know what to say, and then I’d be driving home and I’d think ofd that perfect line and go, “Godamnit.”

KC: I think stand-up comics, for the first half of their career, it’s all defensive, because they’ve got to hold onto the stage, and they actually know how to fight back more than they actually have a girth of material, because they are used to getting interrupted. “Hey, you suck.” Well I got a good line for you. So half of their material early on is just defensive, it’s not a through line. That’s what I saw.

MB: When I met Jay Leno, we were working at a club, I was a little kid, we were getting heckled, and he said, “Believe me, this ain’t bad. I used to play in a club when I started where they had chicken wire between the stage and the audience.” Can you imagine being on that stage, and they had chicken wire in case the audience throws bottles at you?

KC: John Rich, the musician, told me when we were playing some songs in Nashville together at some point, and because I was explaining my songs and where they came from, because people were baffled that I was making music. But I explained what I was doing, and he goes, “I used to do that too, and there’s this one club, and they had that chicken wire, and I started explaining my song and a bottle broke on the wire, and he someone yelled, ‘Play the song, faggot!’” And he just started singing. “Play the song, faggot! Shut up!” Don’t explain nothing. He just kept going. When he told that to me, and I thought, “Oh my god.”

MB: Don’t need the backstory.

Capone: How long ago was it that Mike told you about this story or gave you the script?

KC: We had a really successful collaboration on THE UPSIDE OF ANGER. We were both looking for an opportunity to work with each other. I have pretty singular ideas about the things I also want to do myself. And so for Mike to get a piece to me, it was going to have to jump over some things that I liked, and the first three or four things that had come after that was Mike feeling like we should try to do this again. They were really good; it just didn’t quite match up, and I was beginning to stress a little bit about our relationship, honestly, because it was stretching it. But all we could do was remind each other that when the writing does match up, it doesn’t take me long to say yes, and there’s no layers between me and a yes. There’s nobody going to council me in or out of things. And Mike stayed the course, and wrote this screenplay.





I think what happened to me happened right down the line to Octavia, to Anthony, that it really spoke out loud. My story is a little different, because how are we going to get this made. It ended up spiraling down to me. I had to really search my soul if I could to do this, how I would do this, and it seemed unfortunate that it spiraled down to me, but on the other hand, the movie stayed exactly what I think Mike intended it to be, because maybe the things that were scaring everybody if they did get involved would have been neutered by this time. By the time you saw the movie, maybe some of these things that were the most dicey, that I don’t think any of us considered dicey—it’s what attracted us to it—would have been the things that stuck out the most and had to be sanded down, and we didn’t sand any of them down. So that’s what happened.

MB: Well also, the funny thing is that I would send him these scripts, because we wanted to make another movie, and he had this simplicity of style. It was No. He didn’t like it. There was no small talk. He was like, “No. That one didn’t speak to me. It’s good, but not for me.” And then we’d move on to another conversation, and it was the exact opposite of this one, too. There was no hemming and hawing. It was, “Yeah. I’m going to do it. This is the one. We’re going to do it together.” So then nobody wanted to make it, and he called me up and said, “Listen, nobody want’s to make it, but I’m going to do it. I’m going to make the movie. I’m just going to have to pay for it.” I’m thinking, what does that mean? What are going to make, a poster? It was such a foreign idea.

KC: Well, I also had to make that phone call short, too. I hadn’t thought it out yet. I just said I’m going to make it. Quit bugging me.

MB: Yeah, right. That’s right.

KC: And now I can just bug his wife. I had to go talk to my wife too. There was some talking that had to happen.

MB: It’s so true. “Honey, I don’t know what he meant.”

Capone: Kevin, you work with studios a lot, and when you bring them something like this, and they say no, and they either tell you why or they don’t tell you why, how do you look them in the eye again knowing they passed on this one?

MB: They all agreed it was good. I didn’t run into anybody who said it was bad. But it wasn’t fitting their format. It wasn’t a big enough movie. It didn’t fit into their slate. They already had movies. It just didn’t match up. The advertising would be more than the actual movie cost. That right away, they smell a rat there.

Capone: It’s hard to get those mid-sized budget movies made these days.

MB: They still do it the old fashioned way, where they cobble the money together, but it’s usually everybody else’s money. Nobody’s at risk. It’s just this and that. And by the time that happens, it’s a giant committee, and maybe that movie ends up looking like what you want it to be. Anthony’s got a movie right now that I’m sure he’s going to have to push uphill a little bit. And it’s going to be really up to him to shepherd that thing, because money will be coming in from a bunch of different sources, then they’re going to try to get to a studio. What’s the studio going to think of the movie? Are they going to love everything he loves? Or are they going to go through it with a fine-toothed comb and take out the shit that he really loves? And probably that stuff is the stuff that’s a little bit different. That’s why he responded to it. I don’t know.

There’s nothing wrong with the studios. They’re doing fine, if you haven’t noticed. But it’s a shift. It’s a shift and for us, we can’t shift because the play is still the thing for us. We adore the big money when it comes. There’s nothing better. It makes a difference in our life, in our family’s life. But still, if you’re in it for the love of it, you don’t distinguish between the supermodel and the waitress. If the waitress is better looking, you know it. You just know it. “There’s a supermodel.” “I don’t care. Did you see the waitress?”

[Everybody laughs]

He might have a movie that can pay him [points to Mackie] a lot of money to go do some other kind of thing; that probably did happen. But we said, you can come down to New Orleans and play an attorney for us. He said, “I’m coming down to New Orleans.” He’ll let his agent or manager deal with the rest of that stuff. And by the way, that comes with a caveat: Don’t fuck it up. And I’m not joking, because I do have to deal with his manager, and at a certain point when I said, “That’s all we have,” he said, “Okay. Don’t fuck that up.” That’s what these guys have. They know the difference. So it bodes well for him and his career to be able to do that.

Capone: Let me dig in a little bit about two scenes in the film that I think are the heart of the film. One is the more obvious one, which is your testimony, your monologue, which I’m sure comes up all the time. I have a feeling that most people in America think more or less the way he describes his thought process in that scene. They live on that plain of not being extreme in terms of the way they feel about people that aren’t like them. Fine tuning that scene must have been like a never-ending process, because it’s so perfectly worded, and it captures something I’ve never heard expressed in a film before. Talk about writing it and rewriting it, and where it came from.





MB: Most of the time when you’re writing, your characters say things that you really want to say. I wanted Kevin to be able to say what I feel that, yes, it’s so obvious. I’m not an idiot. I look at you and I know you’re a black guy.

KC: Duh.

MB: I’m not a divine human entity that just sees you as another human entity. I look at you, I know who you are. So what? Now what? I really wanted to say that. Of course we all see each other for what we are. That’s just day one of the voyage, or mile one of the voyage. Now where do we go from here? What’s going to happen next? Steve Harvey said it today in an incredible way that I’ve never heard it said. He said, “A lot of times I’ll say what you are just to identify you, so you know exactly who I’m talking to and I know exactly who I’m talking to. If I say, ‘I’m going to kick your black ass,’ I’m saying that so you know I’m talking to you and not you.”

[Everybody laughs]

MB: “And it has noting to do with any other black people, just your black ass is getting kicked.” I wanted to do what you said. I want to get it to where we all think—the majority of us—we’re not bad people. We’re just living in a world that, for some reason, our creator gave us different skin colors and different eye sizes and color, and our job is to figure out how to live together.

Capone: And the other great scene is the one where Anthony is talking to Reggie about the way you see him, and that whole “missing a chromosome” speech. People in the audience really responded to that scene. We all have someone in our family that’s like that, that’s just can’t pull it together, and you want to say that to them, and his mother’s not saying it. It’s a level of honesty that is so rarely expressed. Tell me about working on that scene.





Anthony Mackie: That’s what made the script so unique and so important to me, the ability to express that and say these words. When I read it I was really intrigued and blown away by the idea of someone expressing verbatim what I think. Then you get into it, and you come to set and start rehearsing and stuff, and you don’t want the acting to take away from the words. Because the words are so powerful and poignant, I didn’t want somebody to look at it and say “Oh wow. He’s really acting— Wait, what did he say?” So my goal was to allow the words to sting him and try and knock some sense into his head. By doing that, by effectively trying to evoke a response out of someone, you end up evoking a response out of yourself. So I realized everything that I was feeling, everything that I was thinking personally, was coming out through these words to him. It’s funny to think that those words can come from him [points to Binder].

MB: He just goes “…from this.” [laughs]

KC: You’re really proud of a character like Anthony’s, and you’re sitting back going, “I’m glad he said that to him, and not just for the black community.” We’re all waiting for someone in the Muslim community to come up and say something to these Muslims about stuff. We want someone to say, “Hey, what about that?” And when Octavia says, “Look, there’s no jury. You’ve got to get yourself together. You’ve got a thing to do.”

We can accept the truth. Really, we can. We hear it delivered and we say “That was the truth, and it needed to be said,” and we were proud that they actually said it. Maybe white people go, “I don’t think anyone in the black community was telling each other what time it is.” He did [gesturing to Anthony]. And this happens all the time, but sometimes people have the fear that you don’t think that we do, and that bugs them. It bugs people that are telling people to straighten themselves up a little bit. I had to straighten my own kids up. I had to say, “You’ve got the last name Cosner. Don’t forget when you’re out there, you’re representing a lot of us. You’re not the only name with Cosner on it. You represent a lot of people with how you behave.”

MB: There’s a line that women always talk to me about in the movie, and I think it’s that same way. When Octavia says to Reggie, “Unless you show her she is loved right now, she’s never going to feel it in her heart. If she doesn’t feel her father’s love, she’s never going to feel any other love.” Women for some reason bring up that line to me a lot. And I think there’s a truth to that and I think that sometimes in movies you just want to do that. You want people to go, “God, I want to say that to somebody. There’s someone I love that I want to say that to.” And I really did wanted to say that.

KC: Anthony’s character says to Reggie, “You really didn’t know the damage you do.” We don’t know. We don't even know the damage we do to our fellow human being when we don’t even smile at them, or when we say a snide remark to a fellow employee. We do damage all the fucking time. And equally when we say to somebody, “Hey. How are you?” When you’re feeling low, that makes a person feel like a giant. Just the smallest of gestures out of people have the biggest impact. But just that idea, “You don’t know the damagem” we don’t know when we’re doing something. I don’t know even the damage as a father I do sometimes if I don’t handle something correctly. Is it therapy 30 years later for somebody? Probably.

AM: You don’t know the damage you’ve done to me.

[Everybody laughs]

KC: For Reggie, it’s always his daddy; he blames his daddy. At some point, you’ve got to take responsibility too. But I have a couple of really good friends that have no right being as good of people they are. They had shitty upbringings. They had bad hands dealt to them, and somewhere along the line, they did it.

Capone: There probably comes a point in every person’s life, if you have that kind of upbringing, where you either say, “I’m wrecked and I’m not even going to bother.” Or, “I have to have to provide the exact opposite life from the one I had for my kids.”

KC: That’s a big man that can do that. It’s hard; it’s not easy.

Capone: I never doubted for a second how this movie is going to end and I don’t mean that there was no drama, because it was really great going through that journey. But there are a couple of scenes—you show Kevin go into Octavia’s home, you show her family come into his house, and the fact that they could pull that off with relative ease made me believe that by the end of this, they were going to find a way to work this out. Are you fine with that?

KC: Well, how predictable would the movie had been if you went down that community and got out of his car and didn’t know how to knock on the door. The first person that sees him goes, “Hmm…” That would have been so predictable, but that’s not life. We have so much in common.

Capone: I love that scene when you go in her house.

KC: Yeah, it was beautiful.

Capone: Everyone’s happy to see you, everyone’s hugging you.

MB: The guy says, “I’d get up, but my back hurts.” And Kevin says, “I know the feeling.” Last night a woman said—and she wasn’t trying to be mean—“How come you decided to go with a Kumbaya ending?” And listen, the truth is it was a choice, and I feel like not all movies have to have a happy ending. This one needed it. This is a movie about hope.

KC: I didn’t get what she was talking about. My character’s heart was breaking into a thousand pieces at that moment. It wasn’t Kumbaya. What it was is, this guy went away, and everything he loved goes away, and that’s not happy for him. But what was clear was that girl was really safe, and for me there was a measure of relief. This is a good family. She’s okay. But it wasn’t Kumbaya. What it was was a high level of satisfaction that this girl was in a great place. So that’s a little I think skin deep. It’s really obvious to say, “That was a really happy feeling.” It wasn’t for my character. He was devastated.

Capone: There are a lot of questions left open at the end about people’s futures.

KC: It’s much simpler than the movie is.

Capone: I also saw MCFARLAND,USA the other day, and last night you brought up DANCES WITH WOLVES as a film that championed Native American community. In MCFARLAND you’re championing these Latino kids, who I’ve never seen represented like this in a movie before. Is this…

KC: There’s no trend there [laughs].

Capone: Not a trend, but I wonder why aren’t more people doing it?

KC: No. I do it because I like all kind of movies. I want to be in a Marvel movie too. I want Anthony to reach back and grab me and take me with him. [Everybody laughs] Why couldn’t I have had [Robert] Redford’s part [in CAPTAIN AMERICAN: WINTER SOLDIER]? Anthony, you’ve got to reach back and help me and Mike someday. There’s going to be a moment when Anthony says, “You need to do this for these two guys.”

MB: Hey, hey. Anthony didn’t even remember my name on Steve Harvey the other day. He goes, “The writer/director Mike…???” And Kevin went, “Binder!” [Everybody laughs] And he’s going to reach back and put me in a Marvel movie? I don’t think so.

Capone: Speaking of which, Anthony, are you lined up for you next turn as Falcon?

AM: We’re about to start CAPTAIN AMERICA [: CIVIL WAR].

Capone: But not in…

AM: Not in all the other stuff.

Capone: I thought they might find a way to sneak you into AVENGERS. It’s a crowded film.

AM: I wish! There are a lot of people in that movie.

Capone: I can’t wait to see it. Alright, everyone. Thank you so much. It was really great to meet you.

KC: Thanks a lot.

MB: Take care. If you talk to Harry, tell him I said hello.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
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