I briefly met filmmaker Vikram Gandhi when he brought his first film, the compelling documentary KUMARÉ to the Roger Ebert Film Festival (Ebertfest). It was a film about Gandhi himself pretending to be an Indian guru and spiritual leader and eventually getting a small following in Arizona, only to reveal himself to be a phony in the hopes of letting his followers realize that self realization and awareness was in them all the time. Not surprisingly, some of them don’t react well to his unmasking, and the resulting film is fascinating and somewhat tense.
I lost track of Gandhi until he started submitting some great news reports for “Vice.” But in the years since KUMARÉ, he’s been pulling together a film called BARRY, about Barack Obama in his college years at Columbia University in New York City in the early 1980s. One of the only non-white students on campus, Obama (who went by Barry at the time) was a man looking for a scene. He found ways of being equally comfortable around both his fellow (mostly white) student, but he also explored the community and nearby Harlem when he was there. Newcomer Devon Terrell plays Barry, with THE WITCH’s Anya Taylor-Joy playing Charlotte, a amalgam of girlfriends that Obama had at the time, many of whom described him as emotionally disconnected.
BARRY just premiered on Netflix this weekend, and it makes a nice companion piece to SOUTHSIDE WITH YOU, which looks at Obama a couple years later, having dropped the name Barry and much more sure of the man he was and would become in the world. I had a chance to chat with Gandhi recently about BARRY, and if its post-election release adds an element of melancholy to the film. Please enjoy my talk with Vikram Gandhi…
Vikram Gandhi: Hi, how’s it going?
Capone: Hey Vikram. How are you?
VG: Good.
Capone: We actually met a few years ago at the Roger Ebert Film Festival when you were there.
VG: Yeah, totally. Ebertfest.
Capone: Your film was one of the few I hadn’t seen before getting down there. I remember you leading the audience in meditation. It's a terrific film.
VG: Thank you.
Capone: I watched BARRY yesterday, and I found it fascinating that both your film and SOUTHSIDE WITH YOU have your versions of Barack Obama still struggling with the non-relationship he had with his father.
VG: Since I’m at home right now, I actually have his book near me, but I remember there’s a section in it where he talks about a time when his father was a myth to him, but he did go through a period of time where he wanted to distance himself from his mother and related himself with his father who he never knew. And I think it was all part of this struggle to figure out where he belonged, how he fit in, and what his identity was. So I think it’s just a natural search for where you fit into society and looking for your roots.
But strangely, his father was not someone who was in his life at all, so a lot of it was in his imagination,. Even the reasons his book is called “Dreams From My Father,” it’s like, what were the dreams that were inspired by this myth. I think a lot of people who are American from immigrant backgrounds have to figure out who they are and have to go back to their roots. I think myself included, you can’t be one or the other, you have to be both. That’s part of being I think a first-generation American.
Capone: Let me back it up a little bit. [Writer] Adam Mansbach has an interesting background as a novelist, but how did you get him involved in writing the screenplay?
VG: Well, I’ve been working on this movie for a while. I had read the memoir a few years ago. I started writing a script, or wrote an outline for a movie. And at some point, I was on the road shooting with “Vice,” and I was like “I really need to bring in a screenwriter to help me.”
And one of the tricky things was, I wanted find somebody who knew about Columbia University, because it’s a pretty specific set of things that you go through when you go there, just as far as the specificity of anything, and Adam went to Columbia. He was a year ahead of me. We were friends, but I didn’t know him that well, but I knew he was writing scripts, and I also knew that he understood race and was obsessed with hip-hop and everything that was coming out of New York in the ’80s. I approached him and convinced him that this is what the movie I wanted to make, then we worked on the script together for a while, and that’s how it came to be. But this is something I had been planning to make for a few years before I got other people involved.
Capone: When you found out the film was debuting on Netflix after the election and right before Obama left office, did you think it would be airing in a slightly more celebratory environment in this country?
VG: Yeah. My plan was always to release it in December of 2016. I hit a time about a year ago when I was like “Shit, I’ve got to do this now before this happens.” So that was always my feeling. If you are going to make this movie, it’s the right time now when we’re reflecting on the last eight years. But I didn’t think that there was going to be this sort of villain that would come in and change the context of the world at that time. It’s amazing how this movie changes on November 9th, watching it. It is a different movie in a lot of ways.
I think the thing that’s really going to make sense is, when I set out to make this movie, I wanted to take a snippet of his life and tell a really personal story. It was never a political message. There’s no inkling in this movie about whether he’s a good president or not. This is an American experience that is rare. We should understand how it happened, who this person is, because it relates to every American. But then on November 9th after living in the context of the Trump rhetoric—this anti-immigration, isolationist idea of America and this general trend that’s also in Europe—America itself has always been about a nation of immigrants and about diversity of culture. That is the direction I’ve always felt America was going in, and that was the ethos of the America that my parents immigrated to, and all of a sudden, it’s been put into question.
So what were once just personal details about the coming of age of a young man are now actually a symbol of America. So to me, a lot of things that were about being American in the movie, I thought at first, “That may be a little overstated,” and now it’s so important. As you see in the trailer, there’s that moment towards the end about this multicultural background and how he doesn’t have to change. He can just be American. That’s part of it. And to me, that is something that’s important to remember, that on November 9th, that didn’t change. We’re still that country.
Capone: I don’t feel like anyone is going to make films like this about Donald Trump. Other than the daddy issues, I don’t think there’s anything special about a rich guy staying rich.
VG: I think they both have daddy issues. Barack Obama is clearly motivated—his father was in politics in Kenya. He was in the government and excelled academically, so you have daddy issues there. And Donald Trump is all fucking Freud. It’s Shakespearian Freud. It’s vengeance, and with Donald Trump he wasn’t like, “I’ll show you I’m a man of respect.” He’s like, “I’ll beat you, old man.” This whole campaign is about vengeance against Barack Obama.
So I do think there is a vibrant story in all these figures, I just think one is more of an earnest optimism in Barack Obama, who is a person looking inward to really understand where he belongs and help the world. For Trump, it’s just pure vengeance. But they’re both daddy issues. They’re both stories about people grappling with their father.
Capone: Up to this point you’ve primarily done documentaries and news segments. Do you use different creative muscles to make a feature film verses a documentary?
VG: Yeah, there’s a number of things. I like improvising. My first movie was completely improvised. “Vice” on the road, it’s all about finding the story, but it’s all improvisation. You don’t know anything until you get there. As opposed to this, which was a highly calibrated, meticulously scouted, shot, organized process. It’s a totally different part of your brain, but I do think at the end of the day, you’re only as prepared as you can be, and then you have to react on set.
The skills that I learned from going out and shooting documentary improvisation I still was using when we’re out there, because there are so many variables in making a movie. It’s like a miracle that there are any good movies, because it’s just a shit show. There are restrictions, like if we turn the camera three degrees to the right, you see 2016; and if you turn it a little bit over, you get a little 1981, so those things are restrictive. To me, it’s all storytelling. Whether it’s like storytelling in the context of representing pure facts or loosely based facts or fiction. There are a lot of similar tools. It’s just very different preparation.
Capone: When you got down to the choice of being 100 percent historically accurate verses telling a compelling, cinematic story that still captures Obama’s spirit in that time period, how did you balance that in terms of the way you told your story?
VG: The way I look at it, my goal is to tell a story about race in America through the prism of Barack Obama’s life at Columbia. We also were trying to distill what he was going through in a six-month period, and therefore, everything I think emotionally, all of the points in it, all of the things he was going through, all these experiences, they’re all based on things that I read. So that was like the biggest goal: can I make the most emotionally true story about a guy named Barry in 1981.
But things like reconstructing “Who was the girl he went out with?”, I didn’t want to take it into this exposé element of exposing causality. We want to try to reconstruct history through causality in these documentary forms—“It was after this experience, he did this or that.” I just don’t think life is lived like that. The changes that people experience come gradually over time. I’ve been asked the question“Was he called Barack or Barry at this time?” I saw this reference that he was going by Barack, and I saw this other reference that he was going by Barry. I said “Look, when I was in college, people called me Vik a lot, and at some point I was like ‘Can you just call me Vikram?’ And half the people did, half didn’t, but it gradually happened. There’s no delineation.”
I think that we really want to, in films, try to reconstruct reality, but it’s 90 minutes. So to me the job is “Can I try to figure out who Barry was?” and not how this guy became Barack Obama, but “who is that kid?” Because in that character, that kid, is a story of every kid who’s gone through that. That’s what I wanted to look for. That’s how I would characterize this is a story about race in America through Barack Obama’s life experience.
Capone: Well, if you called him Barack throughout the film, then the last line of the film loses its power too. The letter to his father is the first and only time we hear that name, I think.
VG: Yeah, totally. I think also in real life, you don’t really hear people’s last names [The name “Obama” is never heard in the film.]. But it was clear the main characters, they all knew Barry as Barry. His mother called him Barry, his roommate called him Barry, his old roommate who also transferred called him Barry. So it was important that that happened. It’s a complicated thing when you’re talking about a story of the most famous person on earth. I don’t want you to think that it’s a telegraph to the future, like “This is about Barack Obama.” That’s not the goal of the film. The goal of the film is to create a relatable character and be true to that guy Barry and not necessarily rewrite history.
Capone: There are two party scenes in the film, and at both of them, Barry says, “This isn’t my scene.” That’s essentially “This isn’t quite me.” But what he did to counter that later in life is make a scene around him. He built the scene around him and made himself the center of a movement “People are going to have to fit in with what I’m doing.” Do you see some of that in him now?
VG: Yeah, absolutely. That’s 100 percent what we were going for. The search for self and identity is often misleading. It’s romantic that I’m searching for my identity and who I am, but at some point, you have to create who you are. The only way to become somebody of great importance is to take the onus of doing that. So as deep as he went inside, it’s almost like he went outside equally. That’s the turning point. When he becomes Barack is when he owns up to the fact that he doesn’t have to look for a scene anymore; he is who he is.
I think that’s a pretty normal thing for a young man. I would say 80 percent of the experience of being a young man is a cliche. Everyone goes through a similar thing. When I look at my own life during that time, there are so many similarities to Barack Obama’s experience, which is why I wanted to tell the story. My screenwriter brought his own things to it, and it’s all like pretty communal. Then take that and put it in 1981 New York, that experience is going to be similar. Then take that and put that on a mixed-race kid, and it spins it on its head. So even just recreating those facts takes you pretty close to what the experience Barack Obama would have had. There are a lot of external forces in this story, and New York is definitely a character. It’s like the antagonist in a lot of ways.
Capone: Where did you find Devon Terrell, your lead actor?
VG: [laughs] It feels like we just made him up, like I constructed him in a lab. Yeah, it was through a lot of experimentation, and we just got the right specimen.
Capone: I was shocked to see he was Australian.
VG: I had read about Steve McQueen having a new series on HBO called “Codes of Conduct,” and there’s a tiny thumbnail [photo] on a press release of this kid who was the star of it named Devon Terrell, and if you look him up online, there’s a rapper that comes up that’s not him. So I was “who is that kid? I wonder what that kid’s about?” He wasn’t available because he was doing “Codes,” but that show didn’t go through, and all of a sudden he became available, and he taped himself, and I Skyped with him. Most of the people I cast in the movie were off of Skype. Maybe that’s part of the documentary thing for me—the casting process becomes getting to know characters though interviewing them.
So Devon was like the immediate obvious choice. Not only did he resemble him enough, but when he auditioned, it was like “This guy can hold my interest for an hour and a half, two hours I could watch this guy.” He didn’t audition with the Barack Obama accent or anything. I was just like “Do an American voice.” So it was really just about charisma. Then we ended up bringing in the Obama accent, bringing in the mannerisms gradually, but that was never really important to me.
Capone: Have you ever met Barack Obama before?
VG: Nope, I haven't. But he emails me every day [laughs]. I just haven't given him money yet.
Capone: Do you have hopes that he’ll see this at some point, and how do you hope he responds to it?
VG: I just hope that he gets the movie and appreciates it. That’s all. He’s a public figure who represents a lot. I don’t know him as a person, so it’s hard for me to worry that much about what he thinks, but it is his story, so to me, it’s really important. I would love if he liked it and got it, and that we weren’t far off. I hope that we nailed it at its essence.
Capone: How conscious and careful were you at the screenplay level not to telescope the man he would become?
VG: I think that there are certain things that are probably true that would feel like “Oh, you’re telegraphing to the future.” So that’s always the conflict. There was talk about him like wanting to be president during that time. It’s not even in the movie. It would feel unrealistic and silly, right? But I’ve heard rumors of even some of the bartenders at a bar calling him “Mr. President” because the way he spoke. But a lot of it’s hearsay. There are a few points where you can see the roots of something—the conversation about change while he’s watching the Ed Koch debate—that’s definitely one.
But at the end of the day, I just really wanted to keep it subtle. My hope is you forgot that it’s Barack Obama in the movie, and you got interested in this guy named Barry, and that Barry is actually a universal character, an archetype and someone you can get behind. Yeah, I think it’s important to have at least one conversation about politics seeing that he was a political science major, but the reality is a lot of people remember him as somebody who was a writer and a poet. And if you read letters that he wrote to his girlfriends in college, he was talking about T. S. Eliot and probably sounding a lot more pretentious than most of us want to believe.
Yeah, we just tried to put little snippets in it. The thing is we are obsessed with extremes. So it’s like “I hear he was a huge pot head.” It’s like “No, I think he smoked pot.” “I heard he was a ladies man.” “No, he had a few girlfriends but he wasn’t like a player or something like that.” We keep wanting to figure out where he belongs because we want to put him in a box too. We want our leaders to have these like epic beginnings and myths around him. But at the end of the day, he was living in extraordinary circumstances in New York in ’81 in his background, but in his heart, he was a regular kid wanting to do the right thing and figure out where he belongs and what his duties to society were.
I think there are a lot of things that are in it: the kid grew up in Indonesia. He went to Bali. Part of his life was around a Muslim and Hindu environment. He carries around a Ganesh in his pocket. All of a sudden, you’re like “Wait, who is this person?” He has all these influences, and he’s not just one thing. So there’s so much more than just a political stance when it comes to what to make of this person, and increasingly the next generation of our world, of America, will have a similar variety of influences and backgrounds and not being defined as one thing will be the norm pretty soon.
Capone: Vikram, congratulations on this, and best of luck. Thank you so much for talking.
