The Big Picture - Yance Ford Made ‘Strong Island’ to Face Down the Past | The Big Picture (Ep. 50)

Episode Date: February 19, 2018

Ringer Editor-in-Chief Sean Fennessey speaks with Academy Award-nominated documentarian Yance Ford about making Netflix’s ‘Strong Island,’ a personal film about the tragic murder of his brother, William, and the larger implications in the story about segregation, race, violence, and power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The morning after Trayvon Martin was killed, my social media feed was literally like alive with people who were saying we need this story now more than ever, or I can't wait for Strong Island. I'm Sean Fennessy, editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show with some of the most exciting filmmakers in the world. Yancey Ford shows all of himself in Strong Island. For the documentary filmmaker's first movie, Ford returned to the most traumatic moment in his family history, the 1992 murder of his brother William and the unresolved feelings around that tragedy. Ford, his mother, his brother's friends, and figures in local law enforcement tell the story in a powerful, intimate, and unflinching way. It's a powerful film with hugely important implications about segregation, race, violence, and power in America. I talked with Ford about the more than 10-year process

that led to Strong Island, his Oscar nomination for Best Documentary, and where to go next after such a personal film. Here's Yancey Ford. I'm delighted to be joined today by Academy Award nominee Yancey Ford, director of the powerful Strong Island. Yancey, thanks for coming in. Thanks for having me, Sean. Good morning. So Yancey, some people know about your film, which is as personal a story, I think, as could possibly be told. But before we go too far into Strong Island, I do want to hear a little bit about where you were in your career when you decided to make this movie. Sure. You know, you were working on POV for PBS. What were you doing on that show and what led you to make this film that is radically different?

Sure. I was a programmer, essentially. You know, in the European model, you would call me a commissioning editor. But I ran the open submissions for POV. I started working there in 2002. Sort of in 2006, I went to the Sundance Film Festival and was that I was thinking about my next career moves with this story in the back of my head, right? And I was thinking about, well, do I want to work in festivals next or do I want to stick with PBS? And, you know, what does my future as a programmer look like if I want it to be as a programmer? And then, you know, there is, of course, this other thing. And I had a conversation with a friend at the festival, and I said, you know, I totally get why, you know, participating in curating the culture, right, and helping, you know, these really important institutions like POV and, you know, Sundance or other festivals make decisions about their programming is really appealing.

But I have my own story to tell. And by the time I finished explaining to that friend what the story was, like I literally told her at that moment, like in the middle of a loud, you know, restaurant in Park City, essentially her response to me was, what are you waiting for? And, you know, that was the kind of kick in the pants that I really needed to understand that, you know, there's only a few people about, you know, what I think of, at least for me personally, is an obligation to turn this first-person experience into something that other people can actually learn from. You know, the injustice in the criminal justice system, right, and the broken criminal justice system, this began to start feeling and sounding like taglines, and people tune that stuff out eventually. That's why there's not been any change,

right, because a lot of people just get to tune it out. They don't have to intersect, like taglines, and people tune that stuff out eventually. That's why there's not been any change, right? Because a lot of people just get to tune it out. They don't have to interact with it. They don't know what it's like to be stopped and frisked or to be profiled while driving, none of that stuff. So deciding to go ahead and make Strong Island was really about knowing that I could take this thing that had happened to my family and use it to show folks what the criminal justice system actually looks like when it's broken, right?

What it means when race gets confused with probable cause or reasonable fear. And so that's really how I came to the decision that I would continue working at POV and start working on the film on nights, weekends, holidays, vacation days. And I did that for about four years. And then in 2012, I left POV to work on the film full-time. I walked away from a really cool job, but I don't regret it because it's what I needed to do to actually move into a place where I could focus on the film full-time. Since people have seen the film, it's been clear that it is reflecting and refracting

a lot of news that we've seen maybe over the course of the last five years. Obviously, it has a massive historical scope to it. But in 2006, it wasn't quite the same tenor of conversation. Did you know at that moment when you had that conversation with your friend that the story was as much about your life as it was about the experience of thousands of people? You know, I really, I had a sense of it, but my sense was really connected to the, you know, that very first moment. I'm not sure if, you know, we can all remember back before a time when we had social media, before there were cell phone cameras, before there was Twitter and Facebook. I can hardly remember. I know,

I can hardly remember either, but my brother was killed two weeks before the verdict in the beating, in the case of the police officers who beat Rodney King. And the Rodney King tape was the first time in our sort of, with the exception of things like the Zapruder film, the Rodney King tape was the first time, you know, as a nation, where we looked at the same bit of footage and either took something away differently than the person who could sit right next to us or the person who worked across the hall from us. But it was also the first time when we were told

that what we saw on something, what we saw on tape wasn't actually the only thing happening, right? There was something else, quote unquote. And in the defense of those police officers, you know, that something else that was being alluded to was the inherent danger in Rodney King, right? But, you know, there's something else that that people in my community saw and that I saw was, you know, the the unchecked ability of white society and white authority figures to, you know, essentially take the life or attempt to take the life or, you know, subdue with with force or near deadly force any black person who posed a threat. And so, you know, I entered the film, you know, sort of, you know, understanding that the backdrop of the months after William's death was the LA, you know, uprising or the LA riots, depending on your point of view, and the national conversation around race that, you know, that those events sparked. Unfortunately, six years later, Trayvon Martin was shot and killed, right? So in that span of time, I went from not actually

having this zeitgeist moment to, you know, the morning after Trayvon Martin was killed, my social media feed was literally like alive with people who were saying we need this story now more than ever or I can't wait for Strong Island or, you know, just people who were like this is another case of, you know, self-defense or, you know, the fact of stand-your-ground laws, like being able to provoke someone when the police tell you not to get out of your car, and there were all these mitigating factors in the Zimmerman case, right? But the mitigating factors didn't matter in the end. And so when I saw that and I heard the narrative of fear that was being told about essentially, you know,

a teenage boy by an adult man. I realized that so very little had changed. I mean, I knew it, you know, like a lot of black people simply know things based on their day-to-day experience. But when that case exploded into the news and I saw his parents, you know, there was so much about his parents that reminded me of my own. And there was so much about his rhetoric of self-defense that reminded me of the rhetoric and, you know, in my brother's situation that I knew at least with that one case, it would resonate. More and more, there were incidents after incidents where we would watch literally unarmed black people die. And by the time we released the film at Sundance last year, it was with this sort of wallpaper of dead black and brown people who were all unarmed. And the ones who sort of got out of these situations without losing their lives, like the guy who was taking care of an autistic man who got shot, you know, like complying with orders, you know, still shot. You know, by the time we got to Sundance last year, it was clear that, you know, people were on some level tuning out what they were seeing, right? And one of the things that I actually

think about a lot is how desensitized we're becoming as a society to actually watching people die on social media, right? That's what happened with the Eric Garner tape. I don't know about you, but I watched Eric Garner lose his life on that tape. Yeah, it's staggering. It's staggering. And then to see people sort of poke him and say,

come on, stop playing around. It's like, you know, you can pantomime this sort of concern for the cameras because you know you're being recorded, but you also know he's dead. And so the ability of people to divorce their action from the consequences of their actions, all of that is part of how I knew on some level that Strong Island would resonate. I certainly didn't have a sense of how strongly it would resonate. I know that my mom is an incredible character, and I knew that his friends had not had a chance to testify in the way that was transparent for them what was going on, and had been asked a very narrow set of questions. And so when we decided to ask a much broader set of questions, I knew that there was something there.

I want to talk specifically about the composition of the whole film because I think you could have, if you were a different filmmaker, you could have made a different choice and woven in the story of Trayvon Martin into your piece. You could have shown this sort of cascading effect that's happened across the last five or six years in America. But instead, it's extremely focused and it is highly specific and highly personal. Was there ever a time when you wanted to make this a broader piece, or were you content and comfortable to keep it sort of representative and metaphorical in its way? You know, I'm the kind of storyteller who believes that the more specific you get,

the more universal the story becomes. And so by doing really simple things like centering each character in the frame, it communicates to the audience that this is the person that you're talking to now. And what matters is the moment that you're in now, not the moment that happened before, not the moment that's to come. But when we were shooting the film, I wanted to have this kind of authority come from the characters themselves. I never thought about making it broader. I never thought about bringing in the news. I never thought about diluting my brother's story in that way, because I felt like my brother's story in total sort of held both the history and the past of racialized violence in the United States and in a way that his case was prologue for the future, you know, like past is prologue,

right? So if you look at the narrative of the Rodney King beating, and then you look at my brother's case, and you can see that there are similarities there. And then you look at the cases that follow William, right? And just the high profile cases, not the cases that go underreported or unreported or that have happened in absolute vacuums and silence, right? Just two days ago in Los Angeles, we had a case just like this that is largely underreported, police officers, yeah, murder young man unarmed. I hadn't, see, I had no idea. And I've been here, I've been here for days, right? I knew that the line of history and this narrative would run through William's story and would run

through the film in a way that connected it to the past and to the present and unfortunately to the future. So, you know, it was really easy to focus just on the figures in this story and just on the characters in this story because, you know, by doing so, they become so universal. My mother and my family become almost like anyone else's family. This is a story that takes place in the suburbs, right, of a black family, civil servants, you know, striving for the American dream. And, you know, just boom. My brother's murder, like, blows their family apart, you know, blows the dream. And, you know, just boom, my brother's murder, like blows, blows their, their family apart, you know, blows the dream, you know, to smithereens. And then the film becomes about what happens after, you know, I also felt like it was important to have everyone's character have an

arc, right? So my father's arc is complete, We see what happens to him. My mother's arc, you know, is unexpected, a turn as her character takes in the film. You know, we followed that unexpected turn to its conclusion because that's her arc. But it was really important to be very, very focused on this one family. But I think in doing so, we actually made a really universal film. You also have an arc. I read you said you set 10 rules for yourself before you made the film. One of those rules was that you would not appear in the film. And yet you are, you know, a core, a central element of telling the story. Why did you change your mind?

Yeah, why did I change my mind? Well, there are two things about that. I think that on one hand, I was sort of fooling myself when I made those 10 rules. And there are some things that I really stuck to with those 10 rules. But Yancey will never be on screen was rule number one. And I think that I just needed to lie to myself. I had to. Otherwise, I would not have been able to sit for those interviews.

I would not have been able to say, no, I don't want to know my questions in advance. I would not have been able to say things I'd never said before. I wouldn't have been able to, you know, to contradict myself, to be wrong, to share, you know, secrets. And there's a huge secret in the film that I reveal. And in one way, you know, the reveal is about, you know, the withholding of information, you know. so it just at a certain point became too great a pull. And my character, you know, the arc that my character also has in the film is as important as all the rest of the arcs. And I was resisting that because I had made the decision to shoot myself in extreme close-up, right? And I did that because, unlike my mother and the characters, you know, the other characters in the film, who you can really read, right?

I've had a lifetime of people misinterpreting the expression on my face, right? Interesting. So, you know, one of the things that I did with Alan Jacobson was to, you know, talk about this real, to talk about this close-up and how close we could get because I didn't want to be misunderstood. And I knew that in order for my face to be legible, in order for the emotions of my character to be legible,

that we would have to collapse, literally collapse the distance and get the audience as close to my face as we possibly could. There are a couple of scenes in the film that feature you having a phone conversation with someone who has information that you are seeking. And there's one in particular that is really overwhelming, unvarnished, visceral. And it's as much like a filmmaking feat as it is a personal experience. You know, it feels like a horror movie at one point.

And I'm curious what it's like to be essentially editing that footage, what it's like to be seeing yourself responding in that way after the event has already happened. You know, how did you reflect on it when you were making the movie? Yeah, you know, editing the film was probably the, it was really difficult for a lot of reasons. Watching myself as a character go through specific moments, you know, we had the transcript in front of us. So we would watch that scene.

Sometimes I would ask the editor, Janus Bilska-Fjansen, I would ask him to mute the audio because I couldn't actually listen to myself on that phone call. And, you know, in the aftermath of that phone call, I call my partner. She is, you know, obviously my rock and my lifeline in that moment and in life. That's one of the examples of a choice that was difficult to live with in the edit. There were other things in the edit that were also difficult to watch. And, you know, we referred to my character as YF. You know, we referred to all the characters by their initials so that I wouldn't have to keep saying my mom or Barbara. My brother was WFJR.

My father was WFSR. My sister was, you know, her initials. So there were things that we used as mechanisms to make it easier for me to essentially watch and rewatch and watch and rewatch the evolution and then the deconstruction of my family. Was it difficult to compel your family members and your brother's friends to participate? Not at all. They were willing participants. They were willing participants. I think, you know, it was really intense when I first reached out to Kevin. I hadn't spoken to him in probably over 13 or 14 years. And his only hesitation was in thinking that my family somehow blamed him for what happened to William.

And I, of course, was scared that he didn't want to talk to me because we had fallen out of touch. You know, time and life has a way of pulling people apart after things like this. But once, you know, everyone sort of, you know, realized that all I wanted was their experience of William. All I wanted to know was how they knew William, who they knew William to be, and what their intersection with his, you with his shooting and the case afterward was. Everyone sort of relaxed because they knew that I wasn't there to judge them, that I was there to ask them questions and to ask them to be honest with me. And that's what they all did. So a lot of times when we read about stories like what happened to your brother, they're happening in places like Ferguson, in Florida, in Minnesota.

I am from Long Island. And so this was a fascinating way to see it. I mean, I know CI. I played baseball there many times. Yeah. So, you know, to see that vision of the suburbs, it is very familiar to me and the way that you tell it. And I thought the amazing disparity between your

experience growing up and your parents' experience and the way that your mother saw Long Island and the way that you guys experienced it was incredible to me. How do you feel about that place now? Sure. You know, Central Islip is a really conflicted place for me. It will always be my hometown. But, you know, the fact is that, you know, my parents' American dream really came to its final conclusion recently when the house that we moved into, the only house I've ever lived in as a child and then as a young adult, recently went to public auction. Really? Because like many families in the suburbs, my parents' home fell into foreclosure. And that's because,

you know, they made the choice to send their kids to parochial school. And if you check the, you know, the state ratings in New York, centralized slip is still toward the bottom of all of the school districts in New York State. There is a systemic problem in the education system in CI. But... Yeah, there's that echo of high taxes, bad public schools in the film that was resonant. You know, I could hear people saying that growing up. Yeah, it's crazy. It literally is, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a year to under-educate generations

of kids. And, you know, my parents, as you could see, you know, the only gift that my widowed grandmother, who never remarried, was able to give her three daughters was their education. And my parents were determined to do that as well. You know, in the aftermath of my father's death and, you know, in the years after William died, things became much harder for my mother and she did the best that she could. But at the end of the day, that suburban dream has really shattered, in total, shattered. You know, knowing the rates of foreclosure in Suffolk County and how many, you know, families can't afford to, you know, keep their homes

for different reasons. It's a complicated place. Let's talk a little bit about showing the film to people when it was done. I'm interested in the people that you're close to that saw it for the first time when it was completed, that were interviewed in the film, but then also what it was like to experience it with the public at Sundance and then later when it came to Netflix. How was that to show it to people? Sure.

So there was the sort of in you know, in progress showing, you know, with, you know, my producer, Jocelyn Barnes, and the whole Louverture Films team, as well as the, you know, co-producer, Sina Sorensen. We did work in progress screenings. And there are some folks like Rob Moss, who interviewed me, you know, and Cara Mertes, who hired me at POV, the folks at Sundance, Doc Fund, and a handful of other really close friends who I've leaned on for advice and guidance over the years who were really honest about the cut

and whose input really made the film stronger. Everyone's film is personal, but what is it like to get notes on a film that is this personal? You know, it's fine if you actually prepare yourself for it, right? So I was prepared. I never referred to myself as I, you know, and the people who gave us feedback, they were able to, you know,

sort of engage in kind of a funny code switching of referring to Yancey the character and then Yancey, right? So it was always Yancey the character. But, you know, when you're doing something and when you're sitting in front of the camera, you know, for six, seven, eight, you know, eight hours, you know that there's going to be a lot of conversation about you. And I was able to prepare myself for that. And, you know, I just, I sort of roll with it. My character is not flawless. My character is not meant to be flawless. But I've gotten to a place where it's, you know, sort of second nature by now.

I'm able to talk about it and talk about, you know, my character in the third person without taking anything personally. I first showed the film, I first shared the film, rather, with the folks who were in it, as well as everyone from the neighborhood that I grew up in. I literally hired a bus to bring everyone from Central Islip to the Walter Reed Theater during a new director's new films. And it was amazing to hear person after person. So it was sort of this mixture of, you know, theater of people who had seen it for the first time who didn't know me and a theater full of people who seen it for the first time who had known me since I was a child, but all of them

sort of having this same reaction, you know, like the, the number of thank yous that I got, which really don't belong to me alone. They belong to the people in the film, um, was really, was really incredible. And then with the Netflix effect, the multiplier that is Netflix, I've heard from people who my mother taught in the 1960s. I heard from people who were classmates of my parents in high school in South Carolina. I've heard from people who were former inmates at my mother's school on Rikers Island. I've heard from people who were former inmates at my mother's school on Rikers Island. I've heard from people who went to high school with my brother. I've heard from people who lost their own siblings who are from my hometown in incidences of police and the use of excessive force. picture was tasered to death in Florida. So, so what happened? You want to say it's a coincidence, but it's not a coincidence. Of course it's not. You want to say it's coincidental, but when you look at the, you know, when you look at the statistics and you look at, and you take a step back

and you look at the numbers and you crunch the data, of course, there's, he's not the only person in his prom picture who's dead. Of course he's not. And that kind of realization is really something that comes home when you're hearing from the people, you know, themselves. And that kind of realization is really something that comes home when you're hearing from the people, you know, themselves. So that has been an incredible experience and something that, you know, those responses will have to, you know, they'll have to become something, you know, once this whole, you know, ride is over and my life gets back to something resembling normal. You know, I have a lot of people to get back in touch with. You're still talking about the film and still engaged with

the film, but something like this, obviously across the span of your life, it's been decades, but you worked on it for 10 years. What was it like to close it and wrap it? Was it easy to be finished? Yeah, you know, I was really ready for the film to do its work. And I think that everyone, by the time, you know, that we were finished with the edit, you know, like, I let, this film left everyone wrung out, you know, the number of hours that we shot, the numbers of hours that we worked in, you know, in the edit, like we worked six days a week, you know, 10 or 11 hours a day in Copenhagen. You know, just the number of hours that, you know, people spent, you know, Jocelyn would come over to Copenhagen at least once every other month. And the amount of time that I spent away from my family, you know, like it was really obvious that we were all sort of pushing this rock

towards something special and that we knew if we could finish it and really nail it, that it would actually go out and do the work. And I'm really glad that it actually has turned out to be the case because to see the reaction of people after they've seen the film and to talk to people at screenings, to have people share more often than I would like to admit. Even at some of these official screenings for the academy, people share that they've lost loved ones to homicide, right? So one of the things that's become really, really obvious is that we are a country awash in violence, and we don't talk about it. A silence has descended upon the survivors of institutional violence in such a way that on the surface it would seem that institutional violence is something that only affects a small group of people.

But when you get just below that surface, you realize how endemic it is to America. And it's, you know, something that we just need to fucking figure out. The collision of art and activism is a frequent topic. And I wonder where you stand on that. Do you feel like you are presently an activist in addition to being a documentary filmmaker? Or do you separate the two things? I separate the two things because I think that being an effective activist and being a good filmmaker aren't always overlapping skills, right? And so I recognize that I'm a good filmmaker and don't necessarily think that I'm an effective activist. other issues and in other places where my brother's case and how it shines a light on the dysfunction of our criminal justice system, where his case connects to other issues.

I think that there are people who are more and better equipped to speak to those issues than I am. But I think that I have made a tool that will help the activists who are doing the best and the most effective work advance the cause of criminal justice reform. And I'm really proud of the film because of that. What does the Oscar nomination mean to you? Gosh. You know, the Oscar nomination is huge.

It's just huge. To have so much work by so many people to be, you know, recognized by our peers is just incredibly humbling. You know, because the nominations are decided by incredibly humbling, you know, because the nominations are decided by the doc branch. And that just means everything to me. And it means so much to everybody on the team as well. I don't take it for granted. You know, like, I may not make another film again. Of course, I would like to. Of course, I plan to, right? But I may not ever be in this moment again. There are so many filmmakers who get, you know, one or two nominations or even one nomination and then they have a great body of work

but they never make it back to this moment. So none of that is lost on me. None of the, you know, the specialness of this moment and how, you know, it really validates the work of so many people that can't always be in these rooms with me. You know, Alan and JT and Jocelyn and Lou Vitour and, you know, Final Cut for Real and Sina and Janus and, you know, the PAs, you know, who, and all of the sound people and the assistant camera people in Boston and just, you know, there are so many people for

whom this Oscar nomination is incredibly, incredibly important and special that it's just – it really takes my breath away sometimes. Given the lifespan and scope of the film, how do you figure out what to do now? Sure, sure. Well, I am really anxious to move on to the next thing, not because I'm tired of Strong Island in any way, but because I think in some ways Strong Island doesn't need me anymore. Strong Island is out in the world doing its work, and it's going to continue to do its work. And I think that what the world needs is for me to continue to be my authentic self and for me to continue to make the kind of film

that I'm really interested and passionate about making. But no idea what that is yet? No, I have some ideas. I'm still trying to figure out this. I got to tell you, in addition to the weather like in LA in February, feeling like the summertime or the springtime in New York, I just, I don't know the LA,

like how do you talk about what's next? You know, like do you hedge on it do you do you not quite say what you're interested in talking about I mean I've got

a lot of ideas it sounds like you've taken to LA perfectly because that's what every filmmaker does

like well I have a lot of ideas but I'm not ready to share them yet that's a common answer

if anybody wants to talk to me about it I'm like I think my number is pretty easy to find

I think some people will find you maybe post Oscars I like to end every show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing that they've seen, so what is the last great thing that you have

seen? Gosh, the last great thing that I've seen? The 35mm restoration of When We Were Kings by Leon Gast at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. How did you respond to it when you saw it again?

I had never seen it on the big screen. I'd only ever seen it played off of VHS tape. This is the documentary about the Rumble in the Jungle. The documentary about the Rumble in the Jungle. So it's Ali and all of his Ali-ness and George Foreman and the entire music festival that happens around them leading up to this fight in Conchessa. And it was glorious.

It was just glorious. And listening to Leon Gast talk about shooting that film and then to find out that he's working on the sequel with all of the footage that didn't make it into When We Were Kings. I didn't know that. Just completely blew my mind. Oh, that's a great one. He shared that, you know, he shared that at the Q&A with Marshall Curry. And I was just so

happy because it's one of my absolute favorite films of all time. And just seeing it in 35 and seeing just how incredible a moment in time that was and how larger than life Ali was. It was just remarkable.

It's a remarkable film. Yancey, Strong Island is also a remarkable film. Congrats on that and thanks for doing the show today. Thank you, Sean. Thanks again for listening to today's show. On Friday, I'll be back with a new episode about one of my favorite movies of the year, Annihilation. The movie's writer and director Alex Gar, came by to talk about his stunning sci-fi movie and a whole lot more. So keep an eye out for that and hit me at SeanFantasy on

Twitter to let me know who you want to hear on the show next. And stay tuned in the next few weeks. We'll have an Oscars preview episode of The Big Picture, a bonus show featuring the best conversations that Bill Simmons and I have had with some of this year's nominees. And tune into The Ringer throughout the rest of the month and on Oscar night when I'll be co-hosting a special streaming after party breaking down all the night's action. See you soon.

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