Lessons in Loving
Aussie actor Joel Edgerton tells Stephanie Bunbury why his latest film reflects the need for his compatriots to look at racism.
Richard Loving, a quiet bricklayer from a small town, was in bed with his wife in the middle of the night when he was woken by a torch shining in his face. The local sheriff – a man he knew – was standing by the bed with two deputies. ‘‘Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?’’ a voice demanded. Mildred Loving, also awake, replied: ‘‘I’m his wife.’’
It was the wrong response. He was white, she was black. This was Virginia in 1958. Under state law, their marriage was invalid. The Lovings were hauled out of bed and thrown into the local lock-up, then taken before a judge, charged with miscegenation. They were given a choice: divorce or leave Virginia for 25 years. They left.
Nine years later, after the American Civil Liberties Union took up their case, the Supreme Court ruled in their favour under the Constitution and the antimiscegenation legislation in 16 states became unenforceable.
When he first read the script for Loving, director Jeff Nichols wondered why he had never heard of these people. He grew up in the backblocks of Texas; this was his kind of country. Then he watched an HBO documentary about them made by Nancy Buirski – a producer of this film – in 2011 called The Loving Family and using network footage of the couple who nobody thought was interesting at the time.
In a way, he could see why. Richard Loving reminded Nichols of his grandfather. ‘‘I could sit with my grandfather for an hour and maybe share four words and it didn’t feel awkward at all,’’ he says. ‘‘That was just the way he related to the world, and I think that’s Richard. It explains so much about why they were not part of this movement.’’
These were quiet, modest people without much education. Neither of them wanted to be on camera or speak in court. Nichols’ whole approach to the film, he says, was to avoid anything histrionic that would undermine that quietness. ‘‘I had the story in front of me.’’ There were no burning crosses or shoot-outs. ‘‘It was a psychological torture: the thought that you could look down the road and the least of your problems would be a police car approaching, the worst would be something else. To have to live with that, day in and day out.’’
Joel Edgerton, who plays Richard Loving, revels in that restraint. ‘‘There is this build-up of weight of oppression that builds up in this movie so when it is finally released at the end, there is the swirl of feelings of frustration, anger and injustice and anger that surrounded this story,’’ he says. ‘‘There is always the temptation to try and drag this story closer to Hollywood by creating fake scenarios, but Jeff decided to stick to the truth.’’
Edgerton says he saw direct parallels with Australia now. ’’There was a definite resonance with my own country, particularly with the right to gay marriage and the latency of under-the surface racism, which is something I think we really need to talk about,’’ he says. ’’A film like this can really illuminate that.’’
Not least, he says, because the court victory was ‘‘a massive tectonic shift in civil rights without bloodshed and without extreme violence’’. Loving looked like what he was: a Southern redneck. One of his lawyers even said he looked more like the opposition than a poster boy for racial tolerance. With his hair shaved back and bleached, Edgerton looks very much like him.
‘‘Richard was very much a man who I think was frustrated by his own limitations,’’ he says. ‘‘He felt something was wrong but he didn’t know how to navigate that. The fear was that his reluctance to be filmed or photographed would be construed as shame about his experience with Mildred. But it was the opposite of that. I think he felt ashamed of his inability to protect her.’’
Edgerton had to master an archaic, clipped Southern accent that has all but disappeared to replace his normal Australian accent.
Ruth Negga, who was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Mildred, had an Ethiopian father but grew up in Ireland. Nichols says he saw an advantage in using actors from outside the United States. ‘‘I think often when the American South is depicted, everyone sounds like they’re in a Tennessee Williams play, which is not appropriate,’’ he says. ‘‘So it makes sense to go through the process you go through with an actor from another country, where you go through the mechanics of acquiring an accent.’’
A few years after the Lovings had left Virginia, as the battle for civil rights became a daily headline, Mildred resolved to fight back. She didn’t know much about politics, but she knew Senator Robert Kennedy was opposed to racial discrimination, so she wrote to him. Kennedy not only replied, but referred the case to the American Civil Liberties Union, whose lawyers took up the Lovings as a banner case. Four years later, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in their favour.
More than laws, however, Loving is a story about love. Richard and Mildred stuck by each other and looked after each other, even as they were cast out. Arguably, the nation was won over to their cause by a Life magazine spread that showed them sitting on their couch, laughing. After making Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings two years ago, Edgerton says, he knew he wanted to make something with this kind of submerged intensity.
‘‘Sometimes a movie teaches you what you crave. What I often crave is an intimate, personal experience I can relate to,’’ he says. ‘‘This was a very rich experience. I can only hope that every actor would get to experience what I did, but also that I get to experience it again. I’m worried that this is the top of the mountain.’’ – Fairfax ● Loving (M) is now screening in select cinemas.