Hometown gets a starring role
‘Blindspotting’ will have viewers seeing Oakland, Calif., in a different light
O akland, Calif., is getting a lot of love from the movies these days.
When Black Panther wasn’t fighting bad guys in Wakanda or South Korea, he was taking care of neighborhood kids from Oakland. Boots Riley’s critically lauded absurdist comedy “Sorry to Bother You” is set in a funhousemirror Oakland where human-horse hybrids are a thing. Now comes “Blindspotting,” the most grounded in today’s reality of the three, where Oakland — a city undergoing seismic waves of gentrification like much of the Bay Area — is as much a character as any of the people on screen.
“Blindspotting,” a Sundance hit directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada that opens in Houston on Friday on a rising tide of critical hosannas, is the brainchild of its stars and writers, Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, friends who grew up in Oakland, though they now call Los Angeles home. They play best buddies Collin and Miles, who work as movers — an occupation that allows them to weave in and out of the fabric of the city — but find their friendship and social circle tested by both the changing environment and a police shooting that Diggs’ character, Collin, witnesses.
The film is their first feature as writers — Diggs is best known as an actor, appearing in the original Broadway edition of “Hamilton” — but it’s an idea they’d been wrestling with for years.
“Around the time that we were beginning to conceive of the film was when the Oscar Grant shooting happened,” Casal says during a phone interview, referring to the 2009 killing of African-American Grant by a white police officer in Oakland that became the basis for the film “Fruitvale Station.” “A lot of the conversation we were having was how a shooting like that was affecting the city, less trying to focus on the shooting itself but more on what does that do to a community.
“The early catalyst and conversations around police shootings evolved over the last decade in different ways, but we were always coming back to how does this shooting affect two characters who (would be) our windows into a changing landscape of Oakland.”
But don’t make the mistake of thinking the two men in the story, Collin and Miles, and their cross-racial friendship are just Daveed and Rafael transferred to screen. “They are sort of compilations of people we grew up around and stories from friends,” Diggs says. “They’re not us, but their dynamic between each other is based on our own. The chemistry is ours, but the specificity of them is just a gumbo of people we grew up with.” Met in high school There’s a lot of chemistry there.
The two first ran across each other in high school but didn’t really start hanging out until after college when each was involved in hip-hop. “I came back (to Oakland), and Rafael was running a studio in north Oakland,” Diggs, 36, recalls. “Some mutual friends played our music for each other and sort of set up a play date in the studio. I went over there, and we stayed up all night and made songs. And that was it for me. I was like, ‘This is who I work with now.’ ”
“What you get when you collaborate with your closest friend is you want to see them win and you want the project to win,” Casal, 32, adds.
Diggs’ “Hamilton” breakthrough happened without Casal, but he says it still all came down to friendship. “That was another friend of mine; Lin (Manuel Miranda) and I had been friends for eight or nine years at that point by the time we started workshopping ‘Hamilton,’ ” Diggs says. “He asked me to come read his play, and I said, ‘Yeah.’
“Three or four years later, I won a Tony. None of those were intended consequences. The intended consequences were, ‘My friend wrote something that I think is hot, and will you come read it?’ If you’re an artist, we all have been involved with or have friends make things that we thought were worthy a thousand times and nobody cares. We assumed this wouldn’t be any different.” Gentrification nation
Even though Oakland is now on screen in multiplexes all over the world, Diggs and Casal aren’t worried about their movie helping to make the city even more gentrified than it already is.
“I don’t know if you can have much more,” Diggs says with a laugh.
“What may happen is people who have recently moved there may get a different understanding of what Oakland is from the people who have been there a long time,” Casal says. “It’s not going to slow down gentrification, and I don’t know that’s the point or the job of (the movie), but what is problematic about gentrification is how little it acknowledges the people it’s happening on top of, and this is a story about those people.
“If people coming into Oakland or Detroit or Atlanta, or any other place where this is happening at a rapid pace, can have some understanding of who their neighbors are and what their neighborhood is, that’s good. With empathy and understanding comes respect. A lot of gentrification is about a lack of respect. If anything, I hope it moves the narrative in the right direction.”
In addition to bringing up issues of gentrification, “Blindspotting” offers three-dimensional portraits of people of color, something that is becoming less of a rarity than it used to be. “We have a greater variety (of images),” Diggs says. “That’s what it’s really all about. This is also thanks to the opening-up of houses for content. You feel it so palpably in L.A. now, compared to five or six years ago. People are so content-hungry because there are so many outlets, they are having trouble filling them.
“If you’re a filmmaker of color, every time you display a black person, you don’t have to feel like they are responsible for the entire story of the community,” he continues. “You can have an individual. There’s enough variety for us to be specific and interesting and not have everybody be concerned with the well-being of an entire race.”
No matter how “Blindspotting” ends up faring at the box office, it probably won’t be the last audiences hear from Diggs and Casal.
“We’ve had so many ideas for so long, and now we’re getting the opportunity to put them in front of people and put them in development,” Casal says. “We’re going to be doing more of what we’ve been doing, except now it has eyes.”
Diggs laughs then says, “If people let us, you will get sick of us.”