A Texan’s nightmare turns into ‘Antebellum’
It began with a nightmare. Several years ago, African American film director/writer Gerard Bush had a bad dream about being enslaved. “It was something that felt ancestral for me,” he says now. “The dream, the nightmare I had felt otherworldly.”
The feelings of horror and dread stayed with him long after waking and he channeled them into a short story that bloomed into “Antebellum,” the featurefilm debut from Bush (who grew up in Houston) and his creative and life partner, Christopher Renz. The movie with a twist, starring Janelle Monae as a woman hellbent on escaping her enslavement from an especially vicious Confederate plantation, will be available through videoon-demand outlets such as Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Vudu, and cable and satellite providers starting today.
“If this would have been an idea that we would have come up with on a whiteboard or something, I don’t know that we would have pursued it because I think that it was so provocative,” Bush said in a Zoom interview. “But then within the framework of how it was seeded, it felt like that was what we were supposed to do.”
The film feels at odds with how Bush and Renz broke into the business. In 2009, the pair launched an ad agency in Miami’s sleek, upscale Design District that created campaigns for brands such as Porsche, Harry Winston, Smirnoff Ice and Vogue. But the 2012 Trayvon Martin case, in which 17-year-old African American Martin from Miami was shot and killed by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Fla., altered their career trajectory.
“We pivoted completely with what we were doing,” Renz says. “Neither of us were happy selling Champagne. We started working with Harry Belafonte’s foundation, Sankofa, Amnesty International, Priorities USA, Hillary’s campaign.”
Bush adds, “It was (Florida Democratic Congresswoman) Debbie Wasserman Schultz who came to our office and we spent three hours with her and she asked us what we could do to activate Black voters for the (2014) midterm elections. So that was our first big entryway into this work.”
Since then Bush and Renz became known for their video activism, such as the 2017 antipolice violence public service announcement “Against the Wall,” starring Michael B. Jordan, Danny Glover and Michael K. Williams. They also made music videos for the likes of Jay-z and Maxwell.
Moving into movies
But the two long had been wanting to make a narrative, feature-length film.
“We thought about feature films the third day that we worked together,” Bush says. “I had this idea about a short story to write about aliens and then we were going to turn that story into a script.”
But it was the script for “Antebellum,” completed in February 2018, that opened the Hollywood
doors. Renz says it was an easy sell, even though around the same time “Game of Thrones” creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff were being roasted on social media for announcing in 2017 that their next HBO show would also be a slavery story with a twist.
“Confederate” was set to be a speculative-fiction drama set in an alternative world where the South had seceded from the Union and slavery continued to exist in modern North America. The series was never produced and was officially canceled in 2019.
Still, Bush expects “Antebellum” to divide audiences. “That (the ‘Confederate’ controversy) actually inspired us to move forward,” Bush said. “It’s the policing of art that we find exhausting.
“We are in this place where some of it has become so milquetoast, so as not to offend. We’re watching these movies that are distracting us and making us believe that a superhero is coming from another planet with a long cape to save us from ourselves. When ultimately it’s only us who can save us.
“Good art is meant to divide, good art is meant to catalyze a conversation and hopefully activate people out of complacency
into real action. So, for us, because of our social-justice background and because we’ve been engaged in the work for a decade, we have the pedigree and the clearance and the integrity to create a story like this.”
“Antebellum” is landing at a time when the topic of race is at the forefront of the cultural conversation.
“It may feel really prescient or make Christopher and I seem unrealistically prophetic. But it really isn’t because of the work that we were doing for the past 10 years,” Bush says. “We could set our watch to the fact that this day was coming: the conversation on race in America, as it relates to Black people.”
Bush says “Antebellum” doesn’t necessarily divide audiences along racial lines as might be expected. “It’s not so much about Black and white as it is about the degree of left to right,” Bush says. “There are people within my own Black community who have a very specific idea about never wanting to see slavery. In my mind, I refuse to participate as a co-conspirator in the erasure of our own history.”
Working together
It might seem strange to some for a film to have two directors working as a team — moviemaking is collaborative but is often portrayed as being one person’s singular vision — though certainly the likes of the Coen brothers make it work.
“On set, we are physically together almost every moment,” says Renz. “Just because you don’t want the costume designer pulling one of us (aside) and asking a question and the other one is, ‘Oh, what’s going on?’ ””
Bush adds, “It should be noted that Christopher and I are life partners, as well as work partners. We’ve been together for 12 years, we speak a telepathic shorthand and we both require tremendous solitude in the writing process. Luckily for us, I’m a morning person and Christopher’s nocturnal. I’ll write from 7 a.m. until a little bit after lunch; Christopher will write from, it can be from six o’clock at night until 3:30 in the morning. We read and edit each other’s pages and we delegate.”
Bush and Renz are already working on their next film, “Rapture,” which the movieindustry site The Wrap described as “a mind-bending nightmare of biblical proportions in which a family is torn apart by warring beliefs and must come together to unravel the mystery around the sudden vanishing of the global population.” It has been picked up for distribution by Lionsgate who are also handling “Antebellum.”
Though having left Houston in 1992 and now living in Los Angeles, Bush says he still carries Houston with him.
“It’s in my blood because I think, for me, it was so crucial in shaping my mindset,” he says. “Because my parents were from East Texas, from this small town called Marshall. So they moved to the big city of Houston. ”
Then something took place that had a big impact on him. “My mom joined (the African American social organization) Jack and Jill, she became the treasurer of the chapter,” he says. “That was so instrumental because I was surrounded by white folks (at school) and it was good because on the weekends there were other Black kids like me and we could hang out, learn about each other and learn about our culture.”