Oakland gets day in the spotlight
“Blindspotting” is third movie to feature city in 2018
Something’s up with Oakland, Calif., and moviewise it’s working. This year three utterly different and bracingly effective films dealing with race, heroism, cowardice and ambition owe their personalities and much of their identities to the California city longtime resident Gertrude Stein once dismissed, at the legendary end of a typical run-on sentence, as the place where “there is no there there.”
“Blindspotting,” opening Friday, furnishes the latest proof to the contrary. The rollicking portrait of a friendship and a frantically gentrifying city completes the 2018 trifecta begun by “Black Panther” (set, in part, in director Ryan Coogler’s hometown) and continued by Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You,” which in its way is no less fantastical than the Marvel smash.
Like “Sorry to Bother You,” “Blindspotting” made a big noise at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The co-writers and costars, Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, met at Berkeley High School. Diggs, now 36 and a Tony Award winner for “Hamilton,” says his life was “saved in many ways” by spoken-word and poetry performance; the same was true of Casal, now 32 and, like Diggs, a multi-hyphenate who raps, records, performs, writes, produces and acts.
They’ve been working on “Blindspotting” for a decade. Diggs’ participation in “Hamilton” set the wheels in motion; their story involves three wild days just as Collin (Diggs) is finishing up his parole. Collin’s moving company co-worker and longtime best friend, Miles (Casal), is a loyal but reckless fuse, perpetually looking for a match, comically enraged by the
fast-gentrifying Oakland all around him.
“Blindspotting” races from incident to incident, provocation to topical flashpoint, dealing with police abuses, multidirectional racism, code-switching and identity politics. The film was directed, with fantastic verve, by first-time feature filmmaker Carlos Lopez Estrada, whose videos with Diggs and Casal prepared him well for this project.
Diggs and Casal came through Chicago recently to host a screening of the film.
The following is an edited transcript. Some highlights from our own interview:
The slam intro
“I was a senior when he was a freshman at Berkeley High,” Diggs says. “We met at a high school poetry slam. I thought he was very good. But then I left for college. We didn’t start working together until I came back in ’04. Mutual friends had been suggesting we hang out. Rafael was renting a studio by then, so I went over and we stayed up all night making songs. And we’ve been doing that ever since.”
The light turns on
Discovering the spoken-word poetry and performance scene flourishing in the Bay Area, says Casal, meant “finding that thing I was good at, something that felt good to do. I had so many questions growing up about why school was structured the way it was, and how our community was dealing with everything it was dealing with. Spoken word was a way to share ideas, and to hold court among your peers. We were just teenagers trying to figure ourselves out. In the competitive poetry world, I’d work all year, refine, refine, test things out. By 15, 16, I was doing independent study, working a retail job and teaching writing workshops at other high schools. Music and poetry was the light that turned on. It was my gateway- drug art form.”
Sound pretty
“I think it saved my life in a lot of real ways,” Diggs says, picking up the theme. Spoken word, he says, “that’s where I found my voice as a writer. The reason you teach a kid spoken word is that literally nobody gives a (rip) about what they have to say, unless they make it sound pretty. That line’s in the film; Collin says it at the end. It’s a trick. It’s a trick by which young people can go into a room and command authority. If you said the same thing in plain English, nobody would listen.”
The movie in their heads
Long before Diggs was in “Hamilton” on Broadway, and Casal was teaching three years at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the friends and collaborators began writing a movie for themselves in between music projects. “Essentially we wrote stories first,” says Diggs. “‘Oh, this would be a cool scene for the movie,’ you know. Some were blatantly comic, in the spirit of a raucous buddy picture; others, such as the scene when Miles’ son toys with a firearm, turn chillingly serious. “Sticking all those different scenes and moods on top on each other felt most honest,” says Diggs. “It feels true to the Bay Area, which was our North Star the whole time. And that feels true to me. I’ve never felt just one thing at a time. I don’t know if any of us do.”
Speed
“We’re writers and content creators of a certain generation,” says Casal. “We’re multi-hyphenate creators with particular attention spans. I think we have the capacity to take in a lot of tones and emotions at once, and a lot faster … we didn’t go to film school. So we don’t know the rules.”
Hip-hop musical elements
The “Blindspotting” script underwent significant changes over many years, while Casal and Diggs shopped it around. “There were a bunch of different versions,” says Diggs. “Some were way more verse-heavy, some to the point where they were almost from a musical. That idea’s threaded through there, still, but earlier versions were more overt about the soundscape becoming song. Once we landed this last draft, it became clear that Collin had to do his last speech in verse. And everything else in the movie had to justify that. The challenge was, how do you condition audiences? How do you make it feel natural? Where do we show the characters proficient with language?”
Mundane virtuosity
“I love a script with a lot of good throwaway lines,” says Casal. “There’s a line when Miles is walking out of the frame, and he says to Val (Janina Gavankar, who plays Collin’s ex-lover and the moving company’s office manager), ‘I’m as moved by your compliment as you are moved by an elliptical.’ It’s not a ‘button.’ It’s just thrown away. The thing about the Bay Area is that we treat virtuosity as mundane. Everything is just: Let’s move on, let’s not dwell on it. And that’s how the movie works.”
“Go” time
Eventually greenlighted by Snoot Productions, “Blindspotyoung ting” was filmed primarily in Oakland last year.
The film’s collaborative team bounced ideas around constantly, on the streets where they filmed, right up to the editing room.
The work was fast but remarkably smooth, says Casal. “I’ve done four-day projects that felt way more turbulent than ‘Blindspotting’ did. We understand the financial side of things, and the logistics of setting up a shoot.”
Diggs adds “we all got in on the ground floor, including the financiers. That’s a particular kind of artistic development. It happens a lot in the theater world; you don’t see it a lot in film. Despite this being the lowest budget I’ve ever worked on (as an actor), and the least amount of time, the shoot was less stressful than most other things I’ve done on camera.”
Praise be to “Hamilton”
After Lin-manuel Miranda’s musical smash opened in New York, and won Diggs a Tony Award for his dual roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, doors opened. “In Hollywood that was the reason why people wanted me in the room — actual moneymaking entities suddenly coming up to you and asking: ‘What do you want to do?’”
The violence of gentrification
Diggs characterizes the gentrification of the Bay Area, Oakland included, as “very tricky to navigate. All this new stuff that you wish had been there the whole time you lived there starts coming in. And then slowly you realize it’s not for you. And you’re being arrested at the Starbucks. And someone’s calling the police on the barbecue party you’ve had every weekend for the past 20 years. Rafael describes gentrification as ‘violent,’ and it is; you’re being pushed out of a thing, a place … when I go back to Oakland now, it feels so different. The context is gone. You don’t quite know what to point to anymore. It’s what every character is grappling with in this film.”