Ben Affleck touched timely nerve with KKK villain in ‘Live by Night’
Ben Affleck didn’t know the Ku Klux Klan would be topical when he wrote the hate group into his Live by Night screenplay.
Affleck’s bootlegger Joe Coughlin, his business partner Dion (Chris Messina) and Coughlin’s Cuban lover Graciela (Zoe Saldana) come up against the menace of Tampa Bay Klansman RD Pruitt (Matthew Miller) in the new Prohibition-era drama (in theaters now).
Pruitt and the KKK wreak havoc, extort businesses and are hideously engrained in the fabric of local life in Live by Night, based on Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name.
Though President-elect Trump rejected support from Klan leader David Duke (who ran unsuccessfully for a Senate seat) during the election, he regularly retweeted posts from white supremacists throughout his campaign.
“I had no idea that the theme of white supremacy would be as present as it is in the modern day, something we’re all talking about now,” says Affleck, 44, who stars in, directed, produced and wrote the drama. “I was writing this more than a year ago, and there was no inclination that these types of groups would be in the news any more than they have been.”
Affleck hoped what would come through was the vision of immigrant life as the foundation of America, with often-separate groups trying to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but often working together.
“Various people wanted to have the Horatio Algers story for themselves: Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, Catholics, Irish, African Americans and the white Protestant establishment,” says Affleck. “You see all of these different groups vying for control and power — trying to build out their little enclaves the way that tribalism kind of built the United States. There’s something really fascinating and important remembering that marginalized groups built this country.”
As for the KKK emerging in the news again, Affleck notes that the hate group’s influence is considerably diminished from the heights of its fear-inducing power.
“The period we show in the film, there was between 5 and 6 million active members in the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. Clearly, we have come a very, very long way,” says Affleck. “I don’t take that to mean we’re perfect, that we’ve learned our lessons about racism or xenophobia or bigotry — that these are not present in this country or that people cannot be manipulated based on baser instincts.
“But the country itself, America, I really believe in as a model for the world — for integration, for harmony, for how to find common ground with our fellow citizens. The whole point is that it’s not easy.
“People I love and care about voted for a different presidential candidate than I did. I’m living with them, they are living with me. We have to live together. We have to figure out a way to make this work.”