Realistic terror unfolds in ‘Detroit’
Director Kathryn Bigelow says story “needed to hurt”
One of the powerful things about director Kathryn Bigelow’s searing movie Detroit is the amount of time she spends on the scenes toughest to watch.
Instead of using a few flashbacks or a condensed retelling, the film devotes more than 40 minutes to a dramatization of a horrific police raid and interrogation inside the Algiers Motel annex during Detroit’s civil unrest of 1967.
The real-life incident resulted in the killing of three unarmed African-American teenagers. Several other people were badly beaten and terrorized.
“The story hurts,” the director says, “but it needed to hurt.”
Bringing difficult material to the big screen is nothing new for Bigelow, who in 2010 became the first woman to win a directing Oscar. After her victory for the Iraq War drama The Hurt
Locker, her next project was Zero Dark Thirty, about the search for Osama bin Laden.
She hopes her latest work (in theaters Friday in New York, Detroit and Los Angeles; expands nationwide Aug. 4) will encourage conversations about injustices of the past and in contemporary America.
The idea came to her attention after the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown by a policeman in Ferguson, Mo., when she heard the officer wouldn’t face charges.
Recalls Bigelow, 65: “I thought, ‘OK, (what happened in Detroit) was 50 years ago, and yet it obvi- ously underscores the severity of the situation (now) and how far we have yet to go in order for this country to heal.’ ”
Early on, Bigelow had her own internal debate about being a white woman making a film centering on African-American characters.
She asked herself this: Would she be the perfect person to make this movie? “Absolutely not,” she says bluntly. “I had to kind of mitigate my own personal reservations with my desire to tell this story. That basically was more important to me, that this story get out there.”
Although Detroit isn’t a documentary, Bigelow wanted it to be as faithful to reality as possible.
Before filming began on the screenplay written by former journalist Mark Boal, she spoke to the actors — a cast that includes emerging stars as well as big names like John Boyega, who plays private security guard Melvin Dismukes, and Anthony Mackie, as Greene, a soldier just back from Vietnam — to make sure they were ready to re-create such a terrifying event.
“It wouldn’t be a comfortable shoot,” she says. “And yet the content was significant enough that it might be worth the discomfort.”
Bigelow says the actors bonded through the process and often prayed together before the cameras rolled. “They went through it as a team,” she says. “No one felt alone.” Bigelow acknowledges that De
troit isn’t a movie that builds to a satisfying conclusion of justice being done. That wouldn’t be accurate. None of the three white Detroit police officers charged were convicted.
So what good can the movie do Well, that’s in the hands of the audience,” says Bigelow. “Hopefully it encourages (a dialogue), so that we’re not looking at this again, getting another alert on our phone about somebody being pulled over for a faulty tail light and being killed for that.
“The catharsis, I think, is yet to come. It is incumbent on us to try to encourage it. To do nothing is not an answer.”