How director and actor found the man inside the legend
Filmmakers sought to knock MLK Jr. off his pedestal and humanize him in Selma
American director Ava DuVernay and British actor David Oyelowo felt no obligation to enhance the legend of 1960s civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., the central figure of their Oscar-touted drama Selma.
On the contrary, they believed the man’s story and message would be better served by having him taken off the pedestal and placed upon solid ground.
“What you want to do is deconstruct the legend,” says DuVernay, 42, who knew all about buffing images in her past life as a movie publicist. Her current career as a filmmaker really took flight in 2012, after she won Best Director at Sundance for her second feature Middle of Nowhere, a family drama that also starred Oyelowo.
“We don’t need to have another myth made, or more mythmaking around (King). You want to humanize him.”
This certainly comes through in a scene where an embarrassed and contrite King is upbraided by his wife, Coretta Scott King, played by Carmen Ejogo, after she catches him in a lie regarding his serial acts of marital infidelity.
“You’ve seen him be the orator, you’ve seen him be the strategist,” says Oyelowo, 38, analyzing the scene.
“Now you see him in a situation whereby he has no words and no strategy in relation to something deeply meaningful to him: his marriage, his home life, everything that entails. For me, between those two extremes, as Ava says, we’re deconstructing the man.”
DuVernay and Oyelowo are both nominated for prizes in Sunday’s Golden Globes ceremony, she for Best Director and he for Best Actor in the dramatic film category. Selma is also up for Best Motion Picture, Drama and Best Original Song (“Glory”).
They didn’t yet know about these kudos during their interview together with the Star, in a visit to Toronto just before Christmas.
But the accolades had already started rolling in, and it was clear that DuVernay was going to be a likely contender not just for Best Director at the Golden Globes, but also for the Feb. 22 Academy Awards (Oscar nominations will an- nounced Jan. 15).
She’s making history, as the first black woman nominated for Best Director at the Globes and possibly soon also at the Oscars. Oyelowo is very likely to be nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars, a rarity for a black actor. He’s potentially in the awards hunt for two other 2014 pictures he appeared in, Interstellar and A Most Violent Year, although Selma is his major calling card.
But mindful of their desire not to further mythologize King, they’re both being careful about not overstating their own achievements. They’re reluctant to discuss any laurels before they’re officially announced.
“It’s like a unicorn,” DuVernay says of the Oscar talk. “I hear it’s out there, but I’ve never seen one.”
This interview was really supposed to be two interviews, talking to DuVernay and Oyelowo in turn. Time constraints meant they had to be suddenly brought together, but their compatibility is clear from body language and banter.
He lights up when she calls him her “muse” and they’re very comfortable working together. They talk about how they both searched for the man inside the legend for their indelible portrait of Martin Luther King Jr.:
Selma looks at a key moment of King’s life and civil rights struggle, over several months of early 1965. Did you ever consider making more of a conventional biopic, to include other aspects of his life?
DuVernay: A cradle-to-grave story wasn’t ever in the plan. It wasn’t anything I was ever interested in. I am kind of allergic to historical dramas in general, so to do a cradle-to-grave just strengthens my allergy. I just think this time was so robust and so ripe for narrative exploration. Everything you want to happen in a story as a storyteller happens between January and March of 1965 and I’m glad as a storyteller to go so much deeper, with so many more layers, so much more nuance to explore, rather than if I’m trying to get in every single point on the fact sheet.
Oyelowo: When you’re delving into a big life, a big personality, a historical figure, the danger is you’re always going to bite off more than you can chew . . . What Selma enables us to do is really focus in on a bite-sized chunk of a time that epitomizes who the man was, what he did, how he did it, and what was going on in the country, in an event that represented a real shift in terms of the personality of the nation.
David, how did you get King’s unique speaking style down so well? And Ava, how did you make sure he stayed in character and voice?
Oyelowo: It wasn’t easy. For me as a Brit, an advantage of mine is that I never come to play a role like Dr King thinking, “I know it.” I have to know every single nuance of it. I can’t just think of him as a preacher from Atlanta because he was that, but he also had a formative time in Boston where some of those sounds crept into his accent. And then he was brought up in the church with a very specific kind of preacherly delivery, which he reacted against because he didn’t want to be his dad. So he had a different way around that. But he also loved big words and he loved to chew on big words, which did something to his speech patterns as well. So you have to put all of that into the blender. DuVernay: Not only am I American, my father is from Alabama. It was very important to me and crucial that if I heard anything that sounded out of order, we corrected it immediately. It happened maybe twice. It wasn’t even technically inaccurate, I just thought people might hear Brit. Because there were some things (King) did because of his Boston influence that sounds a little British, and I said, “Oh, no, let’s just strip it off!” … and the one trick was that (Oyelowo) stayed in voice. Not in character but in voice: at craft services, the wardrobe trailer, at home on a Saturday. He was always King.
David, what do you think of Ava as a director? And Ava, what do you think of David as an actor?
Oyelowo: She’s OK — she will go far, I think! In Middle of Nowhere, that was a point in which I really saw something. Ava loves the moniker of independent filmmaker. I see someone who transcends all boxes you can give her, which is indepen- dent filmmaker, female filmmaker, black filmmaker. Those are all things that she is, but storytelling is storytelling, and when you are able to tell universal stories that make people feel like no matter who they are looking at, they’re looking at themselves, you’re dealing with serious talent there. We were blessed to have her as a director on Selma, which is why so many people are referring to the film as the “humanization” of King. It was in her hands that that was able to happen. Other iterations of this film would, I think, have been a further appraisal of what we think he is, as opposed to finding a new side of him.
DuVernay: As a director, as a film lover, I always saw these great collaborations between directors and actors and you pray that one day you’ll have that as a filmmaker. And so for that to come so early in my career, even though David’s been working much longer than I have, he’s definitely my muse. Usually when you think of a muse, you think of an old guy and a young blond. He’s not young and blond, but I’m just very inspired by him! I feel whatever I write and whatever I imagine, whatever vision I have for a story I know it is achievable because I have him …. My imagination can go wherever, because I have someone who can actually execute it. You’re only as good as someone who can execute the script, so what a gift! Peter Howell’s new Star Dispatches ebook, Movies I Can’t Live Without, is available for $2.99 at starstore.ca.