By Travis Johnson
First appearing on screen in Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile in 2002, Anthony Mackie has since appeared in the likes of Million Dollar Baby, The Adjustment Bureau, and Pain & Gain before joining the Marvel family with 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier. His latest role sees him as part of the ensemble in Kathryn Bigelow’s real life period drama Detroit, an account of the murder of three African American men at the Algiers Motel by police officers during a 1967 riot in the eponymous city.
This is your second film with Kathryn Bigelow following The Hurt Locker in 2008. How do you find her as a director? What sets her apart from the pack?
Her ability not to judge her actors. You know, Kathryn has a beautiful detection of character. She lets you go as far as you want to, be as ugly as you want to be, and then she reels you back in, whereas a lot of directors stifle you and put so much on you, you can’t really do anything once you get to set. She and Barry [Ackroyd, director of photography] have this great style where they light everything and they just let you do the scene, and they capture the scene instead of “You can only face this way, you can only do this, you can only do that.” They really give you the freedom to play and go as far as you want.
How does that semi-improvisational style work in the context of making a film about a historical incident, where you are kind of locked in by certain parameters in terms of what actually happened?
The improvisation on a film is interesting because you improv to get specific beats. Like, never will that improv equate to the entire scene. There are certain moments that you need to be heightened in order to go into quieter moments. You would use the improvisation to heighten that moment and then go into another moment on another take. So I try, when I’m working with Mark [Boal, screenwriter], because he’s such a dynamic writer, to stay as close to the script as possible and to utilise everything that he gives me in the script. Kathryn is a stickler for performance and she’s a stickler for you to bring yourself to the performance. She casts you because you’re talented and you’re you, not because of the way you look, and it’s really fun to be a part of it. With something like this, yeah, there are certain scenes and lines that are slightly improv, but unless it’s something that’s just a space filler you will never find a complete scene that’s improvved and made up.
You’ve spent a lot of time on stage where there is, of course, no camera. Given the way that Kathryn likes to shoot and direct actors, does that theatre experience complement the way she works?
Stage is difficult because you have the opportunity to live an entire lifetime in two hours, whereas in film you live an entire lifetime piece by piece over two to four months. With Kathryn’s style, it is tending more towards theatre because you don’t have marks and things like that to hit. But the thing that sets her movies apart are the quiet moments, those subtle moments, the opportunity for subtlety that she gives her actors. That’s what really lets you in. You see much more, you learn much more about a person from looking them in the eyes than you do from them flailing around and crying and screaming. And Kathryn, I feel, utilises that perfectly.
What was it about this role that attracted you as an actor?
The script. I’m a dad, and some time when my kids are older they’re going to sit down and look at the movies that their dad has done, and I feel like it’s cool that I have these Marvel movies but I want my kids to be able to look at my body of work and be proud. You know, I want my kids, when they learn about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and John F. Kennedy in school, when they go back and watch Detroit they would realise that there were other aspects to the civil rights movement. And learn about all of them – not just the assassinations and the Southern church burnings and defamation of women, but the cities where these rebellions, where these riots, where people who had no voice lashed out to be heard. Where those stories can be told so they can learn those aspects to what made them and gave them the freedom that they live in today.
Were you aware of the Algiers incident before reading the script?
I was not. I was aware of the Detroit Riots, because my uncle and his family moved there after he got back from the war looking for work. I was aware of that but the Algiers incident was very small and specific. And was 10 years before I was born.
Were you able to draw on your uncle and his family as a resource for this role?
My uncle, yes. I had heard a bunch of stories from him about what had happened in Detroit, what he had been through, what he had done in the war and in Detroit, but I also called on a bunch of old dudes that I knew in Detroit that I had met shooting movies there, doing charity work there, talking to them and just hearing what they knew and their perception of what had happened and what part they played.
How do you think their perceptions of the events are reflected in the film as it exists?
I feel like Kathryn, as a storyteller, was very good to take the villainy out of the characters in the movie. I feel like she really gave all the characters, the cops as well as the young men and women in the hotel, a certain level of dignity, self-respect, and humanity, where you can look at that storyline, take yourself and your beliefs aside, and really… I don’t know if ‘understand’ is the word but really sympathise with that character and what they were going through at that time. And I feel like that’s a masterful piece of filmmaking, especially in a story like this.
But the guys that I talked to in Detroit, their level of frustration and hatred was so high, their anger still to this day about what happened in ’67 was so high, that’s something that can never be fixed, a wound that can never be healed or corrected.
Detroit is a very tense, violent film, and the central event – the interrogation, the torture, the murders – is a huge part that must have been very difficult to shoot. How did the cast handle working on that?
There was a lot of understanding and compassion that was brought to set not only for the black actors, but for the white actors, and especially for the women. What was really cool, when one of the actors – one of the black actors – was being tortured on set, when Kathryn would say “cut” the first hand to lift him up would be a white hand. And everybody understood. We all had a certain political view, idea, and belief about how we felt about this story, and all of us brought that into this movie to be a part of it. Fortunately, they were all very similar viewpoints on what happened. But everyone was very unapologetic for the work they had to do and that’s why Will [Poulter] and Ben [O’Toole] and Jack [Reynor], were all able to go so far because they didn’t have to apologise for what other men had done. That wasn’t their cross to bear. Because of that we all were able to go further, knowing that we were each other’s safety nets. There wasn’t any judgment or ridicule for what was going on, on set. We knew how ugly we had to get, how far we had to go and everybody felt comfortable going there.
And if those guys had held back, that would have been a disservice to the truth.
A huge disservice, and it would have been a disservice to the other guys that they were torturing because there’s no way that they would have been able to go as far as they needed to go. It takes a certain level of nastiness and ugliness to bring that fear and lack of humanity out of someone. Being the older guy on set, I feel like they handled it extremely well and I couldn’t be more proud of them.
What element did you personally find the most difficult?
The hardest part is… being a black man in 2017, mentally is very different than being a black man in 1967. As an actor you have to relinquish your beliefs and strengths and basically your rights that you have now that you didn’t have then, that your parents and your grandparents didn’t have then. You have to think about that moment the way they did then. And in no way, shape, or form did they look at their life the way we look at our life now. If you saw a mixed race couple, that man or woman could easily be killed. If you saw a white person standing alongside a black person in a civil rights movement, that white person could easily get killed. It was just a very, very volatile time and a very fearful time. The hardest thing was relinquishing that – those rights. Relinquishing that right of masculinity and humbling myself to where you have to take egg in the face sometimes if you want to live to see the end of the day. That’s not an idea that I live with now.
What are you hoping that audiences take away from Detroit?
We’re not born assholes. We’re made assholes. We decide to be assholes. You have a kid, that kid is born a blank slate and you make it an asshole. So, we as a people have to decide, when you do something wrong or you do something bad, it’s an active choice. When you look at Will’s character, he makes an active choice to torture these men: knowing the consequences, knowing the ramifications, he makes an active choice. So at some point in time, as a people we have to decide to make the right active choice. When you’re put in a position of power, you have to make the right active choice. When you’re a police officer, you have to make the right active choice – your job is to protect and serve, not to enslave and conquer. So, until we start making those active choices, we’re just going to be on a hamster wheel. Conversation is the key to everything. Conversation now has turned into “I talk, you talk” as opposed to “you talk, I listen, I talk, you listen.” The art of listening has been lost.
Detroit is in cinemas from November 9, 2017. Read our review here.
