00:25This is Tim Walsberg from Fast Track Uncerted TV.
00:28I'm here in New Orleans for the New Orleans Film Festival.
00:31Well, I remember from a long time ago getting advice that the more specific and the more
00:36unique, the more universal. So even though the story has a place of New Orleans and has a very
00:41kind of unique, specific theme within that, because I sometimes like New Orleans to be a
00:46character within the pieces. It's quite a city. It's a character of itself. And so I found that
00:51still you can extrapolate and take that into other cultures and other places. And so for us,
00:55looking at trauma because we kind of see, come from a public health background, come from a mental,
01:00my parents were psychiatrists, come from a background of looking at how early experiences
01:06form who we are, the choices we make. And so we were looking at how trauma can be passed along,
01:11what that can do, who breaks that cycle. When you can realize that, oh, I'm kind of inheriting things
01:17that I don't necessarily own. They're not part of me. They're what have been put on top of me.
01:21And what can I do to change that narrative so that I can chart my own path versus the
01:26path that I kind of was born into. And so for this piece specifically, we were looking at,
01:30so there was a previous piece called Peace, sorry, film called Woke. And that was kind of
01:38deeper into some of the early parts of that trauma, just the fighting. And so there's a little bit more
01:42fighting between the father and son. And then at this piece, it was getting back more into his
01:48eternal journey after things fall apart and he starts to spiral more.
01:51Did you talk about that, that hereditary versus situation? Because every action has an equal
01:56and sometimes more extreme reaction with this character.
02:00Yeah. I mean, I think we're born into particular circumstances. So we have very clear things that
02:06define who we are, socioeconomic background. Someone can be born with something that can eventually
02:13develop into mental illness. People can be born into different layers of situations, cities that
02:18have different things going on, like say a hurricane. A lot of things can happen, but then there's also
02:23all that context as well. And within one's own space, I think it's figuring out what was I born into
02:30versus, and like, what can I not necessarily change? What is biological? What are things I have to learn to
02:35cope with? And then what are the things that are the circumstances that I might be able to examine,
02:40to look at, to separate out from, see what I had to do before to cope? Yeah. And now how
02:45can I move
02:46into a place where I'm past that coping, where I'm healing? And so this is a story about trying to
02:51find
02:51what healing looks like in a lot of ways. Why do I need a reason? I guess you don't.
03:00I guess I do have a reason. Brandy?
03:07What are y'all doing? Thanks for coming, Ash. Seriously.
03:19That's it. No more girls in your room, especially with the doors closed.
03:29I'm not telling you again. Clean your room.
03:41Because any character is about a journey, but also seeing what makes him who he is.
03:46You know, I feel like, you know, this particular character is definitely like on his own journey,
03:53like trying to figure out how to cope with, you know, his past trauma, you know, just from growing
03:59up, you know, being in a household similar to the household that he's created, especially in Woke,
04:05the first film, like he was a lot more like aggressive, very, very like outspoken. And,
04:14you know, just just his approach to how he reared Brandon and how he treated his wife,
04:20you know, is very, very plausible that, you know, he came from a similar background. And so he's just
04:25imitating, you know, what he saw growing up and not generational, absolutely. And not having an
04:33outlet or a way to kind of like talk through that and hope, you know, he just carried that throughout
04:39his life. And when he got a family of his own, he just repeated what he saw, you know, growing
04:44up.
04:44I think, I feel like in the second film, he realized that, okay, the damage that he's causing
04:52or that he's caused. And so he turned to certain things to try to help him cope,
04:56that leads to his addiction.
04:58How much influence did Louisiana and New Orleans have on it? Not in just, you know,
05:03geographical, obviously, there's the racial issue, you know, obviously, there's the poverty issue,
05:09because most of us, we've already made the mistakes. So it's about learning from those mistakes
05:13and moving forward.
05:14That piece was not scripted. That was, we asked the students that we had, so first,
05:19shout out to Dillard University. We shot a lot there. And we had a bunch of people in their theater
05:24department, their film department, and we asked them to come be a part of it. And so
05:30we just said, here are some topics. And we also shot in 2018. It's been a minute.
05:34Oh, it has. Okay.
05:35The crazy thing is that, sadly, it still is the same thing that we're going through. It's still
05:40some of the same issues. And so it just, we finally, I finally, I finally finished editing it.
05:44I can't blame anyone else recently. But it was where we just said, go, here are the topics,
05:51because there was a social justice group, because there's a very strong social justice piece in the
05:54first film. And half, well, not half, but one of the, like, the B stories was about taking down
06:00monuments. And so that was a core thing. And at that time, street names hadn't changed in New
06:06Orleans. Monuments hadn't been taken down. It was in the thick of it. It was before a lot of that
06:10happened.
06:10So you wrote, that was all written before?
06:12Yeah.
06:12Look at how they paint these different pictures.
06:15Yeah. And exactly, to go with that, just like you were talking about the metal detectors,
06:20even that criminalizing the youth as they go into school in the morning, that they have to get
06:25patted down and acting like they're going into some four-knot facility. And if that is the case,
06:32and that is where, you know, where we should keep things, then it should be in all schools and not
06:38just in select schools and in the east. Because I know growing up, from personal experience, that that
06:45was a quite, quite traumatizing, in a sense to me, that, you know, what are y'all expecting from us?
06:53Yeah. And so then when she runs, when you see Maisha's character going for a run,
06:57it really, I had that moment where I looked up and then a circle that I would go that roundabout
07:03all the time I grew up nearby. And I was like, wait a second, the monument's not there anymore.
07:07So that was kind of real life happening. So space was key.
07:11Did you shoot it with it in there before, or you shot that afterwards?
07:14Well, we shot that when it was gone, but the first film, it was there. We didn't shoot a scene
07:18there,
07:18but it was there in the first film, because at that time.
07:22Well, yeah.
07:22And so just the actual history that is being made right now with different people standing up for
07:27different movements kind of takes a place and a space in the film. And so by the time you get
07:32to
07:32the second film, we're in a kind of different New Orleans. And I think a lot of that change,
07:36certain things have accelerated post-Katrina, but there are other things. There's George Floyd,
07:39there's a lot of other energy that kind of pushed, actually that was of course later,
07:44but that pushed to where I think movements are. But specifically talking about that conversation,
07:50I love it. Cause we didn't, I was like, I don't even know where it fits to be honest.
07:53So previously Brandon was leading the group, that justice group. And then he got pushed out when
07:58he kind of started to go into his own cycle of decline a little bit.
08:01Sorry, I didn't see the other one.
08:02Oh no, you're totally, y'all think you knew it existed. It's totally fine.
08:05And the joke is the only character that's different is Brandon.
08:08Every other actor came back, but our previous Brandon moved to LA. And so, yeah.
08:38And so, yeah.
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