The"I
Am Not Your Negro” Interview
with
Kam Williams
Meeting
Raoul!
Raoul
Peck’s complex body of work
includes feature narrative films
like The
Man by the Shore,
Lumumba,
Sometimes in April,
Moloch
Tropical and
Murder in Pacot.
His documentaries include
Lumumba: Death
of a Prophet,
Desounen
and Fatal
Assistance.
Raoul
has served as jury member at the
2012 Cannes Film Festival and at the Berlinale. He is presently
chairman of the board of the National French film school La Fémis,
and has been the subject of numerous retrospectives worldwide. In
2001, the Human Rights Watch Organization awarded him with the Irene
Diamond Lifetime Achievement Award.
Raoul
recently completed shooting his
latest feature film, The Young Karl
Marx, a European co-production, shot in
Germany and Belgium, and produced by Velvet Film in conjunction with
Agat Films.
here, he talks about his latest offering, I Am
Not Your Negro, an Oscar-nominated documentary about writer/social
critic James Baldwin.
Kam
Williams: Hi
Raoul, thanks for the interview, and congratulations on the Oscar
nomination.
Raoul
Peck:
Thanks,
Kam.
KW:
What interested you in James Baldwin?
RP:
I
started to read James Baldwin very early on in my life. At a time, as
a young adult in the Sixties, when there were not that many authors
in whom I could recognize myself, he was an important guide and
mentor to me as he was to many others. He helped me understand who I
was and decipher the world around me. He gave me the words to defend
myself and the argumentative rhetoric to master discussions with
others.
KW:
Where
do you think he stands in the pantheon of African-American 20th
Century thinkers?
RP:
I think
that James Baldwin is, for sure, one of the most important American
writer/thinkers of his time... not just African-American. He
singled-handily revolutionized the political, artistic and historical
discourses about America. He created his particular and original
language. At his funeral, Toni Morrison said of him, “You gave me a
language to dwell in, a gift so perfect it seems my own invention.”
Indeed, he’s opened the door for many of the brightest generation
of young authors of many different origins.
KW:
Do you
think his being gay affected his potential to be a leader in addition
to a writer and philosopher?
RP:
Not
at all. To the contrary, his very early questioning about his
identity as a young preacher was key in his quest for answers,
answers that he expected, at first, to find in the church, where he
was a pastor at age 14 and then left when he realized that it was
creating even more contradictions for which he could not find any
justification or comfort in his struggling to understand the world
around him and to protect himself from injustice, isolation and
violence. All these were key elements in his long journey. His
gayness might have, for sure, caused some members of the civil rights
movement to shun him at times. And part of the more progressive
leadership did attack him. Some, like Amiri Baraka, later regretted
these attacks and ultimately came to revere him. Although I am not
sure anybody could address any homophobic remarks directly to him
without fearing an extreme response. And these remarks would most
probably take the form of political attacks. Baldwin was already way
too famous and too unfazed by any kind of limits to be subjected to
any frontal attacks. He didn’t let anybody define who he was and he
made sure that everybody knew that.
KW:
How
would you describe Baldwin to Millennials and others substantially
unaware of him?
RP:
James
Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second
half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant
social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now
in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a
sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet
unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in
Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with
personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and
questing. He had an unrivaled understanding of politics and history
and, above all, the human condition. His prose is laser sharp. His
onslaught is massive and leaves no room for response. Every sentence
is an immediate cocked grenade. You pick it up, then realize that it
is too late. It just blows up in your face. And yet he still managed
to stay human, tender, accessible. There will hardly be anything as
precise, as just, as subtle or as percussive, then the writing of
this man.
KW:
Editor/Legist
Patricia Turnier asks: What does James Baldwin mean to you?
RP:
The
role he played in my life is incommensurable as stated above. He
helped, along with a few others, to shape the man that I am today. My
debt to him is invaluable.
KW:
Patricia
notes that I Am
Not Your Negro Your
is based on Remember This House, an unfinished manuscript by James
Baldwin. If he were still alive, what do you think he would say about
the state of race relations in the U.S. today? What message contained
in Remember This House remains relevant today?
RP:
I
was asked this question a few times which, in fact, I don’t quite
understand. The film is EXACTLY what Baldwin has to say about today’s
reality. I can’t see what else he would have said. That’s what
makes the film so impactful, so urgent. It is as if he wrote the
whole thing this very morning! And
it is scary, because something that he wrote 50 years ago instead of
becoming less acute, became even tremendously more extreme, more
daunting, more massive. The key message would be I guess: Face your
reality. You, black or white, are not innocent anymore. Either you
have the courage to face it or you will go down together with the
whole idea of the American Dream.
KW:
Lastly,
Patricia says: A movie was made in France about Toussaint Louverture.
Are you interested in making a biopic about another Haitian
historical figure, such as Jean-Jacques Dessalines?
RP:
In
fact, I was involved very early on in this movie. Together with two
of the best Haitian historians and experts on Toussaint Louverture,
I developed a seven-hour screenplay about the Haitian revolution. But
after almost three years into the process, the producers obviously
got scared of our political approach and found a contractual
technicality to make it impossible for me to continue. I had to ask
my lawyer to get my rights back. And although they’ve done quite a
good job in making the story palpable and extracted all the major
characters and roles, they were not even able to make a film that
came close to the greatness and significance of this revolution. A
big mess, as, everybody can see, and a mediocre TV film.
KW:
AALBC.com
founder Troy Johnson asks: What was the last book you read?
RP:
The
very last book I read was over the recent holidays. I can’t freely
divulge the title, for it might be one of my next, as yet
unannounced, film projects, an autobiography. But the books I read
prior to that one were a new book on Frantz Fanon and a re-read of
Chinua Achebe’s "Things Fall Apart. "
KW:
What advice do you have for anyone who wants to follow in your
footsteps?
RP:
Don't!
[LOL] But
seriously, I really can’t give any general advice. Maybe, just try
to be yourself and resist complacency and ignorance. All you can do
is work, work; work and be disciplined. Watch a lot of films,
especially the classics, and read all kinds of books, and lots of
them. There are no free rides, nor short cuts in this world. The
Voice and The Bachelorette are very poor examples to model your life
with. And there are only one or two geniuses every century.
KW:
The
Tavis Smiley question: How do you want to be remembered?
RP:
I
don’t. I just hope that my films will survive me.
KW:
Thanks
again for the time, Raoul, and best of luck with the film.
RP:
My
pleasure, Kam.
To
see a trailer for I Am Not Your Negro, visit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNUYdgIyaPM
