The films of Jim McKay are achingly
real, unfailingly giving the viewer the feeling not only of evesdropping on the truth but of what it's like to be - a teenage girl, a woman
of color, poor, urban, a single parent, to be struggling. McKay's award-winning independent films Girls
Town (1995) and Our Song (1999),
were both featured at the Sundance Film Festival. He is the co-founder, along with Michael Stipe, of C-Hundred Film Corp. As if that weren't impressive enough, McKay has been a Rockefeller Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.
He was approached by author Nelson George (who'd also been a consulting producer on the Emmy-winning "The Chris Rock Show" for HBO) with what would become the film Everyday People. George had discussed with HBO the need to do a film about contemporary race relations in America. "Not the civil rights movement," said George. "But what's going on right now." HBO Films, George, and George's producing partners, Caldecot Chubb and Sean Daniel of Alphaville Productions, decided to make a movie about race and had culled a huge batch of stories from around the country about ordinary people's own experiences. McKay, whose Girls Town had been developed through a workshop process, and whose critically embraced follow-up feature Our Song had a similar naturalistic feel, proved to be a good match; he signed on to direct.
"Jim was very interested in race and his films had pivoted around race in different ways," said George. The resulting work, which premiered June 26 on HBO, is a masterful tapestry. And while, like even some of the best films of another one of my favorite filmmakers, John Sayles, it occasionally strains towards overearnest preachiness, particularly at the beginning, it's not long before the character threads begin to weave together, before the film settles into its own rhythm, the rhythm of everyday life, with humor and warmth. McKay has a keen eye for showing the real America, au natural, and like Sayles, has an unerring eye matched with an incredible compassion for even the most flawed of characters.
I spoke with McKay when Everyday People screened at the San
Francisco International Film Festival in April.
 Bridget Barkan (as Joleen) in Everyday
People
You usually
put together your own projects, but on this one (executive producer) Nelson
George came to you. What compelled you to work on an outside idea?
Nelson had these stories and definitely wanted to do something involving
improv, and I think that's what initially attracted him to me - because I had
done some improv in Girls Town. He'd also seen my work and knew I'd
dealt with multi-racial casts and stories. This piece was interesting to me
because it was something new and challenging. And it also felt like Nelson
really trusted me. He came to me and said, "Here's this material - tell me what
you think you'd do with it," and encouraged me to really make it my own. It did
take a really, really long time for it to become my own because it started with
what felt like an assignment - take these stories and do something with them -
but ultimately, when we'd finished the improv, the outline and the scripting, I
felt like it was very in line with my other work.
It was also really attractive to know I'd be working
on something that would have cast members who weren't in high school.
[laughs]
I read that you guys started with thousands of these stories and narrowed
it down to sixty and then to the film. Could you talk about that process of
funneling the stories into a script?
The ones that were most interesting and compelling really made themselves
known. And then I don't think we realized when we started the degree to which
these stories would actually kind of disappear. In the end what they really did
was inspire my mind to start thinking about this fictitious piece that we'd end
up writing. Having read through the stories, I created this huge outline for a
story that dealt with literally 55 to 60 characters, not all of them lead
characters by any means. But then we used this workshop/improv thing to try
things out, to explore the terrain. Certain characters in this fictitious story
I'd written were assigned these email stories. So it was like, "You're gonna
play the real estate developer and you're buying this place and this is going
to happen during your day. And just so you know, as part of your backstory, you
work in this firm," and so on. We'd give an actor backstory - with Ron [played
by Ron Harding], for instance, who worked in the firm, and was the only black
guy there. His boss rode him a lot, sometimes in kind of fucked up and racist
ways. He finally challenged the boss on it one day and the boss said, "Yeah I'm
being harder on you because you need to work harder because the world is
racist, and I'm actually doing you a favor." Rather than see that as
condescending, this guy actually was thankful for it. And so that was Ron's real
story. But then as we added things, other stuff receded into the
background.
And the idea to have it all center around a restaurant?
That was
something that I came up with. I felt we needed a place to have the story
situated where it would be realistic, where all these different people would
cross paths within the course of a day. A workplace seemed to make sense,
because in this country, for some people, it's often the only place to
interact with people of different races and class.
Was the character of Akbar based on an actual person?
Yeah. I saw a guy out on the sidewalk one day in Brooklyn selling black
ribbons, talking about endangered black men, and I just watched him for five
minutes, walked away and thought, "There's a good character for the movie."
Then I did assign him a story, which was that he also had been the only black
man in a very big firm and had encountered all this racism from his coworkers
and his bosses, but he didn't come out of it like Ron did; he came out of it
bitter and angry, and feeling abused. So that was given to Akbar. They both had
similar backgrounds, and [Ron Butler, the actor playing Ron] was able to say,
"Okay, I was successful and I'm very well educated, and here's where I've come
to."  Reg E. Cathey as Akbar, in Everyday People
Was there a challenge in making the film so it wasn't too didactic?
That really was a big challenge, because you're starting with "issues." But
the more we rewrote and worked on it, the more human it got, and the more I
realized there was a lot of stuff about family. Ira's got his dad riding him,
and Erin's got her mom, and Samel's got his own dad problem. And then I
realized the restaurant's a family, too, with Ira essentially the dad. And
there was a lot of generational stuff going on. So the more all that stuff came
in, the more I just tried to work out, make a lot of the racial stuff unspoken,
present but not present. And make it more just about people, as well as also
trying to turn around expectations: Let's show a single white mom instead of a
single black mom, and - with Samel and the old man doing a crossword puzzle, I
tried to flip things. You have all these films where the old black man comes
out of nowhere and gives some young guy sage advice, and I wanted to purposely
turn that around. But even the process of trying to defy stereotypes becomes
tricky.
So we tried to really push away from all that as much as possible, which was
hard. But I think eventually we did, even if we kept some of it in there -
because it's part of everyday life. Like, we have Akbar saying, "You're ripping
me off because you're white," because that was something his character really
would say. But you see him later on and his character somehow transcends that.
Because your films have dealt so empathetically with African-American
people and people of color, do people ever express surprise when they discover
you're a white dude?
I guess I take it as a compliment, but yes, and sometimes I get flak for it
and sometimes praise for it. I think the root of it for me is trying to work
with characters who are underrepresented in media. For the last three films,
that happens to have been working class or female or black characters. Maybe in
the next film it's going to be something else. But really what it's about for
me is just saying, when starting out, "Well, who haven't I seen on screen in a
lot of films? Whose story would be interesting?" And then go from there,
making sure I really know what I'm doing. I think when people write outside of
their experience and don't do their homework, it can end up sketchy, and they
deserve a little flak for that. One does have to be careful.
In Our
Song, did you use a similar process of researching real people?
Our Song was written, there was no improv at all, but I did hang out
with that marching band steadily for a year while writing the script. So a lot
of observation happened, a lot of detail absolutely came out of that. When I'm
out in public, I'm always observing.
It's funny, I read an article in the New York Times Magazine recently about
this Korean American writer [Chang-rae Lee] who just put out his third novel to
a lot of acclaim. It's about this old man, and people were like, "How does he
write about these things he doesn't know?" Because all his characters are sad,
and older, and he's young and seemingly happy. It's just kind of weird to me,
because that's what writers do. You watch, you read, you soak up information.
If everybody just wrote about their life story it wouldn't yield too much work,
and wouldn't be as interesting. It's just a given - you open yourself up to the
world around you and let that inform your work.
I know several teachers and teacher-trainers who use Our Song with
high school students to positive effect.
That's great. Yeah, it seems to work well - except kids don't usually like
the ending.
Because it's open-ended?
Yeah, they're frustrated by it. "What happens at the end?! I wanna know."
But then if you talk to them about it in that kind of educational setting, it's
good because you can say, well, maybe here's why it's like that.
We've done a lot of youth outreach screenings with Our Song, and it's
always been great. I mean, you have to be careful as a filmmaker because
sometimes kids don't really like it or don't connect to it, and you have to be
ready for that. But it's good for them to see something different, outside the
realm of what they're watching normally, The Matrix and the like. And
it's good to see themselves on screen.
The new film has more narrative resolution, but it's still a little
open-ended. Do you have a sense of where those characters ultimately go after
the movie ends?
Definitely, I have my ideas. With some of them I don't know, it's a question
mark. But with others I kind of know. It's great. There are people who come up
to me and say, "I think it's great that Ira changed his mind," and "I think it's
great that the place is going to stay open," while others will say, "I know he
changed his mind but the next day he'll change them again," or "I don't think
the place is going to stay open." I have my own notions about it, but I like
the idea that you can do it yourself. That's part of what's nice about art,
having your own interpretations. A lot of work I like to watch does that,
rather then keeping control in the hand of the maker. Interestingly, on a whole
new level now they have these sorts of, "Edit the movie yourself!," you know,
re-edit the movie, gimmicks. To me, as an artist, that is appalling. It's
scary. I don't literally want to put the control of the storytelling or the
piece of work in somebody else's hands. But I do want to put the control of
just their reaction to what I've made in their own hands, to just say, "Picture
of it what you will."
I just don't want to picture Jolene working at a strip club at the
end.
Me neither. But... who knows?  Marc Anthony Thompson in Everyday
People
The music is always important in your films; how conscious were you before
you started shooting of what the music was going to be?
Everyday People was the first time I've actually used a specific
composer; I've had a lot of music in the other films but this was the first one
where I had a score. I actually approached Marc Anthony Thompson, who performs
as Chocolate Genius, while I was writing the script. He wrote a bunch of
things, and showed me some older stuff, while I was writing and a lot of them
ended up getting used in the final piece. It was a great collaboration for me.
He lives in the neighborhood where we filmed and had a real investment in it,
and creatively it was a fantastic experience for me.
And you put him in the film, too.
Yeah. I'd met him and thought he was a great guy, and his response to the
script was so fantastic I thought, he should be even more involved. I liked the
idea of him as this sort of a muse bookending the film. It seemed to work
well.
On the other hand, I'm working on writing something now that I hope to shoot
soon that has no music score at all in the whole film.
Speaking of music, how did the (producing) collaboration with [REM
singer] Michael
Stipe begin?
Michael I'd met a long time ago, when I was in college in the early 80s. I
became friends with him in 1987 when I was living in Athens [Georgia] after living
in San Francisco for a couple of years. And our friendship became tighter. He
was doing film work with REM and I was just starting out with my own film work,
so we decided to form our own company to do it officially. And we've been doing
stuff ever since. I mean, he's a busy guy - he's got another film company as
well; they have Saved!
out now. So it's not like we're in an office together all the time, but it's
been a great working relationship. I really admire him and his work and his
vision, and we seem to think alike on a lot of stuff.
Instead of asking you your filmmaker influences, I wanted to be less
clichéd and ask you what books and authors are in your consciousness as
you make films.
I read probably equal parts fiction and non-fiction. Jonathan Kozol is one
of my favorite writers. He writes about education - Savage Inequalities,
Amazing Grace, and others. I really love the way he writes and what he
writes about and his books have been really influential on me. Richard Price, I like
his novels a lot. I like Paul Auster. James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, are
both really fun, and great writers. I read Harper's, The Nation, The New
Yorker...
Do you ever see adapting one of those favorite authors?
I don't. I feel more attached to my own stuff. Well, maybe some day. I
love The Ice
Storm; that's one of my favorite movies, and it was a great book - and if
you got some material that strong, and somehow made it your own, I could see
that working. But adaptations are tricky, and right now I have a bunch of
stories of my own that I want to tell. So I want to work on that first.
Everyday People premieres on HBO, Saturday, June 26,
then reruns June 29, July 4, 8 and 12. It also airs throughout July on HBO2.
The DVD will likely be released early in 2005.
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