‘Rustin’s George C. Wolfe On The Complicated Activist Who Made Possible Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have A Dream Speech’ In D.C.

EXCLUSIVE: If on MLK Day, you wanted to view a movie that breathes life into the struggles faced by Martin Luther King Jr and his Civil Rights movement cohorts, look no further than Rustin. Directed by George C. Wolfe and starring Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin, the Netflix & Higher Ground drama tells of the title character’s unsung role in making possible the March on Washington D.C., the historical 1963 event where MLK became an icon following his “I have a dream” speech. The awards caliber film was a favorite on the fall festival circuit, and outside of Ava DuVernay’s Selma, it is perhaps the most penetrating look at Dr. King and his coterie of advisors, and the price they all paid in attacking racism and ending segregation in the South.

DEADLINE: In making Rustin, the story of how activist Bayard Rustin overcame racism and homophobia and organized the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King made the speech that immortalized him in history, is it too much to imagine the challenge of deciding how much of his speech to put in the film without overwhelming everything that happened before?

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GEORGE C. WOLFE: Yes, absolutely. We filmed a certain section of the speech that was longer than what’s in the film. Once I had all the footage that I needed for the march, it is that old adage, you write one movie, you shoot another one, and then you edit the third. We started putting together that part of the film, figuring out what proportions seemed correct, and we ended up with a modified version.

There’s a moment that right after the speech, which are these looks between Byard and Martin Luther King that to me tell the story from the vantage point of Rustin, versus telling the story from the vantage point of a TV camera, versus telling the vantage point of MLK [Aml Ameen] and what resonates with him, what drives him.

DEADLINE: What did those choices give you?

WOLFE: In many respects, it shows there’s this close friendship, and in some respects, it’s telling the story of how one man delivered this other man to this incredible moment in his life, giving one of the greatest speeches that’s ever been uttered in this country. I wanted the emotions surrounding that to have equal, if not greater weight, than what was said.

DEADLINE: I recall when Ava DuVernay made Selma, she paraphrased Dr. King’s speech because his family copyrighted his words and she had a small budget. How supportive was Dr. King’s family here?

WOLFE: They were very, very supportive. I didn’t deal directly with them, but they were very supportive and very reasonable and very, I don’t want to say accommodating, but there were no obstacles, which was really wonderful. There was a spirit of generosity. And I also, I had been told by a number of people, that his children had a tremendous fondness for Bayard. So I think we inherited a lot of goodwill and grace. It was really wonderful.

DEADLINE: Rustin is such an unsung part of the Civil Rights struggle to much of us, before this film. Then you learn all the things he did to argue for the rights of Americans of Japanese descent who were interned and had everything taken from them during WWII.

WOLFE: From the time he was a teenager, his whole life was about this kind of thing. I often thought about this. My grandmother had a tremendous impact on me so I might be projecting, but I think his grandmother was that kind of influence because he was always active and committed. He protested against the movie theaters that were very segregated. He protested against certain places where he couldn’t go to eat. He was a star athlete, and he organized all the other athletes that if they didn’t stay in the same accommodations as everybody else, they wouldn’t play. He’s doing this at 14, 15, 16.

During World War II, he spent time in prison as a consciousness objector, and while in prison insisted that the prisons be integrated. There was this sense of decency and responsibility and correctness and humanity that just seemed to flow effortlessly. A commitment to doing that which was right just flowed effortlessly from him. And then he did protest against the internment of the Japanese. I call him the ultimate American because he is always has, I say he’s ultimate American because he had an expansive curiosity and was an antidote to fear. And he always was determined to help those in need of help.

DEADLINE: You felt a responsibility as a storyteller to now allow his greatest moment to be overshadowed? He got Dr. King to the mountaintop.

WOLFE: I’ve done a lot of theater, and in musical theater there’s the 11 o’clock number. In Gypsy, it’s Mama Rose singing Rose’s Turn. There’s  always an ultimate number that delivers. And I spent a lot of time talking with my editor about that. And then there’s also a moment where Philip Randolph [Glynn Turman] was supposed to deliver the demands of the march, and at the last minute as a surprise, he gave it to Bayard and we filmed Bayard saying them. Only leaders who were in charge of civil rights organizations were allowed to speak. Bayard has a poetry to him, and the demands are very important but they’re on a list he was given so it wasn’t his poetry. So we didn’t use it, and his ultimate act of poetry, Bayard’s 11 o’clock number, came at the end of the film, when he picking up the trash after the march.

DEADLINE: How does that qualify as an 11 o’clock number?

WOLFE: This is the essence of him in service, and that’s what I wanted to honor. As much as I wanted to honor the dynamic and the energy and the spirit and the coming together and the connection and people from all over the country coming together to celebrate this event, including these kids who worked so hard to help it happen, I wanted the ending to be a moment of grace for him.

DEADLINE: We look at all these leaders in the Civil Rights movement, the ones who have streets in Harlem named for them. At that period of time, there was so much resistance facing them, and no roadmap they could follow on what to do. I’m sure they were doing the best they could, but they also were cognizant of their own stature, and how much they felt they could press without basically getting crushed along with this growing movement when Jim Crow and segregation were prevalent in the South.

WOLFE: Washington DC was a segregated city, also.

DEADLINE: It must have been complex to depict these giants sat that time. The NAACP Roy Wilkins character played by Chris Rock, you see that initially, he didn’t want Byard around at all.

WOLFE: You have to remember that image was extremely important because of the impact TV was having. You have the Kennedy Nixon debate and Nixon’s sweating, and Kennedy is looking like, to the manor born. That had an impact on who voted. And so there were all these rules that were involved in sit-ins and protests and how you had to look and how you had to be dressed and you had to be flawlessly, perfectly groomed. Because you’re representing the entire race so that therefore when you’re sitting at a counter flawlessly dressed, and there’s some hooligans behind you, squirting ketchup and mustard onto you, who looks like the civilized person and who looks like the crazy out of control person? Who looks like the person who’s ready to move forward into the world? It was a very conscious use of image so as to present the argument by both black and white protestors of who was the groomed human being and who was the person who appears out of control. So that was very much so on the thought process, and the fact that Byard had been a communist, which he had renounced, but that he was also gay.

DEADLINE: But he was openly gay.

WOLFE: Gay, a 1963 version without question. He was not interested in concealing. He was too busy doing and activating and changing and enforcing and empowering. He had other agendas on his hands, on his mind, not concealing himself, doing activism as a verb, as opposed to a noun. What are you doing? What action are you taking? Where do you stand? Who are you protecting for? Who are you honoring? And so he was much more concerned with that. And I think that concerned a number of the leaders because they knew that the white press, and conceivably the black press was going use anything to undermine that, which was not acceptable.

DEADLINE: That explains a lot about the reticence of those leaders in embracing Rustin.

WOLFE: It was a strategy. What is the perfect image? I was raised that once I left my front door, I was responsible for every single black person that had ever lived, since the dawn of time. That awareness was made very clear to me. So the second you step foot outside your front door, you are being judged and everything you do is a reflection of that. It’s oppression, but responsibility. Every single thing you do contributes to the cause of the race, or distracts from it.

DEADLINE: Wow, what a burden.

WOLFE: Totally. And so that’s from as early as I can remember, your image, your responsibility to the race is very much embedded in the thought process of how you behaved in the world

DEADLINE: Roy Wilkins comes around, but not Adam Clayton Powell. He comes off poorly in Rustin.

WOLFE: He was a very smart, very savvy, very witty, very commanding politician. And then there’s a human being and somebody needs to do that story of that human being. But here, it’s the politician. We’re not dealing with his marriages and who he loved and who he lost and all of that. Adam Clayton Powell [Jeffrey Wright] was a very savvy New York politician. There’s an aspect of me in terms of his wit and his command that I sort of enjoy. But he was tough, and he did threaten for that march that was slated to go against the Democratic Convention. He did make that threat. He just threatened to slander, for lack of better words, the relationship which was totally as friends as brothers, between Byard and Martin Luther King Jr.

DEADLINE: The photograph you show of Dr. King bathing, and Bayard in the frame.

WOLFE: Which was created by Mr. Hoover’s FBI, and totally fabricated.

DEADLINE: And all this stuff was siphoned to Strom Thurmond, the ultimate segregationist senator…

WOLFE: The ultimate segregationist who had a child who was Black. It’s so welcome to America as this complicated land. It’s so incredibly complicated.

DEADLINE: Add to that that Hoover was reputed to be a gay man.

WOLFE: That too. So it’s like, I don’t care what he did, but it needed to be there because it showed the complexity and the image presented. The part of me that is a director and storyteller, who loves people who use language brilliantly, I have this incredible awe for Adam Clayton Powell. I’ve heard sections of his speeches which I really love. He’d say, I’m now going to give a speech and it’s hopefully it’s going to be like a woman’s skirt. It’s going to be long enough that there is substance and respect, but short enough that you want to keep listening. It was just so charming and so wonderful. And he had the crowd in the palm of his hand. So there’s so many things that I just as a human being, I respect as a politician, and he was a perfectly savvy person for the time. But that’s the thing which I think is so really fascinating. I am drawn, the phrase I use is ‘in process’ people. Byard was an ‘in process’ person and so was MLK. He did something to betray the purity of his relationship with Bayer when he was very young, but then he also later honored it. And having Ella Baker [Audra McDonald], an extraordinary woman, point this out to Bayer…it’s a crucial aspect of forgiveness and grace, that somehow we hold our leaders to a standard of perfection, and they should be reaching for that. But whether or not they achieve that, that’s what we figure out over time.

DEADLINE: Quite a challenge to depict these in process people whose actions are flawed even though their cause is right in retrospect.

WOLFE: But also the thing that’s very important to me is that that people watching it see these imperfections and acknowledge their own. And they also see what they achieve. So they’ll hopefully say, I am this, but I can do this because by did it. I can do this because I saw Adam Clayton Powell do it. Hopefully you can see that they become shining examples, not only of what is achievable, but also what you had to overcome and what you had to confront. So it makes the heroics of their deeds seem attainable. That’s the goal.

DEADLINE: What do you hope people take away about Bayard Rustin, a forgotten figure until you made this film?

WOLFE: For many people, he doesn’t exist. I saw a study guide for a cultural institution I will not mention. There was a play that was being done, and it was a study guide about this time period. And his name didn’t appear once. Not once. I saw a book that was written about the Montgomery Bus boycott, which is where he and Martin really started to form their connection. And he was crucial, but was not mentioned once in the book. It’s just people. That phenomenon of history is really fascinating to me, that which is significant in the moment, and that which is forgotten two seconds later or 10 years later.

DEADLINE: But many people are remembered for the March on Washington. Why not him?

WOLFE: One person walked away that day an international figure. Martin, at the beginning of the movie in 1960, is a regional rising star. And there’s a shot in there where after he and Byard exchanged, look, he walks toward the crowd. And that was me. That was in my mind, him walking into history. Bayard was a man driven by a sense of honoring and protecting those who needed that, as an American. There was this sense of responsibility and selflessness, even though it was hard to obey and honor. He succeeded most of the time. And that’s a glorious goal for all of us.

DEADLINE: I’ve seen it depicted where when the March on Washington happened, there’s JFK and his brother Bobby, looking on admiringly, as though they helped it happen. Your film tells a different story…

WOLFE: A historian can tell you more accurately, but I think it was very complicated. Any time you do that which has not been done, it engenders a sense of suspicion and what’s really going on. Same for the leaders of the Civil rights movement. Everybody was trying to juggle various affiliations and political energies. The same thing as in now that there were the Dixiecrats, it was clear that something had to change. How quickly, that was debatable. And so A. Philip Randolph and Byard proposed a march on Washington twice under FDR. They were protesting the fact that the war industry, for lack of better words, was very segregated. They threatened a march and FDR adjusted and they integrated all their war plans then. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had Dorothy Dandridge, Carmen Jones working in the parachute plant in Carmen, and then later the integration of the armed forces, which then happened during the Korean War.

So A. Philip Randolph and Byard had threatened to do this thing twice before. And the political adjustment was made. Now it is 1963. And Brown v Board of Education has already said segregation is illegal, but for many, many states and for many institutions and for many organizations, that was not acknowledged. There was this mounting frustration and intensity about, let’s honor the Supreme Court. They needed to take serious action, and also the violence that was happening against people who were protesting nonviolently, was increasing. So it was their determination to bring about change, which the Supreme Court had already said must happen. And it wasn’t happening. So this was an attempt to make America honor that, which the highest court in the land had said they should.

DEADLINE: Switching gears a bit. You directed Chadwick Boseman’s final performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. After he passed, the Oscarcast producers were so convinced he would win that they made the Best Actor category last. Then Anthony Hopkins does, and he not only wasn’t there, he was asleep in Europe. How did all of that hit you?

WOLFE: It hit me on a number of levels. It hit me on one level because I’d come to know him as a human being, and I had tremendous respect for him and a tremendous degree of affection for him. And I have tremendous respect for his wife, Simone. I was very sad because in the state of anyone who knew him, but especially his intimate grieving family, it would’ve been a lovely moment for them. Awards are complicated because somebody wins and somebody loses. You don’t want to disparage who won, and get into all of that. But that was the thing that ultimately I think that lived deepest in my heart, that I regret his family not having that moment, that moment, that moment. I mean, but they had a lifetime of this human being. And his work, regardless of some statue in that movie, was astonishingly brilliant.

DEADLINE: It certainly was. I found myself wondering as I watched Rustin, what role would Chadwick have played if he was alive? I’m sure he would’ve played some role.

WOLFE: Absolutely, absolutely. He and I talked about a film that we wanted to do together. He sent me something, I sent him something. So we were talking about it. I loved working with him.

DEADLINE: You mentioned to me how stoic and selfless he was, going through these emotional and physical scenes in Ma Rainey, and telling no one he was dying. What was that like, in between takes?

WOLFE: I think when you’re making work, that’s the focus. You’re not thinking about anything else. I can’t imagine what that was for him. It’s like you’re driven to do that which you have agreed to do. If you are an artist, and I think he was a great artist, he is wanting to imbue every single moment and of every single frame of the work that he’s doing with the strength and the fragility that it means to be a human being and doing it brilliantly and having the language soar and having his heart be completely, totally open, which I think he did in an astonishing way. I can’t imagine the dynamic and the complications of all of that, but there was so much that there was so to be done in that role, in these areas, in this aria of August Wilson, this aria of pain and belief and faith, even when the world is closing in on you. It is just heroic. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant work.

The last week of filming was particularly challenging for him because his character Levee had a lot of his biggest set pieces. Regardless, every single time, every single time he delivered. And then on the last day, the last day, I felt as though in the morning, he was very drained, as anybody would be having gone through the week of work. And then we took lunch and we came back and he was back. Wow. He was back. He was back and he delivered. And on the last scene of the movie where he has to attack this other character and deal with the consequences of that. So even on the last day, when he was tired, he took a nap, came back, or whatever he did in his trailer. And then he crushed it at full power. So it’s unto itself just as an act of working, it was a phenomenon, a heroic phenomenon. But given the fact that he was also processing illness, it makes it even more staggering. It’s something I will carry with me forever, that bravery, toughness and brilliance on display for all to see.

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