‘Swagger’ Creator Reggie Rock Bythewood on How Emmett Till Painting Influenced the Narrative of Apple TV+ Series

When Francie Calfo, then-president of television at Imagine Entertainment, first reached out to Reggie Rock Bythewood to gauge his interest in the sports drama that would become Swagger, he wasn’t immediately on board.

“There was something really interesting happening during that time,” recalls Bythewood, the creator, writer, director and executive producer of the Apple TV+ series. “In that same week, two other people hit me about basketball projects. I was like, ‘What is in the air?’

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Still, Bythewood was somewhat intrigued by the idea of a TV show loosely inspired by NBA star Kevin Durant’s youth basketball days. So, he took a 45-minute flight from Los Angeles to Oakland, California — where Durant was playing for the Golden State Warriors at the time — and met with the 6’10″ pro baller, who’s also an executive producer of the series. It was then that the filmmaker’s level of interest changed from “I don’t know” to “I’m in.”

“I was blown away by the vulnerability that he relayed to me,” explains Bythewood in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “The game changer was I found an emotional connection to his story with mine.”

That connection was rooted in fatherhood. At the time, Bythewood’s sons were heavily into sports and he and his wife, fellow screenwriter and director Gina Prince-Bythewood, understood what it was like to have their entire lives revolve around school athletics. Durant also supported Bythewood’s vision for the coming-of-age tale starring Isaiah Hill and O’Shea Jackson Jr., in that it wouldn’t be a biopic or a period piece but a present-day representation of life for Black teenagers on and off the court.

“I really wanted to create a series that focused on people of color growing up in America,” says Bythewood upon the premiere of season two. “That’s ultimately what I wanted to explore.”

Season one of Swagger ends with the team in ninth grade and picks up with the players finishing out their junior year of high school in season two. What caused you to speed up the timeline of the story?

After we wrapped production of season one, we waited a few months for the show to air, then the show aired and Apple had to make their decision, which took a minute, so all the months that go by where you’re waiting to find out if you have a season two, the damn kids keep growing. Solomon’s voice literally got deeper than mine. Then on top of that, you’ve got like 20 weeks of a writers room. So, I couldn’t come back like, ‘Hey, we’re in the 10th grade.’ That wasn’t going to fly. Authenticity is such a big part of our show.

At the same time, our youngest son, Toussaint, was a high school senior. And all of that angst and urgency that he felt to figure out his life — he’s an athlete too — and where was he going to go to college to play D1, we were living that in real time while I was writing the show, so it was great to pull from our real-life experiences. And it felt very satisfying also to write the show where the cast was at with their true ages.

A good number of the cast is made up of athletes turned actors, what’s that experience been like for you as a director and what growth have you seen among the cast from season one to season two?

We had cast a wide net. I started to feel like there’s got to be an actor out there somewhere tall enough to be believable as a ball player who can play and is going to have the chops to be able to go where we wanted to go. We saw a lot of people, but there was one basketball player that we just couldn’t shake, and it was Isaiah Hill. Some people could come in and dunk. But when he dunks, he’s got that hot sauce on it. It’s electric. And he showed a lot of promise without any acting training. He’s a good-looking kid, charismatic, and also a good person. I don’t want to work with jerks. That’s a big part of it too. So, even though we auditioned a lot of people, I don’t know if there was ever a true contender because he’s special.

Same with Jason Rivera, we saw a whole bunch of people, actors, ballplayers, all over from the States to Puerto Rico and landed on Jason from the Bronx, my hometown. What really excited me is I thought Isaiah was solid in season one. A lot of actors, particularly new actors, feel that you’re acting when you’re talking. We really deal a lot with silent moments where there’s no dialogue. I call them “power of silence” moments and it’s been a big part of the storytelling. In season two, Isaiah’s older, he’s a young man now, and with that maturity, he had more access to his vulnerability and that blew me away. He takes it seriously.

Episode five — “Are We Free?” — is one of the standouts of this season. Can you talk about conceptualizing that story around youth incarceration?

This idea had been percolating for decades. In my 20s, I started off as a playwright — and when I say a playwright, it wasn’t like my stuff was on Broadway. It was in community centers and homeless shelters and one of the places we performed was a youth detention center. I always remember leaving and these young brothers would be at the gates while we were driving off and it felt haunting and disturbing and was such an emotional feeling for all of us to just drive away, leaving these young, incarcerated men. So, I would think about that from time to time. Fast-forward, now we’re in the writers room for season two, and one of my writers, Racquel Baker, was also incarcerated as a youth for a certain amount of time, and came out and really got her life together and became a writer. One day I was like, “Hey, what do you think about if our kids went to a youth detention center to play basketball?” and another writer and executive producer named Joy Kecken, was like, “You’ve got to do this.” And I said, “But…,” and she didn’t want to hear any buts. She was just like, “You’ve got to do it.”

There were so many things I wanted to deal with in the storytelling, but I was really struck by this research we came across that the No. 1 provider for people with mental illness in this country are penitentiaries and we wanted to challenge people’s perspective on that. The thing is, when you do something that deep and emotional on Swagger, the basketball’s got to be hot as shit. We’ve got to be even hotter because we’re really making a social statement. But also, you’re not doing it to just show off, you have to really tap into culture and your people and understand what this is. Being able to have Raquel as a co-writer who lived this for a few months was amazing. I felt connected on a spiritual level. And when you’re right in that way, you surrender to the voices of your characters and to what needs to come forth.

On one of our biggest days, it started to rain. And we didn’t have the budget to shut down for the day, it was like we’re either going to get it or not. And when we got on set, I called all of the department heads around and said, “All right, it’s going to rain so this is what’s going to happen.” And we figured out how to make the rain a character in the narrative. And the thing that was so amazing is that it made it better. It’s hard to imagine this now without it raining, but it was like a blessing. It’s something I want to learn from, how do I always surrender in that way? The day started off like, “Oh my God, how are we going to do it?” And it was probably our best day. Everyone was so galvanized and charged up and we did it.

You’ve created your own unique style of shooting basketball scenes. What is the Roller Red technique?

Twenty years ago, I did this on a film I did called Biker Boys. There’s an opening sequence where it’s all one shot and nobody ever really knew how we did it and I didn’t really want to give it up. Now I’m giving it up. I had a Rollerblader with a camera, and I’d always been looking for an excuse to do something like that again. So, when I did Swagger, I was really like, “Wow, what if I use a rollerblader during the basketball games, what would that look like?” Ultimately, I wanted the audience to feel like they’re a part of the action and not spectators. I’d never seen anything like this, but it was tangible for me because I’d already shot that way. The trick became, how do I make other people see it? Once we finally got into prep and I was able to shoot some stuff, everybody loved it. It was very satisfying because now that we’ve learned how to do it, we continue to raise the bar. We use ramps for other elements of the show, but then I was like, what if we do something where the guy gets airborne? So, it’s been really fun, but it’s also economical. We can shoot the basketball scenes so fast with the Rollerblader because you can just get a couple of takes and you’re done. It’s cinematically exciting, but also very practical for us.

The title artwork is also a very important piece of this project. What are you communicating through the images we see at the beginning of each episode?

Lisa Whittington is the artist and I’m just so fond of that sister and so happy to have met her. In season one, the main characters were 14 years old, and I thought about the most famous 14-year-old in American history, Emmett Till, and I started looking at various images of Emmett. I came across this painting called How She Sent Him and How She Got Him Back. On one side of Emmett’s face, it’s hopeful and optimistic and full of life. And the other side of his face is beaten and swelled after all the horrific things that happened to him. The left side of Emmett’s face offers hope and inspiration and everything that we want to have for our kids. It also had colors, it had blue and yellow, and there’s red in the painting. It became known in our cinematic language as Emmett blue, Emmett yellow and Emmett red. So, you would see that in our narrative. That’s why the uniforms were blue and yellow. It really became like a color palette for us. When I was scouting, I saw this gymnasium in Virginia and I wasn’t really sure if that’s where we were going to do a lot of our shooting, but I walked into this gym and, again, tapping in spiritually, the gym is yellow, blue, and red. I’m like, “OK, I got it. Boom. That’s it. This is where we’re going to shoot.” So, I wrote Lisa a letter and expressed the things I just told you and asked her if she would consider doing murals for our main title sequence and she said yes. It was such an amazing collaboration. I can’t tell you how much I love our title sequence. I talked a lot about our kids being masterpieces and that’s what she set out to create. To express the community and all of our kids in the community as masterpieces.

It’s striking how much pressure is on these athletes at such a young age, but there’s also this sense that their successes on the court are not their own and neither are their failures off the court.

Community is such a huge part of our narrative. None of us really get to where we need to get alone. I talk a lot about Swagger being about a cause bigger than yourself, but also, to be able to execute that cause, particularly as a young person coming up, it really helps to have some level of community —mom, dad, coach, neighbor, somebody there helping you, guiding you. I’m really big on that. Growing up, at times I felt it was lacking, other times it was like, oh wait, I’ve got these people here. There were people that doubted me the whole way, but there were people that believed in me no matter what. A lot of our mothers did that. Jace’s mom Jenna’s one of my favorite characters because I love that she can be flawed, but still the epitome of community. And it’s not just like, “Oh, community is a nice thing,” but it’s the urgency of community because a lot of our decisions feel like life and death, particularly when you’re at that age. So, the importance and support of community feels urgent as well.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

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