Star Apps: 'Selma'
Fifty years after the Selma to Montgomery marches, celebrated civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered through memorials, museums, and a national holiday. But a biopic, which has been in the works for years, is only now seeing the light of day. Actor David Oyelowo, who plays Dr. King, talks about the incredible resistance to "Selma," the continuing struggle of African-Americans in Hollywood, and his favorite apps.
Actor David Oyelowo as Dr. King in Selma.
(Credit: Atsushi Nishijima)
The film seems to focus more on the man than the legend. Was that a conscious decision?
It was absolutely necessitous. This is a historical figure around whom there are copious amounts of documentaries and books and specials and TV films. But the one thing, in my research, that they don't have as much of is who the man was behind the speeches, behind the iconography, behind the holiday that is named after him. But at the end of the day, why make a movie if it's not going to be revelatory? If it's just going to be stuff you can find in a documentary, then just go watch a documentary. So I was more interested in who the guy is at home with his wife, taking out the trash, putting his kids to bed, and having doubt, fear, shame, and guilt about what he was like as a husband, a friend, and a father. These are all things that I think evoke universal truths that mean we as an audience can get into the film.
I was surprised not to hear the "I Have a Dream" speech in the film. Why was it left out?
Steven Spielberg owns the rights to the speeches. He has wanted to do a more cradle-to-the-grave film, but this movie beat him to the punch. In the end, I'm hugely relieved that we didn't, because the last thing I want as an actor is someone contrasting word-for-word speeches that he had given. At the end of the day, we felt all we have to do is express the spirit of this man and the facts of what went down, but not feel like we have to do an impersonation or a beat-by-beat account of those speeches. In all honesty the speeches were written very much in the rhythm and in the cadence and in the spirit of Dr. King's speeches, and it meant that we were able to tie these speeches to the narrative that we were weaving rather than having to have things in there that really didn't chime with the film. So it ended up working out great.
What was the process of getting his cadence and mannerisms down?
It was a layered approach. Thankfully there's a lot of footage, a lot of recordings, and part of my job as an actor is to understand the musicality of how we speak. Doing accents is something I love to do. I barely do films in my own accent now; I think I'd be thrown if I had to play an Englishman. I also work with an incredible dialect coach who works with me on all of my films where I have an American accent.
But I also have that incredible journey toward doing this film. In 2007, I felt called by God to do this. I just had this visceral reaction when I read this script. Then what happened, in terms of my career, is I felt like I was taken on this divine journey of a history lesson through movies. You do "Lincoln," and you have the Civil War, and I'm doing a scene opposite Daniel Day-Lewis where I'm playing a soldier asking for the vote. I do "Red Tails," which is about fighter pilots in the Second World War who had the best bomber support record in the entire war, yet were marginalized because they were black. I do "The Butler," which goes through 82 years of history, playing an activist. I do "The Help," where I play a preacher in the pulpit in Greenwood, Mississippi. Those films were all in the DNA of what went on for me to do in this film, and I felt like that whole process I was gleaning things all along the way.
Though you're British, you are frequently winning African-American roles over African-American actors. What's your secret?
Lee Daniels, the director who originally cast me, said, "Of everyone coming in to read for this role, you're the only one who is coming without any reverence, without any weight of 'I'm auditioning to play Dr. King.'" And that's because even though I always admired him, because I knew who he was, I didn't grow up like a lot of African-American kids did, at their grandmother's house with a photo of Jesus, JFK, and Dr. King. I hadn't grown up with the deification of him as St. King as part of my upbringing. I very much approached him as a man first and then the historical figure and all of that. I think that what I am able to bring is the man behind all of that. I think that helped me get it quicker.
Do you see him as a saint now, after playing him?
I see him as a saintly human being. To show how human he was, in the fact that he was flawed like all of us, in many ways elevates what he did, because he did it in spite of being like us. I am the exact same age he was, and I am not changing the world. It makes you really examine your role and the shifts that are needed for humanity to continue to improve and grow. My admiration of him has now transcended the iconography, because he had been reduced to "I have a dream," a phrase. You can't really plug into that, so I hope the film makes people appreciate who he was and what he did.
Was there any opposition in Hollywood toward this film?
I truly believe that one of the resistances to this film in the time that I had been aware of it was, if it's a black lead, what that may mean for foreign [earnings]. And if it's King, who was 36 at the time, it can't be Denzel Washington or Will Smith, so it has to be an unknown. And does anyone want to see a King movie? All these questions seem ridiculous now when you see how immediate and necessitous the film is, but that's what we were suffering under the weight of until those undeniable successes of "12 Years a Slave" and "The Butler."
How have opportunities changed for black actors since you've been in the business?
We're making a shift toward meaningful stories, not comedy or action movies, things like "Selma," "12 Years a Slave," "The Butler," and "Fruitvale Station." These are films where a white protagonist isn't crowbarred into the center of it to tell a black story. Of course those films do well, because the story is interesting, but we're not following the right people. Typically, you set up an obstacle, and the white person helps the black person through it. Because of the success of the films I've mentioned, the tolerance for that has dropped, both from people like me, as well as producers, writers, and directors. Financiers have enough of a comfort level where they'll now support people of color being in the driving seats of their own stories, because those films are doing well. This is something I've hoped to see and know that over the last 12 months, that we're in the middle of the shift.
What are your top five apps?
1. I use Waze, because I've been lost a lot, living in LA.
2. CNN I'm on all the time.
3. IMDb.
4. GrubHub I've been introduced to recently.
5. Uber is brilliant.
"Selma" opens in some cities on Christmas Day and gets wide release on January 9:
