Is your benchmark for success for this film if it manages to break through to a general audience?
No, to me the film is successful already, we made a film that wasn’t supposed to get made. As a film maker you set benchmarks for yourself, making a movie, getting it into a festival, and then getting distribution, we did all those things, which is incredible. The fact that my mom was able to go to a small theatre in New Jersey and see the film, that’s a huge victory for a movie like this. It shows that there is an appetite for these kinds of films. Success is defined in many different ways, there’s lots of first time film makers that didn’t make anything at the box office and are some of the most successful film makers out there today. The box office only means success in one regard, but it doesn’t necessarily mean a successful film. If I look at what critics have said on a global scale, its a win. Rolling stones, four stars, Vanity Fair, GQ best film of the year. We did pretty good for a small movie, we were able to get reviewed by the top critics in the world, including New York Times, LA times, critics pick, for a tiny movie. When I say tiny I mean this was low budget, we were able to make a lot of noise at the lower rungs of the ladder.
In terms of future projects, will you continue to take on social issues?
I’m open to it, but you know, I’d also love to make a heist film like Steve Mcqueen. I think whatever it is, humanity will be at the core of it, finding human stories that tell truths. Whether that has social issues or not. I never necessarily really set out to make a social issue film, it just so happened to tackle social issues; these are issues in my community, this is how we were raised, how I grew up. So I didn’t look at it like that, I just looked at it like ‘this is my life’ so I was just trying to depict real life in that sense. It’s imposed as a social issue movie, because of the themes that are tackled, but these are just things that happen all the time in our community. If you ask an average black person in America, this is just every day. I was just trying to set out to make something that was true to me and my community and how I grew up. However it can best advance that narrative then great, if using the social issue theme can get it to a wider audience so more people see it, then wonderful.
What does the title Monsters and Men mean to you?
I had a title before I had a film. I was trying to question a very basic human instinct that we are all good and bad, we all have the ability to either do something or turn a blind eye, we can be complicit. I thought about how just because you don’t pull the trigger, if you don’t say anything, are you still complicit, are you also guilty? We’re all a little good, we’re all a little bad – that is the duality that I was playing with, and questioning on an individual level. Of course I found out later that there was an Icelandic band with a very similar name and I was encouraged to change the title, but I couldn’t find anything better, it was catchy and powerful, and it represented the heart of the question of what I thought the film was, so it stuck.
