Episode 789 - Raoul Peck
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:How are you?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:This is my podcast.
Marc:You know, it's...
Marc:Sad.
Marc:Sad day.
Marc:As I tell you this, I learned that Bill Paxton, the actor, passed away because of complications during a surgery.
Marc:And the guy was just here.
Marc:He was just here.
Marc:He was sitting across from me in the empty chair that I'm looking at right now, just a few weeks ago.
Marc:It was episode 783.
Marc:It was just a couple weeks ago.
Marc:He was right there, full of life.
Marc:I was so excited to talk to that guy.
Marc:I didn't know him, but sometimes I get very excited to talk to people in here because I love them.
Marc:I love his work.
Marc:I love all his work.
Marc:Seemed like an intense, great guy.
Marc:And he was.
Marc:He's a very gracious, giving, lit up human being over there.
Marc:Just sitting there.
Marc:Excited to be here.
Marc:I was excited to talk to him.
Marc:And now he's gone.
Marc:Life is so fucking fragile.
Marc:You just don't know what's going to happen.
Marc:And it's just...
Marc:It's tragic.
Marc:But I tell you, I'm glad I had that time with him.
Marc:Like so many of the people in here, all I'm looking for is to connect with a human being.
Marc:And that guy was just full-on, force of nature, human being.
Marc:Grounded, decent, excited, passionate, talented guy that we all know from all the movies.
Marc:It's just fucking awful.
Marc:It's just so sad.
Marc:But that life is just so horribly surprising sometimes.
Marc:And I'm in shock and I just, I barely knew the guy.
Marc:I had one conversation with him.
Marc:I shared it with you guys and it was amazing.
Marc:I was hoping to see him again, see more of his work, but he's gone.
Marc:Passed away.
Marc:And it's funny because when he was in here, he said, no matter how many movies I make, weird science is going to be the first thing in my obituary.
Marc:He said that sitting right there in that empty chair across from me.
Marc:There's a lot of empty chairs everywhere, folks.
Marc:It's part of being human.
Marc:But it is funny though.
Marc:Because there's really nothing wrong with being known for playing a funny role that made an impression on so many young people as a movie that they never forgot because of Bill Paxton.
Marc:But the first line in pretty much all the obituaries I saw was how Bill Paxton was a versatile and generous actor and almost everyone who has paid tribute to him that I looked at talks about what a kind and friendly person he was.
Marc:Damn it, just two weeks ago.
Marc:Life is so fucking fragile and surprising and incomprehensible at some times.
Marc:Many of us have been feeling this, you know, for weeks now.
Marc:Maybe for years for different reasons.
Marc:And then the sadness deepens when things get close.
Marc:And he was right there in that chair.
Marc:It's been a few people have sat there that are no longer with us.
Marc:And when I really think about it, it's brutal.
Marc:It's a brutal fucking reality of life.
Marc:But man, am I glad I got a chance to talk to these people.
Marc:It was just great to get to know him as a person.
Marc:We always got to remember that there are people in front of us.
Marc:That if you go outside or you spend time at work or wherever you go, see those people.
Marc:See them.
Marc:Get out of your head.
Marc:See the people.
Marc:It's very important now to see people, to engage empathy, to connect as human beings.
Marc:who want to live good lives, free lives, and do what they want with their life in comfort, safety,
Marc:You know?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It makes me... I'm lost in a certain swirl of sadness at the fragility of life.
Marc:And that's understandable.
Marc:And my condolences and heart go out to Bill's friends and family.
Marc:And it's just horrible.
Marc:I guess out of the gate here I should tell you
Marc:That, yeah, my guest today, Raul Peck, is the director of the film I Am Not Your Negro.
Marc:It is a powerful documentary about James Baldwin.
Marc:And I had to watch it two times because it is so deep, so moving, and so powerful.
Marc:both in words and actions and the scope of what the conversation is in the film and the one I'm about to have about the film.
Marc:It's an amazing movie.
Marc:I was excited that Raoul Peck could be here.
Marc:I was just looking at quotes from Mr. Baldwin.
Marc:online here.
Marc:And one of them is I love America more than any other country in this world.
Marc:And exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
Marc:It's important.
Marc:It's important to keep that in your head.
Marc:But other things.
Marc:I guess I should tell you about this.
Marc:June 1st, if you're in New York City or the surrounding areas, you might want to think about going to this year's Book Expo because I will be there to conduct a conversation in front of a live audience with my old Air America co-worker, Senator Al Franken.
Marc:You can go to bookexpoamerica.com to get tickets.
Marc:If you're not seeing the full Book Expo,
Marc:Expo across both days.
Marc:You can get a single day pass.
Marc:Just remember my event with Senator Franken will be on Thursday, June 1st.
Marc:It'll be fun.
Marc:I really am excited.
Marc:I get a kick out of Al.
Marc:The senator, he has a new book coming out called Al Franken, Giant of the Senate.
Marc:So we'll have a lot to talk about, not only about his SNL days, but also about being a United States senator.
Marc:And one with a great deal of spunk these days, thank God.
Marc:And incidentally, I guess I should tell you that I also have a book coming out later this year.
Marc:Well, I should say we have a book.
Marc:It doesn't come out until October, but I can tell you a little bit about it now.
Marc:It's called Waiting for the Punch, Words to Live By from the WTF podcast.
Marc:And I'll tell you this, people, when my producer and I started on this more than two years ago, we did not know what it would be like.
Marc:I don't think we could have ever imagined what an amazing thing it is.
Marc:It is really, without question, the best possible book to come out of doing this show.
Marc:It's an amazing thing to hold in your hands and experience.
Marc:I know that sounds like hype, but we're both really proud of this thing, and I think it's a special thing because, to be honest with you, once I have these conversations in here, that's it for me.
Marc:And reading this thing through and seeing how things that are said in connection with another human being, with someone there to bear witness and hold the space and feel what you're saying and to read it, it's unlike reading anything else.
Marc:And I could not believe how...
Marc:fulfilling it was and again it's not hype we're just we're just very proud i'll tell you more about it when we start the pre-sale but get excited it's going to be something you'll definitely love comes out in october it's a long ways away and god willing we'll all be here and still able to buy books am i being am i being a dark
Marc:My guest today, Raul Peck, made the film I Am Not Your Negro.
Marc:It is a documentary about James Baldwin.
Marc:Now, I felt a little insecure, or maybe not insecure, but a little ignorant, maybe is a better word, in that...
Marc:Just about six months ago or so, I saw footage of James Baldwin debating William Buckley at Oxford in England.
Marc:I had not read James Baldwin's work, and I have not read much of it, very little.
Marc:And after watching that piece of that debate, I was blown away at the level of humanity and intellect and the depth of it all that that man had.
Marc:And I was very fucking moved.
Marc:I had to watch it two or three times.
Marc:And then when I got a screener of this film and watched it, I had to watch it twice.
Marc:The depth.
Marc:Of his intelligence.
Marc:And again his humanity.
Marc:Is just profound.
Marc:And not unlike anything else.
Marc:Cultural criticism.
Marc:Film criticism.
Marc:Political criticism.
Marc:But the movie is really moving through.
Marc:this book that he never finished, that he wanted to write about his three friends, seeing his life and the struggle of America and race through the deaths of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Medgar Evers.
Marc:And it had a lot of footage of Baldwin, like on the Dick Cavett show, on talk show, some footage of that...
Marc:debate that I saw it had bits and pieces of films and it was all from his words sort of assessing the racial predicament and I felt a little out of my league to talk to Mr. Peck about this but I just copped to that because the movie had such a profound effect on me and it was so disturbing to
Marc:really how little has changed on some level in a very deep way.
Marc:And what really kind of struck me, and you'll listen to the interview,
Marc:It's just that it's again about seeing other people with some form of compassion.
Marc:If you were not blinded by anger, one way or the other, and you are not reacting to something that your head is generating, it's very hard now
Marc:theoretically you're supposed to have some control over what you let into your mind, what you let into your head.
Marc:And a lot of times we prefer things that substantiate our points of view, that make us feel better, that seem right.
Marc:And a lot of times it's not.
Marc:On all sides.
Marc:But it's become very hard to filter.
Marc:And because of that, I think that a lot of what you are reacting to, most people in general, or hating or loving or whatever, is in your head.
Marc:It is not in reality.
Marc:It may have some point of reference in reality, but it is not.
Marc:It is in your head.
Marc:And you got to separate that, man.
Marc:Because I think what we're losing is our ability to see each other as people.
Marc:And we, you know, we can't, we just can't fucking afford to lose that in any way.
Marc:And I talk about that a bit with Mr. Peck and about, you know, a lot of other things.
Marc:But I'll tell you, that movie is powerful and it needs to be seen a couple of times.
Marc:So I actually watched a bit of the Oscars last night to see if my guest's film was going to take Best Documentary, but that went to the OJ movie, which was also a great film.
Marc:But I Am Not Your Negro stands alone as something...
Marc:It's really an amazing document of an amazing person, amazing mind, and a profoundly deep understanding and bringing together of a lot of ideas that are frankly horrifying, but real.
Marc:And it provides a lot of...
Marc:insight into exactly the human dynamics of those forces.
Marc:So it was a great pleasure to talk to my guest, the director of I Am Not Your Negro, Raul Peck.
Marc:So join us now.
Marc:How's it going?
Marc:This is exciting.
Marc:You're running around.
Marc:You're an Oscar nominee.
Guest:I can't even know where I am and where I'm going, where I'll be in one hour.
Guest:Is it exciting?
Guest:Well, yes.
Guest:As a filmmaker, especially when you spend 10 years of your life making a film, a complicated film that you don't even know if, artistically, it can work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So having survived that and then you have such a great acclaim that, you know, you see how the film is changing people.
Guest:You know, the discussion after the movie, you know, not only during Q&A, but after Q&A.
Guest:People stay in the room or in the lobby or in the parking lot and they have discussion.
Guest:And then they come back.
Guest:To you?
Guest:No, they come back with their family, their friends, their organized groups to go to see the film together just to be in that ambience again, in that atmosphere.
Guest:It's incredible.
Marc:Well, it's like for me, I watched it and then I watched it again because the depth of James Baldwin as a thinker is beyond anything I've ever seen before.
Marc:And, you know, I get nervous because, you know, there is... You know, as a white guy, you know, watching this movie and then having the opportunity to talk to you, there's part of me that thinks, like, I'm not qualified.
Guest:Well, that's the contrary because Baldwin...
Guest:talks to everybody right right it's not about who you are it's it's who you are as a human being right and he confronts you with that exactly your responsibility is as a human being not as a white person as a black person right we each have our duty or responsibility and he's telling all of us to all of us you better face it you need to respond to whatever is happening in this country
Marc:And I get that, you know, but the interesting thing for me is a guy who's a liberal guy, who's a guy who is thoughtful.
Marc:I've read a few books that there was a feeling of like, you know, somehow I'm complicit.
Marc:Yes, of course.
Marc:You know, it was something that that did wake something up.
Marc:You know, you take a lot of things for granted.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, it's like, you know, the way I see it is like you have this great teacher of yours, you know, who knew you since you were 10.
Guest:And then one day he sat you down and said, listen, I'm going to talk to you.
Guest:And I'm going to tell you, you know, this is life, and this is what you've been going through, and there are some stuff that you need to face.
Guest:And the way he said it, it's not antagonistic.
Guest:It's not with hate or with anger.
Guest:Or the anger is the anger of somebody who have gone through so much and wants to let it out.
Guest:But he's not aggressing you.
Guest:And that's very rare.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so you listen to that voice.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:And you listen to it.
Marc:And, you know, he speaks because the footage you have of him, you know, there's Dick Cavett footage, you know, in a conversation.
Marc:And then there's some other talk show footage.
Marc:And then you have Samuel Jackson doing an amazing James Baldwin.
Marc:Incredible.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Because Samuel Jackson has such a distinct voice that I didn't realize it was him both times.
Guest:Well, that's the thing.
Guest:People have now a sort of cliche, I would say a Tarantino-esque image of Samuel Jackson.
Guest:And he's much more than that.
Guest:He's an incredible actor.
Guest:He was a stage actor.
Guest:So it's somebody who learned his skills, who is incredibly talented and can do anything.
Guest:And the way, you know, I didn't have to give him too much direction.
Guest:It was just the only thing I could tell him, you know, you need to be the voice.
Guest:You know, I do not want any distance between you and these words.
Guest:We are inside James Baldwin's head.
Guest:So you need to feel the emotion.
Guest:You need to feel the tragic.
Guest:You need to feel the irony.
Guest:You need to feel the joy.
Guest:And he did.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So it's a performance.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And now is all the narration...
Marc:taken from the manuscript, it's called Remember This House?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Well, it's more complicated than that.
Guest:Also, the letter to the editor.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:There are a few documents that were handed to me by Gloria Carithous-Mott, who's James Baldwin's sister.
Guest:And who's running the estate.
Guest:And four years into the process where I was still struggling about what is the right organic approach to make this film.
Guest:Because I had access to everything.
Guest:published, unpublished.
Guest:To the estate.
Guest:From the estate.
Guest:They gave me, really, that's unprecedented.
Guest:Never happened before in the film industry.
Marc:Well, let me ask you a question from that point there that your credentials are deep.
Marc:You've been involved with film for decades.
Marc:You have a production company, which I read about.
Marc:But where do you come from?
Marc:Because clearly it's not an American accent or whatever.
Guest:No, I have a complicated but complex life.
Guest:I'm Haitian.
Guest:I'm born in Haiti.
Guest:My parents left to go work in the Congo.
Guest:To flee?
Guest:Did they flee?
Guest:My father was arrested twice.
Guest:By Papa Doc?
Guest:Yeah, by the regime.
Guest:He lost his job.
Guest:He was a professor at the Faculty of Agronomy.
Guest:Why was he arrested?
Guest:Well, you didn't have to do much in a dictatorship to be arrested.
Guest:He was not really politically implicated.
Guest:It's just because you didn't campaign for the dictator, and so you are taken as an enemy.
Guest:By the way, we are seeing that today in the U.S.
Guest:administration.
Guest:If you don't agree, you have to leave.
Guest:So imagine what it is in a country that's going through dictatorship.
Guest:So he just knew that he had to leave.
Guest:And at the same time, the U.N.
Guest:came to Haiti and had...
Guest:fought 400 contracts for Haitian doctors, engineers, and professors to go work in the Congo because Congo was newly independent, and the Belgian, who had kept everything under their hands, never trained Congolese to...
Guest:To be able to rule their country.
Guest:So they had to do that like in an urgency measure.
Guest:So they came to Haiti because Haiti is, you know, one of the few black countries who had an elite, who had, you know, people fully trained and who spoke French as well.
Guest:And so they recruited a lot of my father's generation.
Marc:And you made a feature film.
Guest:And I made a film about Lumumba, who was the first prime minister of Congo assassinated by the CIA, the French, and some other, the Belgian.
Guest:So Congo was a very important place for me.
Guest:It was my first link to the continent, and I went to school there.
Guest:After a few years, we had to be evacuated to New York because there was some political problems.
Guest:And so I went to school in Brooklyn, in a public school in Brooklyn, near Flatbush Avenue and North Strand Avenue.
Guest:And so that was my first, you know, really experience in the United States, in this country.
Guest:So that's when we applied for residency because we didn't know, you know, we knew we couldn't go back to Haiti.
Guest:That's the only thing.
Guest:Because don't forget, the dictatorship lasted until 1986.
Guest:until I was an adult after my studies.
Marc:Do you remember, because certainly part of this film, I'm Not Your Negro, is there is a sense of terror underneath it in a very real way.
Marc:There is a sense of...
Marc:violence and terror and, you know, horrendous separation of people.
Marc:Do you remember that from your childhood?
Guest:Well, there was several type of terror.
Guest:There was the terror of roadblocks in Haiti.
Guest:You know, I remember the first time my father was arrested and we just knew because he didn't come home.
Guest:And my father, my mother took me in the car.
Guest:I was the only child at the time.
Guest:I have now two more brothers.
Guest:But at the time I was the youngest, the first child.
Guest:And I remember being in the back of that car.
Guest:It was night and roadblocks.
Guest:And my mother going everywhere.
Guest:And there was a curfew.
Guest:She was not supposed to be on the street.
Guest:It was 9 o'clock in the evening.
Guest:And it was a very strange confrontation with terror because...
Guest:you know, at those roadblocks, they could just decide, you know, to shoot or to arrest you or, you know, to do whatever they want.
Guest:There was, you know, there was no rules.
Guest:And incredibly enough, when we went to Congo, we had the same kind of roadblocks as well in, you know, time of really big political confrontations.
Guest:And so...
Guest:And when I went to Brooklyn, it was a time where, you know, you could get mugged in the streets.
Guest:So I felt like I grew up always in knowing what violence was and what, you know, arbitrary was.
Guest:And I think that had a profound influence on me and my work, you know.
Guest:If you know the list of my films, in every film there is this notion of, you know,
Guest:people owning your life in a very arbitrary way and deciding about being killed or not.
Guest:And this is a sense that I always kept with me, even in Germany where I studied later on.
Guest:I think there was not one single day I didn't think about the Holocaust, that Germany being an incredible country who produced the best brand of the century, from Einstein to the best composer of Wagner and all the others, great thinker.
Guest:And that same country was able to produce that kind of monstrosity that the Nazi regime was.
Guest:So those elements always kept me alive throughout my life.
Guest:And that's where I rejoined Baldwin in some way.
Guest:He has a quote, and I'm very bad at quote, but...
Guest:He said, you know, every human being is an incredible miracle.
Guest:And I learned to love the miracle they are, but also to protect myself from the monster they have become.
Guest:It's hard to tell sometimes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:But that's something.
Guest:What he says is about how you deal with people and societies.
Guest:We can do the most incredible things and at the same time become the worst monster possible.
Guest:And all this in good conscience.
Guest:You know, when your question before about, you know, the moral monster, you know, when Baldwin calls the whole Western civilization a sort of moral monster because they went into countries, colonized them, or they invented slavery somehow.
Guest:They use it.
Guest:with totally good conscience.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And he goes on to talk about how if only the people that were enjoying this quote-unquote freedom knew how many lives it cost to sustain it and create it.
Guest:So the Western civilization, and it's also the reaction of, let's say, the winner.
Guest:The winner decide about the narrative.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we have been in a very Eurocentric world for several centuries now.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And in being that, we forgot or they forgot that there are other realities.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And when you get to write the narrative, you decide who is the good guy and who is the bad guy.
Marc:Right, and then there was that point where in the way you structured the film towards the beginning where they thought that vengeance was theirs to take because they had the moral high ground.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Which was at times genocidal.
Marc:Yes, yes, yes.
Marc:So when you were in Germany, is that where you went to film school?
Marc:Yes, I went to Berlin.
Guest:In fact, I never had in mind to become a filmmaker.
Guest:You know, coming from Haiti, this is not something serious you do as a living.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:My parents, you know, of course, you're going to be an engineer.
Guest:So I choose something that was in between.
Guest:You know, there was a new diploma called, you know, industrial engineering.
Guest:So it was part engineering and part economy.
Guest:So the mixture of the both, that's something that seems appealing to me.
Guest:And I knew I could work in all kinds of industries.
Guest:So that's what I went to study in Germany, in Berlin.
Guest:And I did those studies.
Guest:It's very long because it's a double study.
Guest:I spent seven years studying.
Guest:I finished.
Guest:I got my diploma and my master's.
Guest:And I started a PhD for development policies.
Guest:And two years into that PhD, my thesis father died in a car accident.
Guest:And parallelly, I was already working with friends on, you know, I was making photos for different German magazines and newspapers.
Guest:I would do interviews.
Guest:Berlin is an incredible cultural city.
Guest:You know, you have the biggest film festival, biggest jazz festival.
Guest:festivals, theater festivals.
Guest:So I would usually try to have interviews or photos of artists coming from Latin America, from Africa, from the whole third world.
Guest:And so that's how I met a lot of those people, great artists over the years.
Guest:And so that was a kind of job I had, but it was my way to be in cultural circle all the time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And at that point, I went back to New York because my girlfriend at the time was a filmmaker and she had a contract in New York, so I went with her.
Guest:I worked as a taxi driver in New York.
Guest:But of course, journalists made it, you know, he was a taxi driver and became a filmmaker.
Guest:No, that's not, I don't have that mythology.
Guest:I just needed a job that I could leave, you know, anytime I wanted.
Guest:And while I was thinking about my next step, you know.
Guest:So basically during that time, I decided really to say, well, I really want to make film.
Guest:and in order to make it on a solid basis i need to go back to film school so i passed the exam to to the berlin academy which was a very selective school uh they took only 18 students a year and it's a very complicated uh you know exam over you know several weeks what is oh really what is it what part what does it do like what are
Guest:Well, first of all, you had to bring a lot of pile of works that you have done.
Marc:Like photographs?
Guest:Photographs.
Guest:Well, there is usually a thematic, and you need to do a photo shoot about that thematic.
Guest:You need to write a scene using that thematic.
Guest:You need to do a sort of report.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:You know, sort of documentary report.
Guest:They mean business.
Guest:Yeah, there are many layers.
Guest:In fact, it's more to see what are your capabilities on different level.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, it's not like there is a particular profile to be a filmmaker.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They just want to see, you know, how do you fare?
Guest:among all these different things.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:They want to get a sense of your creativity and your capability.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:How do you transform a content into images or into a story?
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it's very competitive and it's great.
Guest:It was a great exam and it forces you also to discover who you are because you can't really cheat.
Guest:You need to be yourself and put something.
Guest:You can't bullshit that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You need to put your belly on the page and be naked, basically.
Guest:And then once you get in, it's one of the best schools because you don't pay anything.
Guest:It's state-funded.
Guest:You have money to make your film.
Guest:And the training is you learn by making films.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:And how long is that program?
Marc:It's a four-year program.
Marc:So you really got in.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:You really dug in.
Guest:In fact, within two years, I had already written a screenplay, which I submit to German television.
Guest:What was that about?
Guest:It was my first story about a young Haitian poet who was living in Brooklyn, New York.
Guest:who was arrested in Haiti and tortured.
Guest:And he met one of those torturers, a former military, in the streets of Brooklyn.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And then he started looking for him to get revenge.
Guest:But it was more an occasion for me to talk about this immigration, Haitian immigration, who had left Haiti because of the dictatorship.
Guest:And because it was a long dictatorship, at one point, some of the people who were themselves murderers or torturers got out as well.
Guest:And then they would confront in the streets of New York.
Guest:That happened.
Guest:Those are real stories.
Guest:I know people who were, you know,
Marc:confronted to somebody who had put them in prison.
Marc:There was a couple of mass immigrations, like very dramatic on boats.
Guest:Well, that came later.
Guest:That was another step up in the dramatic development of Haiti.
Guest:But that's something, you know, I have friends from Chile or from Brazil or from Nicaragua who had gone through those same experiences.
Guest:Coming to the United States.
Guest:Yeah, and then meet one of their former torturers.
Guest:That's incredible.
Guest:And it's a weird situation.
Marc:I would say so.
Guest:Sometimes, you know, you are here and you want to forget about your past.
Guest:You don't want to be confronted with it.
Guest:And then you see that...
Guest:This particular guy never had to come in front of a justice trial.
Guest:And then the traumatic.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And he probably fled because his wife was in danger now.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:That's what that kind of regime do.
Guest:They use you, and then when they don't need you anymore, you're thrown out.
Marc:Or in jail.
Marc:Or in jail or killed.
Marc:So right from the get-go, because of your life and because of your experience, which is unique to situations like that, these films were getting into it.
Marc:I mean, you weren't making entertainment.
Guest:No, that's one of the things.
Guest:I came to movie because of politics and because of my engagement.
Guest:You know, it was, you know, I told you I went to film school.
Guest:I think I was 26 already.
Guest:So I was already an adult.
Marc:Right.
Guest:So I knew why.
Guest:You know, it was not just, I want to make you to tell a story, work with actors, et cetera.
Guest:It was about, you know, how do I can, how can I be of some use to my society or wherever I was living?
Guest:And it was always about going back home.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, I studied in Berlin, but
Guest:knowing that at some point I will have to go back to Haiti and fight, you know, undercover or with, you know, some organization that exists.
Marc:Without a doubt.
Guest:Oh, yes.
Guest:Oh, yes.
Guest:The generation before me, by the way, went back to Haiti, and they were all killed because what we didn't know at the time is that the CIA knew about that, and they gave the information to the regime.
Guest:Because the Devalier was supported by the American, by every American administration, because it was a sort of bulwark against communists.
Guest:So they would prefer to have a dictator that is on the side than to have anything that sounds socialist or communist.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it was a very hard time.
Guest:So I never thought that I was going to stay in Germany or in Europe.
Guest:It was always about going back home.
Guest:Don't forget, I was in film school in 83 and the dictatorship lasted until 1986.
Guest:So my goal was to go back, and like the goal of many of my friends, it was always to go back home, whether you were Haitian or Chilean or from Nicaragua or from Turkey or from Iran.
Marc:However you can.
Marc:Yeah, it was about going back and serve.
Marc:And that's interesting that James Baldwin,
Marc:you know, struggled with that decision.
Marc:It was not innate to him to, you know, once he fled America for personal and political reasons and spent all that time in France and really became who he was, that it seemed in the film there was a reluctance that eventually became...
Marc:No choice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that's the thing, you know, and you never can totally renounce to where you come from, to where you grew up or to where, you know, the first smell you had, the first ice cream you had.
Guest:All those are important memories in your life.
Guest:So when you are forced to leave your country, and that's to come to the refugee crisis here, or crisis they call, nobody wants to leave his hometown.
Guest:Even here, we are a country of immigrants.
Guest:But why is it we have little Italy, we have Chinatown?
Guest:It's because you still have that cultural link and that somehow emotional link to wherever you come from.
Guest:Forever, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, forever.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and and so when syrian uh refugees are coming it's not because some of those people they were happy in their country yeah you know even when they didn't have much money but it was their country it was their place of birth and so to suspect them or the mexican yeah it's whatever is going on right now is really unacceptable you know we are
Guest:witnessing, you know, fascistic attitude toward other human beings, you know, women, men, children.
Guest:You know, it's like you put a stamp on them as they are criminals.
Guest:And even the language you use, you know, I remember hearing those languages
Guest:before a genocide in Rwanda or the Nazi genocide.
Guest:Because that's the first step you take.
Guest:When you want to kill an enemy, you start giving him names.
Guest:And then those names transform themselves into insect names.
Guest:And once they are at that stage, from bad hombres, the next step is to say they are rats.
Guest:And then you can kill rats.
Guest:This type of words using, the rhetoric of that, this is a rhetoric of genocide.
Guest:I don't think we would get to that point here in this country because, first of all, there is resistance.
Guest:There are institutions.
Guest:But still, the mindset can do a lot of damage.
Marc:Well, it's terrifying.
Marc:In the film,
Marc:There's a moment where Baldwin is talking about what people are reacting to with that hate is something in their own mind.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:It's not the person.
Marc:It's not the reality.
Marc:It's the need to have that.
Marc:Hate.
Guest:It's a construction in their own mind.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Because, you know, I can, like he said in the film, you know, I grew up, I never realized that, you know, what does it mean, black?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, you don't wake up and look at you and say, I'm black.
Guest:You know, you're just a human being.
Guest:You know, you go to school, you have friends.
Guest:You know, I had friends of multiple color, multiple nationality, but, you know, it's not the criteria I use to have friends or not.
Guest:It's, you know, I'm your friend because we hit it together and we have something in common.
Guest:But it cannot be the color of our skin.
Marc:Right, and so when you start working on I'm Not Your Negro, this is a decade of work because it seems like some of the thoughts that you're talking about
Marc:you know just what was the moment where you're like this is the the man whose words in life that i can run these you know feelings i have through well it's i was very lucky to have read baldwin when i was 17 or 18 so very early age and
Guest:When you can see a problem from the distance, you always have a better position because you're not totally in the anger of that moment or that place.
Guest:The same thing Baldwin had, going to Paris for him was he understood his country better
Guest:from the perspective of being in paris and in paris he understood that suddenly people were looking at him first as an american and then as a black person yeah because in paris you had you know black american but you had black african you have black caribbean people and for a french person they are not equal they are not the same yeah so when you come as an american suddenly you know you are
Guest:somebody else they see you as an american like they see hemingway as an american right you know the question you know is not you know you're black i mean so it's it's more uh you know complex than that so being elsewhere give you it's like you are on the top of a mountain you can look down and have a bigger picture
Guest:of whatever is going, and you can see the complexity.
Guest:And it gives you some structure.
Marc:And you were able to see that from living all these places simultaneously.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So when I read Balding the first time, it just blew my mind because suddenly what I had felt intuitively
Guest:in my 17, 18-year-old brand was suddenly very structural, very analytic, and very poetic from Baldwin.
Guest:He was explaining to me what I felt intuitively but could not really express.
Guest:What was the first thing you read?
Guest:The Fire Next Time.
Guest:That book was important.
Guest:Really, because Baldwin did one thing, is that he just said, this is who I am.
Guest:I take a stand.
Guest:And then the problem is you.
Guest:You need to find your place.
Guest:I know who I am.
Guest:I know where I belong.
Guest:And I don't let you define who I am.
Guest:And this particular society, because it's a letter to his nephew, and he's explaining to his nephew,
Guest:who he is, the nephew, and in what world he is, and what he will have to confront all his life.
Guest:But he's telling him, yes, it's going to be hard, but don't forget, you are a human being, and don't let people define who you are.
Guest:And you're going to live through things that you can't imagine that doesn't make sense.
Guest:But you need to keep your sanity and understand that it's a particular society that is like that.
Guest:And you have a particular history.
Guest:And you need to know at every moment who you are and face that society.
Marc:Right.
Marc:In the film he says, the history is not the past, it's the present.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Because you were brought here by it.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And you need to confront it every day.
Guest:We are the product of our history.
Guest:And he also said that,
Guest:All of us, we share that same history.
Guest:There is no black history and white history.
Guest:This is the history of America.
Guest:And we need to face our respective role in that history.
Guest:And we need to take responsibility for our roles, our respective roles.
Guest:That's the only way, the only form that we can take to solve all our problems and to construct a future for both of us.
Marc:So when you say it takes 10 years, because I noticed that the structure of the film, it's thoughtful and it's very deliberate.
Marc:You're constantly going up against mediated images or fictional images through film, television.
Marc:of the black person and the white person in this country because film and television dictate somehow and kind of structure our misrepresentation of reality.
Guest:Well, because film and images are ideological grounded.
Guest:They're not innocent.
Guest:Anything you watch on TV or on the theater screen is full of...
Guest:very particularly thoughts or image of a society or prejudice or, you know, it defines who you are, it defines who women are, you know, what is the interaction between men and women, how do you treat children, how do you treat rape, et cetera, or do you treat violence?
Guest:So film are, you know, transporting all of that.
Guest:But most of us don't know how to read those different layers.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We take it for granted.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right, and then James Baldwin read it.
Guest:Of course, and James Baldwin not only read it, but he deconstructed what film is.
Guest:He's giving us a really lesson of the construction of what images are, in particular when...
Guest:as a black person that you don't see your images on the screen.
Guest:You know, you don't see yourself as a real person on the screen.
Guest:Now it has changed a little bit.
Guest:You can see, you know, real great black characters in TV and movies and television series who have been very good at that recently.
Guest:But still, you know, the whole ideology...
Guest:package that goes through film and don't forget American cinema is the dominant cinema throughout the world so I grew up even in Haiti you know from 4 to 8 watching American film
Guest:You know, my African or Congolese friends, they also saw the same John Wayne Western.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Or Tarzan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we knew as young boys that this is not totally reality because, listen, that white guy killings, you know, all the Indians somehow.
Guest:This is somehow aerial.
Guest:By the way, we could be the Indians in that story.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You knew that early on.
Guest:And, yeah, and then I remember very vividly, you know, the first time you started to see black characters in Hollywood movies, and you could basically time at how many minutes the black character would get killed.
Guest:Right, yeah.
Guest:You know, it's like, you know, the first 10, 15 minutes, the guy, he's going to get killed.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then it took longer, you know, as time passed, you know, you had black character who survived the whole movie and could even be in the happy ending, you know.
Guest:That's changed.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:So the movie is like the half-finished or not even half-finished book, Remember This House, is about James Baldwin.
Guest:Well, those were notes, by the way.
Guest:It's not a finished manuscript.
Guest:It's really notes, 30 pages of notes that somehow tried to summarize what the book was going to be.
Marc:And so he's now like this is in the late 70s.
Marc:So he you know, he's written many, many books.
Marc:And this and you feel that this is something that's been, you know, at the core of his soul.
Marc:What what do you feel that he was looking to?
Guest:Well, it was a very complicated and painful process for him.
Guest:He knew, you know, to go back, you know, writing that book means I would have to go back to the South and meet Marilee Evers and meet the widow of Malcolm X and meet the children who are no longer children, et cetera.
Guest:That's, for me, that gave me the story.
Guest:This is the story.
Guest:you know, what it meant for that man to go back that journey.
Guest:And so it gave me the opportunity to go back to that journey myself and to find everything he had written about it.
Guest:You know, the film was... You draw from a lot of sources?
Guest:Yes, of course.
Guest:The film is full of different sources.
Guest:One of the major sources was a book called The Devil Finds Work,
Guest:which is a collection of James Baldwin essays on film.
Guest:He is one of the major film critics of this country.
Guest:Because not only he could review films and books, by the way, but also he did it in a way where he delivers you also the instrument of analysis.
Guest:He didn't just make, you know, like usual critics made, like a very realistic critic, but he gives you the historic perspective.
Guest:He gives you the ideological perspective and the political one.
Guest:What does it mean?
Guest:You know, when he write a critic about the defiant ones, you know, the film with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, you know, being chained,
Guest:He used it to explain what he calls, you know, the source of the white man hate and the source of the black man hate.
Guest:And he compared those two hates.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So he goes into a very, you know, society analysis.
Guest:Real criticism.
Guest:You know, using the film.
Guest:And so this is profound.
Guest:And so that's why those S's are so strong.
Guest:They are much more than just film S's.
Marc:Right.
Marc:They're complete intellectual investigations.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Well, that was throughout the film, your film, that you start with very current footage, I imagine, from Ferguson to almost present that problems exist.
Marc:This is not the past.
Marc:And then you go into the heroes section after a little establishing.
Marc:And that goes right into film.
Marc:Into the idea that, and also into the three men you're about to talk about.
Guest:And how he was introduced to film, to images, and to the absence of his own images on that screen, or the absence of the image of his father on the screen.
Marc:Right, but then that evolves to that point where the only one that he could maybe accept
Marc:as a real black character was the custodian in that film.
Marc:I don't know what the film was.
Marc:And he really talks poetically about the fear in his face and that predicament, somehow that was like, well, that has depth.
Guest:Well, that's exactly, I think, what a lot of minorities, blacks, and also women, you know.
Guest:We had to find our real self in films, sometimes in just a small piece of the film.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sometimes in the case of Baldwin, that was this face.
Guest:You know, that's the way you would experience your own narrative in those films.
Guest:It's like almost like stealing an image or stealing a scene from a whole movie and try to make that piece yours.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But the profound thing about that moment, and especially at that time after he's moved through these black and white silent films, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and then sort of the dancing Joan Crawford as being some indicator that people seem to have fun and he had not put black or white onto it.
Marc:But that moment in that film that connected with him was a moment of fear.
Right.
Marc:Just terror of that man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And he was like, that seems like a thing.
Guest:Because it's a terror he have seen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He have seen people, you know, for a young boy to, you know, that's something that many young kids in the South have seen is an incredibly painful moment where your father or your uncle
Guest:who have authority upon you and who is raising you and suddenly in the face of violence from outside has to behave like a little boy himself and when you witness that it's very hard to you know to feel that your father to be proud of your own father
Guest:Or to feel taken care of.
Guest:Or to feel taken care of.
Guest:And this terror is really traumatic.
Guest:And that kind of situation happened in many ways.
Guest:And by the way, it's not only a black thing.
Guest:It happened in a white worker situation where suddenly your father, who is a janitor or whatever, has to bow in front of his boss.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And when you witness that as a little boy, it's traumatic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because it changes your view of your own parents.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so Baldwin was always very good at feeling those moments of seeing them and describing them.
Marc:And also he was able to expand it intellectually and I think succinctly to an entire group of people.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:How they fit into the society.
Marc:That you are unable, there's another theme throughout the film, that how do you become a man if you are treated like that?
Guest:Yes, yes, and in fear.
Guest:How can you concentrate to become a man when every step can be a danger, can cost you your life?
Guest:And we are still living that in the present.
Guest:Imagine when the parents have to, you give your car for the first time to your teenage boy or girl, and the first thing you have to tell, in case you are stopped by the police, don't do anything stupid.
Guest:Don't move.
Guest:Obey the order.
Guest:And you're basically giving him a recipe for terror.
Guest:You're not educating your children.
Guest:You're telling him, this is a dangerous world, so be careful all the time.
Guest:Never let go.
Guest:And this is a terrible situation.
Guest:And people forget that millions and millions of people go through that every day in this particular country.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the second heading was witness.
Marc:And I found that that was very interesting right at the beginning.
Marc:This is when he goes back to the States and he's going down south.
Marc:He's becoming involved in the civil rights movement.
Marc:And there's that thing he said about the line between a witness and a witness.
Marc:And a perpetrator?
Marc:And an actor.
Marc:And an actor is very blurry.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:But it is there.
Guest:But what he meant also by that is, you know, there was a discussion at the time about, you know, it's either you are an artist or you are an activist, you know, and you had to choose, you know.
Guest:And there were critics, in particular in the literary world, who would say, you know, once you start to write about a current issue,
Guest:you're not a writer anymore, you're a journalist, or you are, you know, somebody who do news, but not art.
Guest:And Baldwin was torn between those two positions, and I think he found an extraordinary form
Guest:to escape from that.
Guest:And when you read his book today, they are very precise, they are very analytic, but at the same time, they are written in a language that is extraordinary.
Guest:Baldwin invented a way to write about America.
Guest:And the written, the music, the words between preacher and
Guest:and ethnologist, and the way he used his humanism to describe a human being, et cetera.
Guest:This is exceptional.
Guest:People tend to take it for granted.
Guest:At the time, he invented a genre, basically.
Guest:You know, people like Toni Morrison are in depth.
Guest:Toni said, you know, he gave me a language that I thought that was so beautiful, I thought it was my own.
Marc:Yeah, and he speaks it too.
Marc:Just the time that he puts into putting a thought together and seeing it all the way through in this very poetic and powerful way, I've never seen anything like it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in fact, doing all these interviews since the film opened, I realized that, you know, I started by saying, well, you should read Baldwin.
Guest:And then I thought, no, in fact, you should study Baldwin.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We have to.
Guest:In the sense of Bible study, you take a paragraph in the Bible and you speak about it and you have a whole philosophical discussion.
Guest:That's the way we need to deal with Baldwin because it's so rich.
Guest:Every sentence.
Guest:I remember the books, starting working on the project, I went back in my library and found my old Baldwin books that I have everywhere I live and
Guest:And then I realized that almost everything was underlined, you know, from the first page.
Marc:At different points in your life.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And that's how much that happened, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You read any other book, you know, there is one place where you have a few notice.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But Baldwin, you can underline the whole book.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And sometimes it happens over years.
Marc:Oh, yes, of course.
Marc:Different colors.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Well, that's why I went back to it because, you know, I recently in the last six months, I have not read a lot of Baldwin, but somebody sent me the clip of that debate at Oxford, you know, and I'd never seen it before.
Marc:And, you know, I've read things that I have to go back and reread over and over again.
Marc:And I watched that.
Marc:I watched him sort of spontaneously generate these incredibly expansive and well thought out argument around race.
Marc:And I was like, what?
Marc:What is that mind?
Marc:Right.
Guest:you know and I had to watch it you know three times just to because you can't follow really it's like oh my god I need to understand that really or listen to it again happening on so many levels yeah and you don't have time to recover right no it's like he's hitting you yeah
Marc:Again and again and again.
Marc:And he did that all the time, even on those Cavett interviews, even when he was just saying something that was relatively succinct.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:The depth of it and how it's going to hit you as it integrates into your own mind and soul.
Marc:It's like, wow.
Marc:It's daunting.
Marc:And I think that what you did a great job in the film doing was that, you know, the way you laid things out and the examples you used from film, TV, interviews, you know, really elucidated, you know, the points he was making and engaged you visually in examples of what was trying to be said.
Marc:And sadly, there is no good conclusion.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, the conclusion somehow is, you know, what he said at one point, you know, this is the reality.
Guest:I lay out the whole reality in front of you.
Guest:There is no other way around.
Guest:Now the question of the future is your response.
Guest:What do you do with that?
Guest:You know, he confronts us with that.
Guest:You know, this is it.
Guest:These are the elements.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What do you do?
Guest:Are you ready to take responsibility for that?
Guest:You know, that one single history.
Guest:We are part of this same history.
Guest:There are not two different histories.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we have done several things.
Guest:We were actors in it.
Guest:And that's why, for me, the movie is about now, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's the same situation.
Guest:What do we do?
Guest:You know, we cannot pretend to be innocent.
Guest:We are not in an innocent time anymore.
Guest:We know all we need to know.
Guest:Whoever we are, black or white or Chinese, Native American women, we know our history.
Guest:If we don't, that's the other line, we are moral monsters.
Guest:because we cannot pretend 2017 that we still don't know how the world is run that we don't know our history that we don't know that this country was built on to genocide and that we need to deal with it it's not about punishment it's not about reparation it's about knowing because knowing is already is the beginning of change
Marc:Knowing in moral terms.
Guest:In moral terms, and also in reality.
Guest:Knowing the facts.
Guest:Knowing the numbers.
Guest:When you say, let's make America great again, what does it mean?
Guest:In that sentence alone, there are at least 20 mistakes.
Guest:20 mistakes.
Guest:And of course, you don't have the time to rebuke every single piece of that phrase, which doesn't make sense, which is idiotic and a manifest of ignorance.
Guest:And not only that of ignorance, but he takes you for an ignorant.
Guest:And that's terrible.
Guest:2017, to be able to say a phrase like that is to erase the history of America and the influence of America throughout the world, you know, in bad and good times.
Guest:You know, what does it mean?
Guest:It means nothing.
Guest:So it's important to come back to reality.
Guest:You know, not reality shows, but to come back to reality.
Guest:And I think Baldwin, that's the strength of Baldwin, is to make us face that reality.
Guest:And he speak to each one of us.
Guest:That's what I've seen those last two months,
Guest:with going on the road with the film is that the audience, whether you're black or white, you are confronted with yourself.
Marc:I think that's true.
Guest:Baldwin talks to you directly in a very friendly but direct way.
Guest:He doesn't antagonize you.
Guest:He doesn't accuse you of anything.
Guest:He tells you this is the element.
Marc:Pick your side.
Marc:Yeah, where are you on the spectrum of ignorance?
Guest:Exactly, also, yeah.
Marc:You know, what have you said to yourself that comforts you into thinking that you're doing enough?
Guest:Exactly, exactly, yes.
Marc:Because that's, you know, you've got hate and you've got a way to compartmentalize that and decide it's not you.
Marc:And then you've got this whole other thing, which is like, you know, like, yeah, I'm not that way.
Marc:All right, so what's the next step?
Marc:You know, I love all people, you know.
I see.
Marc:But see, that was the daunting thing for me is that like, is anybody doing enough in these moments?
Marc:And what it's taken, who the hell knows what's going to happen here?
Marc:But a lot of people certainly woke the fuck up
Guest:Well, that's the reality.
Guest:It's like somehow we went in a sort of intellectual lethargy.
Guest:And I call it once in an interview, it's like the gentrification of the minds.
Guest:It's like we got lazy.
Guest:Even after the civil rights movement where we built monument for Martin Luther King and not for Malcolm X, by the way.
Guest:And then everything is solved.
Guest:And when we take the numbers, that's the thing.
Guest:When you come back to reality, you take any numbers, you know, the amount of people in prison, the amount of, you know, young black or Latino kids who grow up without the parents, and why the drugs numbers, etc.
Guest:Why are, you know, drugs that black or poor people take, you know,
Guest:is hit more gravely than the white or middle class white drugs or not.
Guest:All those things.
Guest:Take any type of numbers and statistic, the reality will hit you hard.
Marc:And also there's the discussion of
Marc:Class that never happens here.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:That's the big elephant in the room.
Marc:Because you have this, you certainly have drug epidemics now that are somewhat systemically hitting all types of people.
Marc:And, you know, yeah, the elephant in the room.
Guest:Well, the inequality in this country.
Guest:We are now in a time of extreme concentration of wealth in the hand of a minority.
Guest:And we just hand in power to that minority.
Guest:And we just accept that.
Guest:And we have an incredible concentration of poverty in this country, the richest country on earth.
Guest:And, you know, I always wondered, you know, how do people react if you put those numbers in front of them?
Guest:You know, don't you take any consequence out of that?
Guest:You know, those are the numbers that Oxfam published a few weeks ago, you know, saying that eight individuals, not 8% of the population, eight persons were,
Guest:own more or as much as 40% of the population of this country.
Guest:Eight individuals.
Guest:You're talking trillions.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How does that happen?
Guest:And this has consequences to everybody, you know, to the way the press work, you know, the concentration of the press, you know, that a few billionaires own all the press, meaning all the information we get.
Guest:And journalists are not that free.
Guest:They are less free than they were 40 years ago.
Guest:And it's a whole chain of consequence and of brainwash as well.
Guest:And people, when you push consumption to people, you push...
Guest:And on all levels, consumption of reality shows, consumption of electronics in your life, consumption of everything.
Guest:You can just make a phone call and get it to your house.
Guest:You can order pizza.
Guest:You can order.
Guest:So basically, it creates a generation of people on couch.
Guest:Even your friendship, you can do it electronically.
Marc:And Baldwin sort of, he said that about TV is a narcotic.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Has a narcotic effect.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:He said the entertainment industry remind him of the use of narcotic.
Guest:And he wrote that 50 years ago.
Guest:At a time where there were only three national networks.
Guest:So imagine what it meant today.
Guest:That means you could see those effect and impact 50 years ago.
Guest:He could.
Guest:He could, yes.
Guest:And you imagine where we are today.
Marc:Well, that's the fascinating thing, too, is that a lot of this stuff he said that long ago, and it is exactly the same and also more sophisticated in some ways in a lot of analysis of it currently.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He saw the truth of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And one aspect, because it's a matter of education as well, but also, even when you went to college, it's hard for you sometimes to see through what's happening.
Guest:You know, the example now.
Guest:I saw the time when...
Guest:television and radio station became very partisan, and where now even network like CNN would have, you know, the guy from the left, the guy from the right, and then the journalist in the middle
Guest:He's not taking any side anymore.
Guest:There is as if there is no truth.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Both positions have the same quality.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So that's what leads us today to have one side, a scientist who worked 40 years of his life on climate change.
Guest:And on the other side, you have some guys who just decided that climate change don't exist.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And those two positions are considered equal.
Guest:That's where we are today.
Guest:And that's just incredible.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And what gets lost there is the truth and the urgency of what is really happening.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:We don't know.
Guest:Now people are putting in doubt everything.
Guest:Nobody has credibility.
Guest:In fact, the loudest you are,
Guest:the most credible you are, apparently.
Marc:And I think that's like, in terms of the film, when it comes around to what we're talking about now and this sort of rabbit hole of hopelessness and panic you can get into around it,
Marc:which I experience daily, is that Baldwin brings it back to human.
Guest:Yes, and he shows you that you can do something about it.
Guest:That's the thing.
Guest:I see people say the film gives them energy.
Guest:Because they just realize, well, I can understand that.
Guest:And I can do something about it.
Guest:It's just about me deciding to give a response to that.
Guest:Because on the bigger picture, it's simple.
Guest:It's clear.
Guest:There is no confusion.
Guest:You know, we are not idiots.
Guest:We are not ignorant.
Guest:You know, there is a way to understand what's going on now.
Guest:You know, you just step back a little bit and watch the bigger picture.
Guest:And that's what Baldwin gave us.
Guest:He gave us a 50 years picture.
Guest:And where we say, oh, my God, this is what, in fact, that's where we are.
Guest:And then you can react because it doesn't seem like this huge mountain of ignorance in front of you.
Guest:How do you start a discussion when you have to, again, I don't want to quote our current president, make America great again.
Guest:You don't need to go into that to have to explain it.
Guest:You just reject it.
Guest:You don't lose your time to go into that kind of discussion.
Guest:So that's what Baldwin gives you.
Guest:Step back.
Guest:And then you can see what makes sense and what doesn't make sense.
Guest:And don't lose your time on the stuff that you're being bombarded with and that make no sense.
Guest:And that's a big part of our day.
Guest:The amount of tweets, of Facebook, of reality shows.
Guest:Why would I indulge in the crazy...
Guest:daily life of a group of men or women buying stuff buying merchandise you know my life cannot be that you know as a human being it's not about you know how many cars i have or how many new clothes i have or you know how many uh you know new house i rebuilt all that
Guest:It's like just material to fool your brand and take space.
Guest:It just takes place.
Guest:There was a scandal in France a few years back where the head of the French biggest private TV, TF1,
Guest:in an interview he just said you know my job is to bring uh films and shows on on my channel so that you don't need to thank anymore but you just need to buy coca-cola you know he said it plainly he's being honest and he's being honest you know he was not even cynical yeah you know and and that it's working
Marc:It's working.
Marc:Sure, and it's even deeper than that.
Marc:It's like, and now it's about not just buying Coca-Cola, it's about buying an ideology that you can use as reality.
Marc:Again, it's what Baldwin said, that it's giving you what you need to hate in your head.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Without having, going outside.
Marc:Like the other thing that I starred here was he said, people who say they care, don't.
Marc:They care about their safety and their profits.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:That's big.
Guest:That's right there a Marxist analysis of our society, which is a society built on profit.
Guest:And that means profit invade every place in your life, in your action.
Guest:And that's one line that the young Marx wrote.
Guest:In the capitalist society,
Guest:Even human relationship becomes a relationship of merchandise.
Guest:And when you look at your own relationship sometimes, where you take decisions because of merchandise, because of money, or because of interest,
Guest:this is what we have become so we've lost our emotional moral and um psychological compass yeah yeah and more and more because we just don't have the space anymore it's being taken up yeah how many times we can have the proper time to sit and read a book
Guest:Or to spend time with other people, to do what me and you just did.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Well, yes, that was a real... This is something I miss in the media, to really be sitting with a real person and have a conversation without having to cut your thoughts.
Guest:Because we are complex.
Guest:We are today living in a very complex society.
Guest:So there is no straight answer.
Guest:I like when they ask you, okay, tell me your life in a nutshell.
Guest:No, my life cannot be reduced in a nutshell.
Marc:Well, that's interesting because as complex as it is and as that is driven by guiding people either for profit or for brainwashing or for competing illusions,
Marc:is that people, I think this is one of the byproducts is that they get overwhelmed and they need it simplified.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:And it's not simple.
Marc:Life is not simple.
Marc:Right, but people together, talking together.
Marc:See, that's my biggest fear now is that the polarization is so profound
Marc:That, you know, how do we do it as people?
Marc:What do we do now?
Guest:But that's why Baldwin, you know, gave us the chance to set back a little bit.
Guest:Take a little bit of distance.
Guest:See it historically.
Guest:Don't see, you know, what happened the last election.
Guest:See what have been happening the last 50 years.
Guest:And then you will understand where you are now.
Guest:You know, if you explain Donald Trump,
Guest:by just explaining the campaign, you will not understand anything.
Guest:But if you understand that Donald Trump came way back from Reagan, that when they start deregulating, when they start breaking the unions, et cetera, et cetera, this is what brought us here.
Guest:And there have been other Donald Trump throughout the world
Guest:So it's not a new model.
Guest:You know, there was a guy named Berlusconi in Italy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That is the perfect, you know, copy of Donald Trump.
Guest:Billionaires, authoritarian, a lot of ignorance, hater, divider.
Guest:And they finally got rid of him.
Guest:You know, and it took time.
Guest:He did a lot of damage.
Guest:But Italy have, you know, came back to a better place today.
Guest:So we shouldn't be afraid of anything.
Guest:You know, we are this country.
Guest:The most difficult part is to sit down with the other one and have, you know, a conversation and decide that we can change a lot of things together.
Guest:And, of course, that's not a simple process.
Guest:There are no recipes.
Guest:There are no shortcuts.
Guest:And this is something that we lost.
Guest:And when Baldwin gives you the whole list of what it took to organize the civil rights movement, you know, it was about learning.
Guest:It was about sitting together and have meetings.
Guest:It was about raising money.
Guest:It was about finding allies.
Guest:You know, everybody was in the movement, not just black.
Guest:You had the unions.
Guest:You had the churches.
Guest:You have the Jewish organizations.
Guest:You have the youth organizations.
Guest:And this was a huge coalition.
Guest:And it took time.
Guest:It took patience.
Guest:Not only anger.
Guest:And that's something that today we voice our anger.
Marc:But then what do we do?
Marc:And also now, because of these disembodied voices of persistent psychic terror through platforms that are disengaged from human beings, in a way, and are redundant in their hate.
Marc:you know how one there was a moment in the film where he talks about the exhaustion that you know you you have to figure out a way to continue fighting so you don't get exhausted exactly exactly because they get you tired
Guest:They get you tired.
Guest:And so the question is always, how do I put my energy in what is fundamentally important and not the side battle?
Guest:And because they are presenting to us an upside-down world.
Guest:So to...
Guest:put it in the right order it takes a lot of energy and you need everything to you know and so that's the incredibly complicated situation now because at some point you need to give response to those daily attacks you know you need to show the disinformation you need to prove that those numbers are not the real numbers etc
Guest:But at the same time, you have to find the space to step back a little bit and to see the bigger picture and to strategize on the middle and long term.
Guest:That's where the fight should be.
Marc:But now because of these sort of echo chambers and bubbles that for me or you to figure out that something isn't true or real...
Marc:may not have any bearing on the people that fundamentally see the country as a different thing almost entirely than we may.
Guest:Yeah, but what does it mean?
Guest:It means that we need to talk with them.
Guest:I know.
Guest:We need to talk with them because it's not about good or bad people.
Guest:No.
Guest:People react to whatever they are going through, and their economical situation in this country determines a lot.
Guest:I don't want to quote Marx again, but this is where it comes from.
Guest:You decide your conscience is different if you have a job or if you don't have a job.
Guest:And it will determine anything you will do in the coming years.
Guest:And it includes also sometimes that you don't get the right information why you lost your job.
Guest:So when you have populists like Donald Trump coming and say, this is this bad woman that made you lose your job,
Guest:You know, you don't always have the time to go and find out.
Guest:And it satisfies an anger.
Guest:Yeah, of course, of course.
Guest:So we are, it's human, you know, to react to whatever you feel makes sense to you and it's simple.
Guest:You know, as you say before, you know, we like simplicity.
Guest:although our world is complex.
Guest:And so it's about how do we get, you know, how we go away from this hate discourse and to try to understand why a worker who sometimes was in a union and a very progressive union suddenly feel the anger to just, or to react to his anger without thinking further.
Guest:And to say, well, this guy who's selling me the car, he's telling me this is the best car ever.
Guest:And yeah, why wouldn't I take a chance?
Guest:Because nobody else is even telling me that.
Marc:Yeah, and also they've lost belief in all institutions as corruption.
Marc:And just generations of...
Guest:unexplainable but yet the explanation is there uh you know uh uh loss of jobs poverty you you know loss of pride loss of ability and i think there is one thing what what we call the intelligence meaning you know scholars universities schools and they they need to find the way back to these people as well
Guest:You know, there was a time when there was big change in society.
Guest:And universities were on the forefront.
Guest:Teachers were on the forefront.
Guest:Scholars were in the forefront.
Guest:And we lost that battle.
Guest:And I know, you know, I taught at NYU.
Guest:I taught in many other universities throughout the world.
Guest:And I see how academia have, you know, created another bubble.
Marc:Yeah, insulated themselves.
Guest:Insulated themselves.
Guest:And, you know, you have research about the most crazy and, you know, really unused type of subject.
Marc:You never hear anyone say, let's take to the streets and do some further reading.
Marc:Right.
Guest:yes exactly exactly and there was time where you know when you remember the vietnam war resistance and all that you know your teachers were in the street with you yeah and then you would go back in class and discuss what is your society at the moment yeah you know do we take a stand do we accept well they're trying to you know they there's a concerted effort to to to take away that dialogue yes yes and now it's a lot easier uh to take away that dialogue it all takes is one student to go like uh that guy's
Guest:bad yeah this is anti-american it's like that's where the language is going again and there is one aspect we forgot and why is it like this is there have been a tremendous fragilization of
Guest:of those institutions as well.
Guest:You know, when universities started to make money in order not to disappear because state funding were, you know, take away from them.
Guest:Now they became businesses.
Guest:And now as a professor or a teacher, you know,
Guest:It was about, you know, I should get tenure because then economically I'm safe.
Guest:But it's a way to fragilize also intelligence to make them scared of losing their job.
Guest:And it's the same for journalists as well.
Guest:You know, a lot of part of the intelligentsia
Guest:had to care for themselves first.
Guest:Taking less risk.
Guest:And then you can intimidate.
Guest:Their safety and their profits.
Guest:Their safety and their profits.
Guest:That's, unfortunately, the human attitude in capitalism.
Guest:That's the other thing.
Guest:It's a historical...
Guest:a way of life you know capitalism is very specific it's very clearly determined the beginning of the industrial revolution that changed the the way people communicate the way you know you get jobs the way you get paid you know everything is depending on that and and we cannot you know go out of it if we don't understand where it comes from
Guest:Well, thank you for talking to me.
Guest:Thank you for inviting me.
Guest:It was a great conversation.
Guest:It was.
Guest:It's rare.
Guest:It's too rare to have that kind of exchange nowadays.
Marc:And I appreciate it.
Marc:And the movie is stunning.
Marc:And you've got to watch it a couple of times.
Marc:Thank you very much.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:That was an amazing conversation.
Marc:It was different in scope and tone than a lot I had, but also very kind of mind-blowing.
Marc:And powerful to me.
Marc:So I'm going to play some slightly maybe sad-ish guitar.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I don't have a plan.
Marc:Redundant is probably redundant in terms of what I've played in this space before.
Guest:All right.
Guest:I'm
Guest:Boomer lives!