I wanted them to be on camera for the first time experiencing that.
“Now, just because we got to deal with this mess, don’t you ever forget that being black is an honor, because you come from greatness.” But the young kids who played the scene in the film, I didn’t rehearse with them. They rehearsed the scene, but they are not actually in the scene, but I only rehearsed it with them so they could have it as a backstory for them, moving forward, for the rest of the film.
It started off by rehearsing a scene with Lamar Johnson, who plays Seven, and Amandla Stenberg, who plays Starr. But keep - “ The rehearsal for the scene was very important. “It can get real dangerous, so don’t argue with them.
THE HATE YOU GIVE BOOK COVER HOW TO
How do you get them to understand how to act around police officers? It’s all about a father protecting his family. But this is a scene that’s very normal in a lot of African-American families across the country, which is, how you keep your kids safe. “You’re going to see me with my hands like this.” What I love about this scene is that this feels like a normal conversation like somebody would have about the birds and the bees with their children. But as the scene sort of progressed, I love turning the scene on its head and seeing that he’s not who you think he is.” “Now, one day, you’re all going to be with me, and you best bet we gonna get pulled over.” He’s a guy who’s a father, a husband, and he’s talking about something that’s a very serious issue, that he’s telling them to put their hands on the table. You see a guy who got braids, and he got a tattoo, so your assumption is that this guy is a gang member and he’s up to no good. But I cinematically wanted to move slowly towards this house, to really show that, while everyone is having a good time playing, there’s important business being done with the Carter family. What I love about this scene is, outside, you see a normal neighborhood, with a lot of playing. “My name is George Tillman Jr., and I am the director of “The Hate U Give.” We always called this scene “the talk.” The scene was actually in the middle of the book, but we decided very early on to move it at the top of the film. narrates a sequence from his film where Maverick, played by Russell Hornsby, teaches his children how to behave around the police. Transcript ‘The Hate U Give’ | Anatomy of a Scene George Tillman Jr. That was one of the moments where it hit me that I was different.” “And I was like, I went nowhere, you know? I experienced how hot Mississippi can get in the summer. “They were talking about, I went to Africa, I went to Fiji,” Thomas said in a phone interview from her home in Jackson. Like the time a professor had everyone introduce themselves and say where they went over the summer. So the aspiring writer pulled from her own experiences as a creative writing student at Belhaven University, a private college in Mississippi. The 2014 big-screen version of “ Dear White People” takes place at an Ivy, for instance, while “black-ish” rarely hinted at a downside to Zoey Johnson’s white prep-school experience. Joseph High, is widely considered one of the greatest documentaries of all time.īut Thomas, 31, struggled to find a single film about a black girl coming of age under similar circumstances. “American Promise,” the documentary about two boys navigating their way through Manhattan’s prestigious Dalton School, won a special jury prize at Sundance in 2013 “ Hoop Dreams,” the 1994 film that tracked two teenage boys at Chicago’s St.
THE HATE YOU GIVE BOOK COVER SERIES
There have been plenty of stories about young black men and boys at white prep schools, whether in feature films (Gus Van Sant’s 2000 drama, “ Finding Forrester” the 2009 inspirational tale “ The Blind Side,” starring Sandra Bullock), documentaries (“ The Prep School Negro” from 2012 “Divided by Diversity” from 2016), television series (ABC’s “black-ish”) or music videos (Michael Jackson’s “was that what that was about?” 18-minute opus “Bad”). And I was like, are there any movies from that era, or even currently, that deal with black girls in situations like this?” “I wanted ‘The Hate U Give’ to be almost a girl version of ‘Boyz N the Hood,’” she remembered. When Angie Thomas first began writing “The Hate U Give,” her best-selling novel about a black teenager dealing with microaggressions and worse at a predominantly white prep school, she looked to movies for inspiration.