Interview: Keith and Jess Calder On How Discovering Rafael Casal Led To Blindspotting

Collin (Daveed Diggs) has three days left of his parole and once he’s made it through that, his life is his again. He can leave the halfway house and he’ll be free of his 11pm curfew. His best friend, Miles (Rafael Casal) is a bit of a trouble maker, a loose cannon.  On his way home one night, Collin witnesses a police shooting down a black man and the two best friends have to deal with identity and race and the realities of life while Oakland’s gentrification has an impact on society around them.

Producers Keith and Jess Calder talked about how they discovered Casal while looking through Poetry Jam videos and how it led to Blindspotting. I caught up with both recently to talk about the film:

Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal are friends and their friendship spans years, and so did the idea for Blindspotting. It took them ten years to write the screenplay. Talk about how you got involved with it.

Jess Calder: It’s a bit of a long story. About eleven years ago, I thought it would be if it would be possible to take the traditional musical structure, but instead of when the characters are overwhelmed with emotion and burst into song, I thought it would be cool if they burst into verse. I thought about how it would work and went down the internet rabbit hole and looked up every poet that I could find. At that time, HBO’s Def Poetry Jam featured this young poet called Rafael Casal and I became obsessed with every video. The more I watched him, I thought that his voice as a storyteller was so unique because he had such command over the audience. He also spoke with such truth and fearlessness and I hadn’t seen that yet, especially depicted in film. I stalked him online and found his email address and I reached out to him. I said, “I know this is going to sound crazy, but is there any way to translate your voice from poetry into screenwriting because it could be super powerful. Is this something you’d be interested in doing?” I was really shocked and surprised when he wrote back and said he thought it was super cool.
This is such a new thing that we were trying to do so we met and decided to see what came of it.
Keith and I went out to the Bay Area and went to this restaurant which sadly is no longer there because of gentrification. We met Rafael and talked about films that we loved and the stories we were trying to tell. We bonded really well and that’s where the process began.

A few months later, Rafael sent this video called “Monster” which was about how frustrated that nobody seemed to care how young men were dying in Oakland. There was another documentary called Thunder Soul during the first Obama inauguration for the black congressional caucus. We needed a black artist to perform and I asked Rafael if he could come and he sent his best friend because he couldn’t. Daveed came and he loved it. He spent fifteen minutes freestyling and was this amazing human that he is and from that moment on, we thought he was the missing piece of the puzzle and that’s how it all came to be.

What about the script idea? What was the beginning of that?

Keith: One of the initial` things we talked about was about their relationship as friends as the launching point. As we were talking about ideas and what format it could take, the Oscar Grant shooting happened and that became such an overwhelming event in Oakland that it felt that if we were doing a film about Oakland, we should do it about an event like this and through the eyes of these two people. One who’s black and one who’s white and one who is the witness to it and observing it. When we started, it was very much pre Black Lives Matter and it was more about the freshness of videos capturing these events that had always been happening but hadn’t been public in that way and the community reacting to it. That was really the version of the film when we first started. By the time we were able to make the movie, it became about what happens if that event isn’t videoed and what happens when it happens to someone who is a felon.

Rafael and Daveed’s chemistry is great in real-life, it’s even better in the film. What’s it like seeing that play out in the film?

Keith: We saw that and had been surprised. We’ve produced a lot of movies over the years and we have a lot of friends in the film business and we were constantly trying to convince them to hire them to write stuff or to act in things and no one listened. When Hamilton happened, I think people caught on to Daveed, but not so much to Rafael. Now, that the movie is out, I think people are starting to see what they as individuals bring as performers, actors and writers and how incredible their chemistry is together.

Jess: I think Rafael and Daveed have talked about it in the past, but one scene that hasn’t changed is the scene in the parking lot. When we were sent that first draft easily eight years ago, it was such a lightning bolt for both of us because we had never read anything like that where two friends were speaking to each other with such honesty.

It’s so exciting to see how well everyone is loving them as much as we do. It’s been a great emotional journey.

It’s a film that’s generating a lot of reaction about how timely and important this film is. What’s it like for you to hear the positive feedback from the public?

Keith: It’s been really rewarding for us. For a long time, there was this core unit of just the four of us and it’s been really rewarding to see that get out into the world and seeing people respond to in the way that. It’s been really interesting seeing different communities responding.

Jess: The most important thing for us, and what we watch for with an audience, is that hopefully, we have a made a film that acts as a gateway for empathy for all the characters in the film, and especially for Collin. I’ve been told by many friends at different screenings how they’ve seen people (regardless of race) start sobbing uncontrollably at the cop car scene when Collin has the spotlight on him, and that for us is the ultimate achievement—that people can feel the same fear that Collin has lived with his entire life… for at least a moment. That they can be on the side of the convicted felon with a gun in his pocket because they have spent 90 minutes with him and know he’s a good person.

We hope that from here on out, the assumption will not be that a shooting victim is guilty of something first. That we see the victim as a person first, with all his flaws and virtues, and as a person who deserves respect and the presumption of innocence. It was really important for us for the cop to also not appear to be just a two dimensional monster. To see him in that moment in the garage vulnerable, with a strange man in his house pointing a gun at him, knowing that this man has made a mistake whether knowingly or not that he will have to live with the rest of his life. And to feel the weight of that burden on his face when Miles asks him “Are you sure?”

We know that we cannot help how our life has conditioned us to be, but we can be aware of it. We can start asking ourselves these hard questions, and ask each other these questions, to try together to grow and become better people—as opposed to being driven apart by these issues and other divisive events of the day…

And so when I see people talking after the screenings, to each other, or crying in these moments, one audience member even asked us after a screening…. “Is this what it’s like to be a young black man today? I had no idea.” This is progress to us, to see that these emotions are being felt and that these questions are being asked. So that is what we are most excited for when we see the movie with the audience—that people are talking and are engaged, connecting, and hopefully trying to see each other in a way they hadn’t seen them before.

You also have Carlos your director. For a first timer, he captures some great visuals that remain memorable. How did you find him?

Keith: When we knew we had this window in our schedules, we then needed a director. I knew about the music video he’d been doing with Daveed’s band and from the other projects Rafael and Daveed had been doing. Rafael brought it up and we always wanted to expand the community of what the artists were that were making the movie. Carlos was from Mexico and had a very different perspective on race and what it means to come into a community and to treat that with respect. He had that eye of being an outsider and was more the gentrifier.

The first meeting we had with him was the four of us with him in New York. Rafael ambushed him and pitched him the movie and asked if he wanted to direct it. He was on board from the pitch and hadn’t even read the script.

Jess: We met him in LA rebooting the entire script so it would make sense for what the world is now, rather than something that was years ago, but also to something Carlos felt he’d be able to direct.