Set against the antebellum South and based on a true story, THE BIRTH OF A NATION follows Nat Turner (Nate Parker), a literate slave and preacher whose financially strained owner Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer) accepts an offer to use Nat’s preaching to subdue unruly slaves. As he witnesses countless atrocities – against himself, his wife Cherry (Aja Naomi King), and fellow slaves – Nat orchestrates an uprising in the hopes of leading his people to freedom.
THE BIRTH OF A NATION is a Fox Searchlight Pictures Presentation, a Bron Studios, Phantom Four, Mandalay Pictures, Tiny Giant Productions Production, in association With Novofam Productions, Follow Through Productions, Infinity Entertainment, Oster Media, Point Made Films, Juniper Productions, Argent Pictures, Hit 55 Ventures and Creative Wealth Media Finance Corp. BIRTH OF A NATION is directed by Nate Parker. The screenplay is by Parker; story is by Parker & Jean McGianni Celestin. The film stars Nate Parker, Armie Hammer, Mark Boone Jr., Colman Domingo, Aunjanue Ellis, Dwight Henry, Aja Naomi King, Esther Scott, Roger Guenveur Smith, Gabrielle Union with Penelope Ann Miller and Jackie Earle Haley.
THE BIRTH OF A NATION is produced by Nate Parker, Kevin Turen, Jason Michael Berman, Aaron L. Gilbert, Preston L. Holmes. Executive producers are David S. Goyer, Michael Novogratz, Michael Finley, Tony Parker, Jason Cloth, Andy Pollack, Allan J. Stitt, Jane Oster, Barb Lee, Carl H. Lindner III, Derrick Brooks, Jill and Ryan Ahrens, Armin Tehrany, Edward Zwick, Mark Moran. Co-Executive producers are John Raymonds, Brenda Gilbert, Steven Thibault, Lori Massini. Co-Producers are Zak Tanjeloff, Matthew Lindner, Harrison Kreiss, Ike Waldhaus, Benjamin Renzo. The filmmaking team includes director of photography Elliot Davis, production designer Geoffrey Kirkland, editor Steven Rosenblum, A.C.E., costumer designer Francine Jamison-Tanchuck, music by Henry Jackman, visual effects supervisor George A. Loucas and casting byMary Vernieu, CSA and Michelle Wade Byrd, CSA.
“And in the cabins at night, the slaves gathered around the young mystic, a sea of black faces looking on in awe, as Nat described what all he had felt and seen.”
The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, Stephen B. Oates
The Turner slave rebellion stands as one of the most influential acts of resistance against slavery in all American history, yet remarkably, the story has never been recounted in a contemporary screen drama. Contentious to some and inspirational to many, until now, the life and impact of Nat Turner has largely been confined to folktales, novels, documentaries and a few paragraphs here and there in history books.
THE BIRTH OF A NATION puts a fiery and focused new lens to Turner’s story – taking on the incendiary notions of retaliation and how the institution of slavery continues to afflict and inform present times. The film offers a fresh perspective on what led to his insurrection against slave owners in 1831, and offers a comprehensive and human portrait of the man behind the rebellion – a man driven by faith and a confidence that God is on the side of the oppressed.
Writer, director and actor Nate Parker takes on a distinctly vast ambition for a first-time filmmaker, presenting a more take-charge slave narrative than we are used to seeing. Amidst sweeping action and romance he presents a man driven equally by love, spirituality, fury and hope to free his people from the legacy of bondage in America. In the process, he restores a figure long relegated as a historical footnote and shows him as the heroic trailblazer he was.
It is no accident that Parker has boldly reclaimed the title of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, which, while pioneering modern film techniques, somehow portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as a force for good – a graphic reminder of how racial imagery smoldered in the early days of Hollywood. Parker offers his film as the birth of something new, an alternate take on the birth of this nation – the unsung story of those who have pressed the country forward in their yearning to be free and equal.
While a number of revered films have explored the contours of slavery, from 12 YEARS A SLAVE to GLORY, AMISTAD and LINCOLN, Parker’s motivation is to renew the past and to seek illumination from it, rather than turn the same blind eye that kept people in the dark for so long. Says Parker: “Nat Turner became a leader against incredible odds. So often when we see slavery in popular culture, it is through stories of suffering and endurance. But Nat Turner’s is a more incendiary narrative; he was a slave but also a true rebel against injustice. His story demands to be told honestly; it is timely and speaks to the aspiration of finding racial peace in this country. For me, calling the film THE BIRTH OF A NATION was about reclaiming those words, about righting a wrong – and turning the title into something that can inspire. It leaves us with a question we must ask if we are to heal as a nation: when injustice knocks at our own front door, are we going to counter it with everything we have?”
For Parker, the film was also an answer to a calling he had felt throughout his life – and worth taking a considerable personal risk to pursue. “I have asked myself how I could be most effective as a filmmaker: I can either keep reading these scripts that project people of color in stereotypical, counterproductive ways or I can put everything I am into a project that I believe will change the conversation and create the opportunity for sustainable change,” Parker explains.
Parker knew he had five daughters relying on him, but he also knew he wanted those daughters to look at him and see someone who did not shrink in the face of what he felt needed to be done. “Everyone said, if this doesn’t work it could affect you being relevant in this town as an actor or from an economic standpoint, being able to support your family. So I had to ask, are you willing to go down that road? But when I thought back to the Denmark Veseys, the Harriet Tubmans, the Nat Turners who were willing to give their lives, I said surely I can step away from acting for a couple of years and just see what happens.”
There was no guarantee Parker would get there but with the inspiration of so many others – who sacrificed so much more than a motion picture career – he found a fire burning within that could not be squelched.
“Now I feel so desperately blessed that I was able to tell this story and do it in such a way that I had the control that I did,” Parker concludes. “If I had to go back and do it again, as arduous as it was, I would do it the exact same way. The takeaway of the film is what I had hoped: wherever injustice lives in the world, it is our duty to face it down.”
TAKING BACK A HERO: NAT TURNER IN AMERICAN CULTURE
Nat Turner has long been one of the most captivating, mysterious and perhaps misunderstood historical figures in the ongoing making of an equal America. His unflinching resistance to the institution of slavery is often cited as integral to the buildup of the Civil War as an act that alarmed and hardened the hearts of Southern slave owners yet raised imperative questions about the morality and sustainability of the so-called “peculiar institution” that stole away the freedom, dignity and destinies of millions.
To Nate Parker, Nat was not so far removed from an African American version of BRAVEHEART’s William Wallace, who roused and united the Medieval Scots against their oppressors at a time when no one thought it was possible.
Despite growing up in Virginia near where the Turner insurrection occurred, Nate Parker did not once hear the name Nat Turner in school. “I heard it in whispers and from family members,” he recalls. “As if they were conjuring the very spirit of rebellion. But it wasn’t until I was in college, taking African-American Studies that I really learned about him. When I did, I thought ‘how is it possible that I didn’t know about this?’ Yet it happened right in my back yard.”
That denial of this essential history lit a fire in Parker. He needed to know more. And the more he tried to trace Turner’s past, the more he was drawn to a figure who was not at all the savage fanatic portrayed in popular books and legends. Instead, Parker discovered the historical Nat Turner was a spiritually-fueled man of astute intelligence who viewed slavery as a symbol of Satan on earth – and came to believe the only way the world could be set right was to “cut off the head of the serpent.”
“This is someone who tried to make a difference in spite of the impossible odds of his environment. I had always longed for that kind of hero, and he’d been withheld from us,” Parker says. He saw in Turner “a measured, self-determined man of faith, whose courage and belief allowed him to sacrifice himself for his family and the future.”
Parker also began to realize that just as in life Turner had never owned his identity, this repeated itself after his death. No one knows Turner’s true surname or where his desecrated body is buried. In the last 200 years, Turner’s image had been used to signify many things. He’d been vilified as an aberrational extremist, re-imagined as a lusty metaphor for a “slave mindset” and exalted as a political revolutionary. Yet the man’s real life and source of his courage seemed lost in all that.
AN INSPIRATIONAL JOURNEY TO THE SCREEN
It took several years of all-consuming historical and creative searching – including time spent as a Feature Film Program Fellow at the Sundance Institute — for Nate Parker to finish his screenplay. He acknowledges the process was lonely, and at times felt like being locked alone in a dark tunnel, but he also says, “that is part of the cost of trying to not only make a movie but disrupt a culture.”
During that time, Parker’s own life underwent major changes. When he started writing, Parker was a former All-American wrestler just getting his acting career started. He drew notice in 2007 in THE GREAT DEBATERS, personally selected by director Denzel Washington to play a 1930s debate whiz. He went on to star in THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES, RED TAILS, ARBITRAGE, RED HOOK SUMMER, AIN’T THEM BODY’S SAINTS and NON-STOP, among others.
Even as his acting career took off, Parker never wavered in his resolve to tell Turner‘s story. A devoted team soon set out to beat the odds and get a production off the ground that, on paper, was an improbable sell: an explosive story from a first-time filmmaker, an audaciously fresh take on the slave movie as heroic epic, and to boot, a period action-drama with large-scale battle sequences to be shot on an indie budget. In Kevin Turen, Jason Michael Berman, Aaron L. Gilbert and Preston L. Holmes, Parker knew he had found his ideal partners.
Each of the producers thought that bringing Parker’s original voice to the world was a uniquely motivating force. Though they all shared in that, the producing team had very little overlap, notes Berman, Vice President of Mandalay Pictures. “We all brought very different skill sets – and Nate seemed to understand how to use each of our specific skills when they were needed. We were all there to serve his vision and he saw that and integrated it, but didn’t ever take it for granted.”
Given the subject matter, time stresses and budget, the production was rife with challenges. Yet as a first-time director Parker never allowed himself to flinch. He set out from the beginning to leave no stone unturned, meeting with directors he admired, including Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee and Mel Gibson, whose direction of BRAVEHEART battle sequences were an influence. “It was a kind of compressed apprenticeship,” muses Parker. “I was told you have to be so prepared that you are never second-guessed. You have to know what you want but also know when you get what you want.”
“That this movie got made is a kind of miracle,” observes producer Turen, President of David S. Goyer’s Phantom Four. “There was no previous business model that fit this film. It happened because a group of people came together who deeply, deeply believed in Nate and who felt we were making a film that could be important and great. We were betting fully on Nate’s ability to execute something special and he has.”
Turen says it was Parker’s incredible promise that gave him the driving confidence that he could compel financiers to back a project that looked high-risk at the outset. “Nate has one of the most amazing minds I’ve encountered in the film business and he also has a work ethic that means he is always brilliantly prepared,” says Turen. “He’s worked hard for everything in his life and has a real appreciation for that – and you sense all of that when you meet him, which was our main advantage.”
Berman also had a fervent response to THE BIRTH OF A NATION. “I’ve been involved in my fair share of independent film but this is by far the most ambitious film I’ve been a part of,” he says. “I thought the screenplay was beautiful, exciting and extremely important. Though it was clear it could be major financing challenge, that didn’t bother me. I thrive on challenges and the script and Nate were so incredible, I was completely up for it.”
The key to the financing, Berman came to believe, was Parker. “When I met Nate it was game over because he has a quality you dream of in a filmmaker: an incredible energy that transfers to everyone he meets. This film could only have worked with a strong leader and Nate was that leader. I’m a persistent and aggressive person, but Nate has given me a run for my money in that area.”
Parker says it was natural to talk to investors from the heart. “I knew I wanted to create a film that could be a creative legacy. I knew I wanted to be able to show it to my children and have them see that I made an effort to change things. So I said if those are the things I want to achieve, then why can’t those ideas become the game plan for talking to investors? I put it in those terms: what movies are we leaving for our children and our children’s children?”
Berman also saw the impact in action when they were hiring the crew. “Everyone wanted to be involved because of Nate’s passion. It’s also important that as strong as he was, Nate was equally kind, humble and gracious and I believe you see that on the screen. It’s all about his humanity and ability to get the best out of people.”
For Berman, one key thing sets the film apart: “It’s the empathy we feel for the characters,” he says. “When indie films break out the reason is never just the performances or the relevance of the social issues they tackle – it’s the fact that audiences can really relate to the characters, can root for them and really feel why they do what they do.”
A huge piece of the financing puzzle fell into place when Canadian producer Gilbert’s Bron Studios came aboard with an unrelenting commitment to get the film to the screen. Gilbert says he was blown away by the power of the script and its exciting, relevant perspective on a past that still has a profound impact; but, as with others, it was meeting Nate Parker that utterly sealed the deal.
“I met Nate for what I thought was going to be a little hello and we ended up spending the next four hours together,” Gilbert recalls. “I’ve had a lot of different experiences in the film industry, but I can say this was truly one of the absolute most important, life changing meetings of my life. Nate and I had a wide-ranging and emotional conversation about how he got to the point of needing to tell this story and his vision of how it would be made and by the end, there was no way I could not make this movie. There’s something rare about Nate where he has that ability to move people, to touch and challenge them in a motivating way and you feel that instantly.”
“This story might take place 200 years ago, but it depicts the era of slavery in a vital new light,” says Gilbert. “You see Nat Turner standing up for his people. Some will argue about his methods, but drastic times can call for the most drastic measures. It’s also a story that speaks to our own times and what’s happening in the world right now, with so many oppressed people still living these kinds of stories.”
The feeling that THE BIRTH OF A NATION brings a new, necessary shift in perspective also drew producer Preston Holmes, known for such productions as MALCOLM X, HUSTLE AND FLOW and NEW JACK CITY. “I’ve had an interest in African-American history throughout my career,” says Holmes, “and the story of Nat Turner is too little known. There has been very little seen previously to even indicate there were many rebellions against the institution of slavery by kidnapped Africans. The film is unique because Nat Turner was not content to go along with the program. The opportunity of a film like this doesn’t often come along, so I was thrilled to take part in it.”
Parker’s confidence to take on an emotionally demanding central performance while trying to direct a visionary first film at the very same time enthralled Holmes. “This would have been a difficult task for the most experienced filmmaker,” he points out. “But Nate was always very clear about his overall vision. We all worked hard to make this film happen, but no one worked harder than Nate.”
THE BIRTH OF TURNER’S REBELLION
“When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in,
he has no choice but to become an outlaw.”
― Nelson Mandela
What is known is that Nat was born on Benjamin Turner’s farm in Southampton, VA, and later adopted his “owner’s” name, though it was not his own. It was said that from an early age he stood out for his gifted intelligence, unbreakable Godly devotion and for saying he saw his life was intended for a “great purpose.”
Given the uncommon opportunity to read, Nat developed into a sought-after Baptist preacher, with both black and white followers, a true rarity in those times. And yet, despite his reputation as a powerful minister, he remained a slave forced to work the land of Benjamin Turner’s son, Samuel.
It was a time of mounting tensions. Severe drought had the Southern economy reeling. The abolitionist movement was gaining strength while paranoia was striking into the core of slave-owning society. Even as some ministers condemned slavery as “contrary to the word of God,” the system was growing more brutal and desperate. In 1829, David Walker, a free black man, published his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a rallying call for slaves to rise up by any means. Southerners feared a catalytic retribution might be coming, but no one could predict when or how.
On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner’s status as a slave abruptly changed. That night, uniting his fellow slaves, Turner and his rebel force threw off their chains in a lethal, bloodstained battle that would bring the full wrath of the Virginia militia upon them. The aftermath sent shockwaves through the South – both raising the hopes of abolitionists and fueling the vengeful rage of slave-owners, who waged ruthless reprisals. The event was so ground-shaking it even led to a debate in the Virginia legislature over ending slavery, but that would not actually come to pass for three decades.
Perhaps the most famous, or infamous, pop-culture depiction of Nat Turner came in William Styron’s best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. The book became at once an overnight literary sensation and a matter of fiery public debate centering on race, perspective and rewriting history – just months before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.
Styron’s heavily fictionalized account – which he said was an attempt to reflect “slavery’s devastation” — compelled readers. But it disturbed historians by ignoring basic facts of Turner’s life and presenting his persona through the implausible skew of a white Southerner lacking insight into African-American culture. Disregarding that Turner was married, Styron depicted him as a bachelor fueled by unfulfilled desire for a white girl. Some felt Styron had replaced the real Turner with a fantasy stereotype and purposefully misrepresented him. A volume of rebuttals entitled William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond followed.
Sums up Parker: “Our history has been very much sanitized in America, I think in part because it forces us to look in the mirror, to self-reflect. But if you look at history – if you look at the history say of how Southern police departments developed out of slave patrols – then you can better understand and analyze where we are now.”
HISTORY AND IMAGINATION: NATE PARKER’S TAKE ON NAT TURNER
“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.”
― Frederick Douglass
Nate Parker, in search of Turner’s truth, started elsewhere. He began with several meticulously documented volumes: The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion by University of Massachusetts professor of history Stephen B. Oates; The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory by history professor Scot French and The Southampton Insurrection published in the year 1900 by William Sidney Drewry, a rare work based on interviews with living witnesses.
“The history is there if you look for it,” says Parker. “Nat Turner is often referred to as ‘controversial’ but I felt he was no more so than many Americans we revere – say, President Truman, or many others, who made controversial decisions that decimated human beings in the name of seeking peace.” It was precisely because Turner did struggle with these larger questions about how to seek justice that Parker was so fiercely drawn to him.
He also grappled personally with Turner’s taking of other lives. “We have to remember the only weaponry he could access was the sword and the ax. Perhaps if Nat had lived in the age of Twitter, he wouldn’t have had to resort to violence but he took up the tools he had at hand. I mean if Nat Turner had Facebook, it could have been a different kind of revolution. But the reality was as it was, and the context of the Bible was very clear to him: “cut the head from the serpent”.” Today, some historians believe that if Turner had not done what he did at that time, the Civil War might have been pushed back. Abolitionists started to point the finger and say, ‘your slave can’t be happy if they are rising against you.’”
Parker underscores that the film is not about hate; on the contrary. “At the root of it all is Nat’s humanity,” he says. “Nat was so deeply moved by his desire to see the world change in a positive way that he took the road that might give the quickest dividends. But nowhere in the research does anyone say Nat Turner was anti-white. That’s not the point. He was simply steadfast in his desire to see evil come to an end. He sacrificed for the future.”
Indeed, Parker resists the idea that slave owners were simplistically hateful toward their slaves. “I think there came to be a perverted way of thinking among some that it was possible that slaves could even be happy if they were being cared for,” he comments. “Nat’s owner thought they could be ‘good slave owners.’ It’s a paternalistic idea that we still see today.”
“All societies have their blinders,” Parker elucidates. “How many bad systems are we indifferent to right now — whether it be the prison industrial complex or the homelessness that we drive by every day? I don’t feel that it’s my place to be pointing fingers, but it is my place as a filmmaker to hold up a mirror.”
He continues: “For someone like Nat Turner, who has been told you are only 3/5 of a person, who has been dehumanized, it is too easy to believe that the freedom Americans have always wanted doesn’t apply to you. So that’s why it was so important to me to humanize Nat, to tell his story as a human being. If we now all can agree that the system of slavery was terroristic, oppressive and torturous, then why wouldn’t you root for the one guy that stood against it?”
Vengeance was not among Turner’s aims, believes Parker. His aim was to carry out the justice he believed passionately God wanted to see rendered in the world. “When he felt the Lord spoke to him, and showed him it was time for things to change, that’s when there was no turning back,” Parker says.
Still, Parker is acutely aware there will be those who will react against the film and against the supposed audacity of portraying Turner as a revolutionary hero. “I think the way people approach this film may tell as much about them than it will about Nat Turner,” he muses.
As he wrote, Parker further submersed himself into research on the long, obscured history of slave rebellions, on the foundational economics of un-free labor and perhaps most importantly, into the psychological warfare that sustains slave-holding as a system and may have persistent after-effects. He cites the volume Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing by psychologist Joy DeGruy – a look at how pervasive oppression leads to adaptive survival behaviors – as a particular influence. “There are books about how others see us but this is a book about how we have been conditioned to view ourselves,” he comments. “Even the way my mother raised me, going into stores and saying ‘don’t act that way around them’ or ‘we have to be better than others’ is something passed down from her mother and her mother’s mother.”
Though he read and absorbed it, Parker also took with a grain of salt the purported memoir of Turner: the pamphlet entitled The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, VA, written by a Virginia lawyer, gambler and slave-owner named Thomas Ruffin Gray. Gray claimed to have transcribed Turner’s jailhouse thoughts over a three-day meeting in 1831, but some believe that Gray, too, had his own agenda.
Says Parker: “There are many aspects of the supposed confessions that have come under fire. There were no witnesses to the confession and some of the things said seem to be completely out of line with who Turner was by common knowledge.” A slave’s existence, by definition, was concealed as anonymous, undocumented, and unknowable.
One place Parker filled in details for his screenplay was in imagining Turner preaching to fellow slaves. “Being that he was a preacher of African descent, and knowing historically he wouldn’t be allowed to preach in white churches, my assumption was he would be preaching to slaves,” Parker explains. “Some of the oral history has it that he went to his owner to say the treatment he’d seen of slaves was wrong and was beaten for it. He was also said to have baptized a white man and been beaten for that. We don’t know where he preached or what he saw but we do know what was happening at the time on plantations.”
To keep the narrative taut, Parker decided to combine the characters of Samuel Turner, who died before the rebellion, with the plantation’s new caretaker, Joseph Travis (who was killed along with his family in the rebellion), into a single person.
But what he says he most altered in writing the screenplay was to tone down imagery that has become all too expected. “The research was enough to give you nightmares,” he admits. “There were harrowing levels of brutality and abuse, but I wanted to show this environment in a richer, more authentic way than has been seen. I wasn’t interested in the shock value.”
Another trail Parker followed as he wrote led back to Turner’s original homeland in West Africa, haunting traces of which permeate the film’s texture. “Dick Gregory said ‘a man with no knowledge of his heritage is like a tree without roots.’ So I felt I wanted to deal in some way in this film with Nat’s African identity. I wanted deal with the fact that his mother and his grandmother were from Ghana. I needed to imagine them coming through the middle passage being stripped of everything — except their identity, which they sowed into young Nat. By the time he was 7 or 8, the elders were telling him, you will be a prophet. You will do great things. I think speaking power into our children is something we don’t do enough of now.”
One of Parker’s initiatives is to educate future generations with the creation of The Birth of a Nation In-Schools program. The program is designed to be a concentrated effort to reach educators and students in public and private high schools and colleges nationwide through activations including curriculum development and distribution, professional development inclusion, and key education conferences. Additionally, the “The Birth of a Nation: Slavery, Resistance & Abolition” national lecture series, in partnership with the American Library Association and the United Nations Remember Slavery Programme to reach educators, students and general public.
THE INFLUENCES ON NAT TURNER: RELIGION AND THE BIBLE
“If Nat Turner wasn’t a preacher, I don’t think I would have been interested in this story,” Parker states. “If he was about anger for anger’s sake, I wouldn’t be interested. There’s nothing about me that wants to celebrate that. That he did what he did as a last resort meant something to me. That he was so obedient to his faith right to the end meant something to me. The true history suggests he was a measured man, a man who toiled over what he felt he had to do and how to do it. His actions speak more to slavery and what it does to men than it does to some half-baked notions of fanaticism. Nat Turner resisted, but he resisted in the name of God and clear injustice.”
Parker points to the fact that Turner, by necessity, drew his moral convictions solely from the Bible, the only book he’d ever known. “It was the only book he had at all,” he notes. “It was his only tool. So I imagine he saw therein that the Bible is full of stories about people who rose up against oppression – and he must have asked himself, if the Bible is real and these people are oppressors, what is God’s message to me? The only imaginable answer was that he must stand on the side of the oppressed. It’s constant in the Bible, constant, that God is on the side of the oppressed, which meant the slave-owners were on the wrong side.”
The irony does not escape Parker. “It is interesting that the very book that was supposed to be used to make him docile was the thing that liberated him and gave him a riotous disposition toward the injustices that were affecting him and other oppressed people,” he points out.
The Smithsonian currently holds what is thought to be the Bible that Nat Turner was holding when he was captured two months after the rebellion. The Bible was donated to the museum by descendants of Lavinia Francis, a slaveholder who survived the rebellion.
CHANNELING NAT TURNER: NATE PARKER THE ACTOR
“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.”
― Muhammad Ali
Having spent so many years embroiled in Nat Turner’s life and times, when it came time to portray him, Parker felt the substance of the man was already deep in his bones. But he wanted to go further. “I felt like Nat was with me, I felt I had a guide,” he describes. “And I knew there had to be that sense of sacrifice. So I fasted and I prayed and did all the things that Nate felt he had to do at that time. And my life changed a lot. I knew I couldn’t fake it. I really went for it – because I wanted so desperately to make Nat Turner proud and to make my people proud.”
It intrigued Parker to think about the fact that although Turner was by all accounts learned and brilliant, for most of his life the only book he had access to was the Bible. “He was so in alignment with his faith. It was said that he was never seen to spend money or to drink. All he ever had as currency was his faith that he was destined for something,” Parker explains.
Parker says that despite also serving as director, he was always able to focus 100% of his intensity into the performance. “It is due to the fact that I prepped like a madman,” he explains. “I put in the hours and the days and the months and I obsessed and I took no rest. Sunday was the only day I stepped away from the movie and took a break. So when it came time to do the work, it was there. I had no doubts if I had the capacity to embody this man.”
That conviction came through in his performance. “What’s interesting is how much conflict you see in the character as Nate portrays him,” says producer Jason Berman. “The Turner slave rebellion was brutal and women and children were killed. Yet even when we see Nat wielding an ax, we see into his soul and his belief that he must do this for reasons that are bigger than himself.”
Adds Preston Holmes: “Nate really shows how Nat’s faith is tested, how he must try to reconcile God’s message of love with the plight of his people. Nat Turner didn’t start out wanting to foment revolt. He tried another approach but he reached a point that he felt he had to act.”
ASSEMBLING THE CAST: VISIONS FULFILLED
When it came to finding his actors for THE BIRTH OF A NATION, Parker worked closely with casting director Mary Vernieu — but he already had in his mind the qualities he sought for of the film’s characters. “Nate essentially handpicked every person on the cast for a reason and the talent level on this film is through-the-roof,” says producer Gilbert.
One of the most difficult roles to cast was that of Samuel Turner, Nat Turner’s boyhood friend turned master — who, despite a torn conscience and a gentler hand than many, nevertheless is a complicit part of the gearworks of the slavery system. To portray such a complicated man, one who reflects both unquestioned privilege and unease about his own inhumanity, Parker was quickly led to Armie Hammer. Hammer, the great grandson of oil tycoon Armand Hammer, is known for his roles in THE SOCIAL NETWORK, J. EDGAR and THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. He and Parker found an instant rapport essential for these two men who grew up together yet came from irreconcilable worlds.
“Armie and I were completely in line together on how to portray his character,” says Parker. “I knew he would help me carry the weight of this film. His character is challenging but Armie himself is one of the nicest, kindest and most disciplined people you could ever meet. Throughout the movie, he was my linchpin – he was always so prepared and committed to the work.”
For Hammer, the unapologetically grand ambitions of the story were irresistible. “I took this project because I thought the message behind it was incredible. It speaks volumes about the past but also sheds light on things that we have not really addressed and we have not really gotten over. This story is part of the genesis of what is going on right now in America. I think it’s a beautiful thing that Nate called it THE BIRTH OF A NATION, because Nate is showing the roots of a movement.”
Hammer was also thrilled to be part of Parker’s directorial debut. “Nate’s one of the most passionate filmmakers I’ve ever seen,” he muses. “It was incredible to think this was the first time he was directing a major feature and that he was also the writer and the star.”
Bringing both romance and a searing motivation to Nat Turner’s life is his wife, Cherry, a fellow slave he was believed to have married in the early 1820s. Taking the role of a woman who finds her own strength despite being denied her identity is newcomer Aja Naomi King, best known for the ABC legal drama “How to Get Away with Murder.”
“Aja gives a breakout performance in this film,” comments Parker. “She portrays a woman who went through so much, it can be hard to imagine, but she showed up in every moment.”
There was no hesitation for King in taking the role; the screenplay hit her hard right away. “I thought it was such a powerful story. This is the first time I’ve seen a story of slavery where it’s the slave who is a hero and decides to stand up for himself, versus waiting for someone else to come in and save the day. That’s something new,” she points out. “I greatly admired Nate’s bravery.”
Like many, King had heard of Nat Turner, but knew little beyond that. “I didn’t know, for example, that people thought he was a visionary and it was always expected that he was meant to be something more,” she explains. “In school, we only touched on slavery, so I think it’s so exciting to get this inside look at what the country was really like during this time, which as history goes, was really just yesterday. I think we need this story — and from this perspective.”
King spoke at length with Parker about how to give Cherry a fiery independence despite her position in society. “Nate really wanted to empower her and I very much agreed and was excited he was thinking in this way,” says the actress. “I love that when Nat decides to go to war against slavery, it starts as a conversation between him and Cherry, and it’s important to him that she is behind him.”
It was also an interesting proposition to think about how a woman like Cherry might approach love under such precarious circumstances. King notes that it takes both of them time to find the strength to open up – and that Nat is initially moved to stand up for Cherry, as an abused slave on the auction block, long before he woos her. “It’s not as if Nat looks at Cherry on the auction block and thinks ‘here is the woman I will marry.’ I think he feels he can’t live with himself if he sees one more horrible thing happen to this human being. Yet, that’s the beginning of their relationship. It’s only later that he starts to really see who she is and their love story truly begins.”
Uncertainty always looms over their romance. “Back then, as a slave, someone could separate you from your loved ones at any second, and you had no choice in the matter,” points out King. “The love story inside this story is so beautiful because Nat and Cherry have this one chance to choose each other and to have a baby and it’s the first time in their lives they feel they can possess something of their own. For Cherry, it’s the first time she believes she can trust someone and feels cherished.”
The chemistry between King and Parker was organic from the start. “As soon as we were in the room together, it just clicked,” she recalls. “Just holding each other’s gaze could be so powerful because I think Nat and Cherry are always very aware they could be separated without warning. They had to drink each other in as much as they could, while they could.”
Penelope Ann Miller (“American Crime,” THE ARTIST) portrays one of the film’s most morally complicated roles as Benjamin Turner’s wife, Elizabeth, a woman born in to slave ownership who nevertheless encourages a young Nat to read and develop his keen mind and faith. Miller sees Elizabeth as a subversive in her own way. “Women in those days didn’t have many rights either,” she points out. “So I find that these two people bonded in this interesting, risky way. She saw that Nat had a gift, and she thought that she could help him by taking him under her wing. Since her husband was a preacher, maybe she thought, ‘Well, I can get away with this because I’m only going teach him the Bible.’ I see her as being very progressive. But you can also look at my character and say regardless of her compassion for Nat, she still kept slaves and could have done more. I saw the complexity of that. But I could only play her as I believe she saw herself. I don’t believe she saw herself as an evil woman, but ethically there were a lot of things wrong with the entire situation she was in.”
One of the film’s veterans is Academy Award®-nominated actor Jackie Earle Haley (LITTLE CHILDREN, LINCOLN) who takes on the sordid role of a slave patrol captain searching for Nat Turner’s escaped father. Haley too was drawn to the fresh outlook. “We know this as such a despicable time that it’s great to see people rising up and saying they’re not going to take it anymore,” he observes. “I felt it’s a story that demands to be seen – and I saw Nate was fully prepared to attack it.”
It wasn’t easy to get under the skin of a typical slave owner. Haley confesses: “Just the way my character talks to people was difficult for me to accept, but it was probably even worse in real life. It felt really good to help this story but it is a bummer to try to put a face on a person like this.”
Award-winning theatre star Colman Domingo, who previously starred with Nate Parker in Spike Lee’s RED HOOK SUMMER, plays the real-life slave known as Hark. “Hark was very much a brother to Nat Turner, and kind of his first lieutenant,” explains Domingo. “According to the research I was able to do, Hark was a jocular person, someone who was funny and who might be a bit subversive with a slave master, saying ‘oh yes, sir, all right, if that’s what you want.’ He was kind of a sweet, innocent guy but the world had its way with him, and a lot of what he loved was stripped from him.”
Hark’s losses are what convince him to join forces with Nat Turner. “I think he wanted to do something and make a difference — not for himself but for future generations more than anything,” says Domingo.
For all the difficulty his character experiences, Domingo loves his joyful moments especially at Nat and Cherry’s wedding. “That scene is so poignant and beautiful because everyone is so free,” he observes. “It was great to imagine these moments of lightness in slave times, because there had to be many. That’s the reason I’m here, and I know it. I know as a descendant of slaves, the reason why I’m here right now is because my ancestors danced and laughed and they loved.”
The cast also includes popular star Gabrielle Union (“Being Mary Jane”), who took the small role of Hark’s wife Esther because she was so driven to support the film. Says Union: “Nat Turner is pretty much the only story I heard in school that I could rally around, his and Harriet Tubman’s. But I just never thought that the Nat Turner story would be made, for obvious reasons. So when I heard Nate had actually put it together, I stalked him and then I Skyped him and I begged him for a role.” Despite the role’s size, it felt life-changing to Union. “It was easily the most challenging, heart wrenching, gut busting, difficult role I have ever taken on, and it’s by far the most important,” she says.
Dwight Henry (12 YEARS A SLAVE, BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD) portrays Turner’s father, likely a seminal figure in Nat’s development – but Henry confesses he almost walked away from the project because he could not countenance being humiliated and whipped by white supremacists. Yet, after some soul-searching reflection, he says he came to the conclusion the film “was important for the future.” That reflection led him to better understand Isaac Turner.
“I’m a father too,” says Henry. “I have five kids. And as a father, your ultimate goal in life is to be able to teach our children morals, how to live, how to love and how to be happy. I believe that’s what Isaac Turner did for little Nat. He taught him there’s a purpose in life. Without his father instilling in him how to care about people, I don’t think Nat would have become the person that he was. He’s a man who sacrificed his life for his family.”
Mark Boone, Jr. of “Sons of Anarchy” makes his own departure as the crafty preacher Reverend Wathel, who suggests that Nat Turner’s slave-master use his preaching skills for money and influence. Boone describes him as “a man of standing in the community with a certain amount of power … but not an upstanding person.” He goes on: “The Reverend sees that Nat has a facility with, with speech and the Bible, and he sees there is money in that. It’s known that some churches propped up slavery at that time – and I think that’s what the Reverend expects Nat to do.”
The great irony is that Nat does the very opposite of what Boone expects. Boone notes that in the film Nat Turner sees right through the preacher’s cherry picking of the Lord’s word. “There is a scene that really pinpoints that the white population is ignoring certain teachings of the Bible that would certainly not support the slave system,” he says. “I think it crystallizes something for Nat and is a turning point for him. At first, Nat used the Bible to shore up his family and other slaves who were suffering. But he came to believe he was acting within his faith when he turned against the system that was keeping them all down.”
Aunjanue Ellis (“Quantico,” THE HELP) took on the weighty role of Nat Turner’s mother, Nancy. “One of the things Nate wanted to do was to have a straight line between who Nat was and where he came from – and Nancy is the conduit of that in the film,” she explains. “I think she saw as a mother there was something different about him, and she wanted to protect him but she also saw there was something inevitable about where he was headed. I think Nancy was constantly having to let go of Nat. She had to let him go in service of things that are bigger than all of us.”
“Nat’s strength came from the women in his life,” says Parker, emphasizing the key role black women played in the film, particularly his mother and grandmother, who were very religious. “There’s a reason why his grandmother and mother are the head of the household. At one point, we were emasculated as black men so it was often that women stepped in to fill that role. We cannot negate the fact that black women have been critical component for us as a people.”
For Esther Scott (TRANSFORMERS, THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS), who plays Bridget Turner, the entire story was an inspiration. “These things are still going on, with people hating each other and fighting each other and not seeing the larger picture. There is still so much work to be done, which makes Nat Turner’s rebellion so timely for today. I feel this film is necessary. It is needed. We need that awareness that lives were lost to get us to where we are now and the struggle is not over,” says Scott.
Roger Guenveur Smith (AMERICAN GANGSTER) has the heartbreaking role of Isaiah, the domestic servant whose job included delivering women to the plantation owner at night. “Isaiah is forced against his better will, and his better sense of ethics, to deliver Esther to Samuel Turner’s dinner guest, Mr. Randall,” Smith explains. “It was a particularly difficult scene to play. But it is a scene that was played in fact over and over again in the South.”
Says Nate Parker of the character: “The reality is that most people are Isaiah. Most people are not Nat Turner, unless they’re activated. Most people are saying I have these few small things I’ve been given and if I fight for more, I face the possibility of losing everything. It’s the feeling of ‘I can’t escape this.’”
Like so many others involved in the film, Smith felt a profound responsibility to tell this story a new way. “I think we all felt a certain obligation to tell the story the best way that we can,” he summarizes. “It’s not just an exercise in nostalgia but a story that resonates in the present moment.”
CRAFTING THE OLD SOUTH FOR A NEW DAY
THE BIRTH OF A NATION was shot in just 27 fast-moving days on location in sweltering yet lush Savannah, Georgia where remnants of the Old South helped transport cast, crew and audience back to the atmosphere of antebellum times. Nate Parker further turned back the hands of time by asking for a no-cell-phone set and insisting on using real former plantations, where the ghosts of the past are still palpable in ineffable ways. “With the actors, I wanted to always feel we were in the moment, that were transcending time, that were really there in 1830s Virginia,” says Parker.
Reconstructing an entire world on a limited budget demanded high creativity. Says Kevin Turen: “We were faced with a challenge: to make an uncompromising period film that felt every bit as big in scope as the script Nate wrote. That was extremely difficult. But we were fortunate to have a team with great insight into where to put our priorities and how to get the absolute most out of what we had. It was all led by Nate, who was always incredibly organized and able to wear all hats.”
To merge the pace of an action thriller with Turner’s internal world of dreamlike spiritual revelations, Parker chose cinematographer Elliot Davis, whose films have ranged from acclaimed historical drama THE IRON LADY and the teen phenomenon TWILIGHT to the stylish thriller OUT OF SIGHT and indie classic THIRTEEN). “Elliot shot one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen, THE IRON LADY,” explains the writer-director, “I loved the weight of Elliot’s camera — how it was still when it needed to be and when it moved, stillness remained. We were really blessed in getting him and his team.”
Originally trained as an architect, Davis brings a structural intelligence to his photography merged with a painterly beauty. But more than that, he was another person drawn passionately to Parker’s bold POV on American history. “I’ve had long history of socially-conscious filmmaking,” notes Davis. “Interestingly, my early film education was with the Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima, so that was always a part of my consciousness. So for me, this film felt like it was a coming from a context I understand, but also was so timely because we all see the conflicts around us getting sharper now.”
Immediately, Davis found an artistic bond with Parker. “My thrust as a cinematographer has been to increase the subjectivity of the audience — to bring the audience and what they’re seeing on screen closer and closer together. I love playing with the contrast levels — with dark darks and white whites – that make you feel something. And Nate responded to that,” says Davis. “When I first walked into his office, he had walls of photos from my films and the thing they all shared in common were de-saturated cool tones. We both felt drawn toward using cooler blue-green imagery for this film that feels more modern and has none of the pretense of sepia-toned history. I think that is the basis of the look: we’re seeing Nat Turner’s world through modern eyes. And that approach took on a life of its own.”
Parker’s vision was full of stark contrasts. “I knew I wanted a very cold and saturated feeling because these were our Dark Ages. I didn’t want to go with the typical golds and browns of most slave-era films. When Nat gives Cherry a bouquet of flowers it’s one of the first bursts of color in the film and you really feel it. You see something so beautiful happening amidst the darkness and grit.”
Creative lighting was essential throughout. “We had to really think about lighting in every frame because there was also a lot of night shooting and there were a lot of technical challenges. I was looking at Andrei Tarkovsky’s polaroids that used a very soft, cloudy kind of light,” recalls Davis. “The light causes white skin to be more pale and black tones to pop out.”
The array of human expressions especially interests Davis and his camera. “I’m very big on faces – because that’s what the audience connects with most,” he comments. “I see my role as sculpting faces with light the way I want so as to enhance the emotion that is emitted.”
The speed of the production also pressed Davis’ creativity. “We usually only had time for one or two takes and that was it,” the cinematographer muses. “It often felt like we were working to a stopwatch, but it really brought my crew very tightly together. Everybody was totally in lock-step.”
Davis used the Arri Alexa cameras, with which he has been experimenting for years, having been the first person to shoot an Alexa in full anamorphic on Keanu Reeves’ MAN OF TAI CHI. “By shooting this film in wide screen we were really able to utilize negative space in ways that give the look of the film a power that pushes the story forward,” Davis observes. “I hope the overall effect of the photography gives audiences just enough distance on the story to see it clearly, while also luring them in.”
Throughout, Davis was bolstered by Parker’s strong vision. “Nate had a very big hand in the composition of the film. He’d lived with this story for so long that every frame was etched inside his brain before we started shooting. And it’s a real achievement,” he concludes. “The film is about ideas that are stronger than color divides.”
One of the toughest jobs of all on THE BIRTH OF A NATION fell to production designer Geoffrey Kirkland, faced with bringing a range of plantations – from the manicured Turner plantation to the rough-hewn Fowler plantation where Nat sees what cannot be unseen — to life on a shoestring.
Fortunately, the Academy Award nominated Kirkland had the experience to make it happen. “The design the film was a hugely important,” notes Parker. “When I came across Geoffrey who most people know from CHILDREN OF MEN and THE RIGHT STUFF, I instantly saw he had both insight into the period and a passion for the story. He saved the movie so many times over, making very little money go a long way. In the end, we had beautiful, transporting sets.”
Those sets also had to come alive with the electric chaos of an all-out insurrection. With only two days to shoot the main battle sequences leading up to the confrontation at the Jerusalem armory, it was an intensive effort to pull it all off. “Guss Williams was our stunt coordinator and he went above and beyond what I asked him to do,” says Parker. “No matter what I asked him to do he always said ‘Yes I can.’ He brought a team that was so experienced and so excited to be there, they got it done.”
That was typical of the all-out attitude that permeated the set. “On every level, we were looking for bold, epic work – from the color to the sound – and everyone on the crew stepped up and sort of willed this film to become more than anyone could have imagined,” says Gilbert.
Equally key to the film’s look are the film’s costumes by Francine Jamison Tanchuck, who earlier in her career designed the costumes for Edward Zwick’s Oscar®-winning GLORY. As on that film, historical realism meets textural imagination in BIRTH OF A NATION.
Right off the bat, Tanchuck was excited to collaborate with Parker. “Nate and I were in constant conversation regarding the authenticity of the period and the clothing to present this unfortunate but very real part of American history. As much as we try to sweep it in a closet, a very large portion of this nation was built from the blood and sweat of slave labor. Slavery was and still is a stain on the American culture, and I think seeing the lives of those enslaved as they really were, tells us much about our history,” she says.
Tanchuck began with intensive research, as much as was possible given the lack of extensive documentation. “Because this was the early 1800’s, it was pre-photography,” the costume designer notes, “so we had to rely on museum pieces and artwork of the period.”
Though much of slave clothing was makeshift or hand-me-downs, Tanchuck honed in on the rare pieces that subtly referenced the African heritage that was so vital to a culture of people torn from their homes. “African influences were usually kept in secret due to the heinous policy of the slave-owners to strip these people of whatever semblance they still had of their culture, so they could be entirely dependent on the slavers,” she explains. “But Nate and I thought it would add to the costumes, especially for the elders, to have a few items recreated from their memories – items such as necklaces or bracelets made from old rope and broken jewelry pieces that might have found, and headscarves made from flour sacks.”
All of the clothing Tanchuck designed was quite literally put to the grindstone. “It was extremely important for the clothing to reflect the real work and living conditions of Virginia slaves,” Tanchuck comments. “They were given a certain amount of clothing to wear, and when those garments wore out, there were no more. So many people were forced to work, sleep and perform every other function in rags. If they could do mending, they used whatever they could find: burlap bags that carried feed for livestock, old carpets or sheets, or blankets that were frequently used for patching, and that is only if the slave owners supplied them with these goods. So the costumes reflect those horrible conditions. For us, it meant weeks of aging and dyeing fabrics to show that deterioration. It was essential for creating this world which Nat Turner turns against.”
Parker approached the job of directing with a coach-like attitude. Observes Gilbert: “What you normally see on sets is everyone catering to the director but on this film you saw Nate catering to cast and crew. Every night he’d write an e-mail thanking people, encouraging people, and it really kept everyone’s spirits high. Then every morning he began with a motivational talk. He instilled everyone with the feeling that everything they brought was appreciated and meaningful.”
The final touches on THE BIRTH OF A NATION were as important to Parker as his first words on the page. He engaged editor Steven Rosenblum — who not coincidentally edited Edward Zwick’s GLORY and Mel Gibson’s BRAVEHEART, both of which garnered Oscar®-nominations – to bring a symphonic sense of pace and dramatic crescendo. Then, he searched for a composer who could evoke the period with both African and early American influences – and came up with a surprising choice: the English composer Henry Jackman, best known for big hit films ranging from X-MEN: FIRST CLASS to KICK-ASS and CAPTAIN PHILLIPS.
“Henry hadn’t done a film like this before but he is a genius,” comments Parker. “Never have you heard Africanized sounds and orchestral music merged in this way. We had a great collaboration, working note-by-note together. He honed every single cue to perfection and he created something essential to the experience of the film.”
They also brought in Wiley College’s a capella choir as well as Alex Boyé – a Utah-based, British-born singer of Nigerian heritage — who add the power of human voices to the soundtrack.
Jackman recalls his earliest conversations with Parker: “One of his frustrations was the lack of a universal African-American hero. He said if you watch BRAVEHEART, you don’t need to be Scottish to relate to the plight of the Scots because you feel that a universal state of the character’s heroism. That’s what he wanted to do so we talked about using a universal musical language.”
At the same time, Jackman brought in strains of African ceremonial music and gospel choirs in unexpected ways. “Nate was really keen on using a gospel choir, but not as a musical cliché, but rather a sort of misappropriation. So we have the sound of spirituals but it’s more like ancestral folk music.”
Seeing an early cut of the film hit Jackman hard and further sparked his creativity. “What I found so impressive is that the film looks like a living painting. It has an extremely high level of out-and-out craft, and it’s portrayed so beautifully, but that actually doesn’t detract at all from how horrific and important the subject matter is … you don’t feel distanced from what is happening to Nat by it being a period piece. That’s quite difficult to accomplish,” he remarks.
CREATING CONVERSATIONS FOR THE FUTURE
“In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just – a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”
― Abraham Lincoln
Everyone involved in the film was buoyed not just by Parker’s fervor but also by the sense they were telling a story that might do what is increasingly difficult in entertainment: to get people talking about things that matter. “This is a film that has the potential to stir controversy but also spark big conversations,” says Aaron Gilbert. “That’s part of what has us all so excited about it.”
Says Preston Holmes: “I think the more that people know about the true history of our country … the more understanding it will foster between us as Americans and as human beings.”
Nate Parker is sanguine about the likely reactions to the film. He knows there are those who it will rankle and many who may learn about Nat Turner’s heart stopping actions for the first time, but he hopes for one particular reaction across the board: empathy.
“I hope that you cannot watch this film and not have empathy,” he concludes. “My goal was to create the mirror of all mirrors on this subject and I challenge the grand wizard of the KKK to not be moved by the film’s humanity. When I see Nat Turner in the final moments of the film, it moves me to tears every time. He is so heroic … and this is what I was missing my entire life. It’s the pride you’ve longed for, the pride you’ve never felt or been allowed to feel.”
“For me, this film is about the hope of untethering the industry from our dark past, about the opportunity to retell the narrative of America in new ways. It