Playing with History: A Black Camera Interview with Kevin Willmott
- Playing with History:A Black Camera Interview with Kevin Willmott
If you’re going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.
—George Bernard Shaw
The George Bernard Shaw quotation in the epigraph is both a charge and a warning. Truth is a bitter pill best taken with syrup. Failure to comply could result in the truth-teller’s figurative death. In the case of the black filmmaker, that death looks like empty theater seats. It is a film with no audience, no home. The Shaw quote opens Kevin Willmott’s 2004 film C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. The film is a mockumentary about what the United States would have become had the South won the Civil War. Using satire to poke fun at a seemingly ludicrous alternative history, C.S.A. eerily resembles a very tangible present. Amid a chorus of honeyed voices hanging on to claims about America’s postracial moment, C.S.A. is an acerbic reminder that there is still a lot of work to do.
This interview with writer, director, and professor Kevin Willmott took place at the end of August 2013. It highlights the critical roles that race and satire play in two of his films: the aforementioned C.S.A. and Destination: Planet Negro (2013). Both films work to critically inform how we think about race, history, and (cinematic) freedom. In addition to discussing his artistic beginnings, this interview also weaves connections between black cinematic representation and American cultural attitudes about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. The conversation concludes with Willmott talking about his dual role as both a director and a college professor.
Could you talk about coming of age in Junction City, Kansas, during the era of the Civil Rights Movement?
Well, Junction City was a great place to grow up because of the diversity. It was incredibly diverse because of the Buffalo Soldiers (9th Calvary and 10th Calvary) and the Big Red One.1 These guys had wives from all over the world back home. So, my “black” was, you know, a [End Page 42] white and Japanese couple, a black and German couple, a black and Korean couple, a black and Italian couple, a black and Filipino couple, a black and Vietnamese couple, and a black and Mexican couple. That was only on one block of a small Kansas town. Everybody was in these relationships. So it was a unique place.
Because it was near Fort Riley, the military base?
Fort Riley, that’s right. The problem was that we had all this beautiful diversity, but the city was kind of embarrassed by it all. So they never really celebrated it. We celebrated it ourselves.
And you went to college in Kansas as well?
Yeah, I went to Marymount College. It’s a small college in Salina.
Is that where you picked up drama?
Yeah, I went there for drama. That’s where I wrote my first plays and studied acting. That was really the first place where I got to do my thing.
You started in drama and playwriting, what got you into film?
Well, I always wanted to do film, but there was no place to do it. My goal was always to, you know, get to film somehow. This was before everybody had video cameras and stuff. So I just wrote plays and did plays in lieu of film. (laughs)
How was the transition from playwriting to film? Was it difficult or did it come with relative ease?
Well, the first one I did was my play Ninth Street. I turned it into a screenplay. Since I knew that material. … It really helped to start with something that I knew pretty well, something I’d kind of always imagined as a film. But it wasn’t until I really went to NYU that I got into screenwriting. I went to NYU’s graduate school to learn how to write screenplays. That’s really where I started writing movies.
There was a while after...
