The Daily Tar Heel had a chance to talk to the director of the new movie “Blood Done Sign My Name” and the author of the book the movie is based on.
Jeb Stuart wrote, produced and directed the movie, which opens today. Tyson’s work, UNC’s 2005 summer reading book, examines the murder of Henry Marrow, a black man in Oxford, N.C.
DTH: How did you decide you wanted to make the book into the movie? Can you tell me a little bit about what drew you to this book?
Jeb Stuart: A good friend of mine who had gone to Duke sent me the book and said that he thought I would appreciate it because of the fact that my father was a minister in NC in the 1970’s the same time that Tim’s father was.
When I went back to talk to this person and said ‘I think it is great’, and he said “I think we should make a movie of this.’ And you know I get that a lot, but in this particular case I really agreed with him. …
If you are reading the book expecting to see what was in the movie you certainly aren’t going to get that. I had to create a narrative. It is really a memoir, and memoirs are told in sort of scattered bits.
Tim would drop a piece about his aunt and uncle, or his grandfather, or tell a little bit about his father in a story, and then jump to another part. And that is what you can do when you are telling a memoir.
In a movie you really have to have a narrative and it has to track along a certain line.
But I thought that the other part of the story that had to be told was — and I don’t think Hollywood does a very good job of this — were the sort of heroes of the civil rights movement post Martin Luther King, Jr. and post Malcolm X, that are simply never told.
I’m sort of in the hero business. I write action movies and thrillers, and I thought that these were everyday heroes. This story is really about courage. It is something that sort of has to be refreshed from generation to generation.
That’s what drove me to say that this really needs to be a movie. So, then I went to Tim Tyson and tried to convince him that I was his man and the relationship sort of began about three and half years ago.
DTH: What were some of the challenges in changing it from a book into a movie?
JS: People tend to think that when you adapt something from an existing work it is easier. It is just as hard as writing something originally, if not harder.
Blood Done Sign My Name was extremely difficult because it is a true story, and I want to be obsessive about the truth, because a lot of these people are still alive. …
We have to make sure that the things Tim says in the book are accurate, and the things I say in the script are accurate. Creating a narrative out of something that is non-fiction, that was not ever meant to be told in the story format that is very, very difficult. It was the hardest adaptation I have ever had to do in 25 years of doing it for a living.
DTH: What was your favorite scene to film? What was the most moving?
JS: I would think that the most difficult scene to write and then to feel like I could pull it off visually was the cross burning scene.
There are a lot of technical things about that scene that are difficult because given your shooting an independent movie you have crew that can only work for 12 hours. And you have a scene that starts in the day in the water hole and ends at night with the clan rally.
You have to pull it all off in multiple locations, even though they may be only a half a mile away. You are still moving a crew of over 120 people and extras and everybody else.
And you have to feed them and clothe them a give them places to go to the bathroom. From a logistics stand point, it was a massive undertaking to do in a 12 hour span.
From a visual or storytelling part, it was the most fulfilling part. I really wanted the audience to not know where the little boy was going, where Tim was being taken by his father.
And the idea that his actions were not being met with punishment, but with an educational piece was important. As they go to the top of the hill and look down, and they see kids playing and mothers folding up picnic blankets and they are raising a cross.
And for a little boy who grew up in the confines of a church, that this had a very strong resonance. This was a revival or it had something to do with good. Then to have the sun go down, and the men reemerge from their cars with their robes on.
What you hear these clansmen say, that was all taken from actual transcripts from clan rallies that had been gathered over the years. And the evil that was sort of embodied in that, to have that sort of flip back on him, was really important to me. As Ricky says in the car afterwards, ‘people hide in familiar things,’ and that was sort of the theme of that scene.
DTH: It seemed that used light and dark in cool ways, what were your thoughts in doing this?
JS: You have a million meetings (with your production designer and cinematographer) and you say, how the heck are we going to pull this scene off? What are we going to need to make it work? How do we do it? And how do we light it?
What you can’t see in the clan rally scene is that Steve blew up a gigantic helium balloon that is probably the size of a mobile home. It is suspended in the air behind those cars in the clan rally, like a giant moon that hangs over.
And so, you don’t see that light, but that light source is coming down from some place. And the same thing with the cars coming down the road part, there are massive lights that are way off in the distance, just giving sort of an eerie glow, and just enough light so that the camera can pick it up and not too much that it feels like Hollywood came to town.
DTH: How did you decide to have these two main characters’ (Ben Chavis and Vernon Tyson) stories merge? What was your thought process in showing the story lines of both these men?
JS: The idea was sort of to tell a segregated story. The audience usually comes in to a paradigm of a movie and expect there to be a merging of two stories.
My feeling was that these two stories, like a lot of the south, were two different universes. They lived in the same town and rarely if ever in the movie interact.
They brush up against each other as sort of a tangential aspect of the story until the end, in the actions that happen in the town that affect them both.
One is spring loaded to go off into a career where Dr. Chavis becomes one of the Wilmington 10 and then later the youngest executive director in the NAACP.
Vernon Tyson, he is sort of run out of town on a rail for doing the right thing. Hollywood’s never done a really good job of telling a story of a black hero, in this respect, without having the white guy save the day — that is sort of the lowest common denominator that is how I would describe it.
For example, look at To Kill a Mockingbird, a classic southern movie, except that Gregory Peck is a white guy and if it wasn’t for Gregory Peck and all this, blacks would probably have a harder time. Mississippi Burning, great thriller, except two white FBI guys in the 1960’s come down to Mississippi and solve that case and they save the poor blacks.
Here is a movie I particularly like, the Blind Side, which has been incredibly successful — Sandra Bullock has done a phenomenal job. But what are you telling the black audience? Are you saying, the best thing for you young black men, is to be adopted by a rich white family. If you are looking at it from the black perspective that is not particularly a movie you are going to go line up and see.
My feeling is good heroes in good stories come in all different shapes and sizes.
DTH: How did you show the differences in time between the mid-1960’s Martin Luther King Jr. time period and the 1970’s?
JS: I think in the opening I tried very hard. You know the shots of Nixon, and the Vietnam War and the things like a man walking on the moon. Those are the images I wanted to portray that we are not living in the time of the Selma March.
We’ve moved way beyond the period of Martin Luther King Jr. when whites and blacks linked arms and marched down the streets together in a very liberal cause.
It is a very different time; the Civil Rights Movement had lost some steam with the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. It was a new era. That was what I was pretty much trying to say with those images at the very beginning. This isn’t your 1963 civil rights story that you’ve probably seen a bunch of times.
DTH: What is the main message or what are a few messages you were trying to convey through this story?
Tim Tyson: I was trying to tell the truth about a complicated history: a human story from which we can see the faces of flawed people like ourselves and write a history of the African America freedom movement, the struggle for democracy in the south mirrored in the clichés of saints and heroes, but is more akin to the painful complicated history that we actually lived.
The book is partly a memoir of sorts and partly a work of history. It was my master’s thesis at Duke, and I did all the research for it and court documents and newspaper and FBI and SBI files.
I set that down for 12 years and then went back and retold it in the only voice really appropriate to it, which was my own because I lived through the stuff in danger, working as a historian of the south and the civil rights movement.
One thing I was trying to underline is the importance of having an honest confrontation with our own history. …
You’re not going to get anywhere in coming to grips with who you are, moving toward who you want to be, until you have an honest, rattling with the realities of your own past.
A lot of narratives about the civil rights movement are essentially, triumphal hymns to a nonviolent call on America’s conscious that got answered.
What we actually lived through was much more complicated than that, much more turbulent, much more violent, less successful and certainly less popular than the narratives that we see in sort of the popular memories.
The most important thing about the movie, what I respect Jeb Stuart for so much, is for one he is a great story teller, two, he respected history.
When Hollywood has dealt with the Civil Rights Movement at all, which is fairly rare, it’s mostly been about the good white folks verses the bad white folks. And then these nice Negroes in the middle who essentially sing hymns and are basically props.
Most civil rights movies don’t have the movement in them but are basically a struggle between white people, which is very redemptive. One of the things I love so much about the way he told this story is that, you know, the part of Tyson, my father, does not save the day. He is a remarkable human being, but he doesn’t really accomplish much.
The movie is about a people who rise up and say ‘no more’ in a messy, complicated, imperfect way. Even inside the movement, there is not really agreement on how this ought to be done. Some people are organizing boycotts and some people are burning stuff down.
It’s a conflict, and it’s messy, which is sort of how history is.
DTH: What moment in the book/movie was the most influential to your life? That you definitely wanted to include?
TT: The difference between a movie and a book is movies can narrate one story incredibly vividly. It would be very difficult for a writer to be so gifted as to conjure up a narrative as vivid as what a film maker can do.
But what a film has less capacity to do is to be analytical, to deal with the subtleties. Anytime you are making a book into a movie, you have to pare it down to its basic purpose or central narrative.
There are a lot of rich side trails, historical backdrops in the book that I’m happy about and worked very well in the context, but that a movie just can’t be expected to do. It pleased me very much that Jeb Stuart boiled it down to what mattered most. That was the messy, complicated dramatic way that African Americans in Granville County stood up against the racial caste system.
DTH: Whose perspective is it from in the book?
TT: I’m a historian by day, and this is my 3rd book. The rest of my work is traditional historical narratives.
This book is different because I couldn’t take the posture a historian adopts to research and narrate history because the history I was researching and narrating was something I grew up in the middle of. It was inherently personal.
There is a sense in which it is a history book, but it’s told in first person — so it is my story. Some of it is my story when I was 11 years old and some of it is my story as a 45 year old historian father, looking back on my own past, and my own upbringing and what we went through. And some of it is my view of history that I learned not just from living through it, because we aren’t always clear on what we are living through especially at that age.
Everybody is looking out through their own eyes in kind of a limited view. And a historian is trying to get a little above that, and yet it is a personal narrative.
I basically used the first person narrative as a way of having an intimate connection with the reader and then using that to pull them through a hard and complicated history.
The movie is not a memoir in its form. It is a drama. Its kind of an ensemble cast; this is not a story of just one of the characters. There is Vernon Tyson and Ben Chavis, Frinks and Henry Marrow, Robert Teel and Eddie McCoy and there is kind of an ensemble approach to the movie that works really well.
DTH: What made you decide to do a narrative instead of a historical book?
TT: In a very real sense, I became a historian when I was 11 years old because I came of age in this crazy place that was created by the toppling of a white supremacist social order and the attempt to create a multi-racial democracy.
I grew up in the middle of this mess and I couldn’t understand it. There was this madness of race all around me and there was no way for me to understand it without going back and exploring the history.
How did this mess get this way? How did we get here? By exploring the history I was able to locate myself in the unfolding narrative of that history and make sense of it.
My work as a historian, even though I got a Ph.D. from Duke and I wrote history in which I tried to be thorough and objective and a professional historian, I did that out of my own deep personal need to understand how we got this way and to contemplate what it might mean to become one nation.
For “Blood Done Sign My Name,” I am talking about my hometown, my friend’s father who has committed this murder, my father who is wrestling with the dilemmas of being a pastor in the middle of this racial conflict. There was no way to tell that story in a third person objective kind of way.
DTH: Was that a difficult thing to understand at the time, being so young?
TT: We had riots at school. We had a group called the Rights of White People, the ROWP, that met in the park across from the school and had guns.
Going through that tumultuous process forced me to think about how things got that way.
One thing I knew was that the murder of Henry Marrow in Oxford and the things that we went through that that was a big example of what was wrong. And I felt like if I understood what happened there I might have some sense of what all this was about.
DTH: What made you pick the title?
TT: It comes out of the theology of the enslaved; it is part of the revolutionary project of African American culture which was to combat the idea that a person can be a thing.
At the beating heart of African American culture is this radical assertion that a person is not a thing.
Part of it is the title: blood connotes murder. When we say blood, we mean race, and how race is operated in our society.
Blood would sometimes mean kin, which is relevant because 1. We are all kin, literally and 2. This is a book about the Chavis’, and the Teels, and the Tysons, and the McCoys.
It is about family and so it is about blood in that way.
Then, when we sign our names we are making a commitment and this story is also about the commitment that generations of black and white southerners have made to redeeming the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States and lifting them up to their highest meaning. And rescuing them from just being worthless scraps of paper, which was all they were until the black freedom struggle elevated them.
So it is about race and family and murder and your identity and then it is about a commitment that generations of people have made to this idea that we are all God’s children and we’re here on the same basis.
Contact the Arts Editor at artsdesk@unc.edu.
