Justin Simien, the director of “Dear White People,” given a limited released Oct. 17, really wants you to know he’s made a movie. More importantly, he wants you to think.
“I was really inspired by [playwright, screenwriter and novelist] Paddy Chayefsky and movies like ‘Network’ with hyperrealities and characters that are posing ideas. It’s grounded in character work and their true-to-life motivations, but they’re sort of mouthpieces for these conflicting ideas,” Simien said in an interview with The Daily Free Press. “I’m really spellbound by those kinds of films because it’s kind of hyper-real. It gives enough distance from the movie and the audience to allow you to think about the film not just emotionally. I love movies that kind of admit that they’re movies.”
“Dear White People” has no shame admitting it’s a movie. From the presence of the camera within the film to the overly involved intellectual debates, Simien’s directorial debut shines brighter than any other film of its kind. The characters smile, knowing they’re being watched. They don’t mind; at least they’re being seen.
The film speaks quite directly to the desire to be noticed, from activist-meets-anarchist Sam White (Tessa Thompson), newly appointed head of the black student housing and host of the campus radio show “Dear White People,” to posh Coco Conners (Teyonah Parris), the aspiring reality star fighting hard to simultaneously fit in and stand out. All of the men and women in the film yearn to be acknowledged, first within the blatant racial stereotypes they inhabit and then as the complicated human beings they must leave uncategorized.
“Having to bob and weave around other people’s presumptions is sort of what I wanted to get into with this film,” Simien said. “We feel like we have to keep responding because the way we’re being reflected in culture is incorrect. That’s sort of a truth of being part of any marginalized community in America.”
The movie itself, prematurely branded a “black film,” struggles between accepting and rejecting its genre’s limitations. Simien refers to his own film by that category in air quotes for that very reason.
“Just like the characters learn in the film, a label is sometimes necessary to orient you to the rest of the world and the context in which something needs to be discussed or understood. But it’s really irritating to be limited by it,” he said. “For some people, black films are either epic, historical slavery movies or light rom-coms aimed at a very specific demographic. A nuanced story about black people today, a multi-protagonist story — That doesn’t really jog ‘black film’ in people’s heads.”
Black film or not, “Dear White People” does tell the story of several characters of color and the white antagonists with which they are forced to coexist, all within the hallowed halls of the fictitious Winchester University. The privileged environment and cast of characters is enough to inspire our heroine, Sam, to lay down the law.
“Dear white people,” she says on her radio show, “the minimum requirement of black friends needed to not seem racist has just been raised to two. Sorry, but your weed man, Tyrone, does not count.”
Simien specifically placed the growing tensions between the black and white communities within the Ivy League in his subtle satire.
“I wanted to put these characters in a tank of sharks and, as a person who didn’t go to an Ivy League school, that’s always how I imagined those schools to be,” he said. “And also because I wanted the film to take place in a kind of hyperreality, in a completely fictional place where all the buildings are named after jazz musicians and that has hints of the Ivy League. But the point is that everyone here is ambitious and super smart. And these kind of situations still happen in the so-called hallowed grounds of hyper-educated, ambitious people.”
Simien attended Chapman University in California, where he first got the idea for “Dear White People.” He played with making the film for years until he simply couldn’t resist the urge.
“There was no reason [to make the film] other than that it was the one that spoke to me the loudest,” he said. “And I just wasn’t content not following that particular dream any longer.”
A young filmmaker with limited funds, Simien started an Indiegogo campaign to raise the money to make “Dear White People.” After raising around $40,000 — small potatoes compared to most feature films — with the help of a Twitter campaign, Simien was able to make the film, which won numerous accolades at the Sundance Film Festival.
But for this filmmaker, it’s not about the reviews, awards or recognition. Really, he just wants you to think.
“The point of the title is to make you come to the movie kind of prepared to think, not to come to be entertained or pacified or laugh. It’s impossible to think, if you’ve seen any of our materials, that you would come into this movie and turn your brain off,” Simien said. “Ultimately, doing work that provokes a conversation will always be more appealing to me than making a piece of entertainment. I don’t know if I have it in me to do that.”
