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| Gabrielle Union and Jeremy Pope in The Inspection |
A huge hit on the festival circuit and now one of the favourites as we go into awards season, Elegance Bratton’s semi-autobiographical drama The Inspection stars Jeremy Pope as a young gay man who, having been rejected by his mother and not wanting to spend any more time homeless, signs up to join the US marines during the fractious ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ era. The director/star relationship was informed by “a commonality and an understanding of how we've had to exist in this world,” says Jeremy, who is deeply moved to be trusted with telling such a personal story. Although Elegance stressed that it is based on his experiences but is not identical, it’s clearly a project which has invoked a lot of intense feelings for both of them, as they discuss when we meet at a press conference.
“We talked about if only we had a film, growing up, where we could see ourselves and get to that place of self realisation and self worth and self love,” says Jeremy. “How that might have changed our hearts and our minds sooner.”
They shot over 19 days during the early stage of the Covid pandemic, he explains.
“We were all in Jackson, Mississippi, in 113º weather and making this film that means everything and you're like, ‘Oh my God!’ so we really had to hold on to each other. So yes, looking at him and knowing that he was smiling, and we could move on to the next setup meant everything.”
A lot of the meat of the film is in little details which we observe and perhaps take in subconsciously. I ask Jeremy how he approached the way that his character Ellis French’s body language changes over the course of the film – first signalling his sexuality, then hiding it, and making little slip-ups, and eventually emerging with a genuinely new way of carrying himself. He steeples his hands in front of his face, thinking about it.
“I think with this film, the work that I had, knowing that I had Elegance and the beautiful words that are on the page, it was all about me excavating what wasn't on the page and adding nuance and colour to the character. And one thing that I think happens a lot, if you identify as a black queer man in spaces that don't feel safe, you do this thing of code switching, and you try to neutralise yourself to feel safe in an environment in order to not get, as we call it, ‘clocked’. Because once you’re clocked, safety resources, everything slips away so fast. So I think what me and Elegance talked about a lot in the way that he was shooting it with our lovely DP Lachlan [Milne] was the perspective of French, and trying to understand that language very clearly, like being in these tight shots. So you can see him going, ‘What is my environment right now? And how does that inform how I need to show up, even in my silence?’ You know what I mean?
“It was fun to be able to play with those type of things. And those ended up being the hardest days on set, because you look on the call sheet and you're like, ‘Oh, I don't say anything.’ But then there's actually so much to be said, because it's all in the physicality. It's all in the understanding and the exchange of energy that's happening with other characters and where he feels comfortable, when he feels at his best, you know? Looking at the pull up bar, how is he going to man up for all of these things, these negotiations that, you know, I've had experience in doing, but ultimately, French has had to do out of survival?
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| Jeremy Pope in The Inspection |
“But it was kind of fun to find those moments. And then to see them kind of play out, you know? You never know what they're filming and what they're getting, but then to see the edit and go, ‘Oh, they were picking up on the little things that I was doing when I didn't think the camera was on me,’ but just using that to inform my decisions and the way that I crafted French.”
Elegance is prompted to pick up the conversation about body language and to reflect on the terrific performance by Gabrielle Union as Ellis’ mother – a version of his own.
“My mother, unfortunately, was killed a few days after the movie was greenlit. And so Gabrielle Union ended up walking into much more than she signed up for. So I have a lot of gratitude to her for helping to bring my mother back to life. Because through this performance that she gave, she's helped me to get some closure that, unfortunately, my mom, in her time on Earth, she just couldn't figure out how to provide for me. So there's that. You know, every piece of jewellery that Gabrielle wears in the movie is my mother's jewellery. The way that her hair is styled, the look of her skin, everything is built out of my mom. Talking about it is emotional because I'm just so grateful.
“When it comes down to it, my mom was the first person to ever love me completely. She's also the first person to holistically reject me. She was a complicated woman. She was an orphan from age 10. By the time she was 16, she had me, and she really tried to make it. She was trying to grasp on the American dream any way she could, and being a single black teenage mom in the Eighties, you know, she was labelled a social pariah and treated as such. And Gabrielle did a really good job of tracking this woman's dreams of who she was before she had Ellis, and again, like Jeremy said, what's not on the page.
“This was all done through a lot of conversation, Gabby just talking to me, and mind you, most of my times I'm a kid, so as I'm talking about it with Gabrielle she's giving me a chance to gain a perspective on these memories. And so ultimately, this is a circle of communal healing, when it came down to it like we – Gabrielle, Jeremy, Raúl and the whole cast and crew, we understood that we had a priority to heal as human beings through this work, and that priority really informed the way we were working together.
“My mom was a beautiful lady. She was known to be the prettiest girl on her block, you know, but the thing is that when you get to know my mom, when you get close, underneath all that soft prettiness is a pretty ferocious human being. I think Gabrielle has a similar type of dichotomy, right? Where she is undeniably just luminescent, she’s gorgeous, but she's a sharp lady. She's a tough, tough, tough cookie, you know? And that combination of qualities and her activism...” He sighs.
“You know, at the end of the day, my mom didn't talk to me for 16 years, and I knew this woman was going to break through to her. Because having somebody like Gabrielle Union play you in a movie is the type of thing that you cannot avoid. Somebody's going to come up to you and say, ‘Hey, you got to watch this movie on Sunday. Is that your son?’ You know? So in that regard, I owe her and Jeremy and the whole cast and crew so much because they all helped me to deal with something that I don't know if I would have had any other means of working through without that. So I'm just eternally grateful.”
“Yeah, it was special,” says Jeremy, reflecting on his experience of working with Gabrielle. “I think, you know, it was all about unpacking, unpacking and understanding. We referenced that relationships as just like a long elastic band that has been stretched so far and wants to pop, but it's still connected. And it was all about finding the underlying tension. [There’s] this idea of love that is conditional, but you see the love, you feel the love. That's what makes it complicated.
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| The Inspection poster |
“I've heard from people you think the movie is going to go one way, because you're like, ‘Okay, she got what she wanted, he kind of got what he wanted, we're in a good place, and now it's about building from that foundation.’ And then it still doesn't quite land the way that one would hope that it does. But that is life, and that is true. So it was really special working with Gab, and you know, her coming in, and being on the same energy as me, unpacking and working in trying to find the soul and the heart of this character was really amazing.”
The key to making everything work, Elegance says, was patience.
“Jeremy had a lot of patience for me in my process of learning things. And I had that lot of patience for the reality that, like, you know, our whole cast and crew was really diverse, right? We had queer folks, Middle Eastern folks, disabled folks, women, men.”
He took pains to look after them all, he says, at difficult times, such as when they were filming a confrontation in the showers. “I was like, ‘Listen, this is going to be triggering for a lot of us here. In addition to, obviously, Jeremy is taking on most of all, we all need to be open and honest about how we're feeling when we're feeling it. Although we don't have a lot of money and we don't have a lot of time, I want to make time for these emotions, because we need to be able to trust that we have each other's back and nobody is being forced to just move on from something that for all of us at different points, you know, gay people have been bashed Jeremy has been bashed, I’ve been bashed, in our costume department are two black gay men who've been bashed, you know? So we all need to make space for each other to express what we're feeling when we're feeling it, so that we can get back to work. So that we're not feeling like there's any shame about having feelings.’
“I would have these conversations often. I think, as a documentarian, the thing that I bring from a movie like Pier Kids to a movie like The Inspection is, I want to create an environment of unilateral consent. I am not in the business of delivering some pages to someone and saying ‘Okay, you have to do this.’ I surrounded myself with an incredible talent like Jeremy Pope, the rest of the cast is incredible. My crew is incredible. I want to hear what you guys think. Because when do I get to be around a bunch of geniuses all day long? And who knows, maybe there's something that you're thinking that can make it better than what I imagined.
“So I hope that by being open in my communication in that way, that it creates a level of trust, and also my mentality or set is everybody is the director of their particular task and department. We have to meet each other at a respectful level at all times, you know? I'm not telling you how to do your job, I am asking you to give me the best of what you know, for your job, so that I can make a better decision about how to make the whole day go. So, you know, it has to be an open communication. I think that's where the seed of trust comes from in life. That's what I learned in the Marine Corps and so I tried to apply it to this.”
