The Knockturnal had the opportunity to sit down with Matthew McConaughey and Director Yann Demange at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival.
They were in town to promote and celebrate the TIFF premiere of their new film White Boy Rick out this Friday, September 14. McConaughey plays Richard Wershe Sr. in the film, which is based on the true story of teenager Richard Wershe Jr. Wershe Jr. became an undercover informant for the FBI during the 1980’s and was ultimately arrested for drug-trafficking and sentenced to life in prison. Check out highlights from our roundtable chat below:
The Knockturnal: This film is so contemporary.
Yann Demange: I think in many ways it’s just a reflection of me having just moved to America and just soaking it all up as I was developing it … so the here and now couldn’t help but find its way into the period film. I think it’s pertinent to right now in many ways, yeah.
The Knockturnal: The film opens up a conversation about excessive punishment for nonviolent offenders. Is that a debate that you hope this movie inspires in the audience?
Matthew McConaughey: Sure, I mean look, you’re already talking about objective things people can take away from the movie and there’s subjects that I’m not gonna completely speak on right here ’cause I need more time and I don’t want to be edited. But, subjectively, the movie’s about family. Subjectively the movie’s about this story, about this young man dealing on the streets, became an informant and that was an amazing story on the get go. I didn’t know the story and I don’t know many people in America that know his story… people from Detroit know this story. It’s kind of local, folklore understanding in Detroit, other than that I don’t know anyone who actually knew the story.
Yann Demange: Yeah. I chose to tell the story not for polemical reasons … I was sent the article a year and a half before I came on board the film and then it was an article about disproportionate sentencing. It was an article about a young informant, it was an article about a young drug dealer and it was an incredible story and I was like “This is an incredible article, I can’t see the movie in it” and I passed. Then I got sent the spec script a year and half later and in the first 10, 20 pages there was this father-son relationship, then the father disappears. I was like “Oh my god.” I made a personal connection with the film at that point with the kid being an outsider, I’ve always been an outsider. I can elaborate on that if you like, with the father-son relationship. It reminded me of my relationship with my father. So at that point I wanted to meet Rick in jail. I started to make a connection with him. I’m the first person in 27 years who asked him about his family. I hadn’t asked him about the informant story but I had asked him about how he’d felt about his sentence. The striking thing about him was he never once tries to say he’s innocent.
Matthew McConaughey: A victim.
Yann Demange: He never plays the victim card, he knows his innocence. When he talks about his sentencing, he actually occasionally has talked about other people he’s come across that got it worse than him. As we know it is a thing out there … for a nonviolent crime.
Matthew McConaughey: The math was– didn’t fit the crime.
Yann Demange: The math didn’t add up. But I didn’t make the film as a calling, as a polemical sort of get him out. I think there’s been 3 or 4 documentaries that shed light on an issue that needs to be talked about. This is about a family that tries to survive abject poverty, their pursuit of happiness, the father’s belief-
The Matthew McConaughey: And they don’t pull it off.
Yann Demange: Yeah, the father’s belief in the promise of overcoming.
Matthew McConaughey: Somebody the other night said to me, on the red carpet premiere, “Is this a story about redemption?” And I was like, “No! Everyone loses, they lose hard.”
The Knockturnal: So, you’ve got a movie. It’s brilliantly done, but it’s a downer.
Matthew McConaughey: There’s no pink ribbon on the end of it. It’s not a fa-la-la-la-la we all go dancing … the man he’s my age, he just got pardoned. He’s been behind bars for almost 30 years. He went to jail for a life sentence, the same age that the lead of our story, Richie Merritt is, at 17 years old.
The Knockturnal: You said it wasn’t for polemic reasons but there are some subversive things in the film.
Yann Demange: Look, I’ve got an European gaze … I’m French Algerian, I was born in Paris, raised in London … how I identify with Ricky in a way is I didn’t have sense of tribe or a sense of place. When I moved to London I ended up in the predominantly West Indian school. I was taken in by the West Indian kids but I was an outsider. Naturally in the playground I didn’t end up with the white kids or with the West Indian kids, but I wasn’t a part of the crew … and then I moved to America and I was an outsider and all of the sudden I’m bunched in with the privileged whites in Hollywood for the first time and I’m like “This is weird, I’ve always been an outsider.” At the same time Brexit was happening back home … I was being introduced to some of the topics of debate here and I was looking and seeing a landscape I wasn’t used to and it was an interesting way to look into the disparity between wealth. It wasn’t for me that I had messages, at all, as such I’m not in the business of messages but for me … it was a time that seemed across the board of Brexit and things that were going on here where people had a lack of empathy, lack of empathy for the other point of view. And what I wanted to do was engage with the other points of view, engage and humanize every point of view without judgment and just spend some time in their lives.
The Knockturnal: Why did you respond to this character?
Matthew McConaughey: Well, one the character was somebody that I personally knew, I knew fathers that tried to be best friends with their children and it wasn’t the recipe for good parenting. I knew fathers and mothers who were raising their children in single parent homes and how that’s an epidemic that we specifically have in America and in a lot of places. It was something that I hadn’t done before as an actor. I’m usually playing the sort of character that does unto, someone who takes, you know, handles the situation by hook or by crook whether it’s good for them or not. This man is done unto, the John Cazale Fredo character he’s usurped by by my son and … my guy who’s living in between everything, he’s between a bullet and a target everywhere he goes. He can’t get out, he’s living on the hopes of the future, surviving on the nostalgia of the past, paralyzed in the present and he’s just stuck … just hoping for things and he’s talking about what life could be.
Yann Demange: He sort of plays into the sort of pantheon of American history, that kind of welo-esque character that believes if he does the right thing … it will become good.
Matthew McConaughey: And this is the time where that’s part of the American Dream, the American Dream is fading at this point in time.
So what did you need to know about this guy to connect with him, to play him?
Matthew McConaughey: The main thing was heart, love of my son, love of family. As Yann was saying, the whole story, the whole blood line is about family so for me, particularly from my point of view playing Rick Wershe Sr. … the story for me was about a father slowly losing his son. Yeah he’s lost his daughter, his wife left him, his sister OD’d … he has no women in his life. None, not dating anybody either while we’re making the movie. I mean the only secure woman in his life is his mother who lives across the street. Never had a good relationship with his dad, really co-dependent with his son.
Yann Demange: It felt to me like he embodied that sort of emasculation of the working man … There was his father, Bruce Dern’s character, who benefited from the American Dream when capitalism was thriving and working in Detroit when it was the picture postcard city of America. He’s bestowed on his son these values … what you do is you get a job for life, you keep your head down, you raise your family. These are the values that he was banging over and over again. However, the landscape changed overnight. These values, this code no longer had currency and you’ve got Senior trying to reinvent the rules as he goes and he was ill equipped for the landscape and then the father was always being judgmental, “You can get a job”.
Matthew McConaughey: If they didn’t live across the street or if Senior would’ve moved on or passed away 5-10 years earlier, I think he would’ve made it.
The Knockturnal: You’re an incredibly accomplished actor, you’ve been doing this for 26 years. You’re now working with a guy who’s never done this, can you talk about that dynamic?
Matthew McConaughey: One it was partly the excitement and the adventure of the whole thing when Yann came to me and said “Look, I think I’ve found the young man and he’s an unknown. I found him in the principal’s office of Baltimore.” I was immediately very excited, just at the unknown and that’s part of what’s exciting to say “Okay.” You’ve found someone who’s lived like Richie has, lived on the streets and has some similar background as young Rick Wershe Jr. … we can get him there. This was where he and I teamed up working with Richie Merritt. If you can get a young person to come in and have the confidence to behave honestly in front of the camera, be able to be themselves and react honestly on camera. It’s like a good documentary, a person in a documentary reacting honestly … there’s not better acting than somebody reacting to a real moment. They’re not actors …. an actor can’t do any better acting than somebody who’s behaving honestly in a documentary. So the opportunity was that, to have somebody who comes in, who knows the world and can behave honestly in front of a camera. Now, he comes in and he’s happy to be there … he wasn’t like “Oh my gosh, what’s everyone looking at me for on action?”. He wasn’t “Oh my gosh, there’s a camera in front of me.” But at the same time wasn’t trying to overdo.
Yann Demange: You can see how Matthew was like pivoting and adjusting and tuning into Richie’s frequency … going “Okay, I gotta show the world that I’m here, that I’m his father. He’s gotta show the world that he’s my son.” And you could see the instinct happening, finding the frequency and then tuning in and then bringing in Matt and Richie up to the frequency … like you could see there was this dance they can play so it was like “Oh okay, we’re gonna go down this road. We don’t know what it’s gonna look like.”
