Gary Ross (Big, Dave, Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) wants you to know that he’s done his homework. As an adjunct to his new film, Free State of Jones, he has set up an entire website of citations, sources, and authentications backing up every detail and scene in the movie. Free State of Jones is a look at the Reconstruction following the Civil War told through the eyes of Newton Knight, a poor farmer who ended up rebelling against the Confederacy with his own army of poor white people and liberated black slaves. He was a controversial figure to say the least.
And Ross wants you to know everything he can find about Knight. Ross, over the course of the last few years, entered an extended period of research where he fell in love with Reconstruction, the real history of the South, and with notions of dissent within the Confederacy.
Ross recently sat down with Crave to talk about his love of research, some of the motivating factors behind this hugely ambitious project, and what he really thinks of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. He also talks a little bit about his upcoming Ocean’s Eleven sequel, and the finer philosophical points of his 1998 film Pleasantville.
STX Entertainment
Crave: This is a really interesting story, so I have to immediately ask: What did you have to leave out?
Gary Ross: Well [if you visit the website], you’ll find over 200 footnotes that support everything that’s in the movie. So that might be worth your time. In terms of stuff I had to leave out… There were some things that I was unable to include. Just because, you know, for – I would call it “brevity” – but for shortening purposes, it would have been difficult to put it in the narrative. Something that [Newt Knight] actually did, was that he burned down a school that refused to educate mixed-race children during the Reconstruction. Which I think is very significant of the kind of person that he was. How strong his conviction for racial justice was. And yet is very indicative of how engaged he was in the post-war period, during the Reconstruction, and the struggle for racial justice. And that’s something I would have liked to include, but couldn’t.
There was also a very large raid that I wasn’t able to do budgetarily. The Night Company launched a raid on a warehouse in a Confederate depot in a place called Paulding. And it would have been a rather large battle set piece in the middle of the movie when The Night Company was engaged against the Confederacy in the middle of the movie. I just didn’t have room to do it. So, sadly, I had to leave it out. Also, it was a budgetary issue.
What brought you to Free State of Jones? I know you used to work in politics, and have – sort of – written a political movie in Dave. Did you want to make something that was politically salient?
No. I mean politics have always been a part of my life, but that wasn’t really it. This is more historical than political, really. I mean, obviously there are political overtones – I guess there’s no such thing as history without politics – but, no. I read this treatment… Leonard Harten wrote a really intriguing short treatment, basically a pitch, of what this was. And I read it and I was intrigued by that. And I started to do research. And the more I researched, the more I realized I didn’t know.
But I went back to school, actually. I became a “visiting scholar” at Harvard. Working under a guy named John Stauffer, who was head of the department American Civilization. And so, under his tutelage, and then in consultation with probably many of the top historian in the country in this area – Eric Foner, David Blight, Steven Hahn – guys who had a remarkable reputation for this. Also Victoria Bynum who wrote the first book about Newton Knight. I embarked on creative research which was satisfying in and of itself.
STX Entertainment
I really stopped what I was doing for two years and worked on nothing else. I wasn’t even thinking about the screenplay! The more I got, the more I was learning for learning’s sake. Trying to understand the era. Trying to understand what about the era had been re-written. Whitewashed. Trying to get the truth of this local history, of Southern Unionism, of dissent within the Confederacy, and Reconstruction in particular. There’s always a certain glibness that is inherent in certain movie making where you learn a little about something, but not everything. And I couldn’t afford that for this one. I really had to learn everything.
It embarked me on a very different process. It’s one of the reasons I put up the website with the footnotes. Because this topic, this one, deserves a level of transparency and accountability. And also my desire to reveal that part of the process. Not just the filmmaking. It isn’t just a story. It’s more than that.
At what point did you come to the conclusion that Free State of Jones required footnotes? When did it turn from a screenplay into something more for you?
It was an evolving process. The question everyone asks is “how true is this? Is it true? What’s true? What’s not?” And I had done three years of research! So it really came much more as a response to the questions everyone asked me. I didn’t know about this story. I didn’t know about Southern Unionism. I didn’t know about dissent within the Confederacy. I knew nothing about the Reconstruction. “What did you make up, and what’s real?” Well, let me just put it out there. Here’s what I fictionalized and why. Here’s what I didn’t. Here’s what it’s based on. Even the parts that are fictionalized, here’s what they’re based on. And I thought that was a good idea and an important thing to put out there. So people could engage with the process themselves.
My favorite element of the film was its tie-in with 20th Century history and of David Knight, Newt’s descendant. That seems so daring when it comes to conventional narrative structure. Is this something you had to fight for?
I think once you dedicate yourself to making this movie, there are so many things that fall into a very pat Hollywood construct. It doesn’t stop at the end of the Civil War. And you are probably, like most people, hardwired to expect a resolution at the end of the war, when emancipation happens and slaves are free, and you think that’s a conclusion. But one of the points of the movie is that that isn’t a conclusion. The point of history is that it wasn’t a conclusion, but that it continues. There was a continuation to the conflict. No sooner were people freed then Confederates got their land and their power back, and there was an attempt to re-enslave them.
STX Entertainment
And that’s something most people don’t understand about the Reconstruction. So one of the first things I committed to was to tell that story all the way through. The minute you do that, you’re already committing to a rather unusual structure. But, the fact that the struggle of Newt Knight didn’t even end there; that he was being tried, essentially in absentia, a hundred years later. So it’s a very relevant thing to include. And, yeah, I think it’s a very unconventional narrative.
You know, it’s funny. Look, I’ve reached a point in my life when I’ve told many conventional narratives. I’ve had whatever success I’ve had. And I don’t feel a need to conform to certain Hollywood tropes anymore, especially when it comes to something you have more of a need to tell the truth.
When telling the story of a man who may not be well-known, at least in a classroom sense…
“Classroom sense.” That’s exactly right. [laugh]
What can you bring to it in terms of character? We may have known what this guy did, but what could you glean from his personality from the history, and what can you and Matthew McConaughey bring to the man?
That’s a great question. Again I would refer you to the website, as that’s partially in a little prologue I wrote. History is usually written by kings and presidents and generals, right? Because they’re the ones who leave the written record. So it’s easy to imagine what Churchill felt. But with someone who has left very little written record like Newt Knight, you’re forced to imagine the large interludes, and what you can glean from the public records and piece together. So it was, at once, a fascinating, amazing, intriguing detective story. In which you can eventually derive what was in the heart of this man. And, at the same time, you are compelled to fictionalize things, but always on a foundation of truth.
And so, I never put anything in the film I didn’t think I could actually support. Nothing in the film in implausible. Everything in the film is at least probable. And I back up all of that with at least citations of things like it. That are plausible in the public record, on which I can rely, all on reliable antecedents with support.
Free State of Jones made me think of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Surely any film about the Reconstruction has to have this film on its mind. Did you see this as an influence?
Well, I’ve studied the history, so let’s be clear: The original Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith is a bunch of racist lies. Those racist lies are based on a theory of a deliberate piece of historical revisionism which occurred in the early 20th century and came out of one professor at Columbia University named Dunning. And Dunning got a lot of his grad students to write white papers – no pun intended – that were a revision of the history of Reconstruction to make it seem as if what was called “the redemption of white supremacists” was a reclamation of their culture. When instead, it was a hyper-violent terrorist attack on the end results of the war in an attempt to neuter it.
Epoch Producing Company
The Dunning school was what the novel The Klansman was based on, which is what Birth of a Nation was based on. So this was the prevalent view at the time as the whitewashing and the re-write of Reconstruction took root. It was very much on my mind to set that record straight. And one of my larger intentions was to set the record straight about the truth of the Reconstruction. And you can’t really understand the truth of the Civil War until you go to 1876, and understand that the battle for the meaning of the war took place over the subsequent ten years.
So yes, Birth of a Nation was very much on my mind. But I wanted the opportunity to set the record straight, and to counteract, in a way I could, the damage that film has done.
One of the things that bothers me the most is when I hear film critics compliment the filmmaking in that movie as if it can be somehow separated from the pernicious racism that’s inherent in the movie.
As a critic, I’ve run into that a lot.
Well, do they do that about Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will as well?
Indeed.
It’s pretty terrible! It’s a revolting, expensive movie. And I’m so offended by what I see, whether it’s the racism of the way African-American lawmakers have been treated during the Reconstruction or the terrible racist mythologies that are in that movie. It’s terrible. And it’s hard for me to see past that and compliment the filmmaking of something that’s really racist and terrible. It’s just really terrible.
At what point during the process did you realize you could use Newt Knight’s story to set the record straight?
Oh, long before. I think it was inherent in my study of Reconstruction. I don’t want to overstate that Birth of a Nation was a motivation for me. It wasn’t. I would say the desire to tell the truth about Reconstruction was. And that transcends Birth of a Nation. Birth of a Nation is but one symptom of a much deeper disease. That we’ve lost a great deal of history in the rewriting of the Reconstruction, and that the truth needs to be told about the post-war era. Birth of a Nation being one of the larger examples of that. But it doesn’t start with the film. It starts with the Dunning school and the history.
STX Entertainment
Moving forward from Free State of Jones, you said you’ve already done, in your words, “Hollywood structure” movies. Is this what you want to do from now on?
Well, I think I’m going to do the Ocean’s Eleven film next. It’s coming together. I’m sure you’ve read about that. That’s something that I’m doing with my friend Steven Soderbergh. We’ve been in a formal collaboration for 20 years. I’ve helped him with films in the editing room, he shot second unit for me on The Hunger Games – wonderfully, I might add – I’ve written and supervised ADR for him. He did a supplemental track on the Seabiscuit DVD. We’ve done these things for each other for years, and we’re very, very close friends. So it’s really an extension of that. If we weren’t collaborating on it, and he wasn’t comfortable with me doing this withing the franchise he created, then I wouldn’t be doing it. But I’m looking forward to doing a different kind of movie.
I’d like to ask you about Pleasantville.
That’s my favorite! Except for this. I think these two are my favorites.
Pleasantville is an odd animal in that it starts as something conventional, but eventually turns into something more “message” oriented. Did it start as a broad comedy, or did you have a message in mind?
It was always to satirize a set of American values. Values that never really existed. And the concept wasn’t that we’re nostalgic for something that isn’t, rather that we should seek something we could legitimately be nostalgic for. That was always part of it. What it morphed into, though, got deeper and richer. And this was kind of what I went through a lot in my early career. This is something that happened with Big. It was something that started as a high-concept comedy, but, as we investigate it, it deals with more than we expected. That was sort of my experience with Big. But I think that was definitely the case with Pleasantville.
Pleasantville is essentially an Edenic allegory. It is Genesis, but from a different perspective, I think. That doesn’t have the Judeo-Christian judgment of sin. It tolerates and embraces complexity, humanity, human contradiction, human impulse. And it celebrates that and basically says “No. That is the Garden.” So, in that respect, I didn’t realize it had all that in it until I had been working on it for a while.
New Line Cinema
A common criticism of the film at the time was that it got out of hand, whereas I always saw it as getting into hand, if you will.
It gets out of hand in the sense that it violates a lot of conventional precepts. The world sort of blows up on you. And if you want a tidy movie experience that is self-referential and self-contained within what you know movie experiences to be, I think that can be disturbing to a sense of anal tidiness that someone may have. [laugh] But that’s not what I was trying to do.
There are times when you can provoke and disturb and disrupt through form, and not just content. And one of the things that I probably upset people the most with was to leave Reese Witherspoon’s character in Pleasantville at the end. I had people just enraged with me that I didn’t unify this with Dorothy waking up at the end of this and it was all a dream. That I left a real character in a fictional universe really disturbed a lot of people. And I understand that. But it was intended.
But that’s what she needs. She needs [a cerebral catharsis]. Every character, when they finally restore their own personal balance, what it is they’re missing, and complete their journey, that’s the think that sends them into color. It isn’t just sexual impulses or a kind of freedom. In Reese’s case, it was a kind of structure and the self-esteem that comes with that kind of structure. Freeing herself from certain precepts about the self. She could develop herself, and that meant put on some glasses and read! In Tobey’s case, it was a journey back to his mother. And a kind of closure in his family environment. Where he comes from.
So those characters are on a journey of self-confrontation. And reestablishing a balance of who they are intrinsically. And that’s what allows them to go into color. I certainly enjoyed doing it.
What was the first record you bought with your own money?
Oh my God! Wow. [Long pause.] I don’t know. With my own money. Trying to remember… It’s probably… Well, I borrowed so many from my sister, who is older than me, right? I was always swiping her music. I think it was The Doors. In your case might be nostalgia, but in my case was present tense! [Laughs.]
Top Photo: Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon. He also contributes to Legion of Leia and to Blumhouse. You can follow him on “The Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
