Jeb Stuart Focuses on Civil Rights in Blood Done Sign My Name

by Rebecca Pahle | Published August 3, 2010

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JS: Oh, I definitely do. I think that there’s no doubt that we have made gigantic strides in terms of race relations since 1970. I mean, it’s almost too easy to say we’ve put an African American in the White House. But from the movie side of this, I don’t know if we’ve made a whole lot of progress. We have a lot more African American actors than we had 40 years ago, but can any of those actors besides Will Smith and Denzel Washington open a big action movie? I know a lot of them can, it’s just that I’m not quite sure Hollywood’s ready to put a big $70 million price tag on a movie that has an African American lead. Far be it from me to say what Hollywood can and can’t do, but I’m not seeing a whole lot of evidence of that, so I guess that just sort of leads me to anecdotally think that we haven’t made as much progress as we think we have.

MM: No, I think you’re right, I don’t think they’ve taken the chance. Like you said, it’s a money game in Hollywood.

JS: It’s a money game and the numbers prove that it’s very difficult to open movies internationally with an African American lead, and that may be just because we don’t try hard enough. You and I don’t have to look far each year to say ‘This film should not have made any money, should not have found an audience, but it was a beautiful film and look how well it did.’ Everybody loves movies that catch them by surprise and take the story off into a different area, and it’s original and fresh. My point is, I think a movie with an Asian lead or an African American lead that has a great story will be just as accepted as any other movie.

MM: One of the things I was curious about when I was watching the film is that at the beginning of the film and the end you featured some real-life witnesses of the period talking about the impact of the trial and the boycott. What made you decide to bookend your film in that way?

JS: One of the things I was concerned about was bringing an audience up to speed very quickly to a different time period. I didn’t want the audience to suddenly say “Oh, we’re in 1963.” I think it’s very difficult to draw the distinctions between ‘63 and 1970. There’s a seven-year difference and an awful lot of history passed by rapidly. I mean it’s the difference between 1925 and the heart of the roaring ‘20s, and 1932 and the depths of the Depression. If a film student saw two different films from those periods, they’d think “Good grief, there’s only seven years of difference.” It’s almost the same thing between ‘63 and ‘70. So I was trying to get an audience up to speed. Also by showing real people who are in their early 50s and late 40s, some of them a little older, you’re showing that all those people are within our generation or only a generation away from anybody who is watching the movie.

MM: I think it’s a good point to be made, because the history itself isn’t that remote.

JS: No, it’s not. And while we think we’ve made tremendous progress, we can point to a million different times in our history where progress has rapidly eroded, even in North Carolina. Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 was the most integrated city in the United States, it was one of the top cities in the United States in terms of population, it had a mixed city council, in it both blacks and whites, four or five black newspapers, and it was just a thriving integrated metropolis. And then in 1898 there was a literally a coup d’etat where they went and murdered many of the black leaders and took over all the black businesses, and bodies were thrown into the Cape Fear River. Blacks were chased into the swamps, and the whites took over the town. From that point on it was not an integrated city. It just goes to show you that the blacks within that community thought they had come a long way from slavery in 38 years, and suddenly everything had been taken away. We make lots of progress, and then if we don’t keep up the progress we’ve doomed to repeat a lot of stuff.

MM: Tim Tyson, who wrote the book on which the movie was based, is the son of a white Methodist minister, and you yourself are the son of a white Presbyterian minister. You also grew up in North Carolina, where the story takes place. Do you feel that the personal connection to the subject matter gave you a unique take on the story?

JS: Without a doubt. A large part of this audience is folks from the south, people who have grown up in the same sort of environment that I have, and I thought it was a very interesting thing to explore. I get paid a lot of money in Hollywood to come in and put characters into a difficult bind, so to speak. I don’t mean to be flip about it, but sometimes people just say “Give them a divorce to work on” or “Make one of them an alcoholic” or something like that. But the idea of a minister in 1970 who is caught between doing what he feels like he’s chosen to do as a minister of god, and as a father who really had another job of just keeping a job and putting bread on the table, not losing his employment. That’s a really great vice to put a character in, and I was kind of drawn to that, and that was definitely the character my father was at that particular time.

MM: What do you want people who see Blood Done Sign My Name to take away from the movie? What impact would you ideally like it to have?

JS: I think it’s an inspirational film about standing up and doing the right thing, whether that is taking an unpopular stand when you know things are not right. It’s a story of courage.

Blood Done Sign My Name is on DVD and Blu-Ray now. Visit http://www.blooddonesignmynamethemovie.com for more information.