Mario Van Peebles & Boys Become We The Party

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Monday, 04 June 2012 20:13

Written by Brad Balfour

A revealing look at contemporary youth culture, writer-director Mario Van Peebles’ We The Party shows teenagers as theyare, not as adults would like them to be. 

Besides the Van Peebles clan (including patriarch Melvin and grandsons Mandela and xxx), it features Snoop Dogg, YG, The New Boyz, The Rej3ctz, The Pink Dollaz, Michael Jai White, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Tiny Lister, Simone Battle, Moises Arias, Orlando Brown and Quincy Brown. Set in a relatively middle-class mixed race neighborhood, this film show a broad swath of kids from a diverse range of socio-economic backgrounds mixing together in one melting pot -- or rather a simmering stew.

Focused on five high schoolers the film deals with romance, money, prom, college, sex, bullies, facebook, fitting in, standing out, and finding themselves evoking such classic teen comedies as The Breakfast Club and House Party. This indie dramedy has an attitude and style all its own, and captures the hopes, confusion, challenges and dreams of today’s teens as they plunge headlong into an uncertain future. 

Drawing on the latest trends in music, dance and fashion, We The Party is a colorful, cutting-edge comedy set in an ethnically diverse Los Angeles high school during America’s first black president. 

Van Peebles and his sons become not only actors in their own film but also serve as writers, producers, promoters and philosophers.

Q: Did you have all these children just so you can have an automatic cast?

Mario: I just always thought it’d be cool to have five kids after seeing The Jackson Five. We’re like the Jackson Five, just without the talent.

Q: How do you manage working together and also being a family?

Mandela: We know when dad’s dad and we know when he’s Mario van Peebles. When he’s Mario van Peebles we know not to talk back, but in general we have a pretty good understanding as far as raises and stuff go. And when he says it’s crunch time, it’s crunch time, no question, you do it.

Q: How do you see it from your point of view, Mario?

Mario: This was an interesting situation because I spent a lot of my life learning from my dad. This required picketing around and learning from my kids. Because if I was going to make an authentic movie, I really have to be ready to listen, so I wouldn’t be making the movie I wanted to make, but more the movie that it is. Does that make sense? 

There were definitely times when I would defer to them as my think-tank council. I would know what I wanted narratively, but, case in point, I took the boys out of private school and put them in public school in the ‘hood. The decision to do that was that I felt the dividing line wasn’t just about race, it was about have and have not. So it was important, I thought, that they hang out with kids of different socio-economic backgrounds. 

So when Makaylo and his brother went to this school in the hood, it was a magnet school. If you played basketball well, they say you’re trying to be like Michael Jordan, if you golf well they say you’re trying to be like Tiger [Woods]. My boys don’t do either; Makaylo is on the debate team. So guys would come up to him and say “you guys are cool, you’re like Obama.” 

So it was interesting because it was saying “we know what gangster looks like culturally, and we know what hip-hop looks like. Now we know what smart looks like culturally.” 

Smart is becoming the new gangsta. I thought how interesting it is with a black presidency, that culturally we have this shift in America, kids are starting to say “The president can look like us! We can take smart all the way to the top.” 

So that was an interesting cultural seismic shift that I wouldn’t have been aware of if I didn’t have these guys. And so in the movie, We the Party, his character is nick-named Obama, just like he was. Since the characters are written inspired by them, a lot of it was listening to them and being inspired by their voices. 

Mandela had a girlfriend that was a 4.0 student and was studying with her over Skype, and a scene where that happens comes up in We the Party, too. When we went out they turned me on to music. I think in a different situation it’d be a different thing, but a lot of these characters had energy that they brought to it.

Q: It's almost a documentary in how the film addresses race and class.

Mario: What we show in the movie is that there are socio-economic differences now. There’s a very interesting scene, that I’ll let Mandela speak about, where he befriends a young man that wears a hoodie. Now that’s timely.

Q: How timely can you be?

Mandela: Y.G’s character, C.C., wears a hoodie and he has tattoos on his hands, his face, all over. And he’s a misjudged, and pre-judged character. A lot of people avoid him as much as possible, and fear him, and whatever the excuse may be, but my character gets put in a situation where we befriend each other and that friendship pays off when we see that he’s a conscious guy with a different side to him and he does want to show it, but they can’t open up to him, so he can’t open up to them. That’s also interesting, because We the Party is kind of the ending I wish we got to see for Treyvon.

Q: Have you guys, both in the course of your life and making the film, found that there are pre-conceived notions about people that do rap, do hip hop, that seem ghetto and people expect them to be a thug, do you find that in the real world?

Makaylo: I do. My perception is this, people get especially that kind of feel, they also make assumptions, but the reason for that is that rap and hip hop were made in this materialistic mold where you don’t really need to think much. You just have to rap how much you have in a certain amount of time, which is called a verse. The reason is people have these conceptions because for the most part, that’s what rap is right now, that’s what we expect. For example,Y.G., his last real single was Toot It And Boot It, but now he has a conscious side to him. 

We have Y.G.’s Truth, which has been released on Youtube. So it’s a situation where people ride certain expectations. If rap’s expectations is to be “I got hos, I got bitches, I got this, I got that,” then that’s what it’s going to be. But if people expect and place their expectations for rap, and hip hop, and music in general to be a little different, then that’s what it will be.

Q: Mario, you started in acting in the Sinbad movie with your father. How did you manage to teach your own kids?

Mario: I think he got a better one than I got.

Q: Answer or experience?

Mario: The experience. What I do with my kids when I’m shooting a scene is that I’ll shoot the scene the way I want or think it should be, but at the end I’ll say to Mandela, “Hey, why don’t you Mandela-fy it?” 

Which means take it and do what you want with it. A lot of times he’ll do something that's fun, and inventive, and take it to a new level. I'll say the same thing to Makaylo, play with it and add to it. Basically I think my role as a director is to create a stage where they can do their best work, and can do the best dancing. 

What I did learn with my dad was work ethic. I did learn with my dad is making films you believe in. He would say he makes films like a poor guy.

He says “well, when I cook something, I cook something I like to eat because if I’m the only one eating it, I’ll still be happy.”

I make films thinking I want to make a film I really want to make. And in the case of We the Party, we made it independently, I paid myself a dollar to direct it, ten dollars to write it, all the people you see in the movie, no one was making big money, they all came to be a part of it.

It was about the project and that was exciting. I knew I couldn’t make this with a studio where there’d be a lot of lines and things I’d have to water down. If you think of the original movies Fame, Risky Business, House Party, all those films were rated R. And now it’s all PG and watered down.

I wanted to make this one show the way they really talk and their lives are not really PG. So when I decided to make this realistic, I had to sort of make the film the way he made Sweetback and some of his other films. So I went back to his blueprints and said “okay, I’ll fund it and do it myself with my buddy, Michael Cohen, and we’ll make the movie we want to make.

Q: The production values are remarkably slick.

Mario: Thank you.

Q: It works as a teen movie where people have certain expectations about the music and the editing. How did you pull that off? Or did he make you guys do the extra work? [laughs]

Mario: The other day someone said we’re like a dynasty. And I said “well that sounds a little grand, makes it seem like we’re sitting in thrones and other people are doing our bidding. We’re probably more like family farmers. My dad is on the porch with a shotgun and a fiddle and I’m fixing the tractor, they’re rolling up their sleeves.”

So we make films like that, but we know how to make the most of it. When you grow up in by-any-means-necessary filmmaking family, you know how to get it all up on screen. So part of what I did was engineer it in way that I knew we could be really strong, and one of the resources we felt we were really strong in was human resources. 

I know Salli [Richardson-Whitfield] from working with her posse. I know Tiny Lister, I know Snoop Dogg. Not everyone gets to be flavor of the month for 25 years, but I started with New Jack City and Snoop started with Gin and Juice, it’s still relevant to today. So I knew the human resources could bring a lot into it. And there guys, what were the bands we had in there?

Mandela: YG, The New Boyz, The Rej3ctz, The Pink Dollaz.

Mario: So with their generation saying “we’ll get our guys and you get your guys,” we get a pretty good mix. The rest of it is making it and trying to pull it together.

Q: I used to be a music journalist. Where did rap go wrong with this path towards bling-bling and the big thing? I hope you make a point that there’s a conscious side to rap and a return to musical values.

Mario: I’m glad you see that, you’re the first person to bring that up. What I think was interesting in this film is that Mandela’s character starts out by saying “Baldwin Hills is three schools in one.” It’s the performing arts, so you get all the artists like in Fame, it’s the magnetprogram, so you get all the braniacs, and it’s the public school, so you get all the brothers from the hood. 

So you really get a socio-economic cross section of humanity. That’s a real important underpinning to the story because that allows you to hear everything from violins, to cellos, to acoustic guitars. Check out the song YG sings in the movie, Truth. The first time you hear it it’s in a classical form as Pachabel’s Canon. 

Pachabel’s Canon is almost like the frist pop song and it’s in the public domain. So you have this great pop song the kids are playing on the violin and cello, and then you have this African section with the girls dancing to these drums. We establish that the YG character in the first act just encases himself in a hoodie and almost never speaks, and we show that he can rap.

When push comes to shove and his brothers push him, he can actually rap. So you take those three elements and it becomes the song Truth. You take the African drums, that beat and the Pachelbel’s Canon and you put the words of Truth on top of that, you get this performance piece in the center of the movie. So everyone comes out and has to participate and that’s what the teacher sets up in the first act, where the teacher talks about the project and talks about what everyone’s role in the piece will be.

Q: What about you guys? Did you have to set in straight about what hip music really is?

Mandela: How the movie came about is that we wanted to see these clubs in LA and see what that was all about. So we said “dad, can you give us a ride to some of these clubs?” And he said...

Mario:  “Hell no! Not without taking me with you.” 

Q: How old were you?

Mandela: 17. So we went back to the drawing board and started thinking how can we bring him into the club without getting crap from our friends? So we decided to dress him up in skinny jeans, give him a snapback hat, swag him out a little bit, and let him rolls with us in our entourage.

We brought him to clubs where The Rej3ctz were performing and YG and I think some of that brought a freshness to the movie, as far as the music goes, but also the dialogue. One of the great things the directors of The Breakfast Club and films like that did was have all the cast hang out before the shooting and that’s what we did on We The Party. 

What me, and Patrick and Makaylo and all of us did was just hang out together for two weeks before shooting just so the friendship feels real. We talk how we talk and when it was time to shoot, we developed our lines a little differently. We’d switch ‘em up. That’s one of the great things about working with dad, we could look at a line in the script and say “no one our age really talks like that, maybe we should say this.” And if he likes it, he’ll say yes. He likes most of it.

Makaylo: One thing we were really open to was creative freedom. He had a script, but that was more a blue-print for the movie. As long as we went through every scene and made things clear, it was easy to ad-lib and go in between and make it more recent, make it more new. Basically he drafted the script and we were able to personalize it to each of us. So it was very authentic.

Q: We're of a generation where our parents never got our music. Does it ever frustrate you that your dad can talk to you about music? My daughter always gets frustrated when I’d talk to her friends.

Mario: What do you guys think?

Mandela: It's fine by me. He can get the music, but he has his own music that he likes. He’s a pretty well-rounded guy.

Q: I heard you shot a lot of the big party scene in sequence to make it easier for people to get into it.

Mario: The big party sequence, part of it is at the neighbor’s house, but the original party scene was at these guys’s party. And it was amazing.

Makaylo: We had to put our birthday money together because we didn’t get a lot from him. He has light pockets. So me and Mandela combined our money together and we hired a DJ and security and turn our house into a party, so that’s where that scene came from. We made money from it, lots of money.

Q: It wasn’t Project X.

Makaylo: No, he knew about it, he was there, we had security. 

Mario: The way they dance now is like safe-sex on the dance floor. The last time I danced like that I had these guys. I walked around with my video camera just making notes, and it wound up being stuff that I said would be the basis for something. But sometimes I think that good movies come through you organically. You can be a conduit to it, just like your kids come through you. I can’t really say “you’re going to be my producer, you’re going to be my lawyer.” They’re gonna be who they are, and I’m going to help them be the best version of them they can be.

Q: The movie both defies and embraces expectations. Kids want to defy parents, but they also don’t want to be Project X either. You dealt with expectations and defying expectations and I assume you all talked about that and had that in mind.

Mario: We did. The other thing that felt natural was we talked a bit between us. And I wanted to make sure that we were not afraid to move a conversation forward that society had already started with our kids. So society has already hit them with hyper-materialism and hyper-sexuality, let them know, through the course of the film, that you might not be able to buy your sense of self at the mall. 

It might not be the rims on your cars that get you respect. The people that are really respected are the Gandhis and the Mother Theresas and the Malcoms and the Martins, and people that stood up for things and not just bought big house.

So that comes up in the course of the movie, but organically as a conversation. It’s stuff that kids are really facing now, they’re being bombarded and facing the environmental challenges of tomorrow.

Mandela: One of the scenes in We the Party is that my character gives a speech to his class where he says “there’s 7-billion people on the planet now and the earth can only hold 9-billion. But the catch to that is that if those 9 billion live like us Americans do with a big house and two cars, and a boat on a weekend will have a carbon footprint of 19-billion.” 

The social issues that are going on in the world are really important to us, and it might seem like a big deal “who got the new Jordans, who got the new car.” That stuff seems so important to us, but in truth, if we don’t get straight with the environment, that stuff’s not gonna last very long. My metaphor is imagine that there are these two species of ants in Katrina in the 9th ward. There’s a red and a black ant, and they’re fighting over this anthill. It doesn’t matter who gets the anthill in the end because Katrina is going to come wipe it out anyways. So if we don’t get straight with the environment, it doesn’t matter who has the new J’s, because it’s all going to be gone anyways.

Mario: Dr. King said “we must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or we perishtogether as fools.” I add to that, we must learn to live together as brothers and sisters in harmony with nature or perish as fools. So it’s not enough for this generation to just get along together as black, white, straight, Asian, or gay, they gotta get along and figure things out together in a compressed period of time.

Q: A lot of times it might be the media or Madison Ave that makes it want to seem like kids only care about Air Jordans and all this stuff, but you guys show that your generation cares about the world and have more awareness than people expect. 

Mario: There’s an astute cultural shift. You have a lot of kids embracing smart as the new gangsta. The geeks are running the world. There’s a scene in We the Party where two girls are discussing who they want on their Facebook page and they say “pretty is temporary. Dumb is forever.”

They lose today, but they become Bill Gates, or Zuckerberg, or Obama. So you gotta look where things are going. You got some kids looking at things in a different way, so I thought that’s interesting to touch on.

Q: The big question is how do you get your movie out for everyone to see?

Mario: That is a huge question. It’s not enough to have the kid, you gotta get the kid through college. We made this independent film and we said all the things we wanted to say without watering it down, now how do we get it out?

Q: You still made it appealing to the core audience you want to get.

Mario: I think so. I hope so. When we showed it at high schools the kids loved it. The kids said “dude, this is real, this how we talk, this is really us, these are the kids we know.” So they got it. The question is the gate keepers.

Hollywood gate keepers right now are supporting, what I consider to be, reductive cinema when it comes to black folks. It tends to be these big comedies where people are buffooning and clowning, and that’s okay if it’s part of it, but if that’s the only representation that you have, it gets to be really reductive and tired. 

Look at House Party, pretty much a black cast, Breakfast Club was a white cast, Stand and Deliver was a Latino class. With this movie we mixed it up. It’s about people of color, but it’s also about a socio-economic divide. So how do we get it out there?

We have this new company called XLrator taking the film out, we’ll be in 60 theaters across America. The first weekend, April 6, we open, then April 13 we open in more cities. I have no idea how it’s going to do. There’s two qualities in film. 

What’s the first one, Makaylo?

Makaylo: Playability.

Mario: And Mandela?

Mandela: Marketability. 

Mario: Right. How the movie plays and can you sell it. For example, Mean Girls. I really enjoyedd Mean Girls, but I never would have seen it if my daughter hadn’t taken me  and made me see it on girl’s night out. You gotta figure it out with this viral generation. If these two guys can help get it out and the cast can get it out. Word is spreading.

Q: Are you going to do a lot of Q&A’s?

Mandela: We plan on it, once the movie gets out, being proactive about getting it out there and bringing more attention to it. So we’ll be there doing autographs signings.

Q: In New York?

Mandela: No, Los Angeles.

Mario: Mostly LA, then New York as well. We love going to Tokyo, man.

Mandela: Last time we went was awesome.

Mario: You were young. We went in ’04 with Badasssss in Tokyo.

Makaylo: We went to Mt. Fuji.

Mandela: And Akihabara. We like One Piece, Naruto.

Q: I like this movie showing tough love as a way to make the kids grow. Your wife’s character says if you use too much tough love you might lose the kid’s self-confidence, so you have to balance it out.

Mario: That’s the scene between me and Salli Richardson. We talk about what’s the balance. She talks about giving him an allowance and I’m saying I want to give him an allowance, but I also want him to have a work ethic. That balance between how much you let the kid do himself and how much you help him. And that’s especially tricky with second and third generations because you see the first generation has to fight to make it on their own. Like my dad, for example.

But then my dad was able to send me to a pretty good college and give me things that would help me along and then at a certain point he wouldn’t help and I had to go on my own. So it’s that balance that I have to find with the kids, where I help them along enough, but not too much so they don’t end up not knowing how to do things on their own. And with each kid the balance is different. One thing that I learned from having kids is not to use one size fits all parenting.

 Not every jacket is going to fit every kid the same. I have to treat Mandela a little different from Makaylo, or Makaylo and little different from Maya or Morgana or Marley because I think kids come through you, but not from you. So you have to kind of take your ego out of it a little bit. Case in point, my eldest daughter loves to talk, she’s got the gift of gab, she loves gossip and be a drama queen sometimes. At school they said if she spent as much time on her academics as she does on her social life, she’d be an A student.

So I said, “Okay, you love to talk, let’s try in a different language.” I sent her to France for a year at school there. She hated it for the first year and in the second year she got tired of not knowing what was going on, so she learned French so she could gossip and know what’s going on in both languages. The other Summer she was in Ghana working at an orphanage and Makaylo, where were you teaching?

Makaylo: I was teaching in Thailand.

Mario: Mandela?

Mandela: South Africa.

Mario: So we go all around and do things and you get a perspective. If you’re going to do art or work in film, you have to be able to put life in your work. If you don’t live, you can’t put it in, but part of that is, as a parent you say “how can I outsource this piece of their growth here?

I can show them this much, but then they have to find a part on their own.” There’s a balance between loving them, tough love, the mom, the dad, it’s always changing and no matter what I do, I’ll get something wrong. You gotta know that. Somehow you’ll end up embarrassing your kids on some level or disappointing them. You’ll give them blue and they’ll say “oh, I have blue, but I always wanted yellow.”

Q: Compare and contrast what you learned from your father, what you emulated from him, what you didn’t? Also, are you planning on expanding to other mediums?

Mario: The first thing is, we want to see if we can get We the Party through the first weekend. We’re sitting here being afraid of going to the theater. What if it’s like Badasssss when granddad saw only two people in the movie theater and one demanded their money back. Mandela doesn’t know if he wants to go, but me and Makaylo want to go. So we don’t know if people will know about it since you won’t see big billboards for it, it’s all word of mouth. 

If the movie works, then other things will come from it. If it doesn’t, people will say “of course not, you have to wear a wig and a dress!” We have to make big comedies, which I don’t want to do. I don’t know what the future is. The golden rule is whoever has the gold makes the rules.

In this particular case it was my money and my friend’s money that funded this particular movie, so we had enough to do this one. If it works, that’s lovely, if it doesn’t, at least we made the movie we wanted to make.

Q: You learned from your dad.

Mario: It’s the three loves in your life. Love what you do, love who you work with,  and love what you say with it. And four, make friends with people that can help get you to Tokyo.

Q: Tell me about your dad.

Mario: I saw my dad against all odds picking up and doing things and I saw my dad at one meeting was looking for funding for a movie and was talking to a lawyer. And the lawyer said “you’re going to be doing this movie with your son?” This is a Mario story you don’t know.

“You’re son’s going to act in it with you? What if you fail? Your son will fail” And my dad said “Well shit, failure’s a part of life. And he’s also going to see me get back up.” So here I am working on this movie with my kids.

What if we totally bomb? What if this weekend no one goes to see We the Party? They will have first class front row seats to a colossal failure where we literally bet the farm on this. That is a possibility. But they will also see I’m resilient enough to say “okay, let’s get back up.”