Grace Lee Boggs and Danny Glover - Detroit Conversations (2009)

Grace Lee Boggs: was the first sign of humanity. And now they've found the fossils that say that Agi, Agi Pythagoras, is the first woman, first human being in Africa. And I think what we have to do is recognize is that evolution is not only anatomical, but it's social and cultural. that we are now experiencing the collapse of industrial civilization. Yeah, exactly. And that, as Diamond points out in his book, Collapse, collapses are not... They are suicidal. They are what people do when they maintain values that are... ecologically unsustainable. And the United States is maintaining these three values that King railed on about.

Danny Glover: Racism, materialism, and militarism.

Grace Lee Boggs: King talks about that. And where Obama needs to be challenged, because he has no sense of history, he needs to be challenged to understand that these are what make, he can't talk just about health and war

Danny Glover: I wish I had been talking to you before I gave the talk at Abyssinia. This is clearly pointed right in the direction where we need to be thinking.

Grace Lee Boggs: That's right. That's why I made these notes for you. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. The people recognize that we are really witnessing the collapse of the civilization.

Danny Glover: Yeah, yeah.

Grace Lee Boggs: And this woman, Carolyn Baker, who's in Colorado, calls it a sacred demise. And what kinds of how the understanding, the thinking that we need, and the rituals that we need for this. I mean, you could think as an artist about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that you also have to understand that when a civilization crashes or collapses, All the institutions, the politics, the economics, the health, the education, everything fails. So everybody is looking for a new way to do these things. And that's where we are. This book called Collapse by Diamond gives a very good example of how that happens. He says these people came from Norway to Greenland. They came with all the values that they had developed in Norway. They were not able to adapt themselves to the new climate. They kept eating meat, even though there's fish all around them. And what they need to do is to start eating fish, adapt to their climate, adapt to the circumstances. And we have not been able to do that. We've been thinking that we lived in it. in an infinite universe with infinite resources. Because we started out with what we thought was empty land. And now we've reached the point. And that's where King was. He really understood that racism, materialism, and militarism was going to destroy us. And that's what a cultural revolution is.

Danny Glover: Yeah, yeah.

Grace Lee Boggs: when you get rid of the values that are no longer... Implicable. No longer applicable. If you continue, you commit suicide. That's where this country is headed.

Danny Glover: And it's dragging the rest of the world in there as well. It's taking the rest of the world with it. But this period that we talk about is less than 200 years old, this period of capitalism in a sense.

Grace Lee Boggs: Well, actually, it started in 1400. I mean, people began, they began doing all sorts of things as feudalism began collapsing. They had the plague and so forth and so on. And people's thinking began changing with scientific rationalism. And they began, they had the witch hunts and they got rid of women's thinking and took the land away from the peasants. And that happened in the 17th century. And the Industrial Revolution didn't really Well, also until the 19th century.

Danny Glover: Until the 19th century, yes. But the kind of thinking around the Enlightenment period, the whole self-governance, the idea of self-governance was a prelude to that.

Grace Lee Boggs: Yeah, but the idea of self-governance came mainly from the Native Americans.

Danny Glover: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Grace Lee Boggs: Yeah. Yeah, without a doubt.

Danny Glover: But the formation, what I'm saying, the formation of those ideas, utilizing those ideas with respect to now this capital accumulation and the emergence of capitalism, you know, through science, technology, etc., etc.

Grace Lee Boggs: The reason why the Industrial Revolution took place in the West and not in China was because the Chinese did not adopt the Cartesian thinking, the objectification of reality. See, Cartesian thinking believes that time is reversible, whereas time is not reversible. It objectifies everything, turns everything into quantities. Anything that's not measurable is not real.

Danny Glover: Okay, all right then, yes. I'm with you on it. I'm following you on it.

Grace Lee Boggs: So I think really to understand this period that's the collapse of that, and to understand it in very concrete terms, I think is what I've been feeling very strongly during this period. For example, at my birthday party, They made these t-shirts. And these t-shirts sold like hotcakes. Because the young people understood that revolution is evolution. And we have a copy of it.

Danny Glover: Okay, good, good. Yeah, good, good, good. Revolution is evolution.

Grace Lee Boggs: Revolution is evolution. And the artist captures it in this thing, this message.

Danny Glover: Right here.

Grace Lee Boggs: So what I did at my party was I began talking about how revolution has to be seen in terms of love rather than in terms of top-down. Exactly. And then I wrote this thing here.

Danny Glover: I read this one. I read this. You have this one.

Grace Lee Boggs: Then what happened was I was in Chicago in September. And we sold t-shirts like crazy. The young people just came in and they bought them. And Bill Ayers, whom you know, his mind changed to see the collapse and the education system. So shortly thereafter, he invited me to come and speak to the President's Weekend, which is next February, where all these people looking for a new way of education are going to be gathering. And then there's going to be this huge convention in Denver, and he wants me and Vincent to be the main speakers. This is when? February next year? Next year. The weekend in Denver I think is in March. Now what was very interesting is that I went to New York for the 60th anniversary of the Monthly Review.

Danny Glover: The Monthly Review, yeah.

Grace Lee Boggs: And I, we had...

Danny Glover: I heard you on Democracy Now! Yeah, basically.

Grace Lee Boggs: And I talked about how Einstein's socialism was more like Martin Luther King's than Marx's. And I think what I found when with Amy Goodman was that she kept emphasizing that I was a philosopher. Because I think she felt, I told her that, you know, that you've got to take it step back, you know, you're doing too much. Yeah, exactly. And think more like a philosopher, get a longer view of what's happening. And I think she understood that, because she's a very sensitive person.

Danny Glover: Yes, she is, very, very, very.

Grace Lee Boggs: So, and I remember that I was in New York, there were filmmakers, young filmmakers, all these kids, millennial generation, making films. And I just felt, I don't know whether you feel that all over the place.

Danny Glover: for me is just that, you know, everywhere in this country, but particularly as I go around the world, you know, and go to film festivals where you make these brilliant, you see these brilliant, brilliant filmmakers. We were involved, my company, Moon Venture Films, was involved with a film that screened at the Cannes Film Festival. And it was supposed to be a major, major film screening. Ilya Suleiman, a Palestinian filmmaker, and people would say one of the best filmmakers in the world. And I wouldn't argue with him one bit. He had done a movie, filmed a movie, made a movie called Divine Intervention. which was supposed to have won one of the major awards, the Palme d'Or, five years ago at the Cannes Film Festival. But for some reason, they were told to go back in, the jury was told to go back in, because they wouldn't allow that Palestinian film to be, you know, to win such a major award. Well, we became involved in this next film, The Time That Remains. Let me tell you, Grace, it's a masterpiece. It's funny, it's engaging, it's satirical, and everything else. About his, from 1948, from a Palestinian point of view, that film was totally ignored. He got the longest standing ovation in the history of the Cannes Film Festival, over five minutes. It was ignored. The press wasn't there and everything else. Now, it was shown at the, the, the Toronto Film Festival and slot it in a position where it didn't get a lot of attention. Because Cameron Bailey, the director of programming at the Toronto Film Festival saw the movie in Cannes. But it was slotted in a way. what had happened was a number of people including Naomi Klein, myself and a number of artists signed on to a petition which we were questioning the fact that they have this thing this city to city city to city programming of films and they picked Tel Aviv without picking any Palestinian filmmakers and without even looking at Tel Aviv as some sort of glorious place in placing in that the relationship or the situation of Palestine. Never mentioning God's love, whatever. It was a big promotional event. being supported by the Israeli propaganda machine. Big promotional thing. And so what happened was a lot of us in numbers were referred to now as fascists or Jew haters or people who didn't want the freedom of speech or whatever. And Naomi Klein has taken a big hit for that. But in essence, his film, and then we were invited and then told we were in the New York Film Festival. And that's basically, all of a sudden, just, we moved from New York to the film festival. It's quite amazing, you know, in that sense. But the filmmaking, around which we have a documentary, that we're doing with a former member of the PLO that we're doing. It's a very, very wonderful documentary. We have another documentary that we've been working with in terms of filmmakers, a story about the role that a film, an Algerian film for the Algerian director, a story called Free Man, a story about the role that Muslims played in sheltering Jews in the mosque. with fascism, the war against anti-fascists, with issues around decolonization, really wonderful film. And those are the kind of things, you see that kind of activity happening everywhere. And that, I mean, to see it emerge here, and particularly under the climate, as we talk about the collapse here, the collapsing of this, I think a lot of these work, a lot of these filmmakers are going to find ways in which they're going to be able to kind of be the kind of, the kind of forefront, as they say to me, it's going to take artists to save us from the machines, you know. So it's going to be, it must be, it's exciting. I mean, it's the most exciting period in my career right now. Right, well, this is the most exciting time.

Grace Lee Boggs: Now, I want to talk to you about Africa. Okay. Because I understand Rick says you want to do a film about it. Oh, Black Jacobins. What have you been thinking about it?

Danny Glover: I've written a script. It's not based upon Black Jacobins. The catalyst, the reason why, was that I didn't know about the Haitian Revolution. So I read Black Jacobins in about 1971. I read Jack Jackson when I was a student. And I was blown away by that. So of course the idea of being an actor wasn't even part of my dream memory at that time. But for about the last 25 years I've been trying to do a script on the Haitian Revolution. And we put together the script. Over the last 10 years ago now, we've had a script for four years. And the focus of our script are looking at two world views. One of traditionalism and one of modernity. The other focus of our script is that what does it mean What does freedom mean for a slave? So a lot of the themes around this center around this story, focusing on Toussaint specifically, because Toussaint being the thinker or basically the one who was able to militarily and philosophically begin to shape this Haitian revolution.

Grace Lee Boggs: Well, that's what I want to talk to you about. I saw a production of Black Jacobins in London in 1986 when I went there. London declared a week in celebration of C.L.R. James. And I went there to speak. The production was terrible. What has happened since, in this last period, is that people like Wangiri Maathai, the women, have been able to point out that the intellectuals of the 60s the West Indian and the African American and the English and the African. People like Padmore and CLR James and people who had been educated here, like in Cooma, had a very limited view of Africa. That their view of Africa was essentially that of the nation state. And Gruber thought that if he just had control of politics, he would be able to do everything. They didn't recognize that they were thinking within the colonialist mentality and operating within the colonialist space. A book has just been written in Africa by a woman at the University of Indiana who came to me and she refers to how at the very last moment as she was completing her book I talked to her about the limitations of that generation of leadership and she said she was able to understand limitations in the light of the context of the time and how they were unable that we the independence movement was just beginning like the black movement was just beginning yeah and what has happened since is that this woman operating from the point of view of a woman And she's the one who got the Peace Prize.

Danny Glover: I know one, Gary.

Grace Lee Boggs: She has been able to talk about going back to what she calls the micro-nations, to the culture of the tribes, and to recognize that they lived in harmony with their environment. And because she proceeds from the perspective of the women, which the guys who took over in the 60s never did. They were thinking more in terms of the cities than of the rural economy. And they were operating in a period when it looked like the global north was in great shape and they were trying to catch up with the global north. And today we're in a very different circumstance where the global north is in trouble and we have to think very differently about the culture before slavery and before colonialism. And what's very interesting is that I'm having a, Selma James, CLI, James's widow, and a woman who worked very closely with Walter Rodney are coming here in a couple of weeks. And we're going to have a conference around the question of how do we look at Africa today? And what Rodney points out is how before slave trade and before colonialism, we had communalism where the family and kinship were the main basis of the society.

Danny Glover: Absolutely.

Grace Lee Boggs: And that's the way we have to begin thinking now with the collapse of industrial society.

Danny Glover: Absolutely.

Grace Lee Boggs: And I think that you have to look at whatever you decide to do in terms of a film now about the Black Jacobins, about Haiti, in that light, and to understand that when Paul Rosen played in the film, Which he did, he played in C.L.R. James' play.

Danny Glover: Yeah, he did that .

Grace Lee Boggs: That was another period.

Danny Glover: Well, I think because the writer of my script is a woman, is a woman, my producing partner, these talk about because those are represented in very clear ways through, first of all, one through Toussaint. you know, Toussaint, in this sense, is someone who is attracted by, to the aspects of development and the aspect, the colonial maintenance of the colonial state itself, the state, the colony itself, you know, to his ideas of modernity. And yet, his nephew, is the other, maybe one of the major conflicts in this is his nephew, who is traditionalism, along with the storyteller is Fatima, who is the Maroon priestess, who is not only clairvoyant, but also is able to kind of be able to look into the future, and prophetic. So that's our story teller. That's our story teller. We begin with Fatima. She's centered central to the piece. Fatima is the central piece to this. Because she, in a sense, Maroons who had lived in the mountains, who had escaped slavery, who lived and had a certain kind of sensibility and life of their own life itself. She becomes a key point in that. and the story, both in the ways which are material in real ways, but also in the ways in which are translated through our own spiritualism, or through our own sense of traditionalism. So those are the two pillars that we base this film on. This is not about men stepping up and giving, sitting up and doing these The struggle, Toussaint realizing at the end that when he executes, Toussaint executes his nephew. He's his adopted nephew because Toussaint, what's called Moise, leads a revolt of farmers against him and is captured then because they become, they refuse to continue to live in existence within this colonial structure. He's captured then. But interesting, in the scene where we see Moise, it's that scene in... what's called, I took a lot, I took a little liberty from that scene in Ilya Kazan's Viva Zapata. It's a scene where we see, there's two scenes which really makes the film very interesting to me. The scene where, one, where at the beginning of his ascension, Zapata has this group of farmers who kind as he marches to deal with the Empire and their authority, this group of farmers that follow him as he goes up here in a revolt. He took a little liberty with that. He took a little pleasure with that scene. I thought it was a brilliant scene. And the other scene was when he's sitting there and he sees someone comes up there and who tells him his story and he's reminded of who he is. This is when he has authority and takes off the thing and walks away from that. Which is basically the same, one of the same scenes in And in Burn, the Canto Barro, Canto Barro, Canto Barro, Vila Canto Barro film about, with Marlon Brando, where Jesus Delores, the the guy who's led through, who Brando targets is to lead the revolt, and leads the revolt, and he comes to see that all this idea of change is not what change is, and he goes out and says, I'm leaving, but if you turn on us, I'm a revolt again. And then Brando comes back and finds himself in pursuit of him. So the idea, the idea is that we've placed this film in this kind of context to ask about, because I think the film is important, one, because it's the first victory of Africa against the institution of slavery. Two, that it demonstrates to people the power that we have to fight empire. It's the first victory against empire as well. So in some sense it's important from that vantage point, but it's also important from the other values that I think are important. between traditional values, the values which are friendly to the mother planet, the values that we live in harmony with the mother planet, to those values of modernity and progress and development, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That is a key point. And then what does it mean, in the final question, what does it mean to be free? What does it mean, in a sense?

Grace Lee Boggs: That's wonderful.

Danny Glover: Yeah, that's how we've shaped the story. Yeah, that's how we've developed the story. And we've developed the story from scratch. We had no, I mean, this journey for doing a story on the Haitian Revolution has been some sort of journey that's been over 30 years for me. And it began to manifest itself in some way through projects that we had done. After I finished Color Purple, that was now 24 years ago, I went to Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg had wanted me, he was thinking about doing Alexander the Great, and he wanted me to play an Egyptian general in it. I thought it was a great idea to be playing an Egyptian general in it. But I talked with him about the Haitian slave revolt. felt that Amistad was the thing he wanted to do. Amistad, you know? But we've developed this thing. We've developed it, of course, when people are saying it's got to have a white person here and a white person there and whatever. We've developed it. And the reason why we're having a difficult time. This has been a white story. It had been done a long time ago. But it's a story where you have people of color challenging empire, you know? And so that's the, that's the direction. So Black Jacobins is only, only the, only the cover as the thing to say. Boy, there was for me at 24 years old, there was a Haitian revolution and I didn't know about it. There was this incredible thing that happened and these incredible men and women and this thing happened and I hadn't heard about it. So it has been the impetus for this in a sense, you know.

Grace Lee Boggs: And it's like, it's an incredible story to tell. Well, I'm very glad to hear that you're doing it in terms of the traditional forces. Oh, absolutely.

Danny Glover: These are the two pillars around traditionalism and modernity, you know. And Moise is a strong kid who comes, young man, who aspires. more and more he's drawn to the traditional values, farmers, their lives, you know, and everything else. And he sees what is happening in the midst of this, this quote-unquote victory, you know. As it turned out, Christophe represented that part of modernity. In one scene we have with Christophe, with every French, if you've been in a French colony, come to France, I am the son of the Gauls, I am from the Gauls, you see that? And then Crusade comes in here and says, that doesn't seem right. You have Dessalines who's leaning in some way, but he's in that camp of somewhat traditionalism. But the pure person, the purity of that lies in Moïse, the son, who eventually, after leading that revolt of farmers and soldiers against Toussaint, Toussaint says excuse him. And at the end, he realizes his failure, you know? That he realizes that. That becomes the last time. Before, we opened the film with this, we opened the film with Fatima's voice, and she talks about the history of Haiti, piano. the buttons, which is said, the Cooper Museum, the buttons, that Leclerc, another Leclerc, that had been given to Toussaint by the general who comes to defeat him, but becomes his ally. I'm losing it right now, but we open the scene with that, and then we see his face at the last moments of death, because he freezes to death. Napoleon puts him in prison, he freezes to death. Then we go back to the night of fire, then we have him come through the encampments where he brings, where he sees women and men drinking rum and everything seems to be just out of disarray. This is after the revolt. So he brings order to the revolt. He's the one that organizes the revolt in such a way. He trains the soldiers, he does everything, organizes the revolt, defeats the Spanish, you know, makes an alliance with the Spanish, then defeats the Spanish, and then makes an alliance with the French. And then that's when Saint-Anax abolishes slavery, his decree abolishes slavery in Haiti right there, 1793. So he does that, goes from that point on through this whole plans of pseudo-statehood or whatever and everything else, then he decides now that he was going to now control and take over the whole island of Hispaniola, the whole island which included many Republicans. So it becomes that particular point. Then he comes back and realizes just as Napoleon, Napoleon comes to power, that he has another, another adversary. You know, and he tells Napoleon something, you may be the first among whites, but I'm the first among blacks. Napoleon sends a secret, he sends Leclerc, his brother-in-law, his brother-in-law, married to Pauline, sends his brother-in-law to Haiti. secret order, but using Haiti as the staging ground to now reassert themselves in the Americas. And the fact that the Haitians defeated them is the reason why, desperate for money, he sells the Louisiana Purchase for $13 million. Jefferson only was enamored with New Orleans, but they got the whole community. So we don't go in that part of it, that part of it, but we take it up for those 12 years, 1791 to 1803 of the years, which thrusts Toussaint from a 47-year-old coachman to someone who dies at 60 years old in the French Oaks.

Grace Lee Boggs: So what stage is this?

Danny Glover: Well, what happened is we finally got the script. First of all, we figured, where's the best place to shoot this movie? Where politically is the best place to shoot the movie? So, we knew that South Africa had a fund. Or South Africa was in the business of doing the movie. So, they have the industrial, the IDC, the Industrial Development Corporation. And so, about... 2000, after trying to raise money, 2005, 2004, we started meeting with various film festivals with people from the IDC. We figured we'd scale up a plan where if we got 30% from South Africa, we got 30% leverage that 30% by a Ingenious, a company in the UK, because South Africa and the UK had arranged, had signed a production deal, co-production deal. And so we do that. Then we go and arrange the other 30%. It's a $30 million film. If I do this in LA, in Hollywood, in the studio, it's a $75, $80 million film. So we... We go to the juniors, in fact, we get all our, all our, here's the departments, or people who are really wonderful at what they do in the UK. Remy Adel-Pharison, who is a cinematographer, who's of Nigerian descent. He shot Elizabeth, both Elizabeths, and then he did a couple of Woody Allen films. But his work in Elizabeth, and he shot Band of Brothers for HBO, which he won an Emmy for. His work is exquisite. We wanted to work with him. Consolato Boyle, as a wardrobe person, is an incredible wardrobe. She's done most of Stephen Sears' movies, from Dangerous Lizzie, his own stuff, to On. She's done that. So we got someone, period. We got someone that we wanted to do that. And we began to work, and that's in putting, we got Michael Carlin, who got an Oscar nomination last year, this last year, but had done, had just finished, when we had contacted him, just finished The Last King of Scotland. Here's a guy who can find ways in which he can, you know, get to doing what he needs to be done. So we got three key people, and often, here's the departments, IHDs. We got three key people that we want to give. So then what we did was we were talking to the IDC, trying to find ways, talking to Ingenious in the UK and everything else. And this is all on my dime. Development of the script, all this stuff on my dime. It's been a long journey but I figured the only way I was going to get this script done and get the story I want was putting my mouth where my money was. My money was my mom's. And so we did all that. Then we went to do location scouting. And we figured out that we were going to try to do it. This is about 200, excuse me, 2,000 kilometers from Mobutu, Mozambique. There's a little island called Ila Mozambique. And on that is a 16th century Portuguese fort. So we were going to use that as the center base so undeveloped that we had to scrap that, to the most part. Because it was so undeveloped, we had to put a water system in. It only had a combination of about 60 people on the island itself. It was a beautiful, beautiful do that. We'd have to bring in a cruise ship or someplace to house people offshore. All the things we came added about three million dollars to the budget. So, and then we went all the kazoo and the towel, we found sugar cane, okay, we may have a problem, now we're gonna have to do some sort of visual enhancement to get the kind of scenery, to get the look of Port-au-Prince or to get the look of Leclerc, you know, the three towns that we needed. So we did all that work and everything else and set up an office there at the end of 2006. Set up an office there. None of that came through because the one thing we could not get And we couldn't get foreign sales estimates for a film because of the cast. Not because of the genre, because the cast was all black. We went to every single one, every single one. We went to Pathé, I had done a film with them. We went to Wild Bunch. We went to all over Europe trying to get a foreign sales estimate. Nobody would give it to us. I even went to Mail.