Early in their courtship, Barack brought Michelle to a community meeting where he spoke and she was impressed by him. In terms of their date, they did go to the Art Institute, they did have lunch afterwards, they did see Do The Right Thing, they did have drinks.Ī couple of locations were changed around a bit. We had a little leeway for creative licensing because they were younger and we – the world – didn’t know them back then. I wanted to show them as younger, and differently to how we’ve been accustomed to seeing them. In that sense, the characters were being created for the movie rather than for any sort of legacy, or any sort of strict adherence to the people we see on TV. And whatever didn’t come up, that was OK, too. So the trick was to get them talking like real people, and whatever bubbled up from their established biographies, great. I was just collecting all of this biographical information about them.īy the time I was ready to start writing, I was pretty soaked up with facts. I read Craig Robinson’s book – Michelle Obama’s brother. I read interviews with the President and the First Lady. I was reading a lot through 20, and really before I decided to officially write it, out of curiosity I was reading everything that came out about them. Tika Sumpter as Michelle Robinson in Southside with You How did you research the project? How much was creative licensing? In retrospect once I understood what an amazing first date felt like, what it felt like to fall in love for real, then I really felt I had a pull towards the story and an approach to telling it. I didn’t know it at the time, but certain ideas kept calling out to me. By that point I had fallen in love in my own life, and I think that really was the impetus. I had something formed nascently, but I didn’t sit down to write it until 2013. I would read about them, and ideas would formulate and I would write little bits of dialogue. I was struck by the idea for the script for several years. Not only in people you know in regular life, let alone the President and the First Lady. It doesn’t feel staged, it doesn’t feel forced, it feel very real, and that’s a very rare thing in people. I think that it’s an authentic and vibrant love and it’s on display for all of the world to see. And what connected you personally to their story so much that you thought, “Oh, this needs to be a movie”?Īs cheesy as this sounds, it really was the love between the two of them. I was just so taken by their story of the first date, the reliability of it, so much so that it just occurred to me as a movie right there and then. I wasn’t searching around for a more standardized approach. It was the only angle that inspired me to make the movie. The film is an effective illustration of what it means to take inspiration from your environment, and to turn that into a force for change.Their first date was the only angle that ever occurred to me. But Southside With You has a claim to relevance for anyone who was moved even a little bit by the inauguration, or, almost 20 years earlier, by Do the Right Thing. Obama's critics will find little reason to watch a movie humanizing him, even though the film has more to say about Gwendolyn Brooks and Good Times than any specific policy, and owes more of a debt to Before Sunrise than, say, Lincoln. And Barack, showing off the kind of ideological code-switching that will later win him the White House, deftly offers a rationale that, he admits later, was meant only to satisfy that person. A white partner at the firm who also happens to be at the theater asks the question every white person does the first time they see Do the Right Thing. It's the subtler scene at the movie theater, after he and Michelle have just been devastated by Spike Lee's prescient vision of a policeman choking Radio Raheem to death. Anyway, it's not a church full of cheering South Siders that convinces us of the future president's oratorical skill.
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