The book, which explores the complex life of a bright boy growing up in Orange, New Jersey, was written by Peace’s former roommate at Yale. His story didn’t fit neatly into familiar tropes about difficult beginnings, imprisoned parents, or overly simplistic ideas about achieving success and emerging from an adverse environment. This was a person who wanted to stay connected to his community, to his father, and also to succeed in his studies and in athletics (water polo), first at St. Benedict High School in Newark and then at Yale, where he studied molecular biochemistry and biophysics.
Nine years after graduating from college, during which he returned as a teacher at his old high school, traveled extensively, considered graduate school, and made money selling marijuana, Peace was murdered. Some of the versions attributed it to the fact that he returned to the place where he came from. Ejiofor said Peace’s mother told them that after his death, television crews came and filmed the garbage in the streets instead of the community.
But Hobbs and, later, Ejiofor saw something more complicated and nuanced in the flawed idea of social mobility and the confluence of race, housing, education, and the criminal justice system. And, more importantly, I felt like I hadn’t seen these ideas in the movies.
“I thought it was very special and very powerful,” Ejiofor told The Associated Press in a recent interview. It was kind of a coincidence that I had had this great response to the book, but I hadn’t pursued it in any way. I took the opportunity.
Fuqua, who teamed with Hobbs’ wife, Rebecca, to adapt the film, thought Ejiofor would be the right person after seeing his first feature film, The Boy Who Harnessed the Windabout a 13-year-old boy in Malawi who turns to his creativity after his family can no longer pay for school.
“I knew it was meant to be a movie,” Antoine Fuqua wrote in an email. It was clear that (Chiwetel’s) humanistic approach to storytelling was a perfect fit for bringing Rob’s life to the screen.
Rob Peace It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday, where it hopes to find a distributor to be introduced to the world.
Movies like this need to be loved to exist, and that takes a lot of people, said producer Alex Kurtzman, who became close to Ejiofor while directing him on the series. The Man Who Fell to Earth. Movies like this are not made for money. You don’t make movies like this for any reason other than that this is an important story to tell. And for some reason, we are lucky to be able to tell it.
To play Rob, who carries the film on his back and manages to live in the very different worlds he has experienced in his life, Ejiofor and his casting director found Jay Will, a recent graduate of the Juilliard School of the Arts.
“I never felt like it was a story about someone who was able to play a role in different places,” Ejiofor said. It was a story about someone who very naturally and consistently was all of these things at once. You really had to invest and believe that about him. Jay did it very naturally because that is also part of his experience. He is also a fabulous actor and has great charisma and real charm.
The performance is a substantial showcase for Will, a fresh face who had done some television, including The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel y Tulsa King by Taylor Sheridan, which has not yet been released.
Jay Will-Rob Peace-AP.jpg
AP/Gwen Capistran/Sundance Institute
Mary J. Blige was already on board to play his mother, Jackie, and Camila Cabello plays an on-again, off-again girlfriend, Naya. Ejiofor cast himself in the role of the father, Skeet, self-aware enough to know that, because he was at the helm of it, he would simply be directing another actor to play him as he would. hara.
He’s kind of a mercurial character, in a way, Ejiofor said. There has to be a sequence of question marks about him, but you also have to be very attracted to him. And Rob’s journey is driven by that kind of magnetic bond that he has with his father.
The same as The Boy Who Harnessed the Windthe director-actor, father-son dynamic also ended up helping the film.
Kurtzman marveled at Ejiofor’s ability to gracefully and calmly navigate three very different roles (writer, director and actor) under the high-pressure environment of making a low-budget independent film in just 28 days with no money for overtime.
“I never saw him break down, break down, get stressed,” Kurtzman said. That he was able to hold space for those three things at the same time and know how to put them in a box while the clock was ticking, that’s a real artist.
Equally important to Ejiofor was making the film look beautiful. He had been horrified by the story of the television reporters and the trash, and sought out the cinematographer of Beanpole y The Last of UsKsenia Sereda, to make this vision a reality.
“What he’s done here is elevate this with a real elegance and beauty and style to the telling of the story, which doesn’t necessarily feel like we’ve seen before within this type of cinematic experience,” he said.
All of these facets work together to change stereotypes and expectations. Ejiofor wants the audience to feel a sense of hope in Rob’s story, as well as for them to feel enriched by knowing him.
At the end of the movie, you’re not just left with this desolation. Obviously it’s a tragic story, but it’s much, much richer than that, she said. Understanding their journey, I believe, is deeply important, enriching, and enlightening. It has been for me.
FUENTE: AP
