A Conversation With Kevin Willmott

By: Brett Deacon

Sunday August 13, 2006

Actor, writer, director, and professor explores the historical south in CSA: Confederate States of America.
On a blazingly hot Friday morning in Lawrence, Kansas I got a rare opportunity to see CSA: Confederate States of America and then sit down with its writer/director, Kevin Willmott who is an associate professor at the University of Kansas. The film is a satirical mockumentary that asks, "what if the South won the Civil War." It's both very funny and very thought provoking.


Brett Deacon: You grew up in Junction City [Kansas].

Kevin Willmott: Uh huh.

What interested you about getting into filmmaking?

Well, you know, as you probably had that same experience, love movies as a kid, watching movies all the time, about every weekend. And it just was a powerful medium, especially in the 70's when the blacksploitation movies came out. There was a theater in Junction City that was owned by a black man, which was interesting. I want to make a film that shows how those theaters kind of evolved from these classic kind of old theaters with the deco, art deco kind of stuff and in the 70's they started to go down and then the blacksploitation movies were there and then they stopped making those and then it turned into an X-Rated joint and then it closed. It is, I think, a good description of what happened to independent film during that time. I mean, just after the 70's it kind of vanished for a little while and then came back.

Yeah, the advance of the blockbuster...Star Wars and Jaws kind of killed it.

Big time.

And the studios began to see the big money that they could make in one shot and they said we should just be trying to -

Knock one out of the park

Yeah, to use the baseball analogy it's like playing small ball vs. trying for the home runs every time.

Right.

What brought you back to KU [University of Kansas]?

Well, on my first film, Ninth Street, I met Tim Rebman and he kind of ... I knew Lawrence had a film scene, The Day After had been made here a few years before that. And so I knew that with Ninth Street I had to go back home [to Kansas] where people knew what Ninth Street was and had a support base there of interest and so forth in the project and so for me that was the driving force to come back. And then it just seemed like the best place to do what I wanted to do from. I was able to write screenplays from here. I hooked up with Mitch Brian and we wrote several screenplays together and that did real well. We worked for several years just as screenwriters in the studios writing a lot of scripts for them. And then really try to get back to what I always wanted to do which was make my own films.

You did some playwriting in the beginning too, right?

Yeah, yeah! "Ninth Street" started as a play. And I still write plays. I have a play that is gonna be in Minnesota at the Minnesota Children's Theater company up there in the fall called "The Watsons Go To Birmingham - 1963"

What was the generation of the idea for Confederate States of America?

Well, a lot of different things. One was that, uh, still a lot of people don't believe the South - that a lot of people still believe that the war was not fought over slavery. And so that issue was one that drove me. The issue that slavery is this taboo topic that Americans still have a very difficult time getting a handle on. Both black folks, white folks everybody. It's just Hollywood rarely deals with it. When it does deal with it kind of, you know, doesn't know quite how to deal with it. So it just seemed like reversing the history would expose kind of what happened to us. And so by reversing the history I kind of told what really happened. And then when I figured I could do it on the cheap that was just the icing on the cake. (Laughs)

You open the film with the George Bernard Shaw quote which was... I had it written down. Which was... "If you don't..." Help me out here...

Sure, uh, basically it's you better make 'em laugh if you're gonna tell 'em the truth or what not.

Yes. Sort of like the sugar with the medicine thing.

Right.

Is that how you wanted to -- how you chose to talk about this issue?

Yeah, I think that's a pretty good description of the approach, you know was that uh... you just can't preach to people. They just shut down and they don't hear that. So satire... you know Dr. Strangelove, one of my favorite films, does a great job of telling you what this is really all about and at the same time making you laugh and making you squirm. And being funny, but not at the expense of what it's all about which is the key to me, was that thin line we had walk between trying to be entertaining on one hand but at the same time not making fun of slavery and not being disrespectful to the realty of any of this but by embracing the absurdity of our history and not being afraid to go straight directly at it and not being afraid to deal directly with the pain. You kind of expose it in a different way.

There are moments in the film that echo true history, December 7th 1941, Kennedy getting elected, that would still happen. Were those meant to remind us that history happens to repeat itself even in a parallel universe?

Yeah, sure and the parallel universe that we have in this film is not so parallel (laughs). You know part of the point of the film is the South did win the Civil War. It didn't win on the battlefield but it won in its attempt to hold onto its way of life. And so the mixing of actual events with this Confederate victory was my way of kind of revealing that deeper truth hopefully that... you know the reason that Gone With The Wind is our favorite movie of all time and all the slaves in that movie are happy to be slaves, you know I think its just another indication of the Confederate victory. There's no big film maybe besides Glory that even deals with it in a very specific way what all this means to us as Americans.

And Amistad I think as well...

KW" Yeah and Amistad. And again it's important to remember that Amistad was only produced after Debbie Allen begged Steven Spielberg to do it. And so Glory...even that had to have a white lead in it.

Right and those films are all pretty heavy. I mean they're good movies, but they deal with it --

Dramatically.

And you come in with a lot of levity and fun with it.

Yeah and I think that choice comes from when you have meetings in Hollywood they always tell you "Well, you know 'Beloved' didn't do well and 'Amistad' didn't do well..." and they kind of use those movies against you, really. And so I wanted to find a way to get around all of that in a sense. That, you know, not have to make some big big film where you have to have thousands of extras and ancient sets. So that when that fails they'll use that against you, too (chuckles). I wanted to find a way to do it and make it more direct to us today. Putting slavery in the modern world takes it out of that ancient history "Well this doesn't affect my life, what does this matter to me? This has no effect on my existence." And you know my father was born in 1898 so that's only 30 years after slavery. And so for me, slavery is not ancient history. You see the effects of slavery every day in this country on black folks and white folks. It's the defining thing of our lives and yet we know so little about it. So this was our attempt to try to get around the big epic kind of thing that other people tried and do it in a different way.

And you take advantage of a lot of archive footage because the parallel universe mirrored so closely.

Yeah and unfortunately that was the expensive part of the film! (Laughs) I mean that stuff was really expensive. But we knew it would be, probably. But it really was the crux of what this was all about that - you know Woody Allen's "Zelig" was a big influence on me and you just gotta fall in to that world, you just gotta believe it to some degree even though it's a different universe. I think as people go along they start to forget it's not real. So that was a big, important part of the approach and the documentary footage was key to that.

Do you think you'd want to revisit this film in 20 years and see where that universe goes?

(laughs) That would be interesting.

Because it seemed at the end that there was a lot of pressure on the CSA to, you know, "grow up" basically.

Right!

... and get with the world.

Yeah! Well you know it does... a lot of people like the film because it kind of speaks to us today in different ways. That we've been living in the CSA for maybe the last 10 years or so. (Laughs) And you know, for me the metaphor was a bigger one. It's always been a battle between the USA and the CSA as to what country we wanted to be. We kind of have moments of both. We have times when we bring outsiders in - immigrants, women, gay people. And then there's times when we want to throw them out and we don't wanna give them rights and we want to limit their rights and keep them from doing different things. We have not quite decided what country we want to be, we still like a lot of the notions of the CSA. So in a sense of going back to revisit it, I think that's a really interesting notion. I mean, I don't want to do it tomorrow, but it would be interesting to see where we are in 10, 15, 20 years and maybe the CSA is another way to go back tell us about ourselves.

A lot of films that are popular at Sundance, that kind of become legends at Sundance, you know "Clerks", "Brothers McMullen"... they get big on the independent circuit but then when they really take off is when they hit video and now CSA's about to hit video. So what is your hope for the film?

Well, I think you always hope that it reaches a bigger audience. I thought what we did was a miracle, what happened for the film. We did really well in the theaters and we got to a lot more cities than we were supposed to. But they didn't know how to market the film, theaters were afraid of it... it was just quite a challenge. And so for what IFC was able to do, I was very pleased. So with video, really the hope is that it just becomes a bigger story. That the people that heard about it but didn't get to see it, that they'll check it out now. That schools, I know a lot of schools are very interested in the film. I'm hoping that college campuses will really pick it up and it'll expand there as well. I've been speaking at a lot of universities over the last year or so and that's been really great because you get to go in and talk to folks and you discuss these ideas and it's a great exchange.

What's next for you?

Just starting another movie here called "Bunker Hill" that explores some of the issues of security and civil liberties and the post 9/11 experience. So we start shooting on that August 14th.

Are you gonna shoot it in Lawrence?

Shooting a little bit in Lawrence but mainly in Nortonville and Coffeyville.

That sounds exciting.

Yeah we're hoping we can make it a good one.

Well that's all I got for you, thanks for doing this.

Thanks, man.


CSA: Confederate States of America hits DVD on August 8th. Kevin Willmott's next film, Bunker Hill is co-written with Greg Hurd and examines what happens when a small Kansas town loses communication with the outside world.