Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Jeremy Mitchell, Sheaun McKinney, "Nemesis" producer, actor: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2
(Return to Part 1)
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: This is your first producing role, I’m assuming, for doing a feature.
JEREMY MITCHELL: It is my first feature producing role, yeah. I’ve produced a couple of short films and such.
ANDELMAN: The question that anyone in my position would have to ask is where did you find the money? How did you guys ante up to produce this, and what was the budget?
MITCHELL: I can’t give exact details, amounts on that, but I’ll just put it at it was under $1 million, so it was a low-budget affair. We don’t have any huge names in it, but hopefully, they will be soon. We were able to fall into an investor. We had one investor, private investor, locally in Florida, that we were able to approach with the film, and we actually already knew him. And he had seen what we had done in the past, a few of the projects, the short films, and the success we were starting to have and recognition with the different projects. He had seen the trailer for this and the script and bought into the concept of where we were going and got on board.
The D.P. helped out a tremendous amount. He was really, really well connected in the Florida area. He’d been working for ten years, not as a D.P., as an assistant camera. Just like us, he was looking to step up and take the next step in his career and do something bigger and become a D.P. This was the project he’d been looking for cause he’d had the opportunity to be in different stuff, but he wanted something that he could really show off in, I guess, for lack of a better word. He loved it when he read the script, got in.
Once he got in, a ton of things started to happen because, like I said, it’s Florida. There’s a lot more opportunities than if you’re shooting in L.A., and it’s a smaller community. He knew everyone and was able to pull a lot of really important people in the Florida film industry, into the project and just raised our expectations a ton. Our philosophy was hey, let’s just make something. We’re not gonna sit around for five years trying to put together a project at the highest level because if we start working now, put something together, by the time five years comes around, it’ll be our third project. And when we finally get there to that big one, we’ll be so ready from all this that it’s gonna pay off a lot more. Just doing stuff, we think, just helps you get there, not just waiting. We had expectations to make it as good as possible, but we didn’t know it was gonna blow up like it did and things would start to fall into place and just bring the production value at a way higher level and raise our expectations and make us come with more of an A game. And bringing Justin Marx, the D.P., in, changed everything as far as that went, our whole mentality. It was just really exciting to be involved and watch it grow, and it’s scary, too, to have to meet a lot of responsibility. We didn’t expect to at the start of it.
ANDELMAN: Actors and responsibility are not supposed to cross, right?
MITCHELL: Actors and responsibility, right? That’s typical of us, but luckily, once you take on a different role, you assume a different name. So when you’re on set, you’re the producer, and you try to portray that, and it just happens cause you believe it cause you are. You have it so, yeah, responsibility comes with the territory, and it changes you. It, definitely for me, it gave me a ton more discipline, absolutely, and it still is.
ANDELMAN: This is still kind of a new format for me. I understand we may have some live listeners. As a matter of fact, we do have a call. Jeremy, let’s see who’s calling you. Hi, is there a caller there?
CALLER: Hello.
ANDELMAN: Hi. You have a question for Jeremy?
Caller: This is actually Sheaun McKinney. I’m in the movie Nemesis.
ANDELMAN: Oh, Sheaun, thanks for joining us.
SHEAUN McKINNEY: Of course. How you doing, Jeremy?
MITCHELL: I’m doing great. Now, I’m glad you were able to get on. This is our star right here. This is “Nemesis” everybody.
ANDELMAN: Appreciate you calling. Sheaun, tell me about taking this role. It’s a small-budget film…
McKINNEY: Right.
ANDELMAN: …but a big opportunity for you, I guess.
McKINNEY: Yeah, definitely. Just like Jeremy had said, when I first got a post about the audition, my initial reaction was I didn’t want to go and just play another rapper because that happens all the time, and it’s kind of not the route I wanted to go with with my career. But then reading the script and seeing that it had a real storyline and seeing that the character, Nemesis, definitely had some substance to it and all the supporting characters were real, real people and the storyline itself, to me, is tremendous, I thought this is great, and I have an amazing opportunity to not only tell a great story but to, as an actor, play a complete character.
ANDELMAN: Your character, it really is complete because, through flashbacks, we see you as a boy, we see you growing up, we see you with your father, and then, even as an adult, we get to see these two very different sides of Nemesis.
McKINNEY: Right. And like Jeremy had mentioned, when I first started out back in the day, I used to rap, and it just hit me that that wasn’t the career I wanted to follow. And being an African-American coming from a place -- I didn’t grow up in the ghetto, per se -- but I grew up in I guess what we call the ‘hood. And there’s a couple of routes you can take to try to get out of there, and one of those routes for a lot of people is rapping. And most of the kids that grow up around there, we see rappers, and that’s what we want to emulate. We want what they have, but we don’t know what goes in between those steps they took to get there. And I’m a huge hip-hop fan. I grew up on hip-hop. I love hip-hop. And it’s been exploited so much, and it’s been manipulated so much. And I think the movie shows a great, great, great part of what happens to these people cause I think we forget that when we see these huge stars that are people first. And Nemesis is a prime example. You see what happens to this kid who’s an artist at heart, and the industry says we want to take you and make you this. And the movie, to me, is about decisions. In a minute, you have to make a choice of what do you want to do with your life and what do you want to sacrifice. And, to me, it does a great job without saying this kid, he has to make a choice. Do you want the fame and fortune, but what is it going to cost you? And, to me, that was a standout reason for me to take that role and try to portray that.
MITCHELL: I think that’s an important point, too, is that hip-hop didn’t start out being what it is now. It started out as an act of rebellion. It was a celebration of life even though times were tough, and obviously in the area that it came out of in New York, it was lean streets, and there were a lot of negatives, but the music itself was positive. And it was trying to be uplifting, and it was a movement. It was a different movement from everything that was around it. It had its own identity, and over time, it’s sort of been morphed into what it is now. And for the most part, at least commercially on the radio and the big music that makes a lot of money, it’s just an agent of propaganda. And like Sheaun said, I think his character has a similar arc in itself. He starts out as a really truthful, true-to-himself, genuine artist and gets manipulated into being something that he isn’t really.
ANDELMAN: Sheaun, let me ask you this: I kind of teased Jeremy about this when we started the conversation about being the white guy doing the hip-hop film. And, of course, he plays a record producer in the film. It seems to me that he’s taken on a dual risk here. One is that he is a white guy producing a film about hip-hop, but he’s got money on the line. And he’s in the film. How do you think that’ll stand up in the community?
McKINNEY: To some people, that may be a double-edged sword, but I think it’s a great thing because the one thing we have to improve in this country, because it’s still an issue today, is race relations. And I think, as an artist, as a writer, your job is always gonna try to be to capture the story from all angles. I think hip-hop is a black commodity in its creation, but it’s not exclusive at all. Hip-hop is open to everybody. And I was shocked, and I told Bechir, who was my best friend who was in the film, that they really captured the essence of hip-hop in this film. They also captured the essence of the industry, which you see now, but there’s millions of people rapping now. Whether you think they’re good or not, there’s millions of people rapping: black, white, Latino, what-have-you. And I don’t think that only black people can talk about hip-hop just like I don’t think only white people can write certain types of films. Do you know what I mean? It’s open to everybody. If I honestly would have read the script and thought, “These white dudes don’t know what they’re talking about,” I wouldn’t have did the film. But I read it, and I was like, “Wow, they know what they’re talking about.” And they were also very open. Jeremy and Lee were very open to whatever input that we had. If we were like, “Oh, I don’t like the way this sounds, I don’t like seeing it this way,” they were just like, “Hey, try it this way.” And it was a great collaboration. And I think that anybody that sees the film within any community is gonna realize that. They might not even realize who wrote it or who produced it or what have you. I have to give kudos to Jeremy because I know, as an artist, I’m coming from a theater background, it’s tremendously hard to try to act and try to direct at the same time. It’ll drive you insane. And he did a great job keeping it together so I commend him, and I love the idea that it was written by somebody outside the black community.
ANDELMAN: And how do you think he did at portraying a white producer?
McKINNEY: He was the most amazing sleazebag on camera that I’ve ever been around! That’s a good one. He just has that presence of just like, “Wow, we really don’t like this guy on camera.” But I think he did a heck of a job, and I think everybody in the film, not just trying to sound cheesy, but it was one of those projects where it was an amazing collaboration of just backgrounds clashing together and coming out with something beautiful or a really great piece of art, I think.
ANDELMAN: One of the things I liked was, I went to school at the University of Miami, just for a year, and it’s been a while, but I felt like, watching the film, that it really, both the cinematography and the atmospherics that were in the film, it really kind of captured the feel of being in Miami.
McKINNEY: Yeah, it did. It did, and it was great. Being out here in L.A., I just came back from Miami yesterday, actually, and I’m like, “Wow, I really miss home.” And the film does capture Miami great from everywhere we perform to the language to just the vibe of the people. Miami has a certain vibe that I think it stands out like anywhere else. Just like New Yorkers have that vibe. L.A. people have that vibe. Miami has that vibe and that culture to it, and I think the film really, really captures that.
ANDELMAN: What do each of you have on the line here as you wait for this film to find distribution and get out? What do you hope the film will do for each of you?
McKINNEY: Speaking personally, as an actor, you hope that somebody will see it, and it leads to something else. I hope people can see the film and take it for what it is. And any aspiring rapper or artist can be like, “I want to go into maybe a contract situation and say I’m gonna make my own choices.” That’s what I hope somebody can be touched by. As an actor, I just hope like anybody else that watched and be like, “Hey, let me call this guy in for an audition.
MITCHELL: Like Sheaun said, I want the movie to stand up on its own cause I think it’s an important piece. Going into this, our expectations were to make something good. They were also to grow, to get somewhere else, use it as a platform. The most viable way we saw was to make something in a genre that a lot of people were interested in, and hip-hop certainly captured that. It’s one of the biggest pop cultural movements there is in America. We said, “Let’s make a film about something that’s important and current and now and has a point.” At the same time, let’s make something good out of it, and we tried to do that and tried to give what we felt and how we really perceived everything. After it’s been done, I really want it to get out there and people to see it and maybe think about it a little bit. I want it to stand on its own. At the same time, I want to use it as a platform to make bigger and bigger projects and reach more people with each successive work. So, yeah, I’m really hoping it does as well as possible.
ANDELMAN: And Jeremy, I should ask you what is the status of the film? Where are you at on the business side of things?
MITCHELL: We’re working on getting a distribution deal. We’re actually looking to try to get into a big festival and get a little more worldwide exposure just to up the status of the project, the awareness of it, and be able to sell for a deal that will make the film circulate more and reach more people. It’s complete, and we recently finished post and got everything done, put the soundtrack in. We’re shopping it around and trying to seek it out, getting it out there into the marketplace.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: This is your first producing role, I’m assuming, for doing a feature.
JEREMY MITCHELL: It is my first feature producing role, yeah. I’ve produced a couple of short films and such.
ANDELMAN: The question that anyone in my position would have to ask is where did you find the money? How did you guys ante up to produce this, and what was the budget?
MITCHELL: I can’t give exact details, amounts on that, but I’ll just put it at it was under $1 million, so it was a low-budget affair. We don’t have any huge names in it, but hopefully, they will be soon. We were able to fall into an investor. We had one investor, private investor, locally in Florida, that we were able to approach with the film, and we actually already knew him. And he had seen what we had done in the past, a few of the projects, the short films, and the success we were starting to have and recognition with the different projects. He had seen the trailer for this and the script and bought into the concept of where we were going and got on board.
The D.P. helped out a tremendous amount. He was really, really well connected in the Florida area. He’d been working for ten years, not as a D.P., as an assistant camera. Just like us, he was looking to step up and take the next step in his career and do something bigger and become a D.P. This was the project he’d been looking for cause he’d had the opportunity to be in different stuff, but he wanted something that he could really show off in, I guess, for lack of a better word. He loved it when he read the script, got in.
Once he got in, a ton of things started to happen because, like I said, it’s Florida. There’s a lot more opportunities than if you’re shooting in L.A., and it’s a smaller community. He knew everyone and was able to pull a lot of really important people in the Florida film industry, into the project and just raised our expectations a ton. Our philosophy was hey, let’s just make something. We’re not gonna sit around for five years trying to put together a project at the highest level because if we start working now, put something together, by the time five years comes around, it’ll be our third project. And when we finally get there to that big one, we’ll be so ready from all this that it’s gonna pay off a lot more. Just doing stuff, we think, just helps you get there, not just waiting. We had expectations to make it as good as possible, but we didn’t know it was gonna blow up like it did and things would start to fall into place and just bring the production value at a way higher level and raise our expectations and make us come with more of an A game. And bringing Justin Marx, the D.P., in, changed everything as far as that went, our whole mentality. It was just really exciting to be involved and watch it grow, and it’s scary, too, to have to meet a lot of responsibility. We didn’t expect to at the start of it.
ANDELMAN: Actors and responsibility are not supposed to cross, right?
MITCHELL: Actors and responsibility, right? That’s typical of us, but luckily, once you take on a different role, you assume a different name. So when you’re on set, you’re the producer, and you try to portray that, and it just happens cause you believe it cause you are. You have it so, yeah, responsibility comes with the territory, and it changes you. It, definitely for me, it gave me a ton more discipline, absolutely, and it still is.
ANDELMAN: This is still kind of a new format for me. I understand we may have some live listeners. As a matter of fact, we do have a call. Jeremy, let’s see who’s calling you. Hi, is there a caller there?
CALLER: Hello.
ANDELMAN: Hi. You have a question for Jeremy?
Caller: This is actually Sheaun McKinney. I’m in the movie Nemesis.
ANDELMAN: Oh, Sheaun, thanks for joining us.
SHEAUN McKINNEY: Of course. How you doing, Jeremy?
MITCHELL: I’m doing great. Now, I’m glad you were able to get on. This is our star right here. This is “Nemesis” everybody.
ANDELMAN: Appreciate you calling. Sheaun, tell me about taking this role. It’s a small-budget film…
McKINNEY: Right.
ANDELMAN: …but a big opportunity for you, I guess.
McKINNEY: Yeah, definitely. Just like Jeremy had said, when I first got a post about the audition, my initial reaction was I didn’t want to go and just play another rapper because that happens all the time, and it’s kind of not the route I wanted to go with with my career. But then reading the script and seeing that it had a real storyline and seeing that the character, Nemesis, definitely had some substance to it and all the supporting characters were real, real people and the storyline itself, to me, is tremendous, I thought this is great, and I have an amazing opportunity to not only tell a great story but to, as an actor, play a complete character.
ANDELMAN: Your character, it really is complete because, through flashbacks, we see you as a boy, we see you growing up, we see you with your father, and then, even as an adult, we get to see these two very different sides of Nemesis.
McKINNEY: Right. And like Jeremy had mentioned, when I first started out back in the day, I used to rap, and it just hit me that that wasn’t the career I wanted to follow. And being an African-American coming from a place -- I didn’t grow up in the ghetto, per se -- but I grew up in I guess what we call the ‘hood. And there’s a couple of routes you can take to try to get out of there, and one of those routes for a lot of people is rapping. And most of the kids that grow up around there, we see rappers, and that’s what we want to emulate. We want what they have, but we don’t know what goes in between those steps they took to get there. And I’m a huge hip-hop fan. I grew up on hip-hop. I love hip-hop. And it’s been exploited so much, and it’s been manipulated so much. And I think the movie shows a great, great, great part of what happens to these people cause I think we forget that when we see these huge stars that are people first. And Nemesis is a prime example. You see what happens to this kid who’s an artist at heart, and the industry says we want to take you and make you this. And the movie, to me, is about decisions. In a minute, you have to make a choice of what do you want to do with your life and what do you want to sacrifice. And, to me, it does a great job without saying this kid, he has to make a choice. Do you want the fame and fortune, but what is it going to cost you? And, to me, that was a standout reason for me to take that role and try to portray that.
MITCHELL: I think that’s an important point, too, is that hip-hop didn’t start out being what it is now. It started out as an act of rebellion. It was a celebration of life even though times were tough, and obviously in the area that it came out of in New York, it was lean streets, and there were a lot of negatives, but the music itself was positive. And it was trying to be uplifting, and it was a movement. It was a different movement from everything that was around it. It had its own identity, and over time, it’s sort of been morphed into what it is now. And for the most part, at least commercially on the radio and the big music that makes a lot of money, it’s just an agent of propaganda. And like Sheaun said, I think his character has a similar arc in itself. He starts out as a really truthful, true-to-himself, genuine artist and gets manipulated into being something that he isn’t really.
ANDELMAN: Sheaun, let me ask you this: I kind of teased Jeremy about this when we started the conversation about being the white guy doing the hip-hop film. And, of course, he plays a record producer in the film. It seems to me that he’s taken on a dual risk here. One is that he is a white guy producing a film about hip-hop, but he’s got money on the line. And he’s in the film. How do you think that’ll stand up in the community?
McKINNEY: To some people, that may be a double-edged sword, but I think it’s a great thing because the one thing we have to improve in this country, because it’s still an issue today, is race relations. And I think, as an artist, as a writer, your job is always gonna try to be to capture the story from all angles. I think hip-hop is a black commodity in its creation, but it’s not exclusive at all. Hip-hop is open to everybody. And I was shocked, and I told Bechir, who was my best friend who was in the film, that they really captured the essence of hip-hop in this film. They also captured the essence of the industry, which you see now, but there’s millions of people rapping now. Whether you think they’re good or not, there’s millions of people rapping: black, white, Latino, what-have-you. And I don’t think that only black people can talk about hip-hop just like I don’t think only white people can write certain types of films. Do you know what I mean? It’s open to everybody. If I honestly would have read the script and thought, “These white dudes don’t know what they’re talking about,” I wouldn’t have did the film. But I read it, and I was like, “Wow, they know what they’re talking about.” And they were also very open. Jeremy and Lee were very open to whatever input that we had. If we were like, “Oh, I don’t like the way this sounds, I don’t like seeing it this way,” they were just like, “Hey, try it this way.” And it was a great collaboration. And I think that anybody that sees the film within any community is gonna realize that. They might not even realize who wrote it or who produced it or what have you. I have to give kudos to Jeremy because I know, as an artist, I’m coming from a theater background, it’s tremendously hard to try to act and try to direct at the same time. It’ll drive you insane. And he did a great job keeping it together so I commend him, and I love the idea that it was written by somebody outside the black community.
ANDELMAN: And how do you think he did at portraying a white producer?
McKINNEY: He was the most amazing sleazebag on camera that I’ve ever been around! That’s a good one. He just has that presence of just like, “Wow, we really don’t like this guy on camera.” But I think he did a heck of a job, and I think everybody in the film, not just trying to sound cheesy, but it was one of those projects where it was an amazing collaboration of just backgrounds clashing together and coming out with something beautiful or a really great piece of art, I think.
ANDELMAN: One of the things I liked was, I went to school at the University of Miami, just for a year, and it’s been a while, but I felt like, watching the film, that it really, both the cinematography and the atmospherics that were in the film, it really kind of captured the feel of being in Miami.
McKINNEY: Yeah, it did. It did, and it was great. Being out here in L.A., I just came back from Miami yesterday, actually, and I’m like, “Wow, I really miss home.” And the film does capture Miami great from everywhere we perform to the language to just the vibe of the people. Miami has a certain vibe that I think it stands out like anywhere else. Just like New Yorkers have that vibe. L.A. people have that vibe. Miami has that vibe and that culture to it, and I think the film really, really captures that.
ANDELMAN: What do each of you have on the line here as you wait for this film to find distribution and get out? What do you hope the film will do for each of you?
McKINNEY: Speaking personally, as an actor, you hope that somebody will see it, and it leads to something else. I hope people can see the film and take it for what it is. And any aspiring rapper or artist can be like, “I want to go into maybe a contract situation and say I’m gonna make my own choices.” That’s what I hope somebody can be touched by. As an actor, I just hope like anybody else that watched and be like, “Hey, let me call this guy in for an audition.
MITCHELL: Like Sheaun said, I want the movie to stand up on its own cause I think it’s an important piece. Going into this, our expectations were to make something good. They were also to grow, to get somewhere else, use it as a platform. The most viable way we saw was to make something in a genre that a lot of people were interested in, and hip-hop certainly captured that. It’s one of the biggest pop cultural movements there is in America. We said, “Let’s make a film about something that’s important and current and now and has a point.” At the same time, let’s make something good out of it, and we tried to do that and tried to give what we felt and how we really perceived everything. After it’s been done, I really want it to get out there and people to see it and maybe think about it a little bit. I want it to stand on its own. At the same time, I want to use it as a platform to make bigger and bigger projects and reach more people with each successive work. So, yeah, I’m really hoping it does as well as possible.
ANDELMAN: And Jeremy, I should ask you what is the status of the film? Where are you at on the business side of things?
MITCHELL: We’re working on getting a distribution deal. We’re actually looking to try to get into a big festival and get a little more worldwide exposure just to up the status of the project, the awareness of it, and be able to sell for a deal that will make the film circulate more and reach more people. It’s complete, and we recently finished post and got everything done, put the soundtrack in. We’re shopping it around and trying to seek it out, getting it out there into the marketplace.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Fat Joe, gangsta rap, gangster rap, Jeremy Mitchell, Justin Marx, Lee Cipolla, Marlon Taylor, Nemesis, Sheaun McKinney, Suzie Abromeit
¶ 9:17 PM
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