Original-Cin interview - Just Mercy: 'If anger was all it took to create justice, we would have had it a long time ago'
“I’m walking on red carpets all the time these days,” Bryan Stevenson says with a laugh at the Toronto International Film Festival. The justice activist – whose most celebrated case is dramatized in the Michael B. Jordan/Jamie Foxx movie Just Mercy – has certainly received less friendly welcomes.
The founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Alabama, received bomb and murder threats when he took the Death Row case of Walter McMillian (Foxx), who’d been convicted in 1987 of the death of an 18-year-old white woman in a Monroeville, Ala. dry cleaner. Three white witnesses placed McMillan at the scene, while six black ones testified he was at a fish fry.
Reasonable doubt rang loud and clear. But Stevenson, a Harvard grad who’d passed up lucrative offers to come south and defend the wrongfully accused, discovered a justice system that would double down as more holes sprung in a prosecution against a poor or marginalized client.
A protracted series of hearings, and a change of heart in both a prosecution witness and a prosecutor himself, saw McMillian freed, the first of more than 140 people Stevenson’s organization would eventually free from Death Row, a record that would see him profiled on 60 Minutes.
Director Destin Daniel Cretton (The Glass Castle and the upcoming Marvel film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) adapted his movie from Stevenson’s memoir Just Mercy, and appeared with the author in a TIFF roundable interview.
Just Mercy, which also co-stars Brie Larson, opens January 10.
Justice activist Bryan Stevenson
“It’s pretty thrilling to be in the company of such talented people and see the excitement and interest around the film. And it’s good to see it screen in a place like Toronto,” Stevenson says. “It’s such a diverse city that asks itself a lot of questions about what it means to be in a community where everybody is not just the same.
“We’re asking those same questions in this film.”
Stevenson admits he felt some trepidation over handing his life story over to Hollywood.
“It’s not the norm in Hollywood to tell stories that are different and challenging and less familiar to people. So, I had the same apprehensions anyone would have when they say, ‘Let’s make a movie out of your book.’ There are a lot of ways for this to be made into a film that would not be particularly helpful.
“What I’ve found in my work is that there are a hundred ways to do it wrong and only a handful of ways to do it right.
“But when I met Destin, my confidence rose. He was just kind and compassionate and caring, and he was so sincere and earnest. And he said, ‘I don’t want to do this if we can’t do it right.’
“And then the other cast was pulled together, it made me feel quite optimistic. And when I saw the film, I was really energized, really moved that they had captured so much about these people who are mistreated and abused and marginalized in our justice system.”
Michael B. Jordan and director Destin Daniel Cretton go over the script for Just Mercy
Cretton, for his part, said he wasn’t much of an activist before tackling Just Mercy, but that Stevenson’s book, “really changed my life. I didn’t grow up chasing these issues. But reading Brian’s book, it’s so accessible and so relatable, to be able to see these prisoners on Death Row come alive.
“It makes me see it as, ‘That could be my friend, that could be my brother.’ They laugh at the same things I laugh at, they care about the same things I care about. It’s such a simple revelation, but a really powerful one.”
The effort to avoid Hollywood-ization extended to reining in Jordan’s performance, a counter-intuitive approach to one of Hollywood’s hottest stars on the heels of Creed and Black Panther.
“As storytellers, we like to push it as far as we can, and give Michael B just a lot of big things to do,” Cretton says. “But working closely with Bryan, we were constantly reminded that this character isn’t operation for himself. He’s operating on behalf of 50-to-100 clients he’s working for at any given time. And his emotional reaction to a judge has a trickle effect that can negatively affect people he’s working for.
“And that restraint helped us to understand and that became a conversation with Michael B, creating this - a really moving, magical performance, with all his emotions trapped inside. It’s a subtle thing on the surface, but there’s a lot happening underneath his skin.”
Says Stevenson, “We did spend a lot of time talking about how the work I’ve been doing requires you to be strategic.
“You can’t just react, you can’t just get angry and show your anger. If anger was all it took to create justice, we would have had it a long time ago.”
From 60 Minutes to TED Talks to a book and movie, Stevenson has been spreading his message of equal-justice for more than a quarter-century, in an infamously unjust Southern legal landscape. Does he feel much has changed for his efforts?
“My office is still in Montgomery,” he says. “The staff is bigger, we have more faces. It’s become a community.
“But a lot of things haven’t changed. We still have a very non-responsive unfair system that is putting innocent people in jails and prison. We (the US) still have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We still have too few people of colour in decision-making roles. We still have an animus toward the poor. We still look the other way when people are suffering. So, we still have a lot of work to do.”
That community took hold in front and behind the camera, Cretton says. “Brie said this thing that’s very insightful. She said people come up to her and say, ‘Oh, you’re an actor. You must be a very good liar.’
“And she said, ‘Actually, it’s the opposite.’ I suppose it might be true for some actors, but all these actors, they are good at what they do because they cannot lie. They open themselves up to all the stuff inside them that relate to the character they are portraying.
“So, they embody what I call in Bryan Stevenson, this ‘genius of empathy.’ We aren’t just watching Walter McMillian. We’re watching Walter McMillian interpreted through all of the things that Jamie Foxx has gone through and relates to. And he’s opening himself up in front of the camera to let everybody see it.
“And to let me sit a few feet away from that and experience it, it was a very powerful thing.”