Filmmaker Mike White & his dad talk 'Brad's Status'; Creative Arts Emmy winners

MEL WHITE: There is so much life material in "Brad's Status." That film is about me. I was sitting next to Diane Keaton as we watched it and I said, Should I leave this room with a bag over my head because people will all know it's me? It was about me and his trip, although he made it a lot better and he made the father a lot smarter.



MIKE WHITE: It's usually all personal, but it's not autobiographical. I love my dad and I do think, in a way, it's a love gift to my dad. But the parts where I feel like I'm hard on Brad I feel like are actually more me — those petty moments that I am resentful of somebody else's success or schadenfreude of someone else's failure. Whatever it is, it's not my whole self, but there is a part of me that has those things. And it's embarrassing and I felt like the movie was a way to kind of unpack those things and hopefully then be released of some of that.

MEL WHITE: When I look at Michael and his success now, I'm just absolutely in awe of it. But I don't feel in any way jealous. Of course if he doesn't loan me money now and then I would. But the fact is I am proud of him for being smarter and richer and more powerful than I am. There's something though about the film that is not just a personal thing. I think he's holding up a mirror to culture, all these crazy guys who have their own planes, they have their own this-and-that. And then he holds it up to me and I'm saying, I have a 501C3. I got no pension. I have no money. And so I've thought, now and then, Have I made a mistake? Do I at least sell Amway on the side or something?

Cinematographer Xavier Grobet and writer-director Mike White on the set of "Brad's Status."

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Jonathan Wenk

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MIKE WHITE: There's the other side of it, which I realize I'm also on the other end of — maybe people see me and I have this life and I have some freedom. You can be on both sides of that. You can be the one who thinks that everybody's having a good party without you. You're the one who's curating your life and putting it on Instagram, and maybe making one of your friends sitting in their cave think, Oh great, thanks.

MEL WHITE: Didn't you feel like that you picked up some of that stuff from me? I wonder if I'd wasted a lot of life and not succeeded in ways. I mean, there are moments where I've gone through that. And maybe you were reading me like you read me when you were a real little kid.



MIKE WHITE: You write books, you made films, you've been a preacher. You have a relationship to the world. And I think that that was something that I wanted to explore, that I don't think is explored very much in movies in an observational way that I can relate to. Like feeling like you want the love of the world. Where you stand in relation to the world was something that I definitely felt you struggled with at different times — where you felt good about the external things that were coming back at you at certain moments, and then sometimes feeling frustrated that you weren't getting the reactions that you wanted from the world. And that's something I certainly relate to in the movie business and people I know.

MEL WHITE: Did you hear him say, I think it was a love gift to my dad? I feel like that was. And I look at that film now and I say, Thanks, Mike. You got me, both sides of me, and you didn't make me look terrible for the other side. I really love that film.



He hasn't changed much. Michael has always been an observer — always thinking, always talking about what other people are doing and feeling. And he's an observer now. Only he's now turned it into a tremendous vocation. And when I look back on it, I don't think I've changed much either. We haven't changed much. He's still my son. I still love him. We're still taking that tour of saying, What do we wanna do next? I don't see us changing much.



MIKE WHITE: It's just gotten better, Dad.



MEL WHITE: Oh geez.

I'd been reading this book called "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander, who's [also] in the film. It's dealing with the trace [from] slavery to mass incarceration. This was all in my world so I just started writing. I was like, I want to write this. I'm going to try to present it to Eva. I end up seeing Eva at President Obama's birthday party in the White House. I walk up to Eva after a little bit of wine and I say, Eva, I want to do a song for [your film]. Let me rap it to you. I start saying part of the verse I wrote for her movie, which I'd never seen. She's like, It's pretty good. You can submit a song. I'll send you the film. And that's how it started. 

I started the song ... it was August. I was looking at this election, and from my perspective I was like, This just doesn't feel like this is a person who's running to better the country. I was listening to those catch phrases, like Make America Great Again. Are you doing your best to make it great for everyone? And [the lyrics] "Trump me" is putting that mentality, that divisiveness, on to all of us. All of the American citizens who don't want to be divided, who are open to whether you're Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Hindu. Embracing gays, transgender. Embracing black, Latino, white, Asian. Those are the people that I wanted to say, Hey, we're not going to get Trumped. We can't! I wanted "Letter to the Free" to express that sentiment.

It is very important because these times seem so critical and delicate. It's important to address the issues and empower in the music and empower in the filmmaking. Also [to] give a voice to the voiceless. I've been around people who don't have [a voice]. Sometimes it's just the exposure of seeing something better that can give that person a chance to live a better life. I'm not judgmental in that way. I don't even judge the people that are out there pushing the hate. I'm on my Martin Luther King mentality of like, Man, we're going to overcome this hate with the strongest love possible.

I'm an artist. I want to create art that is great. I choose to have a message because I have this platform. To me, if you are given a microphone, you do have the blessing to say something if you can, and if it's in your heart. So it's in my heart. The music I grew up listening to — some of it was some of the greatest music. I didn't even realize it even had a message until I got to be a teenager or a young adult. I was like, I'm not into making message music. You want people to digest it. You want people to hear it and in some ways just enjoy it, but also be inspired.

[Editor's note: Alton Sterling was a 37-year-old black man shot by Baton Rouge police officers last summer.] I didn't talk to Alton Sterling's family and I feel I could have taken more responsibility in making sure I got in contact with them. The director of the short that we did — his name is Arthur Jafa, a great director — he brought the footage of Alton Sterling into the whole picture and I initially was like, I don't know if I really want to use this because I don't watch those videos. I don't watch the videos because they affect me too much. I just don't want to see it. I don't feel like watching it is going to benefit me toward [making] change. When he showed it to me in the context, it put me in the mindset of what I wanted, what the seed of "Black America Again" was. "Black America Again" was created because there's been so many unarmed black men who've been killed — brown people too — at the hands of police officers. It made me think, beyond police, [about] the lack of value for black life. I wanted to show our humanity in a different way. Throughout all the struggle, we still are here as people in America that are loving, creative, that want unity and are good people. All of these things to me are showing the humanity of who we are, and that's really the gist of it.

Rewriting the black American story is removing the picture that all black people are criminals, all black people are monolithic. It's removing those thoughts and showing families, showing the love, showing the strength in us. Serena Williams is someone who is rewriting the black American story. Neil deGrasse is rewriting the black American story. Ta-Nehisi Coates. I think it's just about removing those stereotypes and showing new pictures of who we are. 

The first time I really realized I could win a Grammy is when I saw The Roots win a Grammy. It's because they were my friends and they were making music that was different. That's truly the idea is to let kids see themselves. And I'm grateful that we have "Moonlight" and that we have "Hidden Figures" and that we have "Fences." Even in films that are dealing with the superheroes. We want kids to see Latino superheroes and women superheroes and Asian superheroes and Black superheroes. Just like we got to see our president, now kids growing up know you don't have to be a certain color to be president. We've got to get over the hump of female presidents. We've got to really make that happen.

I hope that a viewer will see that film and see some of the companies that are supporting private prison business and say, Maybe my first step is not going out and supporting those businesses. And if they step back and say also, Let me figure out what I can do. This is unjust. This is not right — what's going on in our criminal justice system and with our prison system. I just want the person to step back and look within themselves and say, This is how I want to be part of the change.



That's all I really would like for the movie and the song to do. Obviously, for me, it made me go out — and I'm continuing to do that — and find out more about policies, about things that I can be active in changing when it comes to mass incarceration. One of the things I did find out specifically is that a lot of people coming back into society, they feel lost. This is a country, as we say, of second chances. So I would like for those people to have those chances. I would encourage anybody who watches the film to, whatever way you can empower yourself and others, figure that passion out and go do it.

Well, there's no drugs and no hookers. 

On tour with the rock band there's none of that stuff. 

But in Hollywood there is [laughs.] The difference is mainly travel and how you end writing music. When I sit down to write music for my band, we don't care what anybody thinks. When I sit down to write for a visual media that someone else has created, I'm sort of at their mercy. They tell me what they like. They tell me what they want and I give them my interpretation of what that is. As I do that, and they say, "Okay, but really what I meant was this," then I make changes, where as I would never do that if somebody said, "I don't like that guitar solo." I'd be like, "I don't care what you think." 

Well, it differs from show to show. On "Fargo" for instance, our showrunner, Noah, was a musician. So we have a very easy vernacular. In other shows I work on, they have absolutely zero vernacular. It's my job as a composer to translate. So when they say, "We want it to sound more blue." I have to figure out what that means and that's just part of the job. It could be a guessing game sometimes. 

When I sat down and talked with Noah that first night, he said that he wanted it to feel cold and lonesome, but also to feel the expanse of the open fields of snows. So it was really about wanting to stay within the confines of the feel of the movie. So the movie had a certain tone, so I couldn't go outside the tone of the movie. We wanted to keep the tone, but to create our own identity. 

In this particular case, I actually made a conscious decision to want an Eastern European orchestra to play the score for season one because the sound of an Eastern European orchestra is a thing. 

In terms of their playing style in the way they emote. But in terms of what is available to us, you know, I think that when we made the decision to do this show, we needed to make it sound like a movie. It couldn't sound like a television show or else we wouldn't be able to stand up to the original. 

Well, the TV show sounds like the music didn't matter. Television turns away from music because they use music as a crutch. When you're making television you're on a very short time schedule. You have a very limited budget and when you don't get it, you need to be able to fix it in post. A lot of times, like, "This didn't really feel scary enough so how do we make it more scary." Well, we use music to do that. 

I would say I've had to do that a lot. I get that phone call, like, "We really didn't get this to be funny." 

It's also a composer's worst nightmare — try to make it funny with music. You know, I don't have a slide whistle! I can't do that! You know, but as a composer what we like to do is we like to just support the narrative and we wanna follow and not lead. 

You're absolutely right. And that's the thing, we will watch "Fargo" without music and then decide, you know, maybe we could use music there, but everything is working without music. When you can get it to work without music then any music you put in is gonna be great. 

So we're always trying to do cool, new, fun things. Noah, our showrunner, is always having these ideas. He'll just call me up in the middle of the night and he'll say, "Hey, what about blah blah blah." And I'll say it's a great idea. So one day he emailed me. He was like, "You know, we need another sort of rhythmic idea." We did this thing in season one where episode two opened with just a drum beat and it became sort of thematic for these two bad guys. 



So he called me up and said, "Could we do something that is reminiscent of that. We need some rhythmic thing to be that thing that talks about what we did in season one." And I said, "Yeah, that sounds like a great idea." And he said, "What about marching drums?" And I said, "That's a really great idea. Why don't I write a piece of music for a whole drum line and we'll see how that works." So I wrote this piece of music and then I called him and said, "So, here's this piece of music that I mocked up. I think I need to have it done by a whole bunch of live players and why don't I ask the USC marching band to come into the studio and record it?" And he immediately back and said, "Oh my god! That's a great idea! Let me know when you're doing that." 



So I called the professor at USC and we got them to come down. We got 14 guys to come down to the studio, and when I say guys, I mean kids because they are children. I was in the studio and I was looking at these guys who were playing so fantastically — and they're all 18, 19, 20 — and I was totally blown away by it.



That was a lot of fun, and a lot of them came in saying, "Oh, I loved season one! It was great! I remember that cue."  

No, they didn't and the thing was I had to get pizza for everybody — because they're college kids — and I ordered 15 pizzas. 

Well, at the end of the day, there were no pizzas left. So let's just say that. 

Aloy, my character in the game, is the protagonist and it's an open-world game. There are many different missions in the game. There's what we call the "critical path," which is the main story line and all the missions that you have to do to complete the narrative arc of the game. Then there are side quests. They're not essential to completing the game. They're for fun or because you want to learn the story. My character is involved in every single mission. You spend every single moment of the game with her. There's just so much content. The average play time for an open-world game is about 40 to 50 hours. 

Aloy is a younger woman. She's 18. But she's also experienced a lot of trauma and grief in her life. She never knew her real parents. She grew up as an outcast and was treated really terribly by all the other people in the tribe. There's a potential to make her petulant and angry and closed-off and suspicious, which I think are all things that would make sense for a character like that. But Aloy — what we discovered is that she comes at things from a baseline of curiosity and compassion, mostly. While she is bruised and has elements of suspicion and has an edge to her, she mostly is curious and open to the world. Making that choice and finding her that way informed the rest of the process, because you also have to think about the fact that a player might be spending 60 hours with this character. 

With Aloy in particular — when I auditioned for the character, I did not know how big this game was going to be. When I found out, I felt a tremendous amount of responsibility to make a character that was compelling and interesting. There are very few games, especially on the scale of "Horizon," that have a sole protagonist that is female. 

Most games, if you're stuck with a singular protagonist, it's a man. So I felt a lot of responsibility to make Aloy a complex and interesting character. One of the archetypes that exists in games a lot for female characters is the "capital S" strong female character that has no emotional nuance and is basically just a gun with legs. I really wanted to make sure that Aloy felt three-dimensional and complex and could feel fear at times and could feel vulnerable at times and have a rich emotional landscape. I've been extremely lucky and grateful, especially with Aloy, that she is not sexualized. Her dress is totally practical for what she's doing. She has a body type that makes sense. Like all of the other female characters in the game as well, there's a whole litany of female characters that are of diverse sexualities and races. They all have dress that makes sense for where they live, their tribe and the things they do. It's such a thoughtful construction of this world.

I think we assume a lot about both genders. But in particular I think we assume that only boys play games and that boys are only interested in playing games that reflect their narratives and their interests. What I found in the study with Rosalind is that boys don't really care. They just want to play a fun game and they don't really mind if they're playing as a woman or as a man. Girls have more of a preference to play as a woman. Based on that, it makes more financial sense to include more female protagonists because boys ... don't really care. 

There's the idea that gaming is a closed door and that men are holding access to who gets in or out, and you have to prove — if you're female — that you're a real gamer. I think the younger generation, they don't care. They want more women playing and they just want to play with friends and they just want to play fun games. 

That's why I think "Horizon" is such a huge deal. The fact that Guerilla Games chose to make a new IP, which in-and-of-itself is risky. Games cost millions upon millions of dollars, and to be able to break even they have to sell millions and millions of copies. Which is why there are so many sequels because, if it's a known franchise, of course people are more likely to buy a bad game. Not only that, but having their main protagonist be a woman, for most people is considered very risky. It becomes a chicken-and-egg thing where publishers will say, People won't buy a game with women as a protagonist. But then, of course, they don't market it because they believe that's true. And if they don't market it, people don't know about the game and, thus, they won't buy it.

Now that "Horizon" is out and it sold so well, developers, if they want to pitch a game with a female protagonist, and the publisher says it won't sell, everyone can point at "Horizon" and say, Well?

I think most developers [recognize their importance]. The problem is, publishers don't. All actors are on strike against video games right now because of that very reason. Basically, all video games have a component where, for a while, you're going to have to be doing death screams, pain screams, attacks — and those can be really taxing on your voice. There are horror stories of people being pushed to the point where their vocal cords bleed, or [they're] asked to scream for four hours. So we're asking for a provision where all stressful sessions are limited to two hours with no reduction in pay. MOCAP — motion capture and facial capture — are now a big part of games as well, but there isn't a requirement to have stunt coordinators on the set of motion capture studios. People are being asked to, in certain cases, do acrobatic things that they are not prepared for and have not been trained for, with no safety measures. We're also asking for transparency so that we can appropriately negotiate for ourselves. Then the biggest and most contentious part of the negotiations is asking for residuals. We're asking that for games that have only made over a certain amount of money, which I think last year only five games would have qualified. 

Games are progressing so quickly in terms of their graphics and the technology, and also the stories that they want to tell. People are still stuck in the old mindset where games are side scrolling like ["Super Mario Bros"]. But really, they are these beautiful works of art now, and so many games are hinged on performance.