A Quote by Andre Holland
I went down and spoke to some of the people who lived in the neighborhood in Miami. At the end of the day I think my connection with Tarell [Alvin McCraney] is what helped me the most.
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I had a cheat sheet because I knew Tarell [Alvin McCraney]. His movie is largely autobiographical. I knew about certain events in his life and some of the people he talks about. I had visited the place where he lived many times so I understood innately what that was.
I have worked with Tarell Alvin McCraney, who is the play Moonlight is based on. He's a company member at Steppenwolf. I have done a could of his plays here.
I have known Tarell Alvin McCraney for ten years but the involvement with Moonlight came more with Barry Jenkins, the director. He was a fan of the show I did called The Knick. He was also with Plan B Entertainment, who produced Selma. That is how I got involved.
It [Moonlight movie] deals with drug addiction, drug dealing, and single parenthood, but they are three dimensional characters. You understand where they are from and what they are trying to do with their lives. It is not a stereotype that has been pasted onto somebody. These are stories that come from Barry's [ Jenkins] and Tarell's [Alvin McCraney] mothers.
I was raised in a completely black world. In those days, if a white woman married a black man, she lived as a black woman, and that was just the end of it. So, I don't have a feeling of being bi-racial. I don't have a connection to it. People often come up to me thinking I do have a connection to it, and I kind of let them down because I really don't.
I think the obligation of an artist is to make a difference in the world. That is what matters most to me. I think that artists are the leaders of the world because they do not have a connection to the industrial complex, the day-to-day short-term survival that most people are involved with.
It was just music all day... My neighbors were musicians, and my brother and my family and everybody... It was just a musical neighborhood. I think the neighborhood was such a good family type of vibe for me that I didn't even realize some of the people weren't my real family till later on in life.
I was fortunate that by the time I was born, there were a lot of comforts and at the same time I lived in a neighborhood where it was brought to my eyes every single day that people didn't live like me. Every day I knew that many of my friends "got relief." That was important in my thinking about the world, thinking that not everybody lived that way.
When I grew up, I lived in a neighborhood that had social clubs. It's never delightful to glamorize one's youth. My neighborhood was poor. But people felt part of the neighborhood. This was in Rockaway Beach, Long Island.
Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving: most of the scientists I spoke with assume we'll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade.
Having my name kind of pop out on a page more so than other people helped in recruiting, helped in a lot of different areas. But when it comes down to it and you're talking about professional football - you can either play, or you can't. They don't care what your last name is at the end of the day.
I wanted to work with Barry [ Jenkins]. I am a big fan of his from Medicine for Melancholy years ago. Tarrell [Alvin McCraney] is my favorite playwright. I will do anything he asks. The characters were so clearly drawn and three dimensional. It was an easy thing to say yes to.
I've always felt some kind of connection to people who are kind of over-smart. People who over-think things to the point of some sort of paralysis, and I think that certainly can be me on any given day.
I think there's always some good reason to try and modernize most period things, because at the end of the day, they may have, I suppose, used a different language or a different etiquette, but ultimately, these are still people that loved and breathed and lived and ate and weed and pooed just like we do now.
Most of the time I was in the Northeast, I lived in the country, and I think that helped me to discover my material for writing.
At the end of the day, most people really only want a minivan for a certain part of their lives, when they're forced to have it because they have a lot of kids they've got to carry around or whatever, so I still think that the emotional connection with the car is very important.
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