“Antoine’s the best. I couldn’t think of anybody better to direct this movie than Antoine Fuqua. He’s got a great sense of the characters. He’s not from New York, but he got out here and just wanted to be around everything Brooklyn, soak it up.”
That’s first-time screenwriter Michael Martin, in the midst of telling me his amazing Cinderella story, which begins with a tollbooth clerk from East New York writing an original screenplay called Brooklyn’s Finest and ends with the script being produced by Paramount with Mr. Fuqua (Training Day) directing.
I knew nothing of that story when I discovered the film shooting in my Brooklyn neighborhood last month. My first reaction to the sight of a huge Hollywood crew and thugged-out extras in gold chains was, another bigass Ho’wood King-Kong-ain’t-got-nuthin perp pageant. But, hanging out with the crew–the friendliest and most accessible I’ve ever observed– I wanted to believe that these nice people weren’t just here for pulp plunder.
So when my editor pointed me to Martin’s cool life story, I prepared to eat my shoe. Two weeks later, the crew was still working hard at the Van Dyke Houses housing project. A heatwave had descended recently, bringing to mind another long hot summer flick shot on the streets of Brooklyn, Do the Right Thing. At midday lunch, Martin endured the heat, and my questions, in a project courtyard.
MICHAEL MARTIN: [Fuqua] wants everything to be as authentic as possible. That’s why they’re shooting out here, using people from the community, giving them prominent roles, background roles…
STEVEN BOONE: To that end, does Fuqua keep you involved on the set?
MM: Yes, with everything. And even more than that, there’s a lot of technical advisors from the neighborhood, as far as making everything as authentic as possible. We don’t want to make a bad Brooklyn movie. We really want to show exactly how it is, how beautiful it is, how gritty it is, in every way, shape possible.
SB: Does this experience give you a yen to shoot your own stuff?
MM: Definitely. I kind of got good at screenwriting, and it opened up some opportunities, but my first love is directing. The great thing about Antoine is I get to kind of be on his shoulder and see how he works– really see how an A-list director controls the set, controls the camera. It’s like film school all over again for me.
SB: Do you think you’ll ever “go Hollywood” in a sense?
MM: No. Brooklyn forever, man. I want to make movies based in New York, real New York stories. Hollywood’s not for me. I mean, it’s for me as far as getting the opportunity to make something like this, but it doesn’t change my mentality or change the stories I’m gonna write.
SB: Talking to the kids out here, I see that a lot of them are really inspired by all this.
MM: That was one of the biggest things for me, man, being on the set and seeing these kids of 8, 10, 12, it shook them when somebody said, “This is the writer”– kinda shocked. Really funny. Somebody said, “I never would have pictured you as a Hollywood screenwriter. I didn’t know what a Hollywood screenwriter was, but I didn’t think it was gonna be you. Antoine brings a lot of kids around, lets them sit in his chair, talks to them about movies, like, “You can do this, too.” You should see the way these kids light up. The possibilities, and a whole new world they didn’t know existed, right in their own neighborhood.
SB: Are there any projects you would turn down?
MM: I don’t think I’ll turn down anything. Any story can get told. I guess seeing all this and seeing the way some of the actors are dressed, with all the jewelry, you might say, “This is a Hollywood movie, man. They’re gonna exploit this neighborhood.” But it’s not that type of movie. If you give yourself a barrier, what’ll happen is somebody will tell the bad version of this movie because you refused to tell your version. Everything can be told. You need the best storytellers to tell it.
SB: Not the joke, the delivery.
MM: Exactly. People pass by and think we’re making a big hood drug movie, but we’re not. It’s a movie about how police officers feel exploited and how that exploitation trickles down to everybody, down to this neighborhood as well, as a result of people in power not paying attention to what’s really going on. And everybody knows that– I can’t say everybody. Everybody here knows that. Maybe not everybody in New York knows that, not everybody in the world knows that.
SB: It sounds like you have a political–not a political agenda but a strong political awareness.
MM: That’s what Antoine and I talked so much about. Like the Sean Bell shooting. Because there is a shooting in this movie, involving police officers. The entire movie is a result of that. We’ve sort of lost that in movies, that anger, dealing with what happens when something like this happens and that anger comes out. It goes back to Spike Lee and Do the Right Thing. You saw what happened in Howard Beach and how it inspired him to tell the movie and express those feelings out to the world. And we’re doing the same thing here.
SB: As intense as the movie sounds, I was shocked at how cool and laidback the set is. I see Don Cheadle, that guy from Clockers, that other guy from The Wire just in the mix with the people.
MM: We have the Nation of Islam doing security, but there hasn’t been one single incident the whole time we’ve been here. I know the Mayor’s Office, their thought was, “This is gonna be horrible, gonna be the worst possible thing. People are going to get injured, put in jeopardy”– I mean, they really said this.
SB: (laughs) Wow.
MM: “Expect to get bricks thrown at you, ice cubes.” They said all that stuff, and we were like, “You’re talking about people like they’re animals. And you see it out here. It’s completely the opposite.
Editor’s note: I couldn’t find any images of Martin or set pictures from Brooklyn’s Finest, so I appended this story with the music video for “Brooklyn’s Finest” by Jay-Z and the Notorious B.I.G. I thought its high 90s, blown-out Hype Williams flash would provide an interesting contrast to Martin’s stated mission of telling “real New York stories” in gritty Brooklyn.
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