Interview: Neil Drumming — Part 3

Neil Drumming is a filmmaker, screenwriter, and journalist. He is a former staff writer and editor at Entertainment Weekly, and his work has appeared in Wired, The Washington Post, Vibe, Rolling Stone, Essence, and Vanity Fair. He wrote and directed his first film Big Words, which the New York Times describes as “weaving race, class, sexual orientation and politics — as well as the evolution of rap music — into a wistful tapestry of male disaffection.”

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Neil. In Part 3, Neil digs into a key relationship between John and a female character, homosexuality in hip hop culture, and how Neil wrote the rap lyrics in Big Words:

Scott: Some of my favorite moments in the movie are where we go inside John’s head, and you hear him doing some spontaneous rapping, our observations of what he’s seeing or how he’s feeling. It also shows the music is still with him, even though he’s trying to wall himself off, right?

Neil: Absolutely. It’s just a way…because I think in raps, I write. I never stopped writing. I never stopped writing raps. I think in those terms, I wanted to take it even farther with a person whose basically inner monolog rhymes, you know?

Scott: You wrote all the lyrics?

Neil: Yeah.

Scott: Was that fun?

Neil: Yeah. Writing lyrics is always fun. Writing rap lyrics is cathartic for me. It’s not like I have ever had to gauge how good I am at it, but I’ve always felt very comfortable with doing it.

Scott: Was it a different experience, say writing rap lyrics for a song versus writing rap lyrics that you knew were going to be part of a movie’s dialogue?

Neil: No, because John raps the way I always wanted to rap. Also, I wrote them to music, we just didn’t play music to them. Then when I gave them to the actor I told him to try to be a little more loose with it, more extemporaneous. I always feel like rappers should strive to utilize their vocabularies, and to explore more topics and to be a little bit more unabashedly intelligent because I think it’s an intelligent art form. Hence the Big Words. John comes from the era when the music wasn’t just to tell people how much money you have, but also to impress people with your intelligence. This was a very brief moment in hip hop. That’s the generation I see them coming from.

Scott: Let’s work through these three characters a little more. Malik is probably the funniest of them. He’s the most verbal of the characters, carries the biggest chip on his shoulders. Yet as funny as he is, he has one of the movie’s most honest, dramatic moments where he and John meet up and Malik says, “I’m having a hard time and I can’t figure out how you and James can so easily forget how we used to be.” I thought that expressed profoundly this idea of regret, about feeling like you really lost an opportunity to do something in the past. Did you think that that is a universal theme people can really relate to and was that one of the drivers behind that part of his character?

Neil: It feels pretty universal to me. I just know too many people like that. I think it comes very naturally with a group like that because sometimes a group is definitely more than the sum of its parts and then when the parts separate it can never retain that vibrancy of the whole. I’ve had plenty of friends and collaborators like that. Together we were great, and their feeling is if we were great, why didn’t we just stay together? It would have been better. I have definitely felt that way. I tried to write from a lot of my own experiences and the experiences of people around me, and I hoped and prayed that those things would be universal. It just felt very natural to me.

Scott: With regard to James, you mention he’s come out of the closet, he’s living an openly gay lifestyle, and that gives you an opportunity in the movie to explore homosexuality within the hip hop culture specifically and in the black culture more generally. What drew you to that story line for James?

Neil: It’s a question that always comes up in Q&A’s. Once I’ve been asked to really think about it more, it has to do with a statistical thing which is, I love hip hop and I’ve been listening to it for most of my life, and it really seemed odd to me once I had gotten into my late 30s, that of all of these people, who I sort of know intimately in the sense of through their lyrics, and also having actually been a journalist and met and interviewed most of them, that no one has ever revealed a different sexuality. No one has ever come out. I know gay black men, and I know gay black men who listen to hip hop, but it seemed odd to me that there were no gay black men in hip hop. It just seemed absurd. I thought this can’t be the truth, so let’s explore someone who is actively involved and engaged in the culture who suddenly discovered their true sexuality later in life. It just seemed like a thing that has to have happened, even if people aren’t talking about it.

Scott: Then there’s John. It feels like there’s more screen time devoted to him and he feels like the emotional center of the movie. He’s got more distance to travel because he’s so walled off to the past and resistant to it. You put him into contact with this really great character, Annie. She supports herself by being a stripper but you go totally against stereotype, what you typically see those characters in movies, in that she may be the one who has her act together the most. What was your inspiration for her character and how did you go about developing her?

Neil: There are people who she’s based on. I’m a darker person, occasionally I succumb to melancholy. There’s nothing like a really nice, sweet woman around to make me feel better. That’s the beginning of that. Ultimately, I knew who John was going to be and I wanted a contrast for his darkness and I wanted someone whose situation might even be more dire in terms of whether they were actually going to become successful. But she never doubts she will get to where she’s going. I felt like I needed someone for him to actively push against, to try to shut down her dreams, but she would never succumb to that. She just seemed like the natural partner to him. I talked to a lot of strippers, I talked to a lot of friends. I’ve had a lot of nights just walking around the street with people, which is one of my favorite pastimes. A lot of that stuff came pretty naturally.

Scott: They have a complex relationship, she and John, in which they explore a lot of emotional and psychological territory in a short time span. There’s a really heated exchange between them a little past the midway point of the movie where Annie says, “You’ve got to care about stuff John, or you can’t hold on to it.” That really sets him off where he goes onto this tirade where he says, “You think it’s that easy, huh? All you’ve got to do is care about something? You can care about something as much as you want to, OK, do everything that it takes to get it, but eventually it will let you down or, even worse, let yourself down. Just as much as you wanted it, just as much as you cared about it, that’s how much you wish the thought never entered your head.”

It’s a real crystallization of these two personality types. Is it fair to say that Annie represents the voice of hope in contrast to John’s voice of cynicism?

Neil: Yeah, I think that’s definitely the case. I wanted you to be able to look at her and think maybe her hope is unfounded but that doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable, that it’s not strong, that it might be the only thing that takes her where she wants to be. The odds are against her. A lot of people will ask me why she’s a stripper. Because I want the audience to come into the movie, see her, hear what she does, and immediately have preconceived notions that we will then demolish. I want people to stop thinking of her that way. I want, by the end of the movie, people to think of her the way she thinks of herself.

Scott: Yes, she has that moment at the very end, where he shows up at John’s place again, she has these back‑to‑back lines, basically. “Of course, what would you even do with good news?” or, “People like you don’t get champagne,” or, “You were obsessed with things not working out.” She really pushes back on him. It felt like of all the people in the world John needed to intersect with at this particular point in time, Annie’s it. And it’s really refreshing having a female role where, in a sense, her faith or hope is stronger than where the guy is at.

Neil: Yeah, yeah. I definitely intended it. He’s deep in a hole when we meet him and it’s only a day so people don’t change that much in twenty four hours. He needed a pretty strong challenge to even get him slightly out of that hole. I hoped that, even the way you said he’s still got to find a fucking job at the end of the movie, my intention was to say, “OK, this guy did not just change. This woman did not change this man’s life completely but a little bit.” To me, that’s why I like movies that take place in a small span of time. I don’t really necessarily believe in huge changes, but I like a little bit of glimmer. It’s like a glimmer of hope. It’s a cliché, but it feels kind of real to me.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Neil discusses the ending of Big Words, how the response to the movie has been, and what his future plans are.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, go here.

You can follow Neil on Twitter: @neildrumming.