Interview (Written): Gary Ross (“Free State of Jones”)

A /film interview with Gary Ross, writer-director of the movie Free State of Jones which debuts in theaters this weekend.

You worked on Free State of Jones for around a decade. Were a lot of those years dedicated to research?

It was a tremendous amount of research. I don’t think I did anything but read for a couple of years. And I mean scores of books. I was a visiting fellow at Harvard for a couple of years. I studied under the tutelage of a professor there named John Stauffer, who was head of the American Civilization Department. I spent a lot of time in Jones County visiting it and meeting the local people and getting the local flavor and doing kind of a visceral history.

I really had to learn a lot before I could ever write this movie. I had to learn the entire background of the Civil War. And because so much of this movie refutes the revisionism that’s been around the Civil War, I had to become extra steeped in a lot of the historiography, which is the history of history, and the way the history has evolved and the way our memory of the Civil War has evolved in order to….which is a pretty new perspective in order to debunk a lot of the myths that had been promulgated about the Civil War, and especially Reconstruction.

So that’s a long, long process where you are needing to master and understand a lot of material that may be outside the particular story that you are telling in order to have a supercontext.

The film focuses on Reconstruction quite a bit, and it’s easy to imagine someone else finishing this story with some victorious moment after the Civil War has ended.

Well, you know, that version would have been the white savior movie. That version would have been, “Oh, there’s a triumphant victory, and everything is fine,” and we tie it up with a Hollywood bow and there’s a happy ending. But we all know there wasn’t a happy ending. No sooner was technical emancipation granted than the former Confederates got their land and their power back and began passing laws which were called The Black Codes that were a form of re-enslavement and driving people back to the plantation, driving freed men back to the plantation.

And what ensued was a 10-year struggle over the meaning of freedom, which sadly led to an abdication by the North, a quasi-victory by the South, the reinstitution of a kind of agrarian labor system that morphed into sharecropping and the birth of Jim Crow. So there’s no happy ending there. And there’s no false Hollywood ending there. I’d rather tell the truth than give people a false happy ending or some false satisfaction.

For the rest of the interview, go here.