'The Man in My Basement' author Walter Mosely joins director Nadia Latif and cast Willem Dafoe, Corey Hawkins and Anna Diop at THR's TIFF suite at the 1 Hotel Toronto. Mosely talks about finding a good director like Latif, while Latif expresses how she felt when she initially read his book for the first time 20 years ago. Plus, the stars talk about their thoughts on the story and working together on the film.
00:00Realistically, what is the number that you guys, like, if someone knocked on your door,
00:05like, what would a person have to offer?
00:07To what? To rent the basement?
00:08Yeah.
00:09Is it Willem? He can come for free.
00:11Exactly.
00:12If Willem shows up, bro, come on in.
00:14Hey, pizza.
00:17Party, party.
00:17Yeah, you know.
00:23The big thing is choosing a director.
00:26That's the big thing.
00:28And I said, well, you know, she understands the book.
00:30She's a director, you know, and I go, well, this is great.
00:34And it was.
00:34So, you know, I mean, sometimes it's not.
00:36Sometimes you make that mistake, but, you know.
00:39Name names.
00:41Beat, party.
00:42Beat.
00:44You can never be sure that you're going to make a good film.
00:46But if you've got a good producer and a good director and you have, you know, fair to middling actors,
00:52then you have a really good chance to make a good film.
00:56And so I think it's that really rare thing where you hear about a book adaptation and you feel like,
01:02oh, I would actually just kill anybody else who tried to do this because I've thought about this book for 20 years
01:08and I still remember how I felt about this book when I first read it.
01:12It's about what was the effect on the initial reader.
01:15And I was like, I was that initial reader.
01:17This is me.
01:17I can only perceive it as I perceived it, you know, 20 plus years ago.
01:21And that's the person I'm sort of making the film for, I think.
01:24The genesis of the book for me, and somebody said, well, Mr. Moser, what do you think every black man in America needs?
01:34And I said, a white man locked up in their basement.
01:40Because then you could go downstairs and figure out why you didn't get the promotion.
01:44You know, it was a, there is, there's a, there's a humorous moment, you know, to, to the idea of having somebody locked up in your basement, you know, that it didn't come out in the book.
01:58Very humorous.
01:59I agree.
01:59But the humorous beginning.
02:01Oh, there's some funny things.
02:01There's some funny things.
02:03Yeah.
02:03There's a couple of crack holes.
02:04No, it's true.
02:04But it's.
02:05Yeah.
02:05The sexual aspect of the book really grabbed me too.
02:10Like, like Charles's relationship with the woman and you wake up on the couch and you hear them upstairs doing what they're doing.
02:18And then he comes down to the basement and sees Willem's character completely nude and his, is huge.
02:25And it's like, that's also, you know, like a black man singing.
02:31Like, what does that mean?
02:32Like all of that I thought was, so that really spoke to me too.
02:36I remember like reading this book and looking at Charles and this world and this sort of moral psychological puzzle piece that he's, he's sort of drifting through.
02:49And yeah, it is a strange thing to be like, sure, rent my basement, you know, and pay this absurd amount of money, but also why not?
02:58Like he needs it, you know, he needs the money.
03:00He also has nowhere else sort of in life to sort of go.
03:05And this is a man who is struggling with trauma.
03:08He's struggling with like, he's wrestling with his family history.
03:11He's wrestling with all of those demons.
03:14And, and I don't know, it was just, I remember reading Nadia's script and envisioning it like in just a different way.
03:21Again, like just wanting to run towards the, the, the challenge of it.
03:25I, you know, I play the scene at a time.
03:28You can't plant anything.
03:30You don't know what it is until you get there.
03:33And I always, I always feel like if you anticipate things, you start to get out of the scene.
03:40You're outside of what's going on.
03:42It has a lot to do with, you know, personal history, who they blame, where their roots are, what they identify with, what their identity is.
03:51It's very rich for that.
03:53So I don't know how you prepare for that, except for when you're really looking at the other guy and you're saying, listen, this is my story.
04:02Because that's, that's how this stuff is revealed.
04:05They don't have a particular agenda to share.
04:08It just, it sort of happens.
04:09Shameedly, I read the script first.
04:14Sorry, Walter.
04:16But it has this really rich black history there that's been kind of like pushed to the edges of society and it's now at the Hamptons.
04:23Yeah, I really always appreciate when stories are exploring these individuals, these communities that are not, you know, at the forefront anymore.
04:34Because there's real lives there and there's lots of history and pain there, which Charles' character represents.
04:41I mean, this film is about so much, but especially that enclave of black history.
04:46Particularly in America, the black experience being connected to the land and being connected to that history, especially for African-Americans, because the story of survival and resilience in that way, it's a different kind of connection to the ground in which we stand on and what Aniston represents as a threat to that.
05:06It's like a nihilism. Like, what if history didn't matter at all? Like, it's just the flip side of, like, what would happen if you completely freed yourself from your history and said, I can be whoever I want to be.
05:16Now, obviously, if you're a black person or a white person, those are very different, those are very different ideas.
05:19But actually, there's this idea of, like, history is something that is written by certain people.
05:25And actually, if you write your own history, what kind of power does that give you?
Be the first to comment