Andre Muir

I had the opportunity to sit and chat with the talented Andre Muir, a wonderful filmmaker from Chicago, who’s next project, When They Come for Us, is set to hit festivals this year. At the start of our video call, Muir took the time to make sure that the lighting from his hotel room in Mexico was just right. Before our talk had even begun, the director in him emerged.

Who is Andre Muir? How do you describe yourself? How do you feel you fit into this world?

How do I describe myself? I think that I am, first and foremost, a black man from Chicago. For being in a Midwestern city – which is normally middle of the road, very nice – I think that a lot of artists that come out of Chicago are very over-spoken in their belief systems. I think growing up in Chicago has a big impact on that. I don't know why. I actually really don’t know why, but I have noticed that if you look at a lot of artists that are socially conscious, a lot of them come from Chicago. As controversial as he is, you have Kanye who was very socially conscious. You have an Asia Monet. You have Jerry Lorenzo. A lot of artists that come out of Chicago for some reason want to be socially conscious. I think it's within the DNA. I think if you grew up in New York, or if you grew up in LA, your art can be for an aesthetic, and that's cool. I don't think there’s anything wrong with art being specifically for aesthetic, but I do think there's something about growing up in the art scene in Chicago that you feel like when you do art it has to serve a purpose or be socially conscious in some type of way. So yes, I am first and foremost a black man from Chicago.

I am a director. I came to film late in life. This isn't something that I always wanted to do. Originally, I wanted to be a lawyer. So my brain kind of works in that way. It does not work in a typical director way where you visually see things, you're focused on aesthetic, and you're focused on the best composition of a screen or of a frame. Instead, I think I was really fascinated with the gray areas growing up, because I wanted to be a lawyer. The thing that I love about being a lawyer is you’ve got to represent who you represent. So whether you think they're guilty, whether you think they're innocent, whether you think this law is biased, or whether you think this law is unbiased, if your job is to represent this group of people or this person, you have to represent them to the best of your ability. No matter where that falls in whatever gray area and I really love that. I think there's something really interesting about that.

I don't really believe in absolute truths, and there are circumstances where this one thing is ‘right,’ but there's always that one instance where there's this gray area when put in that context. That little muddy section is where I find the most interesting aspects of society so that's what I like to gravitate towards with my work. I think that because I wanted to be a lawyer, you can kind of see that reflected in my directing and work as well. It's not that my work isn't overly visual, I would just say it's more fixated on asking odder questions, not the easy questions. My first short film was really topical, to discuss police brutality, white on black crime, police on black crime, and then my first film focused on black on black crime, which was not the sexiest thing to do. I felt like that was where the true gray area was, that's where the true interest in subject matter was. I think anyone can see a white police officer abusing the community, abusing black people, and say, ‘that's wrong.’ I think that's easy, but I think the more interesting question is, ‘what are

the reasons why we're killing each other?’ I think that's a better question to ask. So that's why I made that film that way. I think gray areas are my thing as a director.

Lastly, I'm a Jamaican who didn't always love that aspect of himself. As I went into my work, I found myself reconnecting with my Jamaican heritage, but also my heritage as a black man in America. I grew up in predominantly white schools. I went to a lot of gifted programs. As I was growing up, I didn't see race. Then once I became a man, I felt race. So now I'm kind of reconnecting with it, and I see that manifesting itself in my work.

At what point did you realize you wanted to focus more on film and less on being a lawyer? Was there a specific turning point?

That's an interesting question. I never wanted to be an artist myself, but a lot of my friends were in the arts. When I was a kid, I didn't really respect the arts. As I got older, my friends started getting into art because it became cool. At first that wasn't really the cool thing to do. As they got more and more in the arts, I began to respect the arts more and more. I think I had this plan of being a lawyer and somehow being adjacent to the arts, like maybe being a media lawyer or something like that. I think I really started to appreciate film in college. I stopped going to class in college. I was one of those kids that could take a test and just pass it, only studying at night before. I didn't feel like I had to go to class. So when I wasn't going to class, I needed to do something, and so I was watching a lot of movies. As I was watching these movies, I started to realize they're not just movies. I started to see them as art. I never really saw movies as art. I always saw them as just something to entertain, but I started to realize there was intention with every frame. ‘Why does he reveal this phone call now?’, ‘What was he hiding before?’, ‘What is he revealing now?’. I began to notice how the pacing of a film can be drastically different from one film to the next. I started to really see the caricature of each filmmaker in these films, so that's when I started to appreciate it.

I also really thought that it would be easy. I was like, let me try this filmmaking thing out because these filmmakers are so stupid, it's so easy, let me just go make a film. I had saved up like $7,000, and I made a short film, and it was... really, really bad. For someone who always had everything come easily for them, with school always being really easy for me, making a film that was so bad was the first time I really felt challenged. I felt addicted to it. My own hubris was like, ‘okay, this first film was really bad, my next one will be amazing’. Then the next film I made was trash as well. You keep thinking your next one is going to be this really great project, and it always lets you down, but you do always grow from it, and then you try to improve on that in the next one. I think I am really, really addicted to that kind of process, that level of self improvement, and the fact that it never comes out the way that you see it in your head.

There was also an emotional reason for getting into film. As I mentioned before, my friends were gravitating towards the arts, as I was kind of getting ready for law. My best friend, unfortunately, was killed. He wanted to be an artist. He was an artist, not to say he wasn't, but he wanted to be

a successful artist. I felt like he was robbed of that. They say you're not supposed to make life decisions when something like that happens, but I did, I made a really big life decision. I told myself if he didn't get a chance to do it, I wanted to do it for him. And so I decided to take a shot at being a filmmaker and carry on.

Are there any specific filmmakers that you seem to gravitate to and continue to push your excitement towards film?

Yeah, for sure. I think every filmmaker, especially within my generation, gravitates towards Wes Anderson, but I'm, like, so tired of him right now. I think there's a real beauty to Wes Anderson, and I think he was one of the first people where I saw the director in their film, every frame of it. I really respected his work. I think another director that really inspired me was David Lynch. His films terrify me and they're not even supposed to be scary, but they terrify me. I just love their sound design, you know, they're just so immersive.

Most of the directors that originally inspired me, Martin Scorsese as well, were all white directors, and I really appreciated their craftsmanship. I think it's not until after college during my postgraduate era – when I was trying to find my place in the world, where I started to feel what it means to be a black man as opposed to my kind of naive concept of what it meant to be a black man – when the the filmmakers I really loved started to change. That’s not to say that I don't like those filmmakers anymore. But I then started to really appreciate directors like Spike Lee. I thinkDo the Right Thing took on a completely new kind of meaning to me and to this day it's one of my top five films. I started to really appreciate the fact that there aren't that many Black Filmmakers or POC filmmakers, and I want to change and expand that. If I have to be one of the first ones to do that, to open the doors, I'm really into that as well. And so, I’m definitely into Spike, I’m definitely into Barry Jenkins, but I'm also really into Greek cinema. Yorgos Lanthimos is probably my favorite director right now. He's crazy. He's so good. I really love the absurdism of his work.

I think a lot of people are really inspired by feature filmmakers, but I'm also really inspired by shorts. Short and commercial. Your Hiro Murai. He’s had such a big impact on me. Khalil Joseph, who also has had a huge impact on me. I try to channel them in probably everything I do to my own detriment because I just can't do it, you know?

There is one director that really made me go okay, I can do this, and it's because he makes films feel so effortless and that’s Richard Linklater. I think everything I do, I am truly trying to replicate one of his films. I think with 4 Corners, I was really heavily influenced by this movie called Slacker how they just bounced from story to story to story. I think with When They Come For Us, that is really inspired by like Waking Life by Richard Linklater, which is this trippy kind of docu/philosophical question on life. That's kind of what I'm trying to do with When They Come For Us.

What brought you into the world of music videos?

It's weird, because I regret going into music videos, but I appreciate it too. I think music videos are really great because they allow you to show your stylistic choices a lot more than maybe commercials can. They have a better budget than short films do, so it's a really great way to kind of make a hallmark, you know, a calling card. When you collaborate with a musician, you're kind of at the liberty of that musician, so you do have to walk this fine line.

I think moving into music videos was really more about opportunity. Nobody was giving a 22 year old black boy money to go make a short, so in my head, I was like ‘let me trick a musician to give me some money to go make a short,’ and I would just call it a music video. That's the way I wanted to approach a lot of my music videos.

A lot of my earlier music videos were very narrative. I'm not saying they were the best narratives, but they were narrative, and that was my intention. There was this thing that was kind of happening in Chicago right as I was graduating from school. There was this bubbling of all these different kids that I went to school with that were just starting to get famous. They all went to Whitney Young, which was my high school. You have Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa as well, Mick Jenkins, Raven Lenae, um, Noname Gypsy, but I think she goes by Noname now. All of us were kind of in the same artistic community. As they were bubbling and starting to blow up, they were getting budgets, and I was like, ‘alright, well let me on these guys’ coattails.’ I begged and begged and begged and tried to work with whoever I could to do their music videos, which was cool. It was really interesting because a lot of the people's music videos I worked on, we were all in the same community. I had beefs with them, we had a complicated history. It was interesting how I navigated the music video world within Chicago, because it is so small and close knit, but it is also a very supportive artistic community.

Can you tell us about your upcoming short film, When They Come For Us?

It is such a strange film, that it's always really hard to kind of encapsulate what it is, because I am saying a lot, I'm trying to do a lot of things. I think sometimes I get it right, sometimes I don't. What I really love about it is there's a messiness to it, which I really liked. It's not trying to be this overly polished thing and I feel like that's true... ‘artist-ness.’

To briefly explain what it is, one thing that I've noticed throughout black history and the history of the civilized world is you constantly have what some people may call uncivilized or undeveloped communities trying to live their lives, and then there are these more “civilized” communities that come in and they interrupt these communities' ways of living. They force them to then take on the “civilized” society's way of living, and it manifests itself in big ways. The way in which white colonial powers came over and colonized Africa, but then also extracted its people and brought

them over to the Americas. That's a very macro version of it, of a community having their lives being interrupted, right?

Now you see the trickle down effects of it. You see it in everyday society right now, where you have two black kids hanging out at the park, having fun, and then all of a sudden police pull up and start arresting them, or stop and frisk them. It's almost like the second black people are having some level of joy, it's always been interrupted. So I'm kind of taking on that thesis.

I created five vignettes, five interconnected stories, five moments, in a community where black people are living their lives, but they get interrupted. It's made to be extremely mundane, with very small ways of being interrupted. It's meant to speak to how these smaller aggressions kind of build on themselves until they become much larger, and so that's how the story unfolds. As the story goes on, you realize that what's happening in the background is this kind of occupation. It's sort of like a pseudo-world that they're in. It's adjacent and very similar to ours, but slightly different.

Did you always know this story was going to be an anthology, or did it grow into that throughout the writing process?

It's weird. I used a David Lynchian meditation approach to craft this story. I just wanted to make really weird stories that would never connect to each other, but I wanted to prove that they could connect to each other. That's how they developed into each other. It's weird too because you realize that each vignette has some type of black man that's been taken out of the story, and so you’re sort of seeing the aftermath of that.

In one of the first stories, The Widow, a woman goes to speak to a tarot card reader. It's never overtly shown, but subtextually you know that her man or some type of lover has been taken away, and that's what she's trying to figure out. ‘What's going to happen to this man?’ The story of The Son, you kind of realize that this little boy's father was taken in the middle of the night. Or, in the story of The Joker, you see all of these black men getting rounded up, or in the final vignette, The Wonder, where we see this man who escapes the occupation and wants to get away from what's going on. It all links back to this idea of what is the aftermath? What happens to black people when all these black men get extracted? What happens to the black family? What happens to young men? How do they grow up? That's subtextually what's going on.

With The Widow, I think about black women. The scene is really significant to me. It's a black woman speaking to an older black woman, getting their cards read. To me, in society, black women have gotten dealt the worst cards, so when this young woman is getting her cards read, she kind of assumes the worst, even before the older woman tells her what happens. In the story, the older woman never actually tells the black woman her future, the younger black woman just assumes the worst. I think there's a reality to moving through the world as a black woman, you kind of do have to assume the worst, and then you have to prepare for it. That's

where you get these stereotypes of the overly strong black woman, right? There's just some small subtextual things going on in each vignette that I really like to play with.

When did you know this was the next project you wanted to commit to?

Well, I wanted to tell this story and I thought it'd be interesting for people to see. I'm definitely influenced by shows like Atlanta, which is very surreal. I wanted to take my own stab at that. I don't necessarily know if it hits the same kind of weirdness that Atlanta has, but it is my take on it, and I appreciate that.

I write things all the time. I love to write. It helps me recover a lot. Film is a very collaborative thing and oftentimes, like I said before, it doesn't come out the way that you want it to, or how you saw it. There's so many different heads that you're collaborating with, so of course it would never, it can't. I think the stronger you are as a director, the closer you can get your film to be how it was in your head, but it will never be that. As you direct, you have to rely on your director of photography, or your production designer, or your stylist, or your hair and makeup. There's something really beautiful about writing because there's no one you can rely on but yourself. It's just you and that piece of paper. If it's going to get done, it's going to be you that does it. When set doesn't go exactly the way that I always wanted it to, I then turn back and write. It can be really lethargic. It really helps you heal.

Did this project change who you are as a creator? Did it introduce you to new things that you're going to be able to use moving forwards?

I think with every single set, if you're not saying to yourself, ‘Okay, I'm doing it like this from now on,’ then you're Martin Scorcese. He's the only one who can do that, you know, he's the only one that can walk up and say, ‘I'm gonna do it exactly the same way again,’ because he does it perfectly every time. Coming off of this one, I think I used to micromanage early on in my career, and I think later on I started to open up to collaboration. I do think, though, after this one, I respect myself as a filmmaker more, to the point where I'm okay with demanding more. I'm expecting more in the sense of, ‘I need it to be exactly the way that I see it, and we can get it there, we can get it close.’ I think I want to be a lot more hands on with my compositions and my framework, but I also want to be a lot more hands on with my production design, as well.

Did you shoot on location?

So, this one was just wild. Not to say the production went to shit, but I did have to do multiple pickups. We shot on location. I don't think I'm not really a stage guy. Shooting on a stage takes a certain type of director. I really like to rely on the character of a space. When you shoot on a

stage, everything is up to you: the dimensions, everything is exactly how you want it. For some people, that really opens them up, and it really helps them. To me, I actually like being limited to a space and then having to try and find creative ways to create the thing that was in my head. I actually like the limitation, it forces you to get creative in ways that, maybe you otherwise wouldn't be.

Looking into the future, what can we expect next? What is your 2024 looking like?

Outside of some of the other films that I've done, which are very narrative, I feel like this one threads this middle space of narrative that can go to festivals, but I also really want it to live in a fine art space as well. I really want to try and build it out into more of an immersive kind of experience. If I can take it to the MoMA or something like that, that'd be amazing.

Outside of When They Come for Us, I think my next big project will more than likely be my feature. I've rewritten this feature, maybe 14 times. I've taken it through the Sundance Labs, I've taken it through the Chicago International CIX Lab, so I've been developing it for a while. I think it's finally starting to get some momentum, like the DP that's going to shoot it just did Sing Sing by A24, which I think is going to be A24’s Oscar push this year. So I think I'm trying to make a big push this year to try and at least get it greenlit and get that bag. The plan is to shoot my feature in Norway. I'm going to need to spend three or four months in Norway to put that all together. That's the goal.

2024 is all about my feature, and then pushing When They Come for Us out into the world as well. That aside, outside of filmmaking, I plan on working with incarcerated playwrights on a play they wrote in jail. Right now I'm really working to try and get that released into the world and really give it the run of the place. That's the goal.