Earlier this month, “Judas and the Black Messiah,” Shaka King’s chronicle of commitment, love, and betrayal inside the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, opened in theatres and began streaming on HBO Max. The film arrives at a charged moment, during a Black History Month in which the traumatic memories of the summer of reckoning are still fresh, and questions raised by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of the police remain unresolved. King started work on “Judas and the Black Messiah” four years ago, but those same contemporary questions are an inescapable subtext to the film and the killing at the center of it. The thriller is also a stark departure from King’s début feature, “Newlyweeds,” an exploration of weed culture through the lens of a couple whose love of each other is equalled only by their love of marijuana. By contrast, “Judas and the Black Messiah,” which depicts the relationship between Fred Hampton, the charismatic leader of the Panthers’ Illinois chapter, and William O’Neal, an enigmatic F.B.I. informant who infiltrates the Party, is thematically darker and weightier.
King, who is forty, was immediately drawn to the comedy duo Keith and Kenny Lucas’s pitch for the movie, which they described as “ ‘The Departed’ inside the world of COINTELPRO.” But he also recognized that, for a film about a twenty-one-year-old Black radical murdered by the police, the politics of securing studio backing would be as daunting as the artistic challenge of telling Hampton’s story well. During our recent conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we spoke about the complexities of making Black bio-pics (and why this isn’t one), the politics of casting Black British actors to play Black Americans on screen, and how he situates himself inside this moment of creative ferment for Black filmmakers and artists.
Let me start with the fundamental question, which is, how much did you know about Fred Hampton before you started this project?
I knew how he passed away. Knew that he was a Black Panther. Knew he was twenty-one years old. Knew that the F.B.I. had assassinated him, and knew that he was the head of the chapter in Chicago. But that’s about it. Didn’t know anything about William O’Neal at all. Didn’t know he was drugged the night of the assassination. And didn’t know anything about the way he lived whatsoever.
Hampton occupies this niche where he’s exceptionally well known to the people who know him, and not at all known to people outside of that. And I wonder if that presented challenges in approaching this story.
Only in the sense of getting a “Fred Hampton bio-pic”—and I put that in quotes—made. And that’s why you couldn’t do it. Maybe after this movie, if it’s successful, you could—truth of the matter is, you need a limited series to do it any justice. If you want to tell the story in full, you can’t do it in a movie. It’s too dense, too expensive. That’s really the primary reason that you couch that movie in genre.
You’ve said that this is a kind of seventies-crime-thriller film.
Yeah. But you have to couch it in genre—like, you are only touching upon the name recognition, which is the biggest hurdle. First of all, there are fewer bio-pics being made now, because most of the movies being made are tentpole franchises: existing properties, remakes, and sequels. So, the window for what people call quote-unquote adult movies is shrinking. And you also have to take into account that if you’re talking about a bio-pic of someone like Fred Hampton, you’re talking about a period piece. So, automatically, your minimum budget is probably going to be somewhere in the ten-to-fifteen-million-dollar range. And it’s a movie with set pieces, so you’re going to go up north of that. And once you go north of that, then you’re talking about, where’s the Louis Armstrong, Joe Lewis, Rosa Parks? People who are iconic, across the globe. Taught in schools. On stamps. No bio-pic. Doesn’t exist for them. So, the likelihood of you getting a traditional Fred Hampton bio-pic made is minimal.
Did you know that going in? Or was there a point after you started the project when you realized, O.K., we have to make this a genre film?
I knew it, and it came to me that way. The Lucas brothers [Kenny and Keith Lucas] brought the idea to me. They said, “We want to make a movie about Fred Hampton and William O’Neal that’s ‘The Departed’ inside the world of COINTELPRO.” I’d spent long enough trying to get into the industry, and long enough in it, to know that that was the only way you’d get a movie like that made. And that was the genius appeal of it. “Panther” has a similar conceit.
You mean the Mario Van Peebles movie, from 1995, about the Panther party.
Yeah. It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s part of the reason that he has that element in there, because that’s how you get the movie made in Hollywood.
How long did it take for you to come up with the script, and what process did you go through to create it?
The Lucas brothers came to me with an outline. I started working with them on that. And then I was introduced to Will Berson, my co-writer on the screenplay, via Jermaine Fowler. Will Berson had a traditional Fred Hampton bio-pic that he’d written, and he’d been trying to attach a director to, and I grabbed him, and I said, “Hey, do you want to collaborate with myself and the Lucas brothers on making the movie this way?” And so, he and I sat down and started working on a script. And the draft we showed Ryan [Coogler], we probably took about four to six months to write it. And then Ryan Coogler and Charles King came on board. And they developed several drafts with us—way more than several. And then Warner Bros. came on board, and then we developed some more drafts with Warner Bros. Altogether, it took about three and a half to four years to write. I mean, we were still writing while we were shooting, so four years.
I read that, as part of your research, you read Alondra Nelson’s “Body and Soul,” about the Black Panther Party’s medical work and the health-disparity work that the Party did. I happen to have spoken to Alondra Nelson not long ago—she was a colleague of mine at Columbia for a long time—and she’d watched the movie and really had high praise for it.
That’s excellent to me. I’m happy to hear that. There’s a high bar, rightfully so, for people who have been passionate about this story and this history for a long time. And so, I’m always curious, and very accepting of critique. I think I know the film’s shortcomings artistically and politically. I’m certainly the most aware, having gone through it, of what is possible within the industry. And I hope that I can help illuminate that, because I think, for a lot of people who watch movies, and even people who critique films, there’s a real disconnect between their understanding of what they watch and their understanding of how it gets made.
So, what do you think those are, when you say there are artistic or political shortcomings?
Well, I think, just from an artistic standpoint, it’s tough to make that much story fit within the confines of a two-hour movie, which is the movie we had the budget to make. We weren’t afforded the luxury of making a three-hour bio-pic. We didn’t get the money that you got to make “Lincoln” or “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” or most period pieces of this scope. What we pulled off is quite miraculous. But also, it was so important to us to make sure that the family specifically was comfortable with us making this film. Fred Hampton, Jr., and Akua Njeri were cultural consultants on the movie, which took about a year and change, for us to get to that space.
Everything I had heard about William O’Neal prior to meeting the family, and meeting the Illinois-chapter members personally, had stated that he was Fred Hampton’s bodyguard, but that’s a total lie. It’s not true. And our scripts until that point were far more traditional, in the sense that you had these two guys’ relationship, this friendship—there are scenes that were cut from the movie, that we shot, that convey a closeness, or that up the drama of the movie, the tension of the movie, that are not historically accurate, that are actually damaging the legacy of Chairman Fred Hampton. And they’re not in there. They make a better movie, but they fuck up the history. We made the choice to not pollute the history. Not everybody does that.
The argument that people make on the other side is that this is a film, it’s a work of art, there’s license. I talked with one filmmaker about another period piece relating to African-Americans. And he said to me, straight up, “It’s not my job to teach history.” And so, it’s interesting that you made that decision.
I’m not gonna fault that individual, because I think that’s a subjective choice. But you’re talking about a group of people who were deeply traumatized, and to not acknowledge that trauma just to make a piece of entertainment is fucked-up to me. I don’t think that that’s fair, to not engage them. And, the thing is, I feel almost hypocritical, because it wasn’t like we engaged everyone who went through that experience. But we definitely made an attempt to talk to anybody who was willing to talk to us about this, who had been through it. But, on a personal level, I don’t think of public domain the same anymore. You form relationships with these people. Ultimately, the movie over all is far better off for it. But, at the same time, artistic license—you have it, but you don’t fully have it.
In terms of the politics of the film, I actually don’t think those take a great hit. We don’t get a chance to really touch on their anti-imperialism stance. I wish I’d had that third hour to incorporate some of that. Another thing is, when you couch a political movie in genre, you have to keep the people who came to the movie for the genre invested in the genre, while also trying to give them the politics of it. So, it’s tricky. And we tried. I mean, the first words you hear Fred Hampton speak are “We’re not gonna fight capitalism with Black capitalism.” We were intentional with that. Like, O.K., say it, but then, let’s see it practiced. What does a socialist life style look like? There’s this coalition-building, people living together, always talking about the people, the people, the people—versus, in O’Neal, someone who’s embraced a more capitalist ideology. What’s that look like? Individualistic, self-interested: “I want this. I will attain this by any means necessary.” And so, we tried to express up top and then personify throughout. And I think we threaded the needle pretty damn well.
