CS Video: Safety interview with director Reginald Hudlin
In time for the movie sports biopic’s debut on streaming platform Disney+, ComingSoon.net got the opportunity to chat with Oscar and Golden Globe nominee Reginald Hudlin (Marshall, Django Unchained) to discuss his work helming Safety. Our interview can be viewed in the player below!
Disney’s Safety is inspired by the empowering story of former Clemson University football safety Ray McElrathbey, a young man facing a series of challenging circumstances, whose dedication and persistence help him to triumph over repeated adversities. Aided by his teammates and the Clemson community, he succeeds on the field while simultaneously raising and caring for his 11-year-old brother Fahmarr.
The film stars Jay Reeves (All American, The Tax Collector) as Ray and newcomer Thaddeus J. Mixson as Fahmarr, along with Corinne Foxx (47 Meters Down: Uncaged), Mathew Glave (The Rookie), Hunter Sansone (The Little Things), Amanda Warren (The Leftovers), Miles Burris (former Oakland Raiders linebacker), Isaac Bell, Elijah Bell and James Badge Dale (Hightown, The Empty Man).
It was directed by Reginald Hudlin (Boomerang, House Party) and produced by Mark Ciardi, p.g.a. (Secretariat, Miracle) and Gordon Gray (Million Dollar Arm, The Rookie) with a screenplay written by Nick Santora (The Most Dangerous Game, The Fugitive). Douglas S. Jones and Campbell G. McInnes served as executive producers.
Plus: How Disney+ gives room for more types of movies.
From director Reginald Hudlin and based on a true story, the inspirational drama Safety follows Ray McElrathbey (Jay Reeves), a Clemson University football safety who finds himself in the unexpected position of having to raise his 11-year-old brother Fahmarr (Thaddeus J. Mixson). Through dedication, determination and persistence, his unwillingness to give up on his dreams and his desire to keep his family together help him succeed both on and off the field.
During the virtual press junket for the Disney+ film, Collider got the opportunity to chat 1-on-1 with filmmaker Reginald Hudlin about why this story is what the country needs right now, working with the real Clemson University, shooting football in a different way, and what impressed him about his cast. He also talked about the lasting impact of his early films, House Party and Boomerang, his experience working with Bernie Mac on The Bernie Mac Show, taking on a very different Emmy Awards this year, and what he’d still like to do.
COLLIDER: This film is a showcase of strength, drive and courage, all in the name of family, and it’s a very inspirational story. When you first read this script and learned about this story, what aspect of it most inspired you?
REGINALD HUDLIN: All of it. What a perfect summary. You said strength, courage, drive and family. Man, how often do you get that, perfectly woven together in a single story? That’s everything I care about and what I believe in, and it’s a statement that needs to be made. This is, quite frankly, what the country needs right now, so I thought it was an imperative. I was just glad to get the opportunity to do it.
You’re not just telling a story about a real guy, but it’s also set at a real university, so what was it like to get them involved and to work with them throughout the project?
HUDLIN: Actually, all parties were great. Ray is a guy who has a reserve. His mind is always working. He’s very open and transparent about his life. That was very helpful for me in understanding him and telling his story. He was a touchstone for the cast and the crew because he was there on set. Clemson, once they saw what we were doing, was incredibly supportive. They let us shoot at half-time, during a game, for our stadium stuff, so there’s no CG. It’s all real. Two entities that could have been very challenging were, in fact, incredible partners.
How did you approach deciding how you wanted to shoot the game sequences? What was the thought process in deciding what to show, how much to show, and how you wanted to show it?
HUDLIN: Football is shot very well on television. We watch football on TV and we’re very engaged, so what are we gonna do in a movie that’s different or better than what you already see on Monday nights? It’s all about the subjective point of view. How can we get inside the head of the player and what they’re going through, whether it’s him when he doesn’t have his act together and he’s running down the field and he gets his bell wrong, or he does have his act together and, as the play’s about to start, he sees the opponent give his tell, he alerts everybody, and they make that move? That’s the part where you’re really advancing story and not just watching football plays, but the movie and the story is being moved by the plays.
Your leads are relatively new to audiences, so what impressed you about what Jay Reeves and Corinne Foxx brought to these roles?
HUDLIN: They’re good looking, charismatic people that you want to be around. That was so much of the fun of working with them. They’re smart, they’re funny, and they’re really dedicated to their craft. To be so young, they took these opportunities really seriously, and they’re fun. It was a really wonderful situation. I hadn’t worked with young actors like that since House Party. I’ve been fortunate to work with Eddie Murphy and Sam Jackson and Chadwick Boseman, so to work with folks at the beginning of their careers was really invigorating and fun.
Image via Disney+
Very early in your career, you did House Party and Boomerang, which were important moments in Black cinema, and they’ve also been lasting and enduring films. What did it mean to you to direct those movies, at that time, and how do you look back at them now?
HUDLIN: Well, I’m very grateful that they have stood the test of time and that a generation or more later people still go, “I love that movie! That’s my favorite movie!” People who weren’t born when those movies were out are fans. At the time, I was just really on fire because I really had something to say. They were both movies that didn’t exist in the marketplace and in the pantheon. I thought they should, and I was right.
You also directed 11 episodes of The Bernie Mac Show. What does that show’s legacy mean to you and what made Bernie Mac such a special performer, in your eyes?
HUDLIN: They joy was to spend all day and all week with Bernie Mac. He was brilliantly comic, but he wasn’t one of those comics that, off set, had this dark, twisted side. He was just a great guy. Once a week, he would cater a lunch in his dressing room, and it was not just a soul food spread. He’d have oxtail and lima beans. It was the next level of a soul food get down. You’d be eating and be like, “How am I going to work this afternoon? I’m gonna pass out.” And then, he’d be telling stories of his life, before he became a successful comedian, and they were the best stories you’d ever heard in your life. I remember the last time I saw him, we went to lunch together and he said to me, “You know, Reggie, you understand me about as good as anyone in this town.” And I just was so moved by that. He said, “You get me. Most people don’t get me, but you get me.” That really meant the world to me, and I really, really miss him.
How do you feel the Emmys went this year? What lessons did you learn for future producers of award shows in these times?
HUDLIN: I produce a lot of awards shows, and when I signed on to do the Emmys, all of my friends were like, “Hey, Reggie, congratulations! Are you crazy? This is gonna be a disaster. How are you gonna do an Emmys show?” But that was the point. I didn’t wanna do a traditional show. The only way to make it work was to blow it up. COVID was just an excuse to do what I wanna do, which is try to reinvent awards shows. It turns out, we pulled it off. I was really so overjoyed that it seemed to be universally acclaimed. People were like, “Wow, this is so much better. You’re not gonna go back, are you? You need to keep doing this kind of awards show.” That was the goal. We thought about, “What tropes of this kind of program are actually essential? What do we need to keep, and which ones can we throw away and maybe do something better?” It was an experiment that seemed to turn out great.
You seem like you’re pretty capable of doing it all, so what’s next for you? Do you know what you want to go into production on next? Is there something that you feel you still haven’t done?
HUDLIN: I learned a long time ago, if you wanna make God laugh, make plans. I can’t wait to play in the world of science fiction. I can’t wait to do a musical. I’ve done a lot of things in film and television, and there’s a lot of stuff that we’re working on. There are more documentaries that I wanna do. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens.
Does it feel like Disney+ is a home where you can make some of the types of movies that have fallen by the wayside a bit?
HUDLIN: Absolutely. I think what we’re really gonna see with streaming platforms like Disney+ is this kind of sports drama, which used to be a regular part of the theatrical marketplace. People love these movies, but they fell out of favor. Basically, theatrical was narrowed into superhero movies, horror films and musicals, and I love them completely, but gosh, is that it? As a filmmaker and as an audience member, to be able to make movies like Safety is fantastic.
College football has an abundance of individual stories of great trials and tribulations. A vast number of student-athletes – particularly those in Division I football – willed themselves through adverse environments for a chance to play on Saturdays. Yet most of these stories don’t always have anything resembling a happy ending, with many of these kids falling short of loftier goals of going pro or even leaving school with a degree. Worse yet, too many dreams come to a sudden end because players end up in the crosshairs of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, better known as the NCAA.
Which is why what happened at Clemson University back in 2006 lives as the stuff of legend.
Safety, a new sports film directed by Reginald Hudlin that’s inspired by the true story of Ray McElrathbey and his younger brother Fahmarr, recently debuted on Disney+. The former Tigers safety made headlines when it was discovered that he was housing his younger sibling – an 11-year-old at the time – on campus as their mother was battling drug addiction back home in Atlanta. The McElrathbeys’ tale would make national news as Ray’s eligibility would be threatened for potential NCAA violations until eventually, he would be given a special waiver to receive assistance in caring for his kin.
This rare benevolence and the brothers’ perseverance would take well over a decade to be told again after Ray and Fahmarr agreed to license their story for a feature film. In 2019, it found both a home and a director thanks to Disney and one legendary filmmaker in Hudlin, who directed some of the top Black-themed films such as House Party and Boomerang, and worked as a producer on Django Unchained, an Oscar-nominee for Best Picture in 2013.
Hudlin spoke with Decider how Safety moved from concept to reality, how it differs from other sports films and the insanity of filming during an actual game at Clemson’s famed Memorial Stadium, AKA “Death Valley.”
DECIDER: For starters: how did you become aware of this story? Because at the time when this was happening, Clemson wasn’t Clemson — currently a two-time national championship program under Dabo Swinney, but then a fledgling outfit under Tommy Bowden. On the flip side, why did you decide to take it on? And how did Ray trust you to craft it for a film?
REGINALD HUDLIN: I didn’t know about the story when it went down, but then I got sent a copy of the script. I read the script, and I was like, “Oh my god! I’ve got to make this right away.” I mean, I just felt an urgency about it. It just seemed so important, so relevant to right now, so what our country needed right now. I was very fired up about it, and met the producers and then the studio. They were like, “Great! Let’s go make it.” I’m like, “Yay!” And then met Ray and Fay (Fahmarr), and they were just great guys. They lived up to everything you thought they would be. This quiet brother who clearly knows who he is and what he can do, completely honest about his life and his experience — just reinforced my desire to tell his story.
Knowing your career, while you’ve done quite a few feature films, this was your second feature film in the sports world. Safety is kind of categorized as a sports movie, yet football is a supporting character. In a lot of ways with your other sports flick, The Great White Hype (1996), the same could have been said about boxing. How did you try to strike the balance between emphasizing the larger story between Ray and Fay with the actual grind of football? And were you intent on making Safety not your typical sports film?
If you look at all my movies, I’d never repeat a genre. It’s like I did a teen movie (House Party, 1990), did a romantic comedy (Boomerang, 1992), Django‘s a Western. They’re all pretty different, right? The Great White Hype was more a satire on the absurdity of the boxing business, while this is a story of human triumph.
Sports is one of those things where the athletics are important because the athletics help define and clarify who the person is. They’re on that crucible of the playing field. There’s no excuses: either you make the play or you don’t. And that’s the thing about Ray’s whole life. At the end of the day, as unfair as his circumstances were, either he had to fix it or fail. He fixed it.
Viewers can certainly attest to that with how Ray (played by Jay Reeves) was portrayed in the film. Speaking of which, the real Ray made a cameo as one of the players. Even in a short time, a small moment like that can be a lot of work for someone who isn’t a trained actor, per se. How’d you guys decide to include him on the set that way? And how would you describe his experience on set?
Well, it’s interesting. Ray is not college age, but he’s still a very young man. The minute that — I think even before Jay got the part, he reached out to Ray. They realized they didn’t live far from each other. Jay was like, “Hey man, wanna go get something to eat?” And (Ray) goes, “Nah, I’m not hungry man. Let’s go to the gym.” Ray’s whole thing is, “I know who you are by how you work out.” They bonded.
Jay Reeves and Ray McElrathBey in SAFETY.Photo: Chuck Zlotnik/Disney+
Ray bonded with the whole cast and got very involved in their physical training. Because his whole thing is like, “I know you guys are working out, but now you guys are going to work out the way I work out.” Which is a whole other thing, but that bonded them all with each other. The entire crew and cast had Ray right there as a touchstone while making the movie, which helped everybody.
And it comes off that way because you’re asking these actors and stunt doubles to portray actual football — which is not that easy. That kind of sports choreography is incredibly complicated.
Right. Right. And when you look at that whole team, you had a lot of guys who were playing for Alabama. Playing for Georgia. Some of them had played in the pros. There was a lot of pressure on the actors to make sure their football games were legitimate, because they were playing alongside guys who were 1000 percent legit.
So, while football is the film’s backdrop, Clemson itself is quite the central figure in the story – not only because Ray is playing for the team, but because they’re running afoul of the NCAA. This is one of the exceptionally rare instances where the NCAA ruled in favor of the student-athlete and the school. Considering that you’re making this for Disney+, and Disney (through ESPN) has relationships with Clemson and NCAA, were there times when you kind of felt the story could ruffle a few feathers? Because the NCAA is still, in a lot of ways — and deservedly so — seen as this big, bad villain in a lot of lives of student athletes.
Yeah. At the end of the day, I had to be faithful to Ray’s story. Talking to Ray, he was like, “Look, I chose Clemson because of the family ethos of the program. When it came down to it, that family attitude was real.” And with the NCAA, the truth is, they ultimately did give him that waiver. It was like, “Let’s be real about the consequences of the rule, to the point that (specifying one scene) you have an 11-year-old boy walking in the rain.”
But at the end of the day, Ray took the stance that he took — “I’m adopting my brother” — before this even happens. “You understand that I have planted my flag in terms of his position, so now it’s on your move.” He forced their hand, and they stepped up, which is great. I said, “Look, I’m just going to tell the truth as it is with this story, and everyone will come to their own conclusions.”
You can’t imagine doing this in the era of COVID-19 now, but you did shoot in front of a real, in-game crowd at Clemson, which has the best-known atmospheres in all of sports. While it’s hard to imagine doing that now, what was the process like? Trying to work with the school, and working with the NCAA as well? How much time did you have to do the scene? How were you able to get all of these moving parts around, keeping 80,000 people engaged without doing a crazy amount of shooting? How were you able to put all of this together?
Well, the school was very supportive of the movie. We went to them and we said, “Hey, we don’t want to use CG. We want to have a real Clemson crowd — not one scene, but four plays.” And they were like, “Yeah, we will support that. We’ll let you guys shoot at halftime… well, really half of halftime.” Which means we had 10 minutes. So in most movies, they’re shooting one play during halftime. We’re shooting four. So it’s a lot. We announced to the crowd at the beginning of the game, we’re like, “Look, we’re going to be shooting this scene during halftime. Please stay in your seats, don’t go to the bathroom, don’t get a hot dog, don’t get a t-shirt. Just hang out for us.” And sure enough, 85,000 people stayed in their seats. Incredible!
Director Reginald Hudlin behind the scenes with the cast of SAFETY.Photo: Chuck Zlotnik/Disney+
We knew we wouldn’t be able to communicate using walkie talkies or cellphones, so we had flags. Went back to before the 18th-century, like we’re in a schooner. But the fact is, 10 minutes, four scenes, and we had rehearsed the players and the camera positions within an inch of their lives. But we knew there’d be no do-overs. We had to just nail it. So we’re running it, I tell my actors, I say, “Look, when you run down this hill, the crowd’s gonna yell. Don’t let that volume — which is going to become a physical thing — spike your adrenaline to the fact that you lose it and twist your ankle, you fall. We have no time for do-overs. You guys have got to stay focused.” So they’re like, “Got it.”
Dude, the crowd is so loud. The stands actually have a noise meter. It was the third-loudest crowd in the history of the stadium. Forget the players losing it, I start losing it. (Laugh.) Every hair is on end, I’m like, “What is this?” The crowd runs down, they run all four plays: Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! We get it all done, they’re running on field for seven and a half minutes. We actually had time to spare! Twenty-three cameras, all the coverage was an incredible achievement.
Director and Producer Reginald Hudlin joins The Odd Couple’s Celebrity Corner with Chris Broussard and Rob Parker! Hudlin discusses his newest film Safety, coming to Disney Plus December 11th. Plus, Hudlin discusses many of the highlights and successes of his illustrious career, including Django Unchained, Boomerang, and much of his writings for the universe of Black Panther.
