Exclusive Interview: Director Yann Demange Talks ‘White Boy Rick’

Four years ago, director Yann Demange burst onto screens with ‘71, which followed a squaddie separated from his unit at the height of the troubles in Belfast. With its typically driven performance from a then up-coming Jack O’Connell and constant nail-biting tension, it marked out Demange as a major talent. What would he do next?

He’s made us wait to find out. Life, he admits, got in the way but he’s back this week with his first American-made movie, White Boy Rick, starring Matthew McConaughey and newcomer Richie Merritt as the father and son at the centre of the story. This time the setting is Detroit in the 80s, a city collapsing from the demise of the car industry and the rise of drug dealing, where it’s a struggle to keep your head above water. One such family is the Wersches, with father Richard (McConaughey) scraping a living, more or less legally, in arms dealing and his son (Merritt), the Rick of the title, becoming a drugs dealer and a police informant. It’s a risky combination that, first of all, puts him in hospital and then in prison. He’s still there.

Talking to THN’s Freda Cooper, Demange explains why, out of the projects he had in the pipeline, White Boy Rick was the one he had to make and describes his meetings with the real Rick Wersche, who he likens to Del Boy. He also talks about why he’s “desperate” to make a film set in London, as well as his love of the city, and the reality behind all those reports that he was in the frame to direct the next Bond movie.

Read the interview in full below and read our review here.

Well, congratulations on the film.  There has been a bit of a gap since your first film, which was ’71 – about four years ago. Everyone was wondering what you were going to do next – so why have you kept us waiting?

Life just gets in the way. I didn’t have anything ready to go. I wanted to do something about the L.A. riots which was originally a Brixton riots film. First of all, I moved to America, so there was moving. I shot some commercials – a big Nike campaign – so I flexed my muscle in a different direction. I had to settle into a new culture and I was starting from scratch. I didn’t have anything. It was like I was having to grow my own allotment and I put three things in the race and I started developing them. White Boy Rick wasn’t the one I expected to make. The one I really wanted to make I never quite cracked it – I never quite believed in the script enough to take it to production.

Why was that?

It just felt like – I was developing it [around the] L.A. riots and it just felt, in the end, like it wasn’t my story to tell, and I wanted to do the Battle Of Algiers in L.A. and it was the same formation as ’71, so it was the same writer, producer and me. That was going to be our next project. We are all like a band and it was like, our second album. In the end, we had to look at each other and be very honest. It was a good screenplay but the voice didn’t feel authentic enough, and with all the research that we could do – meeting the Bloods, the Crips – you know, it just felt like it wasn’t that authentic African-American point of view on the L.A. riots. It was not my story to tell.

So what was the appeal of this particular story? You’ve talked about moving to America and this is your first American film.

When I read the spec script, the father and son relationship that was in that original script only lasted four or five pages and became the rise and fall of a drug dealer. That father and son relationship was something that really resonated with me on a personal level, and also this sense of this boy having no tribe and looking for his place in the world and being a complete inside outsider if you like.

If you took the father-son relationship out of it, it would have been a lot weaker.

It’s the only thing I cared about. Once I leaned in and I was researching, I decided to tell a story about a family trying to survive. I thought that it was very pertinent to what’s going on right now. Trying to survive out of abject poverty and it’s a question of ‘well, can you really have a crack at the American dream if you’re born into abject poverty? Can you transcend your lot in life?’ I just cared about the family, but when I took it on I had an informant and a drug dealer narrative that was shackled to it and I had to do that justice, to a certain extent, and explain because the guy is still in jail and it is a true story. There’s a moral obligation to land some of the narrative beats of his life and it sort of bends it out of shape of what you want it to be for a film because, on one hand, I want it to be this family drama, but I’ve got to explain the rest that goes around it.

You mentioned going to the jail to meet Rick. That was obviously part of your research. What’s Rick like himself?

He gave me a sense of tone. He’s so funny. Mad banter. He’s just a really funny fucking guy. I’ve never had a phone call or meeting with him where he is not cheered me up. He’s just funny, even when he breaks your heart. He’s got no self-pity – he’s got none of this ‘miscarriage of justice” woe…

I was going to ask that.

He’s angry about the level of the sentence, but there are worse miscarriages of justice in America. I mean, he was guilty. He doesn’t play that card. I learned a lot about his relationship with his father, but then I was not his biographer – I’m taking elements, but I’m making a movie here and we’re walking that line. Meeting him, if anything, made it impossible for me to walk away from this film. It was very important to get the insider’s gaze. Sometimes you get that outsider’s gaze when it comes to poverty, and they imbue the film with a kind of tone – and earnest tone of like ‘oh, they’re so poor like they’re in a Dickensian drama, and it’s not like that. They’re alive and they are enjoying their lives and I don’t want to be patronising about it.

By the end of the film, you don’t get any sense of pity.

He doesn’t have any of that. He just wants to have an opportunity to live a bit of life outside as a free man now, but he’s not self-pitying at all.

The film is set in another shattered city – ’71 was Belfast – now you’re in Detroit which is completely decimated in the 1980s because the car industry collapsed.

And the crack epidemic.

Yes, which followed on because there were no jobs. So, what is it about these shattered cities?

I don’t know. For me, it felt just so pertinent. In the way ’71 did where we could have been talking about any number of conflicts that are going on today. It also felt to me that we could talk about any inner urban city area where there’s a lack of opportunity and kids born into abject poverty.  And this notion, this carrot that they are dangled that if you do the right thing, somehow at this point next year it will come good and you will transcend your lot in life. It’s kind of a terrible line – if it’s not happening for you then you’re doing something wrong. In these landscapes, they’re kind of abandoned and people don’t actually know what it means. It’s interesting to go in there and emphasise with everyone’s points of view, and be on the ground and see what opportunity looks like when you’re there. What are the choices? What are the options?

It sounds very contemporary, because, what’s changed?

For me it does. For me it felt contemporary, the more I researched it. ’71 was the same. For me, it felt like a contemporary piece. It’s almost more freeing and you’re able to say more about your current context than you would be if you were doing something about Afghanistan.

You’ve got quite an interesting balance  – well, I was going to say the main roles – but the main role belongs to Richie Merritt – a complete newcomer, which must have been a leap of faith for you. You’re casting a newcomer in your lead?

I shit myself, yes. Everyone was. They’ve never done that before, but I thought it would be interesting. I didn’t not look at actors for the part – I’d be mad – but it just felt with Matthew [McConaughey] and then a good Hollywood kid, or even if it was an indie star, let’s say, it just felt like it was lacking in authenticity. All of a sudden, it was easier to dismiss. When I saw this kid with Matthew – and I tested him – I was after what he did to Matthew. He had no storytelling instincts – he had no notion that this was a big moment, that this was an emotional moment. An actor would come in and [claps hands], nail it.

That’s actually quite refreshing.

He’d throw it away. He didn’t know who Matthew was. I was like, this is mad, and it’s kinda great. If anything, it was the effect that it was having on Matthew. The kid couldn’t have been in a Matthew McConaughey film. Every time Matthew was doing something that was a bit… I would go look, it’s amazing, but you’re in this film and he’s down here. He can’t come up there. You’ve got to be in the same film he’s in. It anchored Matthew and Matthew was equally shitting himself, but excited by it, and it just felt like the way to go, but it was a wild ride. [Merritt] didn’t emote, he keeps you at a distance. I remember having that with Top Boy. His instincts were so real – he’d go, no, I wouldn’t do that and like, you just go with it. He had a vulnerability. I mean, for his young age – he was fifteen when we started shooting – he’d been through so much, so he could access so many emotions, so many experiences that you could anchor a scene in something that was personal to him, and then he’d do something and you’d be like ‘where’s the truth in it?’ It’s not the truth that some of us would like as a dramatist, but there is a truth in it that actually says a lot about what we expect – what we imbue, a tone that we imbue on characters like that but actually with someone that’s grown up like that. He behaves in a way that we’re probably not used to. It’s different – it’s how they survive.

So, instead of him learning from Matthew McConaughey – obviously tons of experience, Oscar-winner and the rest of it – it was the other way around?

In a way, yes, and you know what? Fair play to Matthew because he was completely up to it. Matthew’s amazing because, you’ve got to remember, Matthew was street-cast. With Linklater, he was only supposed to be in two scenes [in Dazed and Confused]. He got picked out of a bar. He’s from an extra charismatic family and he’s that kind of guy and he’s up for it, but he wasn’t trying to be an actor, he was this good-looking, loud geezer in a bar with so much confidence. Next thing you know, Linklater’s doing more and more with him and everyone’s going ‘you’re great’. So, he got a kick out of doing that with this kid, even though it is completely different because this kid is from the ‘hood.

So this is like, your American film, but you have been quoted in saying that you’d like to make more films in England?

Yes, I’m desperate to do a London film. I always wanted to be a London filmmaker.

Why? Or is it more a case of why not?

Yeah. I mean, why not? Why don’t we have a Spike Lee? Why don’t we have a Scorsese? Why don’t we have a filmmaker that was really London-centric? Maybe Nic Roag was in a way. I don’t know. That was where that I was aspiring to. I’m tribeless – much like the kids in ’71, Top Boy and White Boy Rick. I’m French-Algerian, mixed race. I was born in Paris, raised in London. Moving around. I was in foster care for eight years. I don’t have a sense of a national identity. I’ve got a French passport, but I’m a Londoner. I’ve never been able to say ‘I am British’, ‘I am French’, but I can say I’m a Londoner and I was part of a genuine melting pot. London’s like most cities – it’s transient. My London, from my youth, doesn’t really exist anymore but it is where my identity was formed, and it will always be home for me, and I’ve got a particular love and an affinity for the city and the way it welcomes in people from everywhere. I talk about it a lot with some of my peers. I’d love to do a film in London that’s only 30% in English. My London, I only spoke English 40, 50% of the time when I was a kid.

So, what’s standing in your way?

It’s having a story that’s worth telling. I wanted to do the Brixton riots. I couldn’t get it right. I went to L.A. with it. With films like ’71, they used to say there was a glass ceiling. There was a point when they said, ‘the marketplace doesn’t want this film’. ‘This film can’t pre-sell’. With ’71, with the vision I had and at the budget level that I wanted to make the film, the market was saying ‘no, you shouldn’t make it’. ‘You either make it for $2 million or you don’t make it at all’. Then the Film Council, the BFI, STUDIOCANAL and Tessa Ross at Film4 doubled down and goes ‘no, we back you. We can see what you want to do,’ and the film existed. It’s an uphill struggle. The world has opened up a bit and this old ‘foreign sales’ model is dying off and I think there have been some great films that have transcended this old wisdom that things with people of colour don’t sell and there are opportunities that are opening out. I am developing films set in London – I fully intend to make films in London and I want to make a film in the French language in Paris as well, so I consider myself a European filmmaker that went to America and made a film.

One more question. The inevitable one. How close did you come to making Bond?

That was a lot of speculation, that was awful. It was incredible with the frenzy over here, but I get it. It’s like the monarchy or something. It was a lot of hearsay. I was very flattered to be associated with it but there wasn’t that much truth in a lot of it.

White Boy Rick is released in cinemas on Friday 7th December.