Whether it’s in comedy (What Men Want), award winning drama (Hidden Figures) or horror (The Invisible Man), Aldis Hodge has hardly stopped working until recently. Even so, he’s back on our screens this week with the release of Clemency, a powerful drama about capital punishment and its place in the justice system, which arrives this Friday, 17th July.
After attracting attention at last year’s Sundance, and winning the Grand Jury Prize, it’s a film that’s gathered praise wherever it’s been shown and for Hodge it took him behind the public face of justice. Visiting San Quentin to find out more about death row was part of his research but, as he tells us, the experience of making the film also made him took a deeper look at his own views on capital punishment.
The movie was filmed in a disused prison and, as he explains, there was a moment when he genuinely felt like a prisoner ……
Congratulations on such a powerful piece of cinema. It really does leave you breathless. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance last year and was shown at the London Film Festival last year as well. Were you there for both? How did the audiences react in the screenings?
I wish I could have made to London. I was only present at Sundance and that was barely, just because I was in the middle of shooting a film so I was only able to fly into Sundance for one day. That was for our premiere and then I had to fly back. But I was in New York working on my show, City On A Hill, when Chinonye (director) called me and told me about the Grand Jury Prize and I was, like, are you out of your mind? What just happened?! It was insane. I was hyped about it. It was awesome. It was a fantastic feeling.
How did the story come about? Because, although it’s a miscarriage of justice story, there’s a lot more to it than that, isn’t there?
I can’t speak for Chinonye but for me it was an exploration from her experience into the real depth and the nature of capital punishment. She actually volunteered in a women’s prison and on fourteen different clemency cases and she started a programme in prisons called Pens To Pictures to help inmates write productions, get them out and get them seen. And in the Troy Davis case, she realised that after he was executed there was an outpouring of letters from a lot of prison wardens who wrote on behalf of his innocence and, at the same time, on behalf of the staff members who were affected – all the wardens, all the guards. The PTSD rates for people who work in prisons in these environments are equivalent to people coming back from service in war. She was interested in telling that story about everyone else who was affected by this directly and not just the inmates themselves. She wanted to look at the resounding effect it has on everybody – the wardens, the guards, the families, everybody – so she wanted to give a full scope view of what this world was.
So what appealed to you about your particular role? It strikes me as the sort of part where you have to dig deep.
What appealed to me was education and the message of his journey. I thought that as an actor – and this may sound surface level – this was an opportunity to do some real work, to go to a few different places and jump into a mental place I hadn’t been to before. But then, with what the story meant for me and what it taught me as I read it, it gives room to have a different conversation about what the issues are here and it helped change my perspective. I thought I knew where I stood on capital punishment because I was always generally against it. And I say “generally” because, in hindsight, I do think that it’s wrong. However, I’m human and I always ask myself “what if one of my family members was taken from me and how would I feel if the option was laid at my feet to vote for capital punishment on the person who took my family member?” And the answer is I don’t know what my choice would be. How far would I go? Because if there’s love, there’s hatred, there’s vengeance, there’s all these feelings. But with this film, I said that at the end of the day, the question is “do we as a society have the right to take the lives of those who have taken lives?” And, if we do, are we not like them? So my answer became solidified, that I am staunchly against capital punishment.
I know that as part of your research, you went to San Quentin. How much did you see of the experience of the death row inmates there?
I saw where they lived, I saw their quarters, I saw the separation from the rest of the inmates and I saw the death chamber. The wildest conversation I had was with the warden, who told us that when people are about to be put to death, they have an option of how they want to go out, of whether it’s the needle – intravenous drugs – or the electric chair. And he said “What do you think they choose the most?” and I said I didn’t know. And he said “That’s just it. They don’t know. How are you going to choose how you’re going to die?” And another thing he said was that when it comes to somebody taking those final steps, down the Green Mile, if you like, he said that the guards always try to treat the prisoner with respect and over the years you do form a relationship with them. On those last steps, there’s a peace that they have, which is kind of strange to me. At the same time, it takes a degree of strength to get to a place where you just accept and acknowledge that this is what’s going to happen.
So where did you shoot the film? Was it a set or a real prison?
We shot it in a real prison, a defunct prison in Los Angeles. And it was real! There was a time when I got locked in one of those cells. The door would open when I pressed the button and one time I pressed the button and it didn’t open so I got stuck in there for a minute. I’m not claustrophobic, I don’t panic, but those cells are super small – you’re talking 8 feet by maybe 4 feet, or something like that. It’s like a little box and you can barely move, so when that happened and I realised I couldn’t get out, it felt real. I love my freedom and I love space, so I know I’m not built for jail at all.
That was a little bit too close for comfort! I’m assuming you must have quite a few projects in the can because you never seem to stop working so what can we expect to see you in next?
I’ve been working on a few things. There’s the film I did about Jim Brown. That’s in post-production so that’s coming next. I’m in the middle of shooting City On A Hill, the second season, and I’m also producing a couple of films as well and we’re trying to put the team together for those as well. Lockdown for me has been all right. Quarantine and coronavirus have not been at the height of my worries at this time. The racism and the explosion of idiocy as it has been applied to addressing certain issues in this country have been the height of my frustration. Coronavirus is still, to me, a huge issue. We’ve got to realise it’s real. We’ve got states opening up but you’ve got spikes and it’s like, guys, can we please get to a place where we can contain this because we all want to get back to some degree of normalcy. The thing that’s been most emotionally taxing for me the surge in emboldened racist acts. That is my real problem. Let’s get past that. Because that is, has been and always will be a far greater threat to me, my livelihood and my family than coronavirus ever will be.
Clemency is released on Friday, 17th July. It is available via Bohemia Media’s bespoke platform at bohemiamedia.co.uk/clemency/ and on Curzon Home Cinema.
