Police Beat, based on a popular column by Charles Mudede in Seattle alternapaper The Stranger, chosen as one of only 16 films to compete in the Sundance Dramatic competition, debuted in Park City to critical acclaim,  Buzz about this film around Seattle over the past couple weeks has been high. The film was funded, in part, by Northwest Film Forum, and the screenplay was written by Mudede, who has a strong following here in Seattle. Cinematical sat down with Mudede, director Robinson Devor and producer Jeffrey Brown to talk about the film. 

CINEMATICAL: Let's start out with how Police Beat came into being. Charles, I know the movie was based around your column, "Police Beat". Did you approach Rob about making it into a movie?

CHARLES MUDEDE: Actually, I never even thought about making it into a movie, to be honest. It was all Rob's idea.

ROB DEVOR: Charles and I had just come off another project. I had written a script called Superpower, about a child warrior in Africa. I asked Charles to review the script, to give me his perspective, because I was a white guy trying to write this script about a kid in Africa, and Charles is African. I wanted his point of view to make sure the script felt authentic.

CINEMATICAL: So you already knew each other?

ROB: Oh, no. I just, you know, cold called him. (laughs) I'd never met him, but I really admired his writing, and had a lot of respect for him. And so then we started working on that project together, but it ended up not getting made, as a lot of films don't. And Charles and I - we were very depressed about that film, and we needed to get into another project. And then we thought, well, we don't have to go all the way to Africa to make a film, we're here in Seattle, it's one of the most beautiful places in the United States, let's do a film about Seattle.

The beautiful thing about the idea for Police Beat is that it's all public domain. The stories we used were all from actual police reports. So I started reading through the archives of Charles' column to find ideas for the movie.

CINEMATICAL: And then the script just evolved from there?

CHARLES: It was an interesting opportunity for me, because I'd never written a screenplay before. And I wanted to learn how to do that. This was just the perfect chance.

ROB: Well, the initial concept was much more vague. The cop character had very little personality, we envisioned him as just this anonymous character going through the world of all these crimes. But once we found our lead actor (Pape Siday Niang), he had such an amazing, big personality. We had to totally rework the script to give him more of a place. We always wanted a guy with an intense moral center. Pape is Muslim, but he's this totally modern, fun guy. He's just a great guy. We evolved the character of Z around Pape. And the character of Z became very much more than we envisioned, because of him.

CINEMATICAL: So Police Beat ended up being a very different film than you'd envisioned?

ROB: Right. And you seen Pape speaking on screen, when he interacts with people, in this very broken English. But in the voiceovers, in his thoughts, he speaks in his native language (Wolof), and he is very much more eloquent in his native language. We tried to capture authentically what immigrants experience, that difficulty of learning all the nuances of a language. Pape also speaks French, by the way. English is his third language.

CINEMATICAL: Let's talk a bit about how Pape came to be cast in the lead role.

JEFFREY BROWN: First we went through a casting agency, but they kept getting us guys who were African-American, or African immigrants who'd been in the States too long. We wanted a freshness, an innocence, someone who would capture that feeling of being an immigrant. We needed someone fresh off the boat, so to speak. So then we started looking ourselves - attending every  African cultural event we could find, African dances, community centers, restaurants. Then Alexis (Ferris, the show's other producer) heard through someone at Afrikando (an African restaurant in Seattle) about Pape.

She tracked Pape down at a soccer game, she said there were, like, 60 guys there all playing soccer. She went up to Pape and explained what we were doing and asked him to come in and read for the part. His initial response was very positive - he loves attention. And as soon as we saw him, when he read for the part, we knew we had our lead.

CINEMATICAL: And how did he do, coming into the film. He's not a professional actor, right?

CHARLES: I think he could be working with an agent. He just sustains the film. He carries the whole thing.

ROB: It's interesting to watch  - you see an actor's ego developing. At first he came in and he was all nervous. He couldn't get his lines down. We, all of us, the whole crew - had no confidence going in that he would able to sustain it. The first day's filming it took 14 takes to get the first line, and the crew was watching and thinking, oh, this is just never going to work. This is going to be terrible. But then we realized, he just couldn't do the lines memorizing them and saying them word for word. We had to give him the freedom to understand the context of the scene and make it his own.

There's this one scene where there's this guy out in the Sound and Z has to yell at him to get out of the water. The line was something like, "Sir, you must come out of the water. This water is only zoned for ferries". And he couldn't get that line, so I talked to him and explained the context of the scene, and he says, "So I should just say, 'Sir, this water is not for people. It's for boats".

ROB: Once we got out of his way, it just all came together. And by the fourth day he was like, "You guys just call me when you have everything ready". We even had to get stand-ins for him (laughs).

JEFFREY: He would sit in his car for hours, talking on his cell phone, and the crew would be thinking, 'what's he up to? he's not preparing for his lines or warming up or anything'. Then he'd just come out, bang out the lines, then go back to the car.

CHARLES: He made the line much better. As I was writing I was sort of imagining a guy, an immigrant from Africa who is learning to speak "cop-speak", and how he would say things.

ROB: Pape had a knowledge of TV cop shows so he'd come out there with like, "Pull over!". He didn't like wearing the long black knee socks. He'd roll them down whenever he was off-camera, and when it was time to shoot again we'd be like, "Pape. Knee socks." and he'd roll his eyes and pull them up.

CHARLES: In Africa in school we always had to wear the knee socks, had to hold them up tight with rubber bands, because if they fell down we'd get caught by the prefect and be in trouble.

ROB: But he did everything we asked him to. Going in 20 degree water, whatever. He was great.

CINEMATICAL: Let's delve into the story a bit more. You've said that Police Beat is more of a love story than a cop story.

ROB: The whole key to the movie was - if the crime scenes came out of nowhere, it would just be random. He's thinking about his girlfriend and reflecting on his relationship while he's investigating the crime scene. There's this conflict between the pleasure of the relationship and the ugliness of what he sees in the real world. The poetry of the movie is taking the crime away from its boundary and making it a pallette for thinking about other things, so it reflects upon the protagonist.

CHARLES: One of the great things about working with Pape is he's around the age when people are working out relationships. It's about him being thrown out of his work by dealing with this relationship.

CINEMATICAL: So were you specifically avoiding having the focus be more on the "police work" angle?

CHARLES: You never see him use his gun. He pulls it at the end, but only then.

JEFFREY: That's the first thing they usually do in cop movies is pull the gun, so we wanted it that way - the opposite of what you'd expect.

CHARLES:  It wasn't that we were avoiding it, we just weren't interested in that.

ROB: We weren't trying to make a "procedural", where you actually get into the details of policework. You never see him in his office, there's no chief of police.

CINEMATICAL: Let's talk about the process of filming the movie. The cinematography is getting raved about.

JEFFREY: It was totally unrealistic. We shot with a 35mm anamorphic lens, we had a $170K budget, and we were shooting 2-3 locations a day. We shot for 47 days over a 3 month period, from August 2003 to December 2003.

CINEMATICAL: The film was funded by Northwest Film Forum, right?

JEFFREY: Well, not exactly. We had a grant from them that was good up to $20K, but part of that is "in kind". They gave us a lot of help, mainly, with connections and facilities. We practically lived in their editing facilities. Private investors funded the rest of the film --

ROB: Right, one of our big investors, we found her through Northwest Film Forum. Key members of our crew, one of our producers (Alexis) and 90% of the money came to us from people associated with Northwest Film Forum. I don't want to underestimate the importance of their help. Just being able to use their name, to say we were filming with their support, gave us tremendous credibility.

JEFFREY: And Alexis - we needed another producer, they gave us her name (along with a few others) and we interviewed her and thought she was perfect. And I want to add that, she did such an amazing job that, we initially hired her as "co-producer", but she contributed so much that we dropped the "co" and made her a full producer.

CINEMATICAL: So it's fair to say the movie wouldn't have gotten made without the support of Northwest Film Forum?

ROB: Absolutely. One of our key investors was a Film Forum member.

JEFFREY: We also got a big grant from Panavision out of L.A.

ROB: We had several camera vendors, but Panavision - we had a solid month of Panavision equipment.

CINEMATICAL: Charles, you work as a critic. Did you bring your critic's eye to your work on this film?

CHARLES:  Making the film was like writing a critcism without having to do the criticism, if that makes sense. It was a work of art.

ROB: (to Charles) You did what you told me not to do many times, which was, you kept saying "its fine" when it wasn't. Then we would work on it some more, perfect it.

CHARLES:  In film - the resolution, the answer, is there, you have to work until you find it. If it bothers you you have to go back and go back again, until it doesn't bother you anymore. In so much film, it's so impressive you think the image will just dazzle and that will be enough, but it's not. You have to treat film like you treat a sentence you write, and make it resolve, make it perfect.

CINEMATICAL: Police Beat opened at Sundance in January to a great critical reception.

ROB: You try not to be a slave to critics, but, let's be honest, they were important critics. To have a money deal,  but be savaged by the critics would be worse.

CHARLES:  You can't really compare Police Beat to anything that's ever been done. In a field that rarely does anything that totally breaks new ground and is very unique, Police Beat stands out. There is clear movement into new cinematic territory. There was a breaking away from the mold; still having acting, still being a film, but at the same time being very unique. I had that feeling early on that the film had done some interesting things. Maybe one day we'll turn back and look upon it and say, "it was good".

CINEMATICAL: What would you say were the biggest keys to the film being such a success?

JEFFREY: Well, we had the luxury of having 7 1/2 weeks to shoot, which is unheard of at this level of funding.

ROB: It was a year of editing, it was a lot of work, and there were points that it could have gone the other way, and been a film that people wouldn't respond to. Charles was very involved in the editing process especially.

CHARLES:  I think Rob never stopped pushing until it got to the end, until it got as far as it could go.

ROB: And the crew was so amazing. They'd load up, go shoot one location, reload everything, drive to another location, unload, do it again. They never complained. We had most of the same people for every day of the shooting. This was just a labor of love from everyone involved.