For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this excerpt from Backstory’s interview with Black List writer Leon Hendrix III about his script The White Devils from Backstory Issue 32.
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Leon Hendrix III admits it was originally a struggle to find his voice as a writer. It’s refreshing to hear a scribe of Hendrix’s caliber make such a confession and illuminate how the effort not only led him to discovering his artistic identity but made him a stronger screenwriter. And to say he found his voice is an understatement, as his thriller, The White Devils, is nuanced, powerful and exciting. Not only did it appear on the 2017 Black List, it’s already in preproduction at Warner Bros.
After a childhood where he fell in love with big-budget Spielbergian films, Hendrix got his undergraduate degree at Hampton University in Virginia before moving to New York to enroll in the graduate film program at Columbia University. It was there where his quest to hone his individuality occurred. “I think we had 85 students in my class, and maybe five of them were African American like me,” he says. “Part of the trouble with being a filmmaker who comes from a different than mainstream cultural tradition is your frame of reference is steeped in your culture. The musicians I know and the books I’ve heard of and the paintings I’ve seen and the festivals and traditions and religious rights and everything else that are part of my DNA come from the black community in America, specifically, the South Side of Chicago. So film school can feel like a silo. You can feel very alone, and you can feel like your work’s undervalued. I initially tried to fit into the mold. I tried to go, ‘Well, everyone likes Woody Allen and Fellini, so let me try to make that stuff but with people I’d like to see in those types of movies.’ And I tried, and no one liked it. I didn’t like it very much either. At a certain point, I said, ‘You know what? I’m not going to be able to do their thing.’”
It was at this point that Hendrix started down the path that made him the filmmaker he is today. Finding support from professors, he focused on writing for television in his final year at school, and the TV script he penned was so well received he garnered an agent and manager off it. After graduating in May 2015, he got into Film Independent’s Project Involve for up-and-comers from under-represented communities, and then he was accepted into both the Fox Writers Lab and the Universal Writers Program. Though his talent was undeniable given the reception his writing was receiving, he grew frustrated with not getting his original projects actually made. “I was having these meetings, and people would say, ‘Oh, this is amazing, we should work on something,’ ” he says. “And I would go, ‘Well, I’ve got these things, let’s work on those.’ But no one would want to.” He also wanted to direct, but the lack of past works to show seemed to be blocking any chance of him lensing one of his own scripts. “I got tired of seeing that look in people’s eyes, so I said I’m going to write something that was small, that was contained. A lot of younger filmmakers are making their mark in the thriller space so I wanted to do that. And I wanted it to be so cheap that I could just find some crazy millionaire one night at Sundance and I pitch him this story, and they write me a check for a million dollars and I go make a movie.”
That thought was stirring in Hendrix’s mind in 2017 when he attended a classic-rock concert featuring Fleetwood Mac and Journey in Los Angeles, and an ugly incident occurred that helped shape what the script would be. He’d been trying to get to his seats during the show when another concertgoer refused to get up to let him through. Later, the man—who was white—warned the two women sitting in front of Hendrix to hide their purses because “those seats don’t belong to that guy.” He asked what the man’s issue was, and he said, “Go back to where you to belong.” Hendrix kept his cool and removed himself from the situation, but the damage was done. “I went home and I was really angry about it,” he recalls. “Because here I had purchased pretty expensive tickets to this show, and this guy out of nowhere just decides that because of who I was he should antagonize me.” He got to thinking about a nonprofit he worked for in rural New York before attending Columbia where he lived in relative seclusion. No one cared about his skin color there. “I get this feeling as a young black person when I go out in the woods that, Oh, right, you’re just a person and you live in the world. I don’t have that when I walk through a city. You just get tired of it, and it can make you really angry.”
Out of that grew The White Devils, about a father, Cassius, who decides to remove his two young sons—16-year-old Malcolm and 12-year-old Mandela—from society after his wife is murdered by a police officer in a routine traffic stop. They manage to live primitively until Malcolm stumbles upon a white teenager named June who’s on the run from her own family. The significance of penning a perspective on race relations was not lost on Hendrix. “I don’t feel like I can only write black characters,” he says, “but I knew that, especially as a first feature film, it was really important that I make this statement for myself as an artist and a filmmaker.” He used reverse-engineering to come up with his plot points. “It evolved pretty organically. If you start with a certain philosophy, at some point you have to test it. If the father thinks all white people are bad, then at some point they have to meet a white person that’s not bad. And so that became sort of the natural conflict and push and pull of the story. That’s where the thriller dynamic comes from. It’s not really introduced until we meet the girl.” When it comes to process, Hendrix likes to do an exhaustive outline before moving on to the actual script, using a legal pad to handwrite up to 30 pages of notes. Because of this, the actual drafting process took only two weeks.
The White Devils opens with a gut punch of a first scene, where we witness the officer murder the boys’ mother in front of them through the lens of the cop’s dashcam, echoing the footage the country is getting used to viewing nightly on the news. “I think the point of that scene is you have to introduce a certain kind of violence into this world,” Hendrix says. “When I was younger, I would know older black men in particular who sort of talk about the world being the white world and the white political system and the white police. It was fairly critical—everything was fire and brimstone, and I never understood it. It all seemed like generalized antagonism, and when I finally had some experiences of my own, I realized this is an appropriate reaction. So the initial story and that initial scene, that’s the start of the journey the oldest boy goes on. And that scene is giving the audience a chance to understand why the father reacts the way he does.” The scene is crucial for allowing the reader to get in Cassius’ headspace. He’s a tough character for a reader to embrace because of the overbearing and unrelenting way he parents. And by opening the film with that incident, the reader can focus on the story rather than keep guessing what Cassius’ motivations for raising his children in this manner could possibly be. “You get that he lives in in this half-awake realm—like he’s always aware that he’s at war. He’s constantly looking over his shoulder, and he’s passing that on to the kids. And so love it or hate it, there’s a reasoning for it. But I didn’t want that to become the mystery of why he’s doing this. You need to understand why he’s wounded and why he’s hurt.”
The film’s backbone is the strong and ever-changing relationship between Malcolm and Mandela. It’s evidenced best in one of the script’s standout scenes, when Malcolm discovers Mandela has created a hideaway to escape the house every now and then. It’s a small area where he has chosen to keep the mementos left by their mother and serves as a stark illustration of what the boys have been missing. “The world in the script is conspicuously absent of black women,” Hendrix says. “And there’s a reason for that. Because part of the critique of this world of violence that these guys live in is missing something. It’s taken away from them. They live in a world where they literally live in the elements. If you don’t hunt, you don’t eat. And in that world, the physical transliteration of that psychology is that Mandela, the one who has the least connection to the feminine thing, has literally squirreled away the tiniest pieces of it that he can recall. It’s a moment where Malcolm goes in and sees that Mandela has built this shrine to his mom, and he sees real desperation in the fact that they live this existence that is completely devoid of that kind of energy. He understands that as much as it’s done this one thing to his dad, who is trying to push it away because it hurts him too much to think about the absence of it, his brother, who has only ever known the absence of it, is just dying for the tiniest taste. It puts Mandela’s emotional space into view for Malcolm in a very visceral, physical way.”
The scene has a mirror of sorts later in the script in a particularly tense moment. Mandela has just killed his first squirrel, and as the trio are cooking it, Cassius makes him eat the animal’s heart. The moment itself is meaningful as a real bonding moment between father and the son he has deemed weak, but it also hits Malcolm hard as he sees his innocent brother becoming seduced by his father’s hardened ways. “Mandela has spent this whole movie trying to connect to his father, who never thought he was tough enough,” Hendrix says. “He’s tried to connect to his brother, who’s sort of in his own world. It’s a turning point for Mandela because he tried to have a normal thing. He tried to have a family. And now Mandela is thinking, Well if going down this path costs me the part of me that’s gentle, then fuck it, I’m down. Malcolm sees the tragedy in that because he didn’t recognize until this moment that as much as his brother’s a pain in the ass, as much as he wants to go off and do his own thing, he himself may have helped kill the part of Mandela that just wanted to be loved.”
Hendrix used The White Devils as a sample to get hired in the writers’ room for his friend Vera Miao’s series Two Sentence Horror Stories for Warner Bros.’ digital outlet Stage 13, then as his reps began to garner interest from other parties to purchase his script, Warner Bros. itself decided to make an offer. Paperwork for the sale was being finalized just as Hendrix received word that he made both the Black List and the Tracking Board’s prestigious Hit List. Just as important as the script sale itself is the fact that the writer is on board to direct, at last able to ensure that his vision is the one that reaches the big screen. And due to the overwhelming reception for The White Devils, he has been emboldened to keep penning the tales that are important to him: genre pictures with African Americans at their core. “Maybe this love I have for these kinds of smart stories combined with the instinct I have that there aren’t black people in space, there aren’t black people in westerns, there aren’t black people in fantasy—maybe those two things can be married. And maybe I’m the person to do that.”
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