Tate Taylor (Director) and Viola Davis ("Aibileen") Discuss The Help
Questions for Tate Taylor: How did you make the language of the film so authentic?
A: It goes to writing what you know and what you experienced, and I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi.... I basically was raised in the wonderful company of many African American women. I also think we needed to get it right as far as the way the whites spoke - there's a certain way that Southern women of different society and privilege speak, and it wasn't more challenging, but differentiating between Celia and Charlotte... it's the same thing. So I don't like to think about it like it was the black dialect and the white - there were about 20 going on. And I have to take my hat off to Katherine on that as well.
Q: How do you feel about discussing your own experiences growing up in Mississippi? I don't believe there was anyone like Miss Hilly in our family! But still I'm nervous discussing my own family history with my readers.
A. My mother was the Celia - and so was Katherine Stockett's - they were shunned by the Jackson elite... They had a very lonely existences as single mothers. So I can't really speak to the firsthand accounts of the horrors of how people were treated. I focused on the love...You can't be fearful. I had this conversation with a woman from Jackson who saw the film. She said, "my 10-year-old son wants to see it but I don't want him to." And I said why - and she said, "I don't want to have to have a conversation about this." I told her she was missing the whole point. And she said, "Well my mother and him have a great relationship, and this is part of her past, and I don't want him to ask her what the 'N' word is and show that side of her." I told her, you are doing him a huge disservice.
That's the thing about the South - to your question, we don't like our scabs and think we are failing if we go back and talk about them. But to talk about them shows how far you have come.
Questions for Viola Davis: Viola, how do you feel about talking openly on the subject?
A: I'm someone who was in therapy for years, so I'm a big proponent of truth and talking about it and being open. I think you're only as good as your secrets. I think the fact that we don't talk is because it is NOT pretty. Everybody wants to look good. Everybody does.
I've done biopics of people. And when people write stories about themselves, they leave out all the bad stuff. It's just all swept out. Everybody is courageous, everybody triumphs in the end... I wonder who that is helping. I just know that friendships start when you share something with someone. Especially something really big and they say, you know what, I went through the same thing - and healing can start from there. Otherwise you're just building on a big ol' bed of lies.
Q: What were your thoughts when you read this script/role?
A: It struck me right away. You know, usually characters of color are relegated to a page or two. People will say to me, "you've been working so long, you've had such an illustrious career"...you know usually I'll get three or four scenes in a movie and that's it at the most. I work a total of nine days maybe. But people will say, you were in that movie...well, actually I was a character in that movie. But this (The Help) was a chance for me to really develop a character, to really be a part of it. Characters who are fully explored beyond taking care of babies and cooking in the kitchen, and they were lead roles for Black women. So it was a no brainer.
Question for Tate Taylor: The book is so beloved - how worried were you about the expectations for the movie?
A: The greatest gift that could have ever happened was that I got the rights to the book when Katherine had nothing - she had been turned down by her 60th person. So when I got the rights I thought I was adapting my friend's unpublishable manuscript. I went out and wrote it free of Hollywood..and I just wrote it as a tribute to my friend's book... And to Carol Lee and Demitri and the women I knew (from Jackson). No offense to the readers... I just didn't worry about it because if I kept true to the book and told the truth, hopefully it would all work out. Now Viola, she had the most pressure...
Viola Davis: I'm a Black actress playing a maid in 2011 in Hollywood - that's a lot of pressure. You don't play a maid. That is something you DO NOT DO. And you're playing a maid where a white woman has written the story and a white man is directing it! I am essentially playing a mammy. So I felt a lot of pressure. And of course there was pressure from the readers who all wanted Oprah to play the role. And saw her (Aibileen) as being 70-years-old and about 250 pounds. But it's like Tate said, if you work from that point of pressure and fear, your work is going to be crap. At some point you just have to leave it alone and know that we have our own standard of excellence. I just have to say of Tate...just to compliment him a little bit, this is one courageous dude. He's got a thick skin.
Question for Viola: Along the same lines - do you have help at home today?
A: I actually do. It's so funny because I am listening to myself and thinking, those people say they don't treat their help any differently and they are lying...but, she's a part of our family now. She brings her daughter over and I'll take care of her... I have always felt that she was part of the family.
I came from such abject poverty, it's hard for me to feel like the rich woman in the house with help. And because of my family, it's hard for me to not understand her needs on a day-to-day basis. Some people have this disconnect with class, so they don't understand needs... they really don't. They just feel like "Hey, I can throw her 95 cents an hour (which is what Aibileen was making) and she can eat on that, she can pay the bills with that." I mean Aibileen in the book is barely eating. I'm very aware of that.
Viola Davis as "Aibileen"
Author Kathryn Stockett and Octavia Spencer (Minny)
Questions for Katherine Stockett: Explain your relationship with your maid, Demitri, growing up in Mississippi.
A: Demetri worked for my grandmother for 32 years, so there was a very hierarchal set up there. Demetri was an amazing woman, she ran a tight ship. She grew up in Shanghai, so she understood class and the boundaries. I had a very unique relationship with her because my mom worked, she was single and I'd get dumped off at my grandmother's house after school. My brothers and sisters were older, so it would be just me and Demetri in the house and she would stand me in front of this big mirror, it was in the kitchen, and that was where Demetri always was...in that kitchen. And she would say "Look at you, you are so beautiful." And I was not. I was the dorkiest looking four-eyed kid. I was strangely short and I never brushed my teeth, I'm lucky I've got any left... But she would just say, "Look at yourself, you're worth something." And that was the message that kept running in my head when I first started writing in her voice. She had no children of her own, but if you asked her how many children she had, she would say three; there was me, my brother and my sister. She was an amazing, generous person.
Q: Do you think Hilly ever learned her lesson when it came to integration?
A: No. I think Hilly is going to be fighting that demon her entire life until she dies. She's that self-centered. She is just sick. And we know people really exist like that in the world. They are not everywhere. They are not as common as they are in literature and movies, but those are the people that always want to create the conflict. They are so immersed in what they believe in.
Q: What do you think is the moral of this story?
A: Look, you'll never read anything that I write that has a moral to it...it's not my role in life to try to teach anybody a lesson. If you all knew the routes that I've taken in life, the wrong turns I've made...and I don't want to read something where someone is trying to teach me a lesson. I'm just glad that somehow, in some circuitous way, people are talking about this topic of race and relationships and bringing up a part of history that people seem to have kind of forgotten. And I never wanted to try to act like I was representing the entire black race of Mississippi in 1963. It was a very small population; a bubble that was affected by class... I wanted it to be on paper, and I wanted people to look back on it and think about how ridiculous some of those rules were.
Q: I thought it was very ironic how it was okay for the help to hug and kiss the children but not use the toilet - is that how it really was?
Octavia Spencer: I don't think they were hugging and kissing the children in front of the children's parents.
Katherine Stockett: In my grandmother's house, there was a door out on the side of the house. I never wondered what it was. I thought it was a storeroom or something until after she died. I still to this day have never been in there. I know I should go in there and face my demons...It never occurred to me... I guess that's why I'm sensitive to that phrase "like family" (referring to her maid as being part of the family) because that is absolutely what I thought before I started writing this story. Then I realized that Demitri knew everything about us, but we knew so little about her. We knew she went to church, we knew where she bought her groceries, but we really didn't know ... I love that line that Tate put in the movie, "Nobody knows what it feels like to be me." That was so beautiful. I wish I'd written that.
Question for Octavia Spencer: Did you have concerns about playing this role?
A: I had felt pressure in a) wanting to make sure that Katherine's source material was intact and that my performance portrayed what she had originally intended, and secondly that Tate would be happy, but most importantly it's an homage to all of the men and women who's backs built this country and I wanted to be truthful to them and to give them a voice. So no, there's wasn't any trepidation on my part. Because I also know the story. People who haven't read the book assume that it's the same kind of depiction of African American women being not only subservient but inferior, but I think we find out that there's not a superior or an inferior, there's a equality. And that's what was important to me, to make sure that message was told. That's what I believe.
The Help is now in theatres. Check listings!
Director Tate Taylor with Emma Stone
