David Oyelowo plays Brian Nichols while Kate Mara plays the victim Ashley Smith. She said ‘Brian feels he is where he is suppose to be, ‘” Oyelowo explained, “I think he recognizes what he did and the affect that it had on those peoples lives.
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The movie, which stars A-listers David Oyelowo, of “Selma“, and Kate Mara, of “House of Cards” and “Fantastic Four“, details the encounter between Nichols and Smith while police were hunting for him, says the Chicago Tribune.
Nichols held Smith hostage for seven hours.
A decade after being held hostage by a gunman following his shooting spree at a Georgia courthouse, Ashley Smith says she barely recognizes the woman who talked an escaped killer into letting her go.
“Captive” feels less like a film in and of itself and much more like a commercial for both Warren’s and Smith’s books.
British actor David Oyelowo, most notably known for his Oscar-snubbed performance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.in the otherwise critically acclaimed Selma, is a busy man. He plays Atlanta criminal Brian Nichols in his latest movie Captive, the 2005 true story, which opens nationwide today.
At that time, Smith was addicted to crystal meth, and sometimes visited church, where she was given a copy of “Purpose Driven Life“. In real life, the very devout Smith had been at the book for some time, making a reading from it (along with her Bible) part of her daily routine. There’s a much more complicated and insane story here – a post-credits clip has, of all people, Oprah pointing out just how lucky Smith was, considering she gave an armed murderer crystal meth in her home. For me personally, even though I am a Christian, I’m not interested in preaching to the audience but I do gravitate towards films and characters where faith is an integrated organic part of who they are and what inspires them to function. But somehow, not by coincidence, the book is given back to her while at work.
“Any role I play, my job is to inhabit the mindset of the character and to not judge what they do but to understand what they do”. I’ve seen everything he’s done. He said “You got any drugs in here?” It’s remarkable how immobile the story is, and while restrained elements of empathy for one another surface, no Stockholm Syndrome bonds begin to form, and no major tensions arise aside from brief paranoia when Nichols decides to snort some meth. Ashely thinks about escaping once or twice, but never acts on it. And to take yet another life in the shape of Ashley’s would be just a further erosion of his own life.
Terrified of her captor, yet not entirely unsympathetic to his troubles, Ashley scrambles to stay alive and makes some ineffectual efforts to free herself from Brian’s grasp.
“It’s surreal at times, especially when you go through all of the emotion I go through when I watch it”, Smith said about seeing her story on the screen. “I think that is a universal truth and something I hope anyone and everyone can take from the film”.
One, it’s based on a gripping true-crime story that many will probably remember. “I mean it literally turned the trajectory of her life and she has used the way God shaped her to serve God and others. And right now he still can impact people’s lives”, she said. Everything about all, I just said was a downward spiral.
Oyelowo tried to meet with Nichols, but “access was impossible”, he says. Even worse, as an observer pointed out to Oyelowo, in one scene Mara wasn’t wearing a bra, something potentially offensive to Christian audiences.
One of the most powerful things to me about this story is that Brian Nichols figured her for a party girl. I would like to hear about how you approached that facet of both of these characters. She remembered this event as if it had happened yesterday and she was on set with us quite a lot of the shoot. He knew that the moment he stuck his head out that door – when they knew where we was – he was gonna have a hundred bullets (fired at him).
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DO: Yes, I had read it before I knew about this incident and it’d been a very meaningful book to me personally as a Christian.
