One, it’s based on a gripping true-crime story that many will probably remember.
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“I knew that I was still saved because the Bible tells me that once I’m saved, I’m always saved”. “I don’t want (faith-based filmmaking) to feel cliquey”.
“[God] showed me, ‘You know what, I love you”. Based on hostage Ashley Smith’s book about the 2005 incident – a recounting of harrowing events in which Rick Warren’s bestseller The Purpose-Driven Life proves pivotal – the movie is, above all, a no-nonsense portrait of two damaged but resilient souls. He then asks her a probing question about her and her husband, who was killed years earlier by a drug dealer. “That’s basically why I pretend to be English”.
How do you think you would’ve handled that situation if it would’ve happened to you? The young woman he kidnaps and holds hostage at her home is Ashley Smith played by Kate Mara, who is a recovering addict and single mom. “When you see that kind of energy, I think it raises all boats”. In “Selma“, people died.
“People respect it, accommodate it and actually gravitate toward it”, he said. This was a dark situation, but it took people of all colors and ages to declare it a wrong and to make a change.
Oyelowo was so passionate about the telling of this film, he took over the role of producer.
“The real Ashley Smith was a huge source of information for me”, Oyelowo (pronounced oh-yellow-oh) said in a recent phone call. I would like to hear about how you approached that facet of both of these characters. 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.
“I was forced with the decision of whether or not I was going to use drugs with Brian Nichols that night”, she said. She went to the cops and they were floored by the fact that this man let her go. Yet, he had the degree of humanity where he was stopped in his tracks by her, reading to her and eventually letting her go. If that’s what they think, they couldn’t be more wrong. It’s in the news more now because we have more cameras, we have more social media, and that means some of these stories can’t be buried in the same way they were in the past. So yes, the idea at the beginning of the movie is to have him be cold blooded and one of the things that I really struggled with was that you have a guy with no shirt on, a very muscular man, with two guns running around Atlanta.
“To me, that crystallizes so much of what the human experience is – that we are built of hope”. It needs a certain amount of poetry, of magical realism, to convey the reality of the inner life without words.
I spent a lot of time with Ashley.
I know her talent is incredible, and that mutual respect helped while we were on set. Smith is now a sober mother of three, and Nichols is behind bars, serving multiple life sentences without parole. Really, honestly, she could not kick it. She was trying to get her life back together. It makes you mad, so I wanted to be there for them. “Maybe I’ll send it one day and maybe I won’t”. More than excitement, I had trepidation. So, Ralph and I tried to get a movie going which was just a fictional ensemble drama like Crash or Grand Canyon, something like that. Robinson said that when the time is right, she’ll broach that discussion. We needed to make him feel like the monster he was on that day and then have something about his interaction with Ashley Smith bring out his humanity.
Smith decides on a late-night cigarette run as Nichols, having fatally shot Judge Rowland W. Barnes, court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, Fulton County Sheriff’s Deputy Sgt. “In playing Brian Nichols, I was very far outside of my comfort zone”.
David Oyelowo and Kate Mara star in a scene from the movie “Captive“.
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She is a twenty-something, Cuban American girl living in the sunny, yet shady, Miami, FL. now a Nurse but still a Nursing student (it never ends). A Twitter and Disney enthusiast (that’s putting it lightly) whom enjoys writing about other things such as film, music, TV and traveling. When the third time she turned down the offer, she felt “free”.
