'Black Panther' screenwriter Joe Robert Cole on directing his gritty new Netflix movie 'All Day and a Night'
- Joe Robert Cole talked to Insider about his new movie, "All Day and a Night."
- Cole opened up about how the movie mirrors the people he interacted with while in college.
- The writer-director also explained how the movie's message is about how the main character is trapped in walls even while not in prison.
- The movie is available now on Netflix.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
At 40 years old, Joe Robert Cole is one of the most sought after screenwriters working today in Hollywood thanks to his work in TV ("The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story") and movies ("Black Panther").
But for his latest project, he's moving away from helping the vision of people like Ryan Murphy and Ryan Coogler to set out and direct his own story.
"All Day and a Night" (available on Netflix) is an unforgiving look at Jahkor (Aston Sanders of "Moonlight"), an Oakland kid who is trying to make a better life for his newborn baby with his skills as a rapper but finds himself falling into a life of crime that puts him in jail alongside his gang banging father, James (Jeffrey Wright).
This a story that Cole wanted to tell long before "Black Panther" was made. A decade to be exact. And it's in many ways the first time audiences will get something that comes directly from Cole (even for his directorial debut, "Amber Lake," he admits the project was very collaborative with the actors).
But for the first time in his career, he's the tone in the director's chair, which means he's the one with the final say and the vision — regardless of the amount of collaboration. And for "All Day and a Night," he set out to give an unforgiving look at what he observed growing up around the San Francisco Bay area.
"My grandmother used to say, 'Our family didn't grow up with a silver spoon in our mouths.'"
Cole said he found inspiration for the movie from spending time with people like the ones he depicts
The light bulb for "A Day and a Night" really came into focus when Cole was in college at the University of California, Berkeley.
"I spent a lot of time between classes and semesters with people in these same environments that are in the movie," Cole said. "I'm a square so I make no claims to having any kind of street crew, but I got to see the humanity in these people that I was interacting with."
And Cole said that's the biggest thing he wants people to take away from the journey we see Jahkor go on in the movie. To see "the people in those communities in a more humane light."
Though the comparison to a raw inner-city crime movie like "Menace II Society" is expected by Cole (and he admits he probably mentioned that movie when pitching it to Netflix), he also hopes it can stand on its own. Especially in how it depicts the characters of Jahkor and James in prison.
"My film isn't about the black community, just like a white crime film isn't about all white people," Cole said. "What Jah is grappling with is trying to understand how the systemic walls that are put around him outside of prison, in his community, are not that different than the walls he sees inside prison. It is him trying to find hope in the one place that he can control through the journey of this film which is inside himself. That's the thrust of what I'm trying to get at. There are these societal structural challenges that particularly African-Americans in these underserved communities have to face. I feel oftentimes no one speaks to the reality of the circumstance they are in."
Going forward still expect Cole to pen comic book-based projects. He's currently adapting the Vault Comics title "Failsafe" (a project also for Netflix), with Michael B. Jordan producing. But at the same time, Cole also wants to continue to direct movies like "All Day and a Night," where the story is shedding light on someone you wouldn't expect you'd be interested in.
"What I wanted to achieve was taking the audience on a journey and humanizing someone we often struggle to see the humanity in," he said. "I was constantly working on finding the humanity in the stylized crime genre."