“People exploded. We were now in this powder-keg moment,” King recalled during an online panel at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday. “The producers on the film, we all talked, and we were like ‘We’ve got to figure out a way to get this out now.’”
Based on a play of the same name by Kemp Powers — who also wrote the screenplay — the dialogue-driven film unfolds largely over a fictionalized night in which real-life friends Cassius Clay, Sam Cooke, Malcolm X( Kingsley Ben-Adir), and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) celebrate Clay’s surprise title win over Sonny Liston, before Clay took the name Muhammad Ali. King, making her feature directorial debut, joined the project after her agent sent her the script. “I had never seen conversations like this happen before on the screen,” she said. “While it was through the voices of these legendary men, I felt like I was listening to conversations from Black men speaking about the Black man’s experience — and I wanted in on that!” Each man in “One Night in Miami” delivers a differing perspective on their status as Black public figures navigating their roles in the Civil Rights movement and in a capitalist system, themes just as relevant six decades ago as they are today. Cooke and Malcolm go at it most intensely, with Malcolm’s Black separatist views standing in sharp contrast to Cooke’s savvy ability to achieve financial success within the white supremacy of the music industry. “I wanted to show men that we see as iconic and indestructible in moments of vulnerability and do it in a way [where] that vulnerability isn’t a bad thing at all,” Powers said. “The conversation that I wanted these guys to have, it’s honestly a conversation that me and my buddies had freshman year in the dormitory at Howard (University) … you have dreams, you want to have success as a Black man. But when you get to that point, when you have it, it always comes with an asterisk. It’s questions like, ‘How much do I have to compromise myself to succeed in this world that, at times, can be very hostile towards me?’”
Odom said the film allowed him and his co-stars to bring their lived experience to the screen. “It felt a little dangerous and felt exciting — this was a private conversation we were going to have in public,” he said. “When my white manager was reading the script, he was like, ‘You know, I’ve never been a party to a conversation like this. I felt a little like, should I be hearing them?’” Hodge said he hopes the film will be a tool to help people navigate today’s racial climate. “We have an opportunity to really relay the message to those who really don’t understand it. We have an opportunity to teach those who are trying to have the conversation how to have the conversation, how to continue to debate positively to continue aiming for progress,” he said. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
