Two years ago, Tarell Alvin McCraney won a screenwriting Oscar for Moonlight, a movie based on his original stage play, which was in turn loosely based on his childhood in Miami, and which, on the surface, could not possibly have less in common with his new movie, High Flying Bird, which is loosely based on…the 2011 NBA lockout. Moonlight is a wrenching character study about a gay kid’s self-discovery in a place where coming out is even harder than getting out. And High Flying Bird is about… the 2011 NBA lockout. And yet somehow, in the end, they’re about the same thing: the bartering and exploitation of black bodies. And like Moonlight, High Flying Bird tells its story from a perspective we rarely see onscreen—the business of pro sports—and the result is the most honest and polemical sports movie in a generation.
High Flying Bird is also directed by Steven Soderbergh, which means it’s a genre experiment—the genre this time being sports, and the experiment this time being: what if we make a sports movie with no sports? The result is more of a caper movie than a sports flick, more Glengarry Glen Ross than Rocky. High Flying Bird stars Moonlight’s André Holland as an agent plotting to get the NBA’s money train moving again before the lockout bankrupts his gifted but immature lottery-pick client and forces his boss (Zachary Quinto) to lay him off. It’s fun and fast and hyper-verbal, but it’s also a rallying cry for black athletes to flip the script, seize control and take back their game from white corporate America.
McCraney, meanwhile, is a busy man. In addition to this film, which he’s been chipping away at for five years, and his day job as the playwriting chair at the Yale School of Drama, he’s got a new play on Broadway and a new TV series in the works for Oprah’s television network. But he carved out a few minutes to talk about basketball, power in pro sports, and where on Earth he got the idea to make a movie about a labor dispute.
GQ: This project began with Soderbergh and Holland talking about basketball and the economics of pro sports—but it didn’t become about the lockout until you got involved. Why did the subject interest you in the first place?
Tarell McCraney: Well, in the spirit of team sports, I like working with like-minded folks. I only say that because you often see players in the NBA saying, "I play well with this person, I work well with this person, we can build something together." And they’ll try and find ways to get on the same team with each other, build franchises today. This is no different. Steven is a huge basketball fan, so is Dre. I wouldn't say I'm a huge fan—like, I couldn't tell you who was on X team in 1962—but I grew up in a basketball family, and I loved watching games live. So I sat down thinking, "Okay, I'm going to have to figure out how to match my musicality to what these guys do on the court."
This notion Soderbergh had of making a sports movie without sports—did it alarm you? That’s a big ingredient to remove.
It didn't alarm me at all—but it was surprising, because I'm like, "That's what's thrilling!" To see these athletes who are dancers, basically, and do amazing things and even when they miss a shot—there's something beautiful and powerful in the athleticism. And he's like, "Yeah, but those highlights are being used to distract us from the business." That was a moment where light went on in my head and I'm like, "Oh, there's tons of comparison to my industry." To any industry. How the folks who make the work happen are often left out of the big decisions. Unless you're the Will Smith of your sport. The rest of us have to eke out a living.
How did the real-life NBA lockout in 2011 come to be the spine of this story? It doesn’t seem like a natural setting for a movie.
We'd already taken off the table flashing any sinewy muscles running up and down the court, so the flesh of that is not there. So what are we after? What are we talking about? To me, the best time to look at a character is when they're under duress. Not when things are great but when things are falling apart.
And in the NBA over the years, there have been these moments where a lockout will happen and people start to panic. There are people who are prepared for these moments, and then there are those who are new to the game, or are still living paycheck to paycheck. Like when the government shuts down.
I was about to say: This is sounding eerily familiar.
If you look at Congress, they look a lot like what these team owners look like. Mostly white, mostly older people who will be fine during a lockout. And then there are those who are on the ground floor, who are mostly black, who if the lockout doesn't end, they are struggling. Now they're taking loans, they're taking in debt. It's piling up, and by the time the lockout is over, they may not be able to get out of it again. They were living off of checks that paid for their house, their mother's house, their mother's car, their brother's whatever. So what if there's this person who's on the periphery of the game but in a moment like this, he looks at it and says, "Hey, this crisis could be an advantage." This moment where there are no rules and everything's up for grabs—this could be your moment. What are the ways you could do that? And when the industry does kick back into gear again—and it will, it will find a way back; we as Americans always find our way back to capitalism, we believe in it as a birthright—so when it does come back, this may mean you won't be a part of that. Are you prepared to do that? There are no easy answers to that.
That kind of complexity is pretty rare in the sports movie genre. Sports movies tend to celebrate very simple, conventional, rock-ribbed, American virtues. This movie is nothing like that. It's not a crowd-pleaser. It's subversive.
When you say "sports movies," a lot of folks probably think of, like, the Rocky movies. And absolutely, look, I've seen all the Creeds. [laughs] You know what I mean? I love MBJ, love Creed. I love the underdog stories. Cool Runnings, things like that. But mostly I am interested in films about folks who love a thing and try to use that thing to help them get to a place. And how that doesn’t always work out. Or works out very differently than expected.
Like, there’s a show on Starz right now about Liberty City, which is where I'm from. It’s called the Warriors of Liberty City, and it starts off by telling you that the NFL has an absurd amount of players who come out Liberty City. And this is a 12-block, not even five-mile radius area. Someone's coming into that neighborhood and picking these young, talented folk and sending them to some of the biggest and largest platforms in the world. But that's also the same neighborhood where we shot Moonlight, and the projects where we shot them are literally being razed, and where the other day the police chief had to have a press conference about surveillance cameras, and where a person who was in witness protection and testifying about a shooting was gunned down and killed. You know what I mean? It's the same neighborhood.
So for me, what I love about doing films about talent, and the things that make us talented, and things that can take us out of quote unquote "poverty," is looking how, on one hand, the American dream is being carroted in front of us, but on the other, the stick of oppression is beating us—looking at what that does to a person, what that does to ideology.
The other way this movie tends to diverge from most sports movies—besides, of course, the lack of sports—is that it often feels more like a workplace caper.
Yeah, when we were just getting started, Steven told us about this film he really wanted us to watch called Sweet Smell of Success [the 1957 film noir starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis set in the dark corners of Broadway]. I love when there’s a story about a big industry, and a gatekeeper, and then there's someone who comes in and tries to make their way in it. I think a big part of the American ethos is to see someone in the system change it, or work against it, or try to find their own way. We love that.
The gatekeeper in High Flying Bird is also the villain—the lawyer for the NBA owners, who's just a remorseless monster in a tailored suit. I'll need to give readers a SPOILER ALERT, but there's a scene in the film, set in a sauna, in which MacLachlan's character does something grotesque in order to intimidate this agent. Please tell me that's not based on any kind of real experience.
Oh. Sadly—
No!
To be fair, not in basketball! But I've had those experiences. Absolutely. Absolutely. As a young and upcoming black person in this industry there have been moments that I have been intimidated by older white men who have said things like, "You're going to be fine and you shouldn't be a disruptor. You shouldn't interrupt what's happening. Everything's going to be fine, get out of the way." Yeah. Absolutely. That's why I put it in the sauna. Steven and André were like, "Why in the sauna?" It’s because we can tell privilege and comfort by what spaces people think they own. And so you're at your local gym and think, "Oh, well, we all own a piece of this, right?" But there are folks who walk in there like, "Nope, I still have more rights to this than you do."
OK, intimidation tactics are one thing. But—again, spoiler alert—a snot rocket? That really happened to you?
Oh yeah. You can't make that shit up. I mean, sometimes life offers us way more colors than we can... [laughs] You know what I mean?