Titus Kaphar
speaker
40 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Titus Kaphar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah.
Oh, wow, man. That's a good one. Wait a second, man. What do you think the teacher's going to look like this year? Oh, yeah. Teacher, stop that screaming. Teacher, don't you see? Don't want to be no uptown punk.
Thank you.
The documentary happened because I was going back to Michigan, where I'm from, Kalamazoo, to visit my grandmother. And when I got to my grandmother's house, my father was sitting on the doorstep, and I had my sons with me, and my wife was with me, and they'd never seen him before. My kids were probably about seven and five or something like that at that time.
And I basically told him I didn't really want to talk and that this wasn't a good time. So I walked up the stairs, walked into the house, and to my surprise, my father followed me in. Now, this is my maternal grandmother. And so as I was starting to get a little frustrated about the situation, my grandmother said, baby, you need to talk to him.
And I say this all the time, but when my grandmother tells you to do something, you do it. There's no question. I had a camera on my shoulder at the time because I was going to take a photograph of her. I was going to make a painting and drawing of her. And so kind of on a whim, I said to my father, if you want to talk, let me let me film you. There's a there's a lot to be accounted for.
And I was hoping he would say no, but he said yes. He said be in my house for 15 minutes. And that was the beginning of it. And the truth of the matter is that documentary felt wildly unsatisfying. I showed it publicly in the theater one time and decided I don't want that in the world like that.
A lot of it was just the fact that it felt like it did a really good job of telling me where I was but not how I got there. It was me as an adult reflecting on these things as an adult. And there was no space for that child, that child's voice in that documentary. And somehow that felt really necessary.
So as I let go of the idea of the documentary project and I moved in to the idea of doing this as a feature film, I realized that it was going to be necessary for me to think differently about my father when I write him as a character.
Yeah, I mean, the writing process was very different for me. And so what happened is I'd wake up in the morning.
about five o'clock and i'd start writing for a couple hours take my kids to school and then i would go to the studio and i would i would start drawing or sketching from what i had written the day before so i have this app on my phone that allows me to listen to text so i was listening to that and remembering all of the things from my childhood experiences and And just writing that down.
And initially, I was writing this stuff for the purpose of trying to tell my sons a little bit about their father, me, about where I come from and, you know, why I don't like to talk about when I was a kid so much. And for their whole lives, I've always said, well, I'll tell you more when you're older.
Yeah.
Yeah. And so my oldest is going off to college now. So I think that's part of what initiated this whole process for me. And the painting aspect of it is so – that's so normal. That's my happy place. That's peace, you know. I'm a pretty extroverted person, but that's only because I have – all of this time alone in the studio.
So that part felt normal, felt right, and it made the writing process easier because the writing process was far more emotional than I expected it to be. The process of sitting down and writing made me remember things that I had pushed out of my mind.
for a long time and I Also as I took it from reality and moved it into the script it actually became more difficult when I was moving it into a script because If you were writing a character you have to be honest about that characters motivations you can't just say this is a bad guy and And as a young man, I would have told you that my father was the villain of my narrative. He was the bad guy.
It wasn't until I sat down to write and I had to ask myself, no, no, that's not enough. Why is he doing what he's doing? What are the motivations for his actions? What are the broader context of the world? Yes, that's right. You grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Yes, that's right. That was a place of industry, of factories, of businesses. And yes, that's right.
By the time you were in high school, all of those businesses, so many of them had been shut down. And so there were no jobs. There were few opportunities. And yes, that's right. Crack cocaine came in right at that same time. So with context and writing and asking myself the motivation for this character, I gained a compassion, a sympathy for my father that I never had as a young man.
He has a young son. Terrell has a young son. I have two. You know, I think fundamentally this film is about one artist's journey towards healing. Of course, there's this question of this father who reenters the situation and whether or not there will be reconciliation or forgiveness between them. And we go with this family on this journey. The film for me is about generational healing, about
How does this generation make sure that our children don't have to carry the same wounds and baggage that we carry? Is there a way for us to leave it here so that they can go on without that burden? And in the film, the artist Terrell and his wife Aisha, they figure this out through their artistic practice itself.
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