Exclusive: Mario Van Peebles Talks Life, Love & Action

Recently Jeff Fountain had the chance to talk with actor/writer/producer Mario Van Peeples about life, the current tensions in the world, love his passion for all things in front of and behind the camera.

With your dad being in the business, was it inevitable that you would follow his footsteps or did you have a joy for this film early on?

Mario: It definitely was influenced by my father, who made The Story of a Three-Day Pass, Watermelon Man and Sweetback, and then twenty years later I get to do New Jack City, Posse, Panther and then my movie to him BAADASSSSS!, where I play him, which was amazing. I wanted to use the medium of cinema, television to kind of connect the dots, so to speak. You know, my mom is white, my dad is black, my aunt is gay, I have a Trumper in my family, so I always felt just within my own family tree I had to be multilingual, cast a wide net and love everybody. Dr. King said, we either learn to live together as brothers and sisters or we all perish together as fools, and I would add we need to learn to live together with nature as well. 

You’ve worn a lot of different hats so to speak in this industry. Do you have a favorite medium to work in?

Mario: Growing up in a filmmaking family you learn about editing, directing, writing, you learn to wear multiple hats. It’s not that I want to do everything, it’s that I want to do enough things that I can get in where I fit in, in different situations. Being a parent has made me a better son for example, so it’s all been pretty delicious and unbelievable, playing your own father, playing Malcolm X, etc. 

When and why did you decide that you wanted to try directing?

Mario: I saw my dad doing it pretty early on, I think when he did Watermelon Man I was eleven, I was working as a PA on his set, and then when he did Sweetback I was twelve or thirteen, and again I was working on his set. My mother took me along to audition for theater pieces, early experimental stuff in San Fransico, so I got exposure to the arts and I was such a different kid after having traveled the world. I guess to some degree the arts were my refuge, I found America strange, full of materialism, apartheid, and to be off putting because like I said, my family is multi-racial, I couldn’t fit into any slots and I didn’t feel I needed to. We lived in Amsterdam, we traveled to Morocco where if you didn’t have three wives you were considered poor, everyone had a different take on what social happiness meant in each culture and yet in each culture there is some happy and unhappy people, so I looked at it as more of a smorgasbord and less of a finite this is what you are given. 

If you are born as a Palestinian, or an Israeli, you are born with a pre-assigned friend and enemy group. It seems like that here in America, if you are born black the cops are going to look at you one way and if you’re born white you’re going to get indoctrinated into a whole different mentality. At some point you hopefully take responsibility for that and see outside of the different boxes and circles and think oh wow, that’s what they were given and that’s what we were assigned, we don’t really have to buy into what we were assigned. I felt no compulsion to buy into what I was assigned culturally because when I came here I was already sort of formed, oh, I like girls, or you’re really cool if smoke cigarettes and weed. Well, my best friend was my sister so she helped me understand yes I loved girls and my mother has the best weed so if I want to smoke I smoke with her, so I was just a different dude, an old soul. A lot of stuff simply escaped me, I couldn’t take it seriously, so acting and directing became a great way to show someone who was stuck in one particular box what it was like to be in another particular box, to connect the dots between this cultural smorgasbord that we are.

You’ve been in the entertainment business for a while now. How have things changed, both good and bad, from when you started to where we are now?

Mario: : You know, I had breakfast a few years ago with President Obama and he said something that made me think about the arts. He said in the big overall picture, the five or ten year plan, you can get very discouraged. Black people can become free but they don’t even get to know about their freedom for years later, we decimate the Native Americans, we send Japanese to internment camps, you can get very discouraged. But in the much bigger picture, the fifty or one hundred year plan, it does march towards justice in some ways. Folks get the right to vote, women get the right to vote, now you can love who you love so if you stay with the very long term plan, things seem to be going that way. I think the short term is two steps forward, one step back. But for all those boys and girls of all colors, growing up and seeing Sweetback, Shaft, Superfly, all of those movies where were no longer the motif of a certain class anymore, it made very little difference. They saw black folks finally winning…winning at the box office, two hours of seeing black being beautiful and badass and classy and what does that mean? That for two hours you could someone winning as the lead, in the theater, and that one day, one event can show them they can win in real life.

You look on the TV and get discouraged when you see/hear Donald Trump say “I could get away with shooting a guy on 5th Avenue, my constituency would still let me get away with it”. Then you see a guy with his knee on Floyd’s neck, with his hand in his pocket, basically saying, I can get away with this, no one can do anything about it. That may be discouraging, it is discouraging, but then the reaction to it and it’s interesting, you see it on the news, and then while watching this news you see and ad come on, and it’s this lovely multiracial couple, a black mom and a white dad, a brown child, or a gay couple, and you look at how far advertising has come. Even a couple years ago, you would have never seen ads like that so in what we have is the aspiration is being held higher than the reality, it’s almost schizophrenic, it’s bizarre. The thing is though, there definitely has been movement. My son Mandela who is acting, his mom is Canadian, he gets auditions for things I never would have gotten auditions for when I was his age, and it’s great, I love it. So in some ways, I see great change that way but obviously this administration is a big step in the wrong direction but here’s the thing: Anyone who does media knows the numbers are pretty diverse, in terms of the browning of America, and that’s an inevitability, even though Trump is like the ugly sheriff, trying to keep the blacks and the browns down, trying to restrict the gays for doing this or that, change is coming.

The Cosby Show would become the number one show, not number one black show, simply the number one show. Modern Family showed how a young gay couple could indeed be wonderful, caring parents. It may seem slow to some but change is indeed coming, and has been for a while.

So let’s talk about the movie A Clear Shot, where you play a hostage negotiator. What was it like playing that character?

Mario: For me, I’ve played a lot of police officers and cops have the most power, they’re the people you deal with first. They can take your life, they can take your liberty, and that’s a big deal. You can say oh, there’s just a couple of bad apples, but it’s like what Chris Rock said, oh he crashed the plane but yeah, there’s just a couple of bad apples. There are certain professions where you cannot have a just a couple of bad apples because if you’ve got what, eighteen strikes against you, I mean, how are you still a police officer? Cops and priests are two professions where you can do some nasty shit and just get re-assigned. I mean, if you crashed a plane a couple of times for Delta, you don’t get hired by PanAm.

I’ve been able to work with some really good apples. However, I’ve also seen some that weren’t so good and the character I play in Clear Shot is between a rock and a hard place. He’s stuck between some cops who are good apples and some who are overzealous and not so good and on another side, there’s this minority group, which this time happens to be Vietnamese, based on a real story, who felt disenfranchised and we’re going about dealing with the disrespect and the pain that comes with that the wrong way, so my character has to go in the middle and be what we need right now in the Presidency, a healer and chief. We don’t need Trump fanning the flames, we need someone who gets both sides and can see the big picture and bring it together. Now there are going to be knuckleheads on both sides, no questions, but there are going to be a lot of folks that are not, so to play a character like that, who cannot rely on pulling out his weapon and has to rely on his people skills, his heart, compassion, to get people to de-escalate, I thought that was a really interesting character, and it turned out to be more interesting than ever with what we’ve got going on right now politically.

Do you think the current climate, with people stuck indoors more because of COVID, will get A Clear Shot some more attention via VOD?

Mario: You know it might, I don’t know. I’ve actually been watching shows I haven’t had time to watch so it’s interesting but I really don’t know. For Clear Shot, it’s a hard thing to say, I think we’ll know more as time goes on. Obviously in this climate things are really clogged up right now but I would imagine there is going to be a need for product, but honestly right now, I don’t know the answer.

There are many young people out there who are looking at a career in the entertainment business. What kind of advice would you give them as they start this journey?

Mario: I’ve always liked to get out there so I made a bunch of movies early on, one was bad, the next one was better, the next one better still so I would say learn your craft as best you can and start learning it by doing it. Everyone is different but try it out, do short narrative things and build from that. 

So what projects do you have coming up next?

Mario: I have the Salt-N-Pepa movie, which we filmed in Toronto, that I’m finishing up now, and that’s for Lifetime and Sony. I’m also putting another Western together, but I have to figure out how to shoot it in this post-COVID land, which is understandably a bit more complicated. I was also shooting something in New York and that got halted, so we’ll see when that gets back up and running.

Mario’s new film A CLEAR SHOT is now available on DVD and Digital through Uncork’d Entertainment