The Action-Film Director Who’s Taking On Michael Jackson
In debates about figures like Michael Jackson, some advocates emphasize the distinction between the artist and the art, but a biography is necessarily about both. Jackson’s sublime pop-soul creations – “Billie Jean,” “Rock with You” and countless others – remain extraordinarily popular, and the people most attached to the music tend to share an attachment to its creator. “Michael” is not an ambivalent meditation on the complex relationship between goodness and greatness but an unapologetic celebration of its subject, based on the wager that, a decade and a half after Jackson’s death, audiences are ready to celebrate him too.
Last November, when the trailer for “Michael” was released on YouTube, it was viewed more than a hundred million times in the first twenty-four hours – a promising sign for Lionsgate, which, along with other companies, invested something like a hundred and fifty million dollars in the film. The title role is played by Jaafar Jackson, the son of Michael’s brother Jermaine, with a slightly familiar shy smile and very familiar frenetic dance moves. But, insofar as “Michael” is about a man under pressure, that man is Joe Jackson, the star’s overbearing father, played by Colman Domingo with an intensity that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Fuqua’s more combative films.
Throughout his career, Fuqua has worked to make himself difficult to categorize; Shortly after the success of “Training Day,” he traveled to Ireland to film “King Arthur,” a battlefield epic starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightley. His goal has often been to bring audiences films that feel like thrill rides, but today he’s speaking more about the responsibility of telling stories about black people in particular. He fought hard to make “Emancipation,” a 2022 slavery drama starring Will Smith. And he tends to describe “Michael” less as a potential blockbuster than as an act of historical reappropriation. “Michael is too important a character for our culture to shy away from,” he told me.
Fuqua’s resume includes seventeen feature films and half a dozen documentaries, as well as film and television projects on which he served as producer or executive producer. (“The Terminal List”, in which Chris Pratt plays a renegade Navy SEALwill release its second season on Prime Video later this year.) But he’s never been nominated for a major award, and although he lives outside of Los Angeles, he’s much more comfortable training at his local boxing gym than appearing at industry events. Still, his profession sometimes requires self-promotion, and that’s how he found himself walking through Park City, Utah, on a bright January morning, heading to a promotional panel at the Sundance Film Festival. Fuqua is tall and broad and looks like a former football player, although in fact his sport of choice was basketball: he earned a scholarship to West Virginia State, a historically black university, and then transferred to West Virginia University.
When Fuqua arrived in Utah, “Michael” was almost finished and he was taking a break to focus on a very different and pressured man: Nelson Mandela, subject of his new documentary “Troublemaker,” which premiered at Sundance. On the street, Fuqua was stopped by autograph collectors who held up posters for “Training Day” and “The Equalizer.” He quickly signed them, then retreated to a makeshift green room on the second floor of the Filmmaker Lodge. There he met his co-panelist: Billie Jean King, the tennis pioneer, surprisingly sharp and slim at eighty-two. “It’s an honor,” she said, and Fuqua bowed respectfully. He gets along particularly well with athletes, perhaps because he admires them a lot; He says one of the hardest things he ever did was accept that he wasn’t going to play professional basketball.
Cartoon by Edward Steed
On stage, Fuqua and King, who was promoting his own new documentary, talked about the connection between sports and activism. Fuqua once made a documentary about Muhammad Ali, and King shared his memories of knowing him: “He would say, ‘Billie Jean King, you’re the queen.’ » Fuqua had the pleasure of discovering, during research for his film, that Mandela was an amateur boxer. He liked the idea that a liberation hero, often memorialized in America as an icon of nonviolence, was actually a fighter. “The only way to change anything is to win,” he said.
