The focus of Black Lives Matter protests has inevitably fallen on the most visible injustice - instances of police brutality. More systemic racial disparities in the American penal system are too often hidden from plain sight. The US incarcerates more of its citizens – 2.2 million people – than any other country on Earth. African American adults are nearly six times more likely to receive a prison sentence than white adults. Nearly half of the 206,000 people serving life sentences in 2018 were black, though black people represent only 13.4% of the population; almost equal numbers of white and black prisoners are currently on death row – just over 1,000 of each ethnicity – but as the prosecution of capital punishment has declined, so the racial imbalance has increased.
If ever a film could bring home the buried trauma of those latter statistics it is Clemency. The film, which won a grand jury prize at Sundance last year, has been instrumental in catalysing again urgent debates around mass incarceration, capital punishment and race.
It was written and directed by Chinonye Chukwu, born in Nigeria, raised in Alaska, who became, at 34, the first black female director to receive the Sundance award. Chukwu was inspired to write the film after the widely protested execution of Troy Davis in Georgia in 2011. She embarked on six years of immersive research that involved not only interviewing numerous death row prison wardens, but also running a film programme for inmates in Ohio, and advocating for retrials in unsafe convictions. There have been other movies about death row, of course – Dead Man Walking, last year’s Just Mercy – but they invariably end with redemption. Clemency refuses that Hollywood trajectory. Instead, more than any other film I have seen, it looks hard at the mechanics and emotional fallout of state killing. At every turn, it asks that most relevant question: not “Does this person deserve to die?” but “Do we the people deserve to kill him?”
The nuance and force of the film are carried in the performance of Alfre Woodard, who plays the prison warden, Bernadine Williams, through whom the story is told. For nearly 50 years, Woodard has been one of those actors who has illuminated – and often stolen – dramas from a line or two down the credit roll. She has had lead roles – from 1994’s Spike Lee film Crooklyn, through Winnie Mandela in HBO’s Mandela to How to Make an American Quilt and See, the launch vehicle of Apple’s streaming service last year; she also has a record 17 Emmy nominations for work in 16 different TV series, including wins in roles as diverse as Hill Street Blues and Miss Evers’ Boys. When Woodard first came to Hollywood in the 1970s people told her there were no film roles for black actors. “I’m not a fool. I knew that,” she says. “But I was always confident that I knew my craft.”
In Clemency, Woodard gives the performance of her life. Having overseen one botched execution, Bernadine, full of steely integrity, has started to question the ethics of her role. Through Woodard’s eyes, the film examines the dehumanising act of deliberately strapping a living body to a bed and ending a life.
Woodard conveys a history in those eyes. She has seen some things. Her personal political activism began with protests against segregation in Tulsa when she was 14 and has never wavered. The actor first met Chukwu when they were both working on a successful clemency appeal for Tyra Patterson, wrongly convicted of murder and eventually released after 23 years. I spoke to Woodard about some of that history a couple of weeks ago, on the same day the US supreme court voted to resume federal executions after a break of 17 years. At her home in Los Angeles it was eight in the morning, but Woodard, a barely believable 67, was at full wattage in her living room, laughing loudly as she struggled with her Zoom feed. I apologised for getting her up so early. “Oh God! I’m happy to do it!” she said. “The more we talk, the more people get to see Clemency!”
Woodard describes working on the film as a campaign as much as a movie. The 17 days in which they eventually shot the film, in a defunct jail in East Los Angeles half an hour from her home, were as intense as anything she has done: “‘Walking through the valley of the shadow of death’, for anyone who reads the Bible, that phrase comes to mind,” she says. In preparation for the film, Chukwu took Woodard on extended visits to five prisons in Ohio, where she had been working: men’s maximum security, women’s medium security, death row. “To see that, the caging of human bodies on a mass scale, is arresting for the human soul,” Woodard says. “And then to see that they have sectioned off the ones that they want to ritualistically murder, in the light of day… that’s when you start to talk about the scar on the soul of a nation.”
When Chukwu first thought of writing a film based on Troy Davis’s execution – Davis had been convicted of murder in 1991 without forensic evidence; seven of nine witnesses from the original trial had recanted their testimonies prior to his execution – she decided her film would focus on someone intimately involved with carrying through the death sentence. It was that that intrigued Woodard.
“As an actor, I like adventure,” she says. “I don’t like to do things I know how to do. When the producer called, she said she had this script by this young, dynamic film-maker and she had written a film about death row. I thought: OK. And then she said: ‘She wants you to play the death row warden.’ And my ears really pricked up. I mean, what little girl imagines her future and says: ‘You know what I want to do when I grow up, I want to be a death row warden’? I just couldn’t imagine who that person would be. Is it someone who grew up dismembering frogs?”
Woodard talked in depth to six wardens and the director of prisons for the state of Ohio, all women. She discovered that they were not monsters but “people you might have in your book club or that you might know through your PTA”. They came from a background in social work or mental health. “You could not imagine anyone better to deal with these damaged boys who have grown up,” Woodard suggests. And then: “I say damaged boys, because even though inmates might be 70 years old and have been inside all their life, you still see the boy in them; you see it in their faces and the way they walk.”
One of the prime motivations for Chukwu’s script was an unprecedented open letter that six former prison wardens had written as a plea to halt the execution of Troy Davis. It gave a unique insight into the psychology of those who oversee death row: “Like few others in this country,” the wardens wrote, “we understand that you have a job to do in carrying out the lawful orders of the judiciary. We also understand, from our own personal experiences, the awful lifelong repercussions that come from participating in the execution of prisoners… Living with the nightmares is something we know from experience.”
The wardens Woodard interviewed did not speak in such candid terms about that trauma, but they emphasised their responsibility to the condemned, to give them as much dignity as possible. “Everyone is referred to as Mr and Ms,” Woodard says. “They give people respect, the kind of respect that many of these people would never have had in the outside world, especially in that week before the person has to make that walk to the [death] chamber. It takes at least 10 years to exhaust appeals, so the relationship becomes like someone you have worked alongside for a long time in an office. It is a kind of covenant between them.”
In the film, that integrity and careful emotional engagement are set against the industrial starkness of the prison building itself and its embedded silences – the drama plays out with no background music. “The prison was one of those old-fashioned places,” Woodard says. “New prisons look like a poorly funded public school, very bland – but it’s like: ‘If you are going to take my life I want drama, I don’t want it to look like a health clinic’. Where we shot, they hadn’t cleaned it up and all the scratches and the scrapes and the blood were still on the walls. You could feel the anxiety and the pain there.”
Some of the most affecting scenes are where Woodard as Bernadine fills the silences with talk about end-of-life protocols with the death row inmate Anthony Woods, played with haunting power by Aldis Hodge. It is hard to imagine any proponent of capital punishment not being troubled by the believable surreality of those conversations. It feels the challenge, as ever, would be to get those people to engage with the film in the first place. Twenty-eight states retain the death penalty in statute; 28 executions have occurred since Clemency won its Sundance award.
To avoid preaching to the converted, Woodard says, she and Chukwu and the film’s producers have done all they can to reach out. “We started last summer, screening it for groups of public defenders, prosecutors, journalists, law colleges, social workers,” she says. “We want everyone to see this film, obviously, but in particular we wanted those people who have a stake in mass incarceration and the death row business to see it.” She did upwards of 70 on-stage events prior to lockdown. And what was the response? “Often it is easy for people to think it’s not about them – it’s like: ‘They are always killing people in Texas or wherever.’ We wanted people in Iowa, where they haven’t killed anyone in 20 years, to think, this is a national malaise. As long as you are paying taxes then you are complicit in this; or at least if you remain silent you are complicit.”
Woodard believes one unexpected effect of lockdown – when we spoke California was reintroducing restrictions – is that people have been drawn to things that they might not normally watch. The film is available on streaming services. “I think a lot of people are seeing it who would not necessarily have done if we were busier. And because they are often watching alone, they are really receiving it.”
Perhaps surprisingly, given the drift of Trump’s America, recent polls suggest that a record low percentage of people believe the death penalty to be morally acceptable. And in some ways, of course, the film’s focus on racial injustices could not have come at a more defining moment. Woodard has been energised by the Black Lives Matter protests. “There is a great upheaval happening in this country and those of us who work in social justice are trying to move into that space with specific actions, demands, ways forward,” she says. She knows from long experience as a campaigner that the opening may quickly close again.
Woodard is a board member of the Democratic party and an organiser and advocate for several human rights charities. Her interest in politics stretches back to when she was a little girl in Tulsa, five years old, and her father insisted she watch the news every night.
“I was around for the anti-war movement in the 1960s and when they killed Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King. I saw that every time people stood for fundamental change they were killed,” she says. She retains hope that this wave of protest will produce lasting change. “During the 1960s, it was the youth mainly on the streets. What makes it feel different this time is that everybody’s kids are in the streets, all colours and ethnicities, but lots of their parents and grandparents who were protesting back then are still there too. The [George Floyd] video of callous disregard for human life, the eight minutes 46 seconds, that brought out the Sunday school teachers, the ladies who lunch, everybody got up and came out.”
What her own first marches were about?
“In Tulsa, the first protests were around access, being able to go into the restaurants you wanted to. When I started, I was in charge of helping make the signs, then I would get the coffees. I went away to Boston University when I was 17 and I was majoring in acting and when I came home that summer it was like: ‘You are an actress, you get up and read out the press statements.’”
Ironically, partly because of segregation the community she grew up in was incredibly vibrant, she says. “Everyone lived together – doctors, lawyers, ballerinas, pole dancers. You could go to the well-off white part of town, but not to the white working-class areas. The butting of heads was between well-off black people and working-class whites. Classism was as important as racism in some ways.”
Woodard’s family was on that particular frontline. Her father was self-made, “an interior designer, a property developer and an oil man. That’s what people did back then. My paediatrician had two side hustles. It was in the blood.”
Just how much that was the case was revealed in Woodard’s journey into her past in an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? in 2015. The programme uncovered not only the fact that her great-grandfather was enslaved in Georgia – “he showed up in records as ‘property’ when he was eight years old” – but that after emancipation he went on to be a landowner with his own acres. “There was a period of reconstruction right after the proclamation. These people had only the rags on their backs, but they got out there and did it for themselves,” Woodard says. “That story rarely gets told, but what a great lesson it would make. We had more black representation in the legislature in that period, before lynching and the Jim Crow laws, than we had up until about a decade ago.” In the programme, in tribute to Alex Woodard’s climb from bondage to landowner, Alfre poured a libation of water on the land that he acquired.
That story ran deep with her father. “From as early as I can remember he would say: ‘Never forget there is no man above you, but also that you are not above any other human being.’” By the time she was 14, her father would invite her to speak in his place to the business club of which he was a member. “He was a most excellent man,” she says.
Activism was always linked with acting for Woodard. At her Catholic high school in the early civil rights period, faith mixed with politics. “We were encouraged to discuss things, so we would say, you know: ‘Jesus was on a rampage, he was so radical’ and they would have to agree. We would say, ‘Jesus would be marching right now’ and they would let us go on that basis, but as long as we didn’t wear school uniform.”
Brother Patrick taught film studies and once a month students would be bused to an arts cinema. “At first it, was like: ‘Great, we are going to a movie!’ But then when we got there, and we were sitting in the dark, it would be subtitles, and we would be transported by something magical like Sundays and Cybèle. There you were, 14 and in the dark in Tulsa and identifying with a middle-aged French man. That is when I decided I wanted to be an actor. I think I sensed you could change the world with this medium. I got in my first play at 15.”
Fifty years on, Chinonye Chukwu has said that she knew finally that her film would be made because Woodard, “one of the great actors working in America”, had agreed to be part of it. Watching the performance she gives as Bernadine Williams, it feels something of a travesty that Woodard has not had the lead roles over the years that her talent merits. For the past 11 years, she has hosted a pre-Oscars party at her Hollywood home – she calls it the “Sistahs’ Soirée” – “for those black women who have been nominated in the acting category by the Academy, as well as those who, in a perfect world, should have been”. Does she feel that frustration? She smiles. “You can say that. But for me, that cannot be my focus. Because that is imprisoning. Here’s the thing: I came to LA to have a film career, to tell stories, because I believe stories are healing. You don’t follow the money or the adulation. You follow the story.”
The stories have never gone away. Before lockdown derailed everything, Woodard was working on the second series of See (set in a future pandemic) and the sequel to last year’s Netflix film Juanita that her screenwriter husband of 37 years, Roderick Spencer, wrote for her (“like giving me a field to play on!”). She is anxious to get back to both.
“To answer your question. Would I like to have been given the career choices that my contemporary Caucasian sisters had? Hell, yes. But not having them is not an option for the great-granddaughter of a striver who walked out of bondage and built for himself an incredible life, which carries on through me and my two children. So if the story is being told on the street corner I am going to do guerrilla theatre. I have had a very satisfying time. I have done what has been offered me.”
She casts her mind back to early performances at school and at film school and in off-Broadway theatre. In one strange sense, Clemency has brought her career full circle. The first professional lead acting role she had in Los Angeles was in the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide. Coincidentally, they took the play to the prison in which Clemency was filmed and performed it for the female inmates.
“You know, when I started to act I realised that I had been walking around all my life doing the breaststroke on dry land,” Woodard says, “and suddenly somebody had tipped me into the water. There was a freedom and a connection that I never wanted to lose. And to this day I go through all the bullshit of the business just to get to that bit between ‘action’ and ‘cut’. That is why I came in the first place,” she says. And that is why she is, triumphantly, very much still here.
• Clemency is available now on Curzon Home Cinema and bohemiamedia.co.uk/clemency/
