With a noose looped around his neck and baking in the 108-degree Louisiana heat for agonizing minutes on each take, actor Chiwetel Ejiofor could almost feel the weight of history crushing down on him as he filmed a key lynching scene in “12 Years a Slave.”
What got him through the grueling shoot was that it was not a typical scene in an ordinary movie — rather the most brutal and honest depiction of American slavery ever put on film.
“The scene shows his tenacity, his strength of spirit and his will to live and the reflex of wanting to stay alive and for me, I wanted to feel a fraction of what he went through,” the British actor told the Daily News.
“12 Years a Slave,” opening in New York Friday, is the true story of Solomon Northup, a free New Yorker who is duped into traveling to Washington, D.C., for a violin-playing gig — only to be kidnapped, stripped of his identity and sold into slavery in a succession of plantations. His owners range from a benevolent preacher (Benedict Cumberbatch) to the cruel and vindictive Mr. Epps (Michael Fassbender).
Critics have lauded Ejiofor as an Oscar front-runner and the movie as the early Academy Award Best Picture favorite – comparing it to how “Schindler’s List” treated the Holocaust.
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“We were obviously so hungry just to have the subject broached that we would think a revenge western like ‘Django Unchained’ was actually about real slavery,” said Alfre Woodard, one of the film’s stars.
“The reason we haven’t seen it to date is, first of all, white Americans have so much guilt around it, because they can’t believe that someone like them (participated). And black people have shame about it,” she told
The News. “As Americans, we didn’t want to hear about it, it’s the root of so much dysfunction in our society.”
“Maybe now, with the amount of time and distance, a black President, with all these sort of anniversaries, 150 years since the abolition, 50 years since the March on Washington, people feel that there’s enough time and distance to reflect on things as well as a desire to move forward,” Ejiofor said.
Ultimately, it took a British director to tackle the ugliest chapter in American history.
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Steve McQueen, whose own ancestors were taken out of West Africa during the slave trade, sees Northup’s struggles as universal. When his partner, Bianca, discovered Northup’s 1853 memoir, a best seller in its day but long faded into obscurity, he felt a calling.
“I suddenly realized that nobody I knew heard about this book,” McQueen told The News. “So then it became my passion to tell this story. For me ‘12 Years A Slave’ is like ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ and should be taught in schools.”
Brad Pitt — much like the character he plays in the movie, Canadian carpenter Samuel Bass, who ultimately aids Northup’s bid for freedom — came to the rescue with his Plan B production company to get the film made.
McQueen’s mandate: that the film be an unflinching look at the institution. That was put to the test in the case of a scene where a slave named Patsey (newcomer Lupita Nyong’o) is whipped over and over again until the skin flays off her back, while the camera doesn’t cut away.
“I had to come to terms that this was not larger than life, that this actually did happen to someone,” said Nyong’o, who beat out more than 1,000 hopefuls to land the part fresh out of Yale University’s School of Drama. “What I share with Patsey is my humanity . . . as much as it happened to her, if I had lived in that time I could have been Patsey.”
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“The scene needed to be held as a pressure cooker, that scene needed to be in real time, almost like a documentary,” said McQueen, “because there was no escape for the audience. It was about keeping it in real time. It’s almost like the audience considers itself present as it is going on.”
The cast and crew spent 35 days filming on a plantation in Vacherie, La., just a few miles from where Northup endured his 12 years of hell.
“To know that we were right there in the place where these things occurred was so powerful and emotional,” said Ejiofor. “That feeling of dancing with ghosts — it’s palpable.
“You can’t have that much human occurrence, without it staying in the air, staying in the trees,” said Woodard.
Even the slave masters felt tortured making the film.
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Fassbender recounted filming a scene where he physically interrogates the slaves to find out where Patsey, the object of his lascivious desires, is hiding. His screaming was so intense that a child extra broke down in tears and had to be removed from the scene.
“I went back into the slave hut, the place where I would prepare and get my head around it, and I was pacing around . . . when I looked and the girl had come through the door,” said Fassbender. “She was looking at me, so I stopped. And she said, ‘Are you okay?’
“It almost brought me down. She knew that there was something wrong with this guy.”
Once the cameras stopped rolling, Fassbender and the other actors showed just how far society has come since Northup’s day.
“It was tough to pull myself away from that despair,” said Nyong’o. “But I am free, I get to enjoy my freedom. We owed it to (Northup and Patsey) to enjoy that freedom. So we finished that scene and then we all went to lunch together. We were all in it together.”
esacks@nydailynews.com
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