When Code-Switching Fails You
Julius Onah, JC Lee discuss personal connections t0 “Luce”
BY DAVID NOH
Amidst this summer’s cinematic
welter of comic
book derring-do, “Luce,”
directed by Julius Onah
and co-scripted by him and prodigious
writer JC Lee, stands as a
beacon of intelligent, deeply compelling
human drama. It focuses
on high school senior Luce (Kelvin
Harrison, Jr.), a star athlete and
debate team captain in Arlington,
Virginia. Adopted by lovingly supportive
white parents Amy and Peter
(Naomi Watts, Tim Roth), he is
a privileged lifetime away from his
harrowing past as a war-torn African
child in Eritrea. But Luce’s
near impossibly idealized school
image comes into question when
his very involved teacher, Mrs. Wilson
(Octavia Spencer), discovers
fi reworks in his locker, shockingly
violent political views in an essay
of his, and possible culpability in
a rape situation involving a Korean
student (Andrea Bang) he’s close
with. Mrs. Wilson brings all of this
into the light, creating an explosive
situation, not only for Luce and his
family, but the entire school, as
well.
Gay City News sat down with
Onah and Lee, at the Whitby Hotel
last week to discuss their searingly
powerful fi lm, the rare kind
of movie you see that fi lls your
heart and mind so much you can’t
wait to discuss it in depth immediately
afterward. The fi rst thing
both of them — ultra-smart and
hiply funny — wanted to know
was when I saw the fi lm because,
as Onah said, “We’re so curious to
see what reaction was, because as
the creators no one’s really honest
with us.”
Lee explained that the script
was based on a play of his that ran
in 2013 at Lincoln Center, adding,
“Julius deserves a lot of credit for it.
First off, he spent three years chasing
me trying to get me to do it and
I was saying ‘No, it’s not going to be
a fi lm and never will be. You’re out
of your mind.’ And then one day he
shows up with a 130-page script
and I thought this guy’s a lunatic.
Tim Roth, Kelvin Harrison, Jr., and Naomi Watts in Julius Onah’s “Luce,” based on the play by Onah’s co-writer JC Lee.
But I read the script and said, ‘Oh
no, he has gotten it.’
“He cracked it open wide enough
that it felt cinematic and infused it
with an urgency where I was like,
‘Now I understand why this has to
be a fi lm.’ I’ve seen a lot of plays get
made into a fi lm because people
think they can make money off of
it and that’s not the right reason to
make a fi lm. There has to be a reason
why this story will be served
by the uniqueness of cinema, and
Julius could fi nd that rationale.
And once that rationale was there
we began working back and forth
on building what the script eventually
became.”
Onah’s background mirrors that
of Luce’s in the fi lm.
“I was born in Nigeria and moved
to America when I was ten, and
lived in Arlington, Virginia,” he
explained. “My father was a diplomat,
but when his term ended he
left and I began a long immigration
process living with my mom and
siblings, a big change from being
an ambassador’s son to being with
a mom who worked at McDonald’s
while we lived in subsidized housing.
The process took so long that
by the time I fi nished college I had
no papers. So I spent almost a year
undocumented and got a job busing
tables. So the idea of being
an outsider was very real to me,
and I told JC that it was like he’d
peered into my head, and he can
also speak of his own experience
in terms of navigating identity. We
defi nitely shared an overlap of being
constantly in different spaces
where we had to put on different
masks — trying to fi gure out what
is the acceptable version of ourselves,
primarily to white people,
that would not just make us accepted
but give us the opportunity
to thrive and succeed. And
the more you start putting these
masks on and taking them off, you
start to wonder, ‘What’s the real
me and what’s the performed me?’
And that is the crux of what Luce
is going through as a 17-year-old,
with the kind of expectations people
had of him, and it is not easy.”
Lee observed, “You know it’s funny
because I often talk about how
being a queer person of color half-
Chinese, growing up in New York
City, I live in a lot of intersections.
I grew up very lower class on the
Lower East Side. It taught me how
to code-switch very early in order
to alleviate anxieties in terms of
different groups. I think when you
grow up gay, you learn how to see
certain groups of people, thinking,
‘I’m going to make you comfortable
so you don’t attack me.’ I think
that Luce has all of that. What
he’s trying to do is use that to his
advantage, and then it all sort of
goes awry. That was the genesis of
it all — we both shared a unifi ed
vision of trying to tell a story that
contained all the multitude of the
characters’ complexities but then
NEON AND TOPIC STUDIOS
didn’t offer you an easy way out at
the end.”
Onah added, “When you watch
or see somebody or even in the
newspaper when you read about
something, at the end of the day
you have your own internal biases
and your own critical faculties, but
you never have the full picture and
yet you have to arrive at some sort
of conclusion. That’s what I loved
about the play, that it’s trusting
the audience enough to do that.
We’re having this conversation in
this country at this moment right
now about who gets to be human
and who gets to have full access
to the full spectrum of humanity.
Who gets to have full moral consideration
and at the end of the day,
that’s not just some high falutin’
ideal: it’s lived on, on the ground
level of every interaction we have.
It’s a constant ongoing project, and
I think what was brilliant about
what JC did with the play and I
think what we were trying to honor
with the movie was to make sure
we were asking that question because
I think the questions are the
answers.”
For a so-called small indie,
“Luce” boasts one powerhouse of a
cast, which all started, according
to Lee, “with my relationship with
Octavia Spencer. I had been very
good friends with Octavia’s agent
at the time, and we had worked
➤ LUCE, continued on p.33
August 1 - August 14, 2 32 019 | GayCityNews.com
/GayCityNews.com
