Rick Famuyiwa on Making Confirmation and Meeting Anita Hill
The filmmaker Rick Famuyiwa was finishing postproduction on his recent feature Dope after its premiere at Sundance in 2015, when he got a call about a very dissimilar project. The actress Kerry Washington (Scandal) was shopping around a script penned by the screenwriter Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich), about the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas kerfuffle. Washington and some other producers had seen Dope and loved it. Was Famuyiwa interested?
He was. And Confirmation, the new film he’s directed based on Grant’s script, starring Washington as Hill and The Wire’s Wendell Pierce as Thomas, premieres Saturday on HBO.
“It was curious, because they’re seemingly so different,” the director said by phone of Dope, a comedic caper about teenagers in Inglewood, California, and Confirmation, a historical drama set almost entirely in the hallowed halls of the Senate. “But it was something that really sparked a genuine interest and excitement. [The Thomas confirmation hearings] were a big part of my coming of age. I was very familiar with the story when this was all going down in 1991.”
If you can’t say the same, here are the CliffsNotes: After Thurgood Marshall, a civil rights advocate and the first African-American Supreme Court justice, retired from the bench in 1991, President George H. W. Bush quickly nominated judge Clarence Thomas, also African-American and far more conservative, as Marshall’s replacement. During Thomas’s confirmation hearings, various news outlets began reporting that Anita Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, had been sexually harassed by Thomas 10 years earlier, when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Education. Hill was called to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a body comprised entirely of white men, led by then-Senator Joe Biden. Thomas denied Hill’s accusations, framing the hearings as “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.” Ultimately, Hill’s testimony did not block Thomas’s path to the Supreme Court—it became a matter of her word versus his, particularly after Biden did not call Angela Wright, another Thomas accuser, to testify—but the hearings were a nationally televised circus that drew major attention to questions of gender dynamics in the workplace.
True to its title, Confirmation focuses narrowly on the hearings themselves, and particularly on how that event, and Hill’s testimony, played out in the media. (Famuyiwa splices in plenty of real news clips to illustrate the way the press had a field day with the story.) He wasn’t, the director told me, interested in investigating or dramatizing what actually transpired between Thomas and Hill a decade prior. “I was very adamant that we were going to go wherever the truth took us, whoever looks good or bad,” he said. “But I didn’t necessarily want to start with a point of view that I know what the truth is.”
Some early reviews have critiqued Confirmation for being wishy-washy about taking sides. And, indeed, the characters who come out looking the worst are neither Pierce’s shell-shocked Thomas, for whom the film reserves a certain amount of compassion, nor Washington’s reluctantly vocal Hill, who gets more sympathy but not, in my opinion, nearly enough. The film is hardest on the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, including Biden, played by Greg Kinnear as a beleaguered peace broker unwilling to go out on a limb. On one end of the spectrum, there are Republican senators too hidebound, hoary, or committed to their candidate to consider the veracity of Hill’s accusations; on the other, there are Democrats too timid about appearing racist or hypocritical (they had, as one fictional female Senate staffer put it, “their own shaky dynamics with women”) to defend Hill against character assassination from the right.
For those utterly fed up with the gridlock and partisanship of present-day politics—particularly in a moment when Republicans are refusing even to acknowledge President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court—Confirmation is sure to strike a powerful chord. “I think we’ve now gotten to this point where we’re growing more and more distrustful of our institutions, be they government or corporations or otherwise,” Famuyiwa said. He attributes our fascination with ’90s news spectacles like the O.J. Simpson trial, and now the Thomas hearings, to our desire to “look back at the beginning of that.”
Famuyiwa and I discussed making Confirmation, how not to handle the current Supreme Court vacancy, and what happened when he finally met Anita Hill.
When you read Susannah Grant’s script, were there aspects of this story that made you think: I can’t believe this actually happened?
There was a lot that was surprising. My memory, along with our collective memory, has sort of faded. I think we lingered on the more salacious aspects—the Coke can, the things that became pop culture. What was fascinating to me was how much I didn’t remember, or thought I remembered a certain way, but then when you go back and look at the record, it was different. And then diving into some of the things I wasn’t privy to: I obviously didn’t know the things going on behind the scenes with the senators. I was not familiar with this other witness, who was potentially going to come forward, even though when I went back to the archive, it was something that was reported on. After I read the script, I went back and started looking at the testimony. It was really surprising how much I had forgotten, even though I was convinced that I knew everything about it. Just that alone was why I felt it was an important story to tell. This was so important in terms of how we deal with each other in the workplace, sexual harassment. But also there’s a sitting Supreme Court justice who was a mere four votes away from not being a justice. How close that was to changing our history and some of the rulings that came after—that was ripe for re-examination.
Not to mention the fact that it made you think about the fallacy of memory, and this whole hearing was based on memory.
Yes, exactly. We forget that the incident happened 10 years before the nomination, and we’re now 35 years from those events. When I went back and started talking to some of the people involved, they’re still so convinced of her truth or his. She was a tool of the left; he was a tool of the right. Everyone had cemented their beliefs. There’s a really telling moment in Thomas’s testimony early on where he says, “If there’s anything I may have done or said in any way to have offended Anita Hill, I apologize.” So before he categorically denied everything, he understood that there was something that happened, something that he was even trying to re-examine in himself, even if he didn’t quite understand or feel like what he did was significant enough to rise to the level of denying him his nomination. But it’s interesting how our memories fail us—our 20/20 hindsight on things changes, not based on what actually happened, but what we wished happened or hoped happened.
It’s interesting that Confirmation is coming on the heels of Ryan Murphy’s O.J. trial series, and that both of these projects are about the intersection of racial politics and gender politics. Why do you think we’re suddenly so interested in those issues and how they played out in the ’90s?
One, because those issues are still alive today. We’ll always be re-examining how we relate to each other in terms of race and gender, in terms of power and access. In the case of the Thomas nomination, it was the first time I can remember that what we would now call the 24-hour news cycle, or mainstream media, was really an active participant in the drama, because the hearings were on and televised for the duration. It was, in some ways, the seed of what would become reality TV. And obviously O.J. and Court TV and his trial being televised: That came afterward and is what took it to the absurd level of coverage, the precursor to today. I think that’s part of it. And then on just a simple level, it’s been 25 years. We’re just getting perspective on these things. You have filmmakers and artists who came of age, like myself, during this era. Whether it’s Clarence Thomas or O.J. or the impeachment of Bill Clinton—
Can’t wait for that one!
That’s the next one, right? That’s sort of how I mark my young adulthood. Now that people of that generation are in positions to tell their stories, we’re looking back on that era. Dope, obviously, was that, too.
The other interesting context for this film is that we now have a female presidential candidate, a contested Supreme Court nomination, and your film depicts politicians who are still in the mix. Did you feel any angst over making a movie about Thomas, a sitting Supreme Court justice, and Biden, a sitting vice president?
Look, you definitely think about it. But I didn’t have any trepidation. I think once you start the process, you quickly get into the mode of just telling a story. You divorce yourself from that history, even though it’s recent. I met a lot of the people who were peripherally involved, but I didn’t want to speak to any of the principals. I made a choice: I wanted it to be about the moment. I didn’t want the point of view to be the omniscient us from the future looking back at 25 years ago and passing judgment. It needed to live in 1991.
We’ve formed caricatures about Anita Hill, about Clarence Thomas, about Uncle Joe Biden, and I didn’t want those things to be the point of view of the film. I really wanted it to be about the people in the moment and not the political-cartoon characters that some make them out to be.
I do think it’s balanced, although I will say I think the Republicans come across as more buffoonish. But that’s probably my bias.
[laughs] Everyone’s going to take from it what they will. I don’t think we were hiding from any of the truth. There was a lot of behavior that I think those involved would look back on and say we’re not necessarily proud of. In being as objective as you can, you also don’t want to gloss over anything.
Grace Gummer and Zoe Lister-Jones play young staffers for Senators Ted Kennedy and Biden, and their characters are instrumental in bringing Anita Hill’s testimony to light. Are they based on real people? To what degree were young female staffers leading the charge?
They’re all composites to a certain extent. There were people in all the senators’ offices who were very instrumental. That was striking: How these senators rely on their staff, and how young that staff really is. Many of them were women. It was also a commentary that I was interested in exploring. Whether it was Judy Smith, who was in the White House, or these young women staffers who were working for Senator Kennedy and Senator Biden, they were thrust into having to do their job even though doing their job might be going against something they believe. Susannah and I wanted to illustrate the challenges of being a woman in the workforce, the choices you have to make, even though those choices sometimes get questioned. That’s what happened to Anita Hill. The senators questioned why she would move to a different office with Thomas, or why she would have conversations with him [after the alleged harassment]. She says part of why she didn’t want to come forward was the sense that she had to think about her career, about her life and how this would affect it. Those are big decisions that women have to make in the workplace that often men don’t.
You said you didn’t meet any of the principal characters. Does that remain true even after the movie was made? Or have you met Anita Hill since?
I met Anita Hill at the premiere. She’s as poised and professional and impressive in person as I remember her during her testimony. And she was a fan of the film, which I was happy with. You never know. She definitely, I’m sure, had some things that she would quibble with, but she said it reflected the challenges of what was going on during that time in her life.
Having immersed yourself in this Clarence Thomas episode, do you have any insight into how we should be handling our current Supreme Court vacancy, and the confirmation of Merrick Garland?
This process has obviously become more and more political. I think that what you hope the film reflects is that we have to continue to challenge the people in power, the people who represent us, to do their job and to serve the American people. Even as contentious as [voted-down Supreme Court nominee Robert] Bork was, as Thomas was, they were put forward. There were hearings. You can be against them or for them, but that’s the way the system works. I don’t know if I’ve seen in the Constitution where it says if there’s an election year, then we take a break until after for us to do the business of the American people.
