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Episode: Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar

Author: NPR
Duration: 00:48:37

Episode Shownotes

Alex Van Halen has written a new memoir about forming the rock band Van Halen with his brother Eddie. It takes readers from their childhood to the wild ride of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Eddie Van Halen died in 2020. Alex talks with Tonya Mosley about his grief

and reflects on their relationship. Also, artist Titus Kaphar talks about his new movie, Exhibiting Forgiveness, based on his life. It's about a celebrated painter whose world unravels when his estranged father suddenly resurfaces. Carolina Miranda reviews the new Netflix film Pedro Paramo Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_04
Support for this message comes from Sony Pictures, presenting the new movie HERE, reuniting the director, writer, and stars of Forrest Gump. A tale of love, loss, laughter, and life, all of which happen right here.

00:00:14 Speaker_04
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00:00:19 Speaker_08
From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Tanya Mosley with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, Alex Van Halen. He's written a new memoir about forming the rock band Van Halen with his brother Eddie, who died of cancer in 2020.

00:00:33 Speaker_08
It takes readers from their childhood, discovering music through their jazz musician father, to the wild ride of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, including some close calls on stage during their performance antics, like setting Alex's drum sets on fire.

00:00:48 Speaker_03
We've kind of gotten it down to a science, and as we're doing it during the performance, the lighter fluid starts to come down my arm, and then I look over and I notice my arm's on fire.

00:01:00 Speaker_08
Also, artist Titus Kaffar joins me to discuss his new movie based on his life. It's about a celebrated painter whose world unravels when his estranged father, a recovering addict, suddenly reappears.

00:01:12 Speaker_08
And Carolina Miranda reviews the new Netflix film Pedro Paramo. that's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

00:01:21 Speaker_04
Support for this message comes from Sony Pictures. Presenting the new movie, Here. Reuniting the director, writer, and stars of Forrest Gump, Here is an original film about multiple families and a special place they inhabit.

00:01:35 Speaker_04
From visionary director Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, and Robin Wright star in this tale of love, loss, laughter, and life, all of which happen right here. Here is now playing exclusively in theaters.

00:01:49 Speaker_02
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00:02:52 Speaker_08
This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my first guest today is Alex Van Halen of the iconic band Van Halen.

00:03:16 Speaker_08
Jump was Van Halen's biggest hit, and it became an anthem when it came out in 1983, even though a record executive once said it sounded like the kind of music you'd hear between baseball innings.

00:03:28 Speaker_08
Alex Van Halen shares this story in his new memoir, Brothers, which he wrote after the loss of his younger brother, Eddie, who died of cancer in 2020.

00:03:38 Speaker_08
Known for their extravagant, high-energy performances, Van Halen is credited with being one of the most influential rock bands of all time.

00:03:46 Speaker_08
The book covers the first three decades of Eddie and Alex's music career, which started from their arrival as kids to the United States from the Netherlands, the influence of their father, who was a Dutch jazz musician, and the formation of the rock band in 1974, after meeting vocalist David Lee Roth and bassist Michael Anthony.

00:04:08 Speaker_08
But most importantly, Brothers is a love letter to the music they created, and Eddie, who has been called for decades one of the greatest guitarists of all time.

00:04:18 Speaker_08
Van Halen disbanded after Eddie died in 2020, but throughout their run, Van Halen produced 12 studio albums, two live records, and 56 singles. They were included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Alex Van Halen, welcome to Fresh Air.

00:04:36 Speaker_03
Thank you for having me.

00:04:39 Speaker_08
Alex, this was a beautiful read, and I feel like there is no better way to ground this conversation. than to start at the beginning of this book, because the way you write is so poetic.

00:04:54 Speaker_08
And the way that both you and Ed talk about your relationship, which you use his words in this book, really gives us a grounding. And I want to read just this first piece that you have on the very first page.

00:05:09 Speaker_08
It says, without my brother, I would not be. We fight, argue. We even argue about agreeing on things. But there is a bond and unconditional love that very few people ever experience in their lifetime. We're not a rock band. We're a rock and roll band.

00:05:26 Speaker_08
Alex is the rock. I'm the roll." And that was your brother. He wrote that about the two of you. Did he write it or did he say that at one time?

00:05:35 Speaker_03
I'm not quite sure. But when I hear it, even though I've heard it a hundred times, when I hear it again, it brings a lump to my throat. We literally were yin and yang, the two halves of a whole, however it's been characterized.

00:05:54 Speaker_03
And it made the, when Ed says that even we fight when we argue, yeah, sure, Ed, my way. No, your way. No, both ways. It bled into everything we did, whether it was writing songs.

00:06:10 Speaker_03
Even though Ed did the majority of the music, we all had a hand into bending and twisting it the way that we felt appropriate for what we were doing. meaning that you can't have a nine-minute song on your first record.

00:06:26 Speaker_03
Well, you can, but it doesn't serve you well. So the constant juggling and adapting I wouldn't call compromising, but blending is really the word that I'm looking for. It's kind of like making a soup.

00:06:43 Speaker_03
All those things kind of come together, and then you walk away at the end of the day with something that you say, okay, this is pretty good. Let's see what happens tomorrow. Because we left a lot unfinished.

00:06:56 Speaker_08
You left a lot unfinished. You spent your whole lives together. You're basically like twins, 20 months apart. Yeah. How much of the music did you listen to while writing this book?

00:07:09 Speaker_03
I'll be honest with you, man. I went through a lot of emotional issues. But I basically had PTSD when he passed. I didn't know why I was yelling and screaming at people, and I was borderline violent. I didn't hit anybody. I don't hurt anybody.

00:07:28 Speaker_03
I'm too old for that. But the feelings of frustration and this inexcusable way of behaving to my closest friends and my family was all wrong. So I sought help and found out what it was.

00:07:44 Speaker_08
Yeah, it was the pain of the loss.

00:07:47 Speaker_03
Yes, it's indescribable. You know, I had the pleasure and the good fortune of being close friends with the Peccaro family. And Steve lost a couple of members. He lost two brothers.

00:08:04 Speaker_08
I'm sorry, can you reference who the Peccaro family is just so we'll have those who don't know?

00:08:09 Speaker_03
while they were probably the most famous studio musicians and later made a band called Toto. I just thought, Steve, you shouldn't have called it Toto.

00:08:23 Speaker_08
What should he have called it?

00:08:24 Speaker_03
I don't know. But the thing is, it's not really named after a little dog. The original name was for Entoto, which means in total. They were a band that did things in total. That was the Italian version of it.

00:08:40 Speaker_03
But anyway, so I went to visit him because I really didn't know where to, who to talk to, who I could relate to. It's difficult to find people your own age and your own musical history and background that you can communicate with.

00:08:54 Speaker_03
So I was talking with Steve. I'm laughing because the punchline was at the very end, I leave and I'm maybe 15 minutes out from his house and he calls me and he says, hey Al, I just realized I never dealt with any of it.

00:09:11 Speaker_03
Which I found profound, indirectly, because of Ed and my problem. He finally would admit that it's not done yet. And that's really what it is. You're never going to be rid of it. There's going to be memories. There's going to be people.

00:09:26 Speaker_03
There's going to be instances that, whether it's smells or food or places where you've been together before. Obviously, every time I hear some of our music, that puts me right back there.

00:09:36 Speaker_08
Yeah, and that helped you in the writing of this book, but that was such a painful place to be because that is the basis, that's the core of you and your brother's relationship.

00:09:48 Speaker_08
It was fun to read about your origin story because it allows us to see how the two of you saw yourselves because at your core, You guys always seem to see yourselves really as immigrant children from the Netherlands who fulfilled this American dream.

00:10:05 Speaker_08
Is it really true that you didn't even know English when you arrived in the States?

00:10:09 Speaker_03
That's true. I'm trying to, you know, coming to America, was such an overload, a sensual overload of colors and smells, and the weather was different, and the people were different, and the cars were huge compared to what we had in Holland.

00:10:27 Speaker_03
It was a lot to take in. But I kind of rolled the wave, so to speak. Ed was very sensitive in that way. if not always. So it was a good mix between the two of us. I kind of plowed ahead and then Ed would analyze or be overwhelmed by things.

00:10:51 Speaker_03
But you know, it was a different time. It was 1962, I think it was.

00:10:55 Speaker_08
And you were eight and he was six? Yes. With your mom being Indonesian and your father being Dutch, right, they were an interracial couple and you were mixed-race children.

00:11:06 Speaker_03
Yes.

00:11:07 Speaker_08
Why did your parents choose to come to the United States? What were they fleeing from?

00:11:13 Speaker_03
There was a lot of political turmoil in Indonesia. And to put it simply, they wanted to be free of the colonial power structure. And they saw my dad as part of that because he was Caucasian.

00:11:30 Speaker_03
Our parents were already married, so the best thing that they could do, they thought, rather than live in the middle of some place with conflict, where you really are, the Caucasian people really were a minority at that time in Indonesia, even though they were the ruling class.

00:11:46 Speaker_03
They moved to Holland. It was my dad's home country, and there the shoe was on the other foot. Now my mom is the minority, and she's easily identifiable.

00:11:58 Speaker_03
I'm laughing because, you know, it's absurd what people do on this planet, but that's another story. So they moved to Holland, and she was really, really got the brunt of racism. You know, all the time it was, even as children, we saw it happen.

00:12:14 Speaker_03
But, you know, you can look back on it, depending on how you navigate it. It could be a positive, it could be a negative. It never really affected me as much as it did Ed. It can either make you tougher or it can make you hate people or angry.

00:12:33 Speaker_03
I never had any of that. As a musician, you welcome everybody. Why would you cut your audience? Let everybody come in.

00:12:43 Speaker_08
Let's go play. What was the choice for them moving to the United States? Was it because of what they were experiencing in Holland around their relationship? Yes.

00:12:54 Speaker_03
At that time, My mother had a sister who lived in a city called Pasadena and she kept sending letters and all these different communications of how wonderful it was and the weather is great, it's just like Indonesia. Oranges are a penny a piece.

00:13:18 Speaker_03
In Holland you don't really get oranges. You get them once in a while and they ship them from Spain and they come elaborately wrapped. It's a big ordeal. But that aside. So oranges for a penny a piece was very attractive for my mom and us too as well.

00:13:36 Speaker_07
How did your parents meet?

00:13:38 Speaker_03
Uh, the way my mom explained it was, uh, he, he showed up on his motorcycle and he, he didn't have any underwear on. That's a love story. You know, those kind of stories. A little humor, I think.

00:13:56 Speaker_03
Because, you know, living in those times was very...things were not secure. The Second World War had just ended, and now everything's headed for another conflict and another disagreement. And God only knows what's going to happen.

00:14:12 Speaker_03
But my mom came from a very wealthy family in Indonesia. They owned a bit of a railroad piece or something, and they were higher up the food chain. But to my mom,

00:14:24 Speaker_03
Working in an office and wearing a suit and a tie, nothing was higher than that in her ambition. And for her whole life, that's all she ever asked was, Alex, Edward, please wear a suit.

00:14:42 Speaker_08
She had you guys playing classical music.

00:14:45 Speaker_03
Classical music was in the house 24-7. That and military marches. Because my dad, to be able to work in Holland, he had to join the Air Force. So they would do the dignitary marches and all that. But yeah, basically it was

00:15:05 Speaker_03
As a musician, you have to look for opportunity. And every musician knows that. You make do with what you got. But being in the military was, I think, very indirectly was very much involved with how we were brought up.

00:15:23 Speaker_03
Being strict with the kids, there was no question about it. You know, you do it or else you're going to get your ass beat. And they will never beat us a lot, but just enough.

00:15:33 Speaker_08
Just enough to get you in line.

00:15:35 Speaker_03
Bingo. You know, it was very normal. Corporal punishment was very typical at that time.

00:15:42 Speaker_08
Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Alex Van Halen. We're talking about his new memoir, about his life and his brother Eddie, and the formation of Van Halen. We'll continue after a short break.

00:15:55 Speaker_08
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

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00:17:38 Speaker_08
This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Let's get back to my interview with Alex Van Halen from the rock band Van Halen. He's written a new memoir that covers the first three decades of the Van Halen brothers' journey in music.

00:17:51 Speaker_08
their childhood in the Netherlands and later in working class Pasadena, California, meeting and working with front man David Lee Roth, and the creation of the Van Halen sound.

00:18:01 Speaker_08
The book is also a love letter from Alex to his younger brother Eddie, who died in 2020. Hot for Teacher was a song from your album 1984.

00:18:11 Speaker_08
It's one of Rolling Stone magazine's, it was on their list saying that this was the album that brought Van Halen's talent into focus. Let's play a little of Hot for Teacher.

00:19:03 Speaker_03
Wow, man, that's a... Wait a second, man. What do you think the teacher's gonna look like this year? Whoa! Oh, yeah!

00:19:12 Speaker_09
T-t-teacher's stoppin' and screamin' Teacher, don't you see? Don't wanna be no uptown fool

00:19:30 Speaker_08
That was Van Halen's Hot for Teacher from the album 1984. Also humor is a big part of your act, I wanted to say that. I know we've been talking about it not being an act, it's who you are, but yes.

00:19:41 Speaker_08
But this album overall was pioneering because there's a lot of synth, which was a new sound back then.

00:19:48 Speaker_03
Yes, and we were always looking for what's around the corner. And we heard a lot of synthesizer music. It was all this progressive rock stuff, whether it was Maha Vishnu or Billy Cobham.

00:20:01 Speaker_03
And there were a number of people who used that sound quality, if you will. I guess I hate to use the word synthesizer, because it conjures up a certain image of certain things.

00:20:13 Speaker_03
When you juxtapose that over a very simple pattern of something else, it does become something else. I know I'm talking in riddles, but that's what music is. It's a big riddle. Try to figure it out.

00:20:23 Speaker_08
This song, which came first, the melody or the drum beat?

00:20:28 Speaker_03
Ed and I played so much all the time, it's hard to remember who. I think it was probably Ed who came up with the guitar lick.

00:20:37 Speaker_08
How did you get the idea to set your drums on fire as part of your act?

00:20:42 Speaker_03
There were a number of people at that time who tried different versions of it. I've always been fascinated by fire, because for me, fire represents the temporariness. Is that a word? Only the moment counts.

00:20:58 Speaker_03
I mean, the flame is there, and poof, it's gone. So is life, right? So to me, that represented that.

00:21:04 Speaker_03
And there was an element of danger, because we did it on such an amateur level, that any given night when we did it, if my drum tech, Greg, an old buddy of mine, if he put too much stuff on it, it would leak.

00:21:20 Speaker_03
There were several times when... What do you mean by stuff, like S? Oh yeah, lighter fluid. Lighter fluid?

00:21:27 Speaker_03
My favorite memory of all of that was we kind of gotten it down to a science, and as we're doing it during the performance, the lighter fluid starts to come down my arm, and then I look over and I notice my arm's on fire.

00:21:43 Speaker_03
So I'm thinking, that can't be good, right? So I look at Greg, who's, you know, in theory, he's there with a fire extinguisher so he can So I look at him, and he's looking at me, and he gives me the thumbs up. Looks great, man.

00:22:00 Speaker_03
I'll never forget that as long as I live. Greg, I love you, but man, put that damn fire out.

00:22:07 Speaker_07
Wait, did he? Do you have burns? What's going on? What?

00:22:10 Speaker_03
Yeah. Did you have burns?

00:22:12 Speaker_07
Yeah.

00:22:13 Speaker_03
Yeah, we had, but it was very low-ditch, you know, we just used lighter fluid and you put a match to it and poof, there it goes. It's very uncontrollable. You're taking a risk every night, but you know, we were young, so it's okay. Right.

00:22:28 Speaker_07
Did you end up having to get new drum sets every time? I mean, how did that work?

00:22:31 Speaker_03
No, actually, it wasn't until the end of the tour. I got slapped with like, I don't know how much, all the microphones and the chords were fried. And nobody told me that when we were doing it. The drum set itself was made out of stainless steel.

00:22:46 Speaker_03
Ludwig was very accommodating. They made a stainless steel drum kit for me. It wasn't the only one, but they gave it to me. But it really goes to show you how at that age, the stuff doesn't really register in your brain.

00:23:02 Speaker_03
It turns out that the average male brain does not completely mature until the age of 27. I'm still waiting.

00:23:14 Speaker_08
You watched Spinal Tap, right? Oh yeah, that wasn't funny at all.

00:23:21 Speaker_03
Well, Ed and I saw it and we said, man, that's what we experienced. That is really how things happen. It's mind bending. You know, the public doesn't really have any idea what goes on behind the scenes. And I'm certainly not going to burst the bubble.

00:23:35 Speaker_03
But that movie, there were a lot of elements that were more true than they were parody. And of course, then they believed their own stuff and they went out and toured.

00:23:44 Speaker_08
Right, right, right. That was the ironic part. You and Eddie famously for a long time never recorded any music without each other until a request from Quincy Jones for a little known song called Beat It. Let's listen.

00:24:48 Speaker_08
That was a solo Eddie did on the iconic song Beat It by Michael Jackson. And Alex, I think it was on the charts the same time as 1984, if I'm not... Yeah, it was. Yeah, why do you think Eddie went and did that without consulting you guys?

00:25:03 Speaker_03
If I remember right, he did consult and we said no. What are you going to do? I'm not going to make something. We really did not overthink anything, but I did want to kick his ass. Why? Because our model was basically Led Zeppelin.

00:25:21 Speaker_03
The way that they structured their business, the way they structured how they played, who they played with. Led Zeppelin was Led Zeppelin. You couldn't get Jimmy Page anywhere else. You can only get him on Led Zeppelin. Come to the show. That's it.

00:25:34 Speaker_03
You don't get him with Michael Jackson. You don't get him with so-and-so. But Ed violated that and it started a whole cascade of this bad, bad vibes.

00:25:42 Speaker_08
It was the beginning of the end for you guys as a unit.

00:25:46 Speaker_03
In all fairness, it really was not the single thing because things were already starting to unravel. When we named the album 1984, it had nothing to do with the year. It had to do with George Orwell and the dystopia of what was going on.

00:26:00 Speaker_03
This band was so fractured. We barely ever played together anymore. And unfortunately, MTV became the predominant way of conveying all this, and Dave being the visual guy, naturally opted for more visual stuff.

00:26:16 Speaker_03
I don't blame him for any of it, but you know, it's just too bad, because we were on the cusp of something really, really big.

00:26:23 Speaker_08
Ed going and doing this song with Michael Jackson, if you guys had always said you wanted to be Led Zeppelin, what do you think it was that made him say, I want to do this anyway?

00:26:34 Speaker_03
I don't know. There's some aspects of his behavior are even to me a mystery.

00:26:40 Speaker_08
I just have to say to you, Alex, it also opened up another world to you guys. I mean, I'm a little black girl in Detroit hearing that little solo from Van Halen. It introduced me to you.

00:26:55 Speaker_03
That was the argument that a couple other people make, but I tell you, I don't buy it. My suggestion would have been, put Michael on our record. Then you got something. And people will say, are you out of your mind?

00:27:09 Speaker_03
Well, you can have guest people on your records. But am I angry? Of course not. That's just posturing. That's what you do to your brother and your bandmates. Nobody fights better than friends.

00:27:24 Speaker_08
Alex Van Halen, this was such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

00:27:27 Speaker_03
It was my pleasure.

00:27:29 Speaker_08
Alex Van Halen is a founding member of the rock band Van Halen. His new memoir is called Brothers.

00:27:37 Speaker_08
In 1955, Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo published a slim novel called Pedro Paramo about a man who goes in search of a father he's never met, only to discover that his father is dead and ghosts haunt the village he inhabited.

00:27:53 Speaker_08
Pedro Paramo changed the course of Latin American literature.

00:27:57 Speaker_08
Among the writers it influenced was a young magical realist by the name of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who went on to write 100 Years of Solitude, and who once declared that Rulfo was as enduring as Sophocles.

00:28:12 Speaker_08
On November 6th, a new movie inspired by the novel premieres on Netflix. Contributor Carolina Miranda had a look to see how this cinematic interpretation holds up against Rufo's timeless book.

00:28:25 Speaker_06
Pedro Páramo is not the sort of novel that's easy to turn into a movie. The plot, what there is of it, meanders constantly. Perspectives shift. The narrative jumps back and forth in time. Strange things happen.

00:28:39 Speaker_06
And as you sink into the story, it can be impossible to tell what's waking life and what might be a dream. The novel is also hard to make into a movie because it's iconic.

00:28:51 Speaker_06
Practically every school kid in Mexico reads it, and every student of Latin American literature has wrestled with its ruminations on betrayal, power, and death.

00:29:01 Speaker_06
Rodrigo Prieto, an Oscar-nominated cinematographer from Mexico whose past projects include Killers of the Flower Moon, has bravely chosen Pedro Páramo as the subject of his first feature film.

00:29:13 Speaker_06
The story kicks off as Juan Preciado arrives in the village of Comala to look for his father, a prominent landowner.

00:29:20 Speaker_06
In the film's opening scene, a camera plunges the viewer into a hole in the earth as we hear Preciado deliver the novel's opening lines. Lines so famous, many Spanish speakers can recite them by heart.

00:29:33 Speaker_09
I came to Comala because they told me my father, a man named Pedro Paramo, lived here.

00:29:41 Speaker_06
I came to Comala," he says, because I was told my father lived here, a man named Pedro Paramo. But as Preciado enters Comala, he discovers that the lush settlement his mother had once described no longer exists.

00:29:56 Speaker_06
The town is abandoned, its crumbling adobe houses occupied by the ghosts of his father's ruthless past. In the role of Preciado is Tenoch Huerta, best known for playing the ocean-dwelling Namor in the Black Panther sequel Wakanda Forever.

00:30:12 Speaker_06
His performance in Pedro Páramo is far more restrained. As his character is led by one ghost and then another ever deeper into Comala, Preciado learns about his father's casual brutality as well as the other children he'd fathered and even loved.

00:30:29 Speaker_06
The actor conveys these painful discoveries in flashes of quiet hurt and bewilderment.

00:30:34 Speaker_06
As in the novel, about midway through the film, the narrative shifts its primary focus from son to father, charting Páramo's rise as a landowner during the years of the Mexican Revolution. Páramo murders his adversaries and takes their land.

00:30:49 Speaker_06
He treats the town's women like a personal harem. He knows he can disobey the law, because in this corner of Mexico, he is the law.

00:30:59 Speaker_03
What laws, he asks? We'll make the laws ourselves.

00:31:08 Speaker_06
Starring as Páramo is Manuel García-Rulfo, a Mexican actor known for playing the title role on the Netflix series The Lincoln Lawyer.

00:31:16 Speaker_06
Born in Guadalajara, García-Rulfo also happens to be a distant relative of the book's author, and to the character he brings the spoken cadences of Western Mexico, where the novel is set.

00:31:28 Speaker_06
But the actor's approachable good looks don't always jibe with the merciless rancher described in the book. The bigger challenge facing any director who tackles Pedro Páramo is constructing a believable world.

00:31:40 Speaker_06
To read the novel is to get the sensation that you are being told a story by ghosts, as if you're hearing voices fade in and out. The author conveys the strange and terrible events in matter-of-fact ways.

00:31:54 Speaker_06
He doesn't sensationalize or overdo the suspense. Capturing the sensibility on film, however, can be difficult, and it's why it's been a challenge to translate Pedro Páramo, as well as other novels by magical realists, into movie form.

00:32:09 Speaker_06
The literature has a very restrained approach to the extraordinary. On screen, however, things like violence can come off as lurid and apparitions can feel hokey. Prieto's film, for the most part, presents a convincing world.

00:32:24 Speaker_06
His transitions between past and present and life and death are seamless. Bleak scenes are portrayed with otherworldly beauty. And sound, which Rulfo describes with great care in the novel, is used in interesting ways.

00:32:40 Speaker_06
At one moment, we hear the world through the partially deaf ears of an old mule driver. In another, we're immersed in the echoes of Komala's empty streets. The movie, however, has its awkward moments.

00:33:03 Speaker_06
A scene that involves a woman who turns into mud feels like an intrusion of CGI in early 20th century Mexico. And the same goes for a key death scene, of which I won't say more so as not to give away plot.

00:33:16 Speaker_06
Prieto's film is one of several inspired by Rulfo's novel. A version from 1967 was more melodramatic. Another, released in 1977, had a stripped-down spaghetti western vibe.

00:33:30 Speaker_06
Prieto's version adheres most closely to Rulfo's text, and that can hamper the film's pacing. The frequent jumps between time periods, which give the book its sense of disorientation, become repetitive and extra confusing on screen.

00:33:47 Speaker_06
Though, ultimately, being confused is part of grappling with Juan Rulfo's masterwork, a story about love, corruption, dominance, and the ways in which death comes for us all in the end.

00:34:01 Speaker_08
Carolina Miranda reviewed Pedro Paramo, coming to Netflix on November 6. Coming up, painter, sculptor, and filmmaker Titus Kaphar talks about his directorial debut, a new movie based on his life titled Exhibiting Forgiveness.

00:34:16 Speaker_08
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

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00:35:14 Speaker_08
This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my next guest is contemporary painter, sculptor, and installation artist Titus Kaphar.

00:35:22 Speaker_08
He's known for taking classical forms of art and deconstructing them by cutting, crumpling, shredding, stitching, tarring, twisting, and binding to reveal hidden truths that challenge historical narratives.

00:35:35 Speaker_08
His art provokes, forcing the viewer to confront the erasure of Black Americans from our historical narrative.

00:35:41 Speaker_08
Take his 2014 painting, Behind the Myth of Benevolence, a portrait of Thomas Jefferson peeling away to reveal Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman Jefferson owned.

00:35:51 Speaker_08
His 2020 Time magazine cover, Analogous Colors, depicted a mother holding the silhouette of a child, which Kaphar created by cutting into the canvas. The image references George Floyd calling out to his mother during his arrest and final moments.

00:36:08 Speaker_08
Kafar, whose paintings and installation art can be found in some of the world's most prestigious museums, has now taken his vision to the big screen, deconstructing his own life with his directorial debut, a raw and deeply personal film titled

00:36:23 Speaker_08
Exhibiting Forgiveness. It's about a celebrated painter whose carefully constructed world unravels when his estranged father, a recovering addict seeking redemption, suddenly reappears in his life.

00:36:36 Speaker_08
It's a searing exploration of forgiveness, asking us who deserves it, who owes it, and at what cost. Titus, welcome to Fresh Air.

00:36:45 Speaker_05
Thank you.

00:36:47 Speaker_08
If I'm not mistaken, this idea for the film was originally a documentary, right? How did it turn into a feature film?

00:36:57 Speaker_05
The documentary happened because I was going back to Michigan, where I'm from, Kalamazoo, to visit my grandmother. And when I got to my grandmother's house, my father was sitting on the doorstep.

00:37:12 Speaker_05
And I had my sons with me, and my wife was with me, and they'd never seen him before. My kids were probably about seven and five or something like that at that time.

00:37:24 Speaker_05
And I basically told him I didn't really want to talk and that this wasn't a good time. So I walked up the stairs, walked into the house, and to my surprise, My father followed me in now.

00:37:37 Speaker_05
This is my maternal grandmother and so as I was starting to get a little frustrated about the situation my grandmother said baby you need to talk to him and I say this all the time, but um When my grandmother tells you to do something you do it.

00:37:52 Speaker_05
There's no question and I had a camera on my shoulder at the time because I was going to take a photograph of her. I was going to make a painting and drawing of her. And so, kind of on a whim, I said to my father, if you want to talk, let me film you.

00:38:06 Speaker_05
There's a lot to be accounted for. And I was hoping he would say no, but he said yes. He said be in my house for 15 minutes. And that was the beginning of it. And the truth of the matter is that documentary felt wildly unsatisfying.

00:38:24 Speaker_05
I showed it publicly in a theater one time and decided I don't want that in the world like that.

00:38:32 Speaker_08
Why? What was it about it?

00:38:34 Speaker_05
A lot of it was just the fact that it felt like it did a really good job of telling me where I was but not how I got there. It was me as an adult reflecting on these things as an adult.

00:38:49 Speaker_05
And there was no space for that child, that child's voice in that documentary. And somehow that felt really necessary.

00:38:59 Speaker_05
So as I let go of the idea of the documentary project and I moved it in to the idea of doing this as a feature film, I realized that it was going to be necessary for me to think differently about my father when I write him as a character.

00:39:18 Speaker_08
This changed your creative process because you were writing and also painting this story at the same time. This was the first time you had actually done something like this.

00:39:30 Speaker_05
Yeah, I mean, the writing process was very different for me. And so what happened is I'd wake up in the morning about five o'clock and I'd start writing for a couple hours, take my kids to school, and then I would go to the studio and I would

00:39:46 Speaker_05
I would start drawing or sketching from what I had written the day before. So I have this app on my phone that allows me to listen to text. So I was listening to that and remembering all of the things from my childhood experiences.

00:40:02 Speaker_05
just writing that down and initially I was writing this stuff for the purpose of trying to tell my sons a little bit about about their father me about where I come from and you know why I don't like to talk about when I was a kid so much and For their whole lives.

00:40:21 Speaker_05
I've always said well. I'll tell you when we older and

00:40:23 Speaker_08
They would ask. They would ask.

00:40:26 Speaker_05
And so my oldest is going off to college now. So I think that's part of what initiated this whole process for me. And the painting aspect of it is so, that's so normal. That's my happy place. That's peace, you know.

00:40:43 Speaker_05
I'm a pretty extroverted person, but that's only because I have all of this time alone in the studio.

00:40:49 Speaker_05
So that part felt normal, felt right, and it made the writing process easier because the writing process was far more emotional than I expected it to be.

00:41:03 Speaker_05
The process of sitting down and writing made me remember things that I had pushed out of my mind for a long time.

00:41:09 Speaker_05
And I also, as I took it from reality and moved it into the script, it actually became more difficult when I was moving it into a script. Because if you are writing a character, you have to be honest about that character's motivations.

00:41:29 Speaker_05
You can't just say, this is a bad guy. And as a young man, I would have told you that my father was the villain of my narrative. He was the bad guy. It wasn't until I sat down to write and I had to ask myself, no, no, that's not enough.

00:41:45 Speaker_05
Why is he doing what he's doing? What are the motivations for his actions? What are the broader context of the world? Yes, that's right. You grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Yes, that's right. That was a place of industry, of factories, of businesses.

00:42:01 Speaker_05
And yes, that's right. By the time you were in high school, all of those businesses, so many of them had been shut down. And so there were no jobs. There were few opportunities. And yes, that's right. Crack cocaine came in right at that same time.

00:42:16 Speaker_05
So with context and writing and asking myself the motivation for this character, I gained a compassion, a sympathy for my father that I never had as a young man.

00:42:32 Speaker_08
Titus, the story isn't completely autobiographical, but there's truth, so much truth from your life in it. For those who haven't seen the film, can you say what the story is?

00:42:43 Speaker_08
Terrell is an artist living with his wife, who is also an artist, a musician, and you have a young son.

00:42:49 Speaker_05
Mm-hmm. He has a young son. Terrell has a young son. I have two. You know, I think fundamentally this film is about one artist's journey towards healing.

00:43:05 Speaker_05
Of course, there's this question of this father who reenters the situation, whether or not there will be reconciliation or forgiveness between them. And we go with this family on this journey. The film for me is about generational healing.

00:43:28 Speaker_05
About how does this generation make sure that our children don't have to carry the same wounds and baggage that we carry? Is there a way for us to leave it here so that they can go on without that burden?

00:43:48 Speaker_05
And in the film, the artist Terrell and his wife Aisha, they figure this out through their artistic practice itself. The thing that I'm most excited about is in the film, you see the practice of two artists connected, caring for one another.

00:44:09 Speaker_05
It's not generally the picture of an artist that you see on film.

00:44:14 Speaker_08
There's such a vulnerability in this film. I mean, we are seeing Black men emote and express and cry. And we rarely see that in film. Actually, we don't see that for men, period, let alone Black men.

00:44:33 Speaker_08
What have been the discussions with your sons, you writing this with the intent of being able to show them that, hey, this is what my life was before you were here?

00:44:43 Speaker_05
Yeah. I mean, there's a moment in the film where Jermaine, Terrell's son, runs in the house and starts jumping on the couch. And I love that scene. Daniel, the young kid who played that part, he's extraordinary.

00:45:01 Speaker_05
And he comes in, he starts jumping on the couch, and I wish I would run into the house and jump on my mother's couch. I wish I would. That would be a very short scene.

00:45:16 Speaker_05
But Tyrell, he walks in and he gently grabs his son by the shoulders and he looks him in his eye and he says, breathe. I want you to breathe with me. Let's take a breath together.

00:45:29 Speaker_05
And what that's about is giving the next generation different tools than we had. We weren't told that it was okay that we could cry. That was something that we had to suppress. That was something that it was necessary for us to hold in.

00:45:45 Speaker_05
We grew up in a kind of rough spot. You didn't want people to see you weak. That meant you were vulnerable. And if you were vulnerable, the opportunity to take you was there.

00:45:58 Speaker_05
And so that became another thing I began to understand is like even these things that feel harsh in the minds of our parents. This was for our protection. And I don't agree with, you know, doing that to your children.

00:46:20 Speaker_05
I have to believe that love and compassion and kindness and care, those things are the things that we offer to our children and that will bring them to a peace, a place of peace and wholeness.

00:46:32 Speaker_05
but at the same time recognizing that the world that I grew up in, the neighborhood that I grew up in, was fundamentally different from the neighborhood that my children are growing up in.

00:46:42 Speaker_05
I understand why, why they made the decisions they made, why they did what they did.

00:46:47 Speaker_08
It's interesting, you said it was kind of like therapy. You had a conversation with a couple of directors, producers, just to get advice. You talked to Steven Spielberg, right?

00:46:57 Speaker_05
I did, yeah.

00:46:58 Speaker_08
And he said something to you about putting your life on the page like this in a film. What did he tell you?

00:47:05 Speaker_05
Yeah, first shout out to Kate Capshaw, his wife. She's a painter. That's how we met. So she came to the studio, and we were just geeking out about paint. And I had these canvases there that I had been working on for the film.

00:47:20 Speaker_05
And she asked me, she said, so what is all this work about? This feels a little different from your other paintings. And so I had a script in my hand, and I handed it to her, signed it, and said, thanks for coming to the studio. Appreciate you.

00:47:34 Speaker_05
And Kate and I have stayed in touch. And so she read the script in about 24, 48 hours and got back to me and said, this is something special. Do you mind if I share it with Steven? And I said, yeah, no, of course not. That's insane.

00:47:50 Speaker_05
I said of course and she gave it to Steven and within a couple of days he got back to me and he said you have something very special here this is not the kind of film that Hollywood usually treats well you have to protect yourself it's going to be difficult and it is not going to fix everything.

00:48:14 Speaker_05
And he had just done his own family story.

00:48:17 Speaker_08
With the Fablemans, yeah.

00:48:19 Speaker_05
Yeah. And so he also told me that I cried every day on set. And for me, I didn't cry every day, but there were many days.

00:48:28 Speaker_08
You on the other side of the project.

00:48:31 Speaker_05
To be honest with you, Kate and Stephen spoke to me about the project throughout filming. And so on the other side of the project, I would say, yeah, it's true.

00:48:46 Speaker_05
Everything has not been fixed, but there definitely have been some revelations, like I said, about understanding the motivations of my father. That has changed. That has definitely changed for me.

00:48:59 Speaker_08
I want to talk to you a little bit about some of the other reasons why you wanted to make this film. You also made this movie because while you document Black life, Black people by and large are not the ones consuming or buying your art.

00:49:16 Speaker_08
And in the short documentary that you did in 2022, Shut Up and Paint, you shared your struggle with the commodification of your art. You mentioned in there how you have family members who, at least at that point, still hadn't seen, still to this day.

00:49:35 Speaker_08
Has that ever made you question what you do?

00:49:39 Speaker_05
Well, actually, let me rephrase that. It hasn't made me question what I do. It's made me question where what I do goes. So I don't question painting. I love that.

00:49:49 Speaker_05
That's like, in my heart, it's the thing that I, one of the things that I know that I was made for. But the reality is, as I said in that documentary, where I grew up, the place I grew up, does not look like the place where I am now.

00:50:07 Speaker_05
And the people who engage with my work often don't come from that world. And let me be clear here, I'm not just talking about race. I'm talking about class as well. I feel blessed to be able to do what I do every day.

00:50:25 Speaker_05
I mean, I make paintings and people pay me to do that. It's kind of ridiculous. It's like, let's just be honest, let's just put that out there. It's kind of ridiculous. So I'm not complaining about that.

00:50:38 Speaker_05
But what I want is to figure out how I can get more access for folks.

00:50:43 Speaker_08
And you felt like a movie. You felt like visuals in that way was more democratizing.

00:50:49 Speaker_05
Yeah. As I said, I think I said in the film, the documentary, film is a much more democratically accessible medium. You don't have to be a rich man to go to a movie, you know? And nobody makes you feel uncomfortable when you walk into a movie theater.

00:51:06 Speaker_05
You can just walk in a movie, watch a movie. or, you know, eventually you'll be able to watch it in your home, you know. So...

00:51:16 Speaker_05
That was incredibly important to me, because as I went into more spaces, gallery spaces, I recognized how uncomfortable they are. This beautiful, big, white space where you are the only black face in that building.

00:51:33 Speaker_05
There is some fancy person sitting at the front desk, and you don't know whether, do I need to pay to get in? It's like, do I need to talk to them? Do I need to say something?

00:51:41 Speaker_05
And then you see these paintings on the wall, and you're like, these are interesting, but I don't know anything about them. That kind of elitism that one feels when they're in those spaces doesn't help people connect to the art at all.

00:51:58 Speaker_08
Titus Kaphar, thank you so much.

00:52:00 Speaker_05
Thank you.

00:52:02 Speaker_08
Painter Titus Kaphar's new movie is based on his life titled Exhibiting Forgiveness. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our engineer is Adam Staniszewski.

00:52:28 Speaker_08
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yacundi, and Anna Bauman.

00:52:39 Speaker_08
Our digital media producers are Molly CV Nesper and Sabrina Seward. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.

00:52:52 Speaker_02
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00:53:42 Speaker_01
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