Emergency Stars RJ Cyler, Sebastian Chacon, and Donald Elise Watkins On How Society Views Black and Brown Men and Filming That White Guilt Scene
Prime Video’s new film Emergency follows three college students who are ready for a legendary night of partying ahead of graduation, but their evening takes a turn when they find a random young white woman unconscious in their living room. They’re worried the police will suspect them of wrongdoing, so they try to get the woman to safety without drawing suspicion. I spoke with director Carey Williams, writer K.D. Dávila, and actors RJ Cyler, Donald Elise Watkins, and Sebastian Chacon at the Emergency junket. They discuss how society views Black and Brown men and how that impacts how they view themselves, plus they open up about the final results of a powerful scene that was filmed multiple ways.
Following his feature directorial debut with R#J, Carey Williams returned to Sundance Film Festival with Emergency continuing his mastery of telling authentic stories about young people of color. His secret? “I was one of them once,” joked Williams. “I don't know if there’s a secret to it other than just thinking back to how I feel about a lot of things and tapping into the characters and what they're experiencing. I’ve had a lot of Sean and a lot of Kunle in me. [It] definitely was not hard to tap into their world views and their their mindset.”
Writer K.D. Dávila brought her own experiences as a Mexican-American woman and what she saw her family experiencing on a daily basis into the script. “I grew up with a very acute awareness that how you look affects how you're treated by the world. There are some people who are dark-skinned who are treated way differently from the paler people in [my] family and that was something that we talked a lot about. This movie is about perception and these guys who have have this burden of having to anticipate how they're being perceived at all times. The comedic and thriller elements of the movie all come out of that one spine,” “The stakes are so real for them […] and I think that is a reality for people of color that i think a lot of people deny is real. They don't see it and they don't experience it, so they're like, ‘Oh, it must not happen that often,’ or ‘You must have been doing something that looked suspicious.’ We wanted to be able to put people in that position of watching these guys go through this night, of watching every single decision that they make. You may disagree with some of them, you may be like, in hindsight, that was a bad idea, but in the moment you see why they're doing what they're doing.”
Emergency has a lot to say about the way America views young Black and Latino men from a variety of perspectives and the actors shared how working on a film like this both influenced and validated their own points of view. “The first thing that I thought first read the script was that I'm never gonna book that part. I almost didn't audition to play like a nerdy awkward rocket scientists type [because] I had played career criminals over and over again,” shared Sebastian Chacon. “To come into something like this is just like, ‘Wow, like, yeah I could do that. Of course, I could, like, why not?’ So really from the outset you're thinking about how you're perceived, you're thinking about what is possible.”
“It checked off all those boxes, but did it in a refreshing way to where it wasn't too overbearing, you feel me?” said RJ Cyler, while Donald Elise Watkins shared: “I always feel like you bring a piece of yourself to every character that you do, whether it's a large piece or a small piece. There's always you know that piece of RJ, piece of Sebastian, piece of Donald that goes into this.”
“I absolutely saw things about myself that maybe I didn't know were there. You don’t know what you don’t know. It's almost like this thing is a door in your house that's been locked and then someone's like, ‘Hey, what's this?’ I’m like, ‘I don't know, it's always been locked.’ They’re like, ‘I got this key’ and they open it up. I feel like that's what Carey and K.D. did. I'm looking around, like, ‘What? This has been here the whole time?’” continued Watkins, with Chacon chiming in: “You leave your imprint on it, it leaves its imprint on you.”
The film also tackles white guilt in a scene with Sabrina Carpenter whose character Maddy misinterprets a lot of what is going on with these young men trying to help her sister. Interestingly, the cast shared that the scene was filmed a variety of different ways and they were surprised to see what ended up in the final cut. “There was a version of that scene where we shot it and she actually has this whole speech and tells us, ‘I’m sorry’ [and] it's this whole moment, but it was thought that it would better serve the movie to have us actually reject that apology,” revealed Chacon, with Watkins adding: “I like that because you don't need it.. Words won't take away the trauma for Kunle. [We] see this man lose his innocence and you'll never get it back once you've experienced that, so it doesn't matter what you say here. This apology isn't for me, it's fo you. It's to make you feel better.”
Emergency is currently streaming on Prime Video. Check out our review of the film, below:
