Robin Williams as Dwight Eisenhower and Forest Whitaker as the butler
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“The Butler” is based on the life of a butler in a Washington Post article written by Wil Haygood, who served more than 30 years as the White House Butler under eight different U.S. Presidents. The film stars Mariah Carey, rapper and activist David Banner, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Fonda, Robin Williams, Terrance Howard, Lenny Kravitz and more. The story follows Gaines as he observes the world growing up as the child of a sharecropper to the election of America's first Black President Barack Obama. Lee says most of the story is true including all of Gaines' encounters with each President. When directing the film. Lee says he tried to show the different sides of the Presidents- good and bad.
“Ronald Reagan did give money to poor Black people, but at the same time he wasn’t anti-apartheid and at the same time he questioned his political beliefs," Daniels continues. "Johnson did in fact give him a tie clip and Kennedy’s wife, Jacqueline, did give him a tie. We interwove the truth with a little bit of fiction.”
The film captures the life of a man who served under the highest office in the nation and it also reveals how the decisions made in the White House affected Gaines and his family. The story follows the relationship between the butler and his son as they clash over the Civil Rights Movement. The film documents the generational gap that existed between students who participated in the sit-ins and their parents and grandparents. For Daniels, capturing the disconnect between the older and younger generations of Blacks in America was an important piece of the narrative.
“I yelled action and out of nowhere comes the KKK members with the hoods, and the swastikas, and the crosses and the bus is shaking and we’re getting scared inside the bus and I yell ‘Cut.’ and I got to the window and I’m screaming ‘cut,’ and they wouldn’t stop because they couldn’t hear me,” Daniels says as he recalls the scene. “I realized there was no one there for those kids to yell cut. That these kids were heroes and they were fighting to save the soul of the country and Oh Lord this is bigger than a father/son story.”
Daniels describes himself as always yelling on set and says his anger comes from a place that angers most Black people in America. As a writer and director he experiences firsthand the lack of attention and resources given to the production of Black movies, despite the support from Hollywood heavyweights and the Black community. He says he carries the anger on set because, "we have to it and quite it" without the luxury of big trailers and opulent food.
“As a Black man I am very angry. I get angry at the way we as African-American men have been treated. It’s hard to not be angry and hard not to know if I was Steven Spielberg I would have $70 million or $80 million for this movie,” Daniels explains. “We have Oprah Winfrey on the set, I got Forest Whittaker on the set, Jane Fonda on the set, all these fancy movie stars on the set and I am angry. If it were anybody else they would be treated different. What I learned from Forest is a sense of humility and not to hold that anger in ‘cause it ain’t gon’ do nothing but cause you stress and kill you and that was the beauty. The most difficult thing is trying to keep the anger and hostility away and to learn to be humble which is something I learned from my star (Whitaker).”
Projecting his anger in a productive direction proved invaluable. Ironically the film grossed the exact amount of his limited budget of $25 million, during opening weekend and $17 million the second weekend making it the #1 movie in theaters for three weeks in a row. Many attribute the success of the film to the loyalty of the Black community, the Black church, and the flawless performances of Whitaker and Oprah, but underlining an all-star cast is timing. “The Butler” was released at a critical point when Black people wanted to know that someone knew exactly how they felt and sympathized. It was Daniels who pulled on his passionate emotions to poignantly express those sentiments.
“When we wrote those lines ‘Any white man can kill any Black man and get away with it. The law isn’t on our side, it is against us,’ we did it before Trayvon Martin’s case even came up and the thing with Johnson when he passed the Voting Rights Act, that bill that was historic which was important or almost as important as freeing the slaves ," Daniels says. "I didn’t know when I would finish the movie the Supreme Court would make the decision they did, so your grandmother and my grandmother if she ain’t got an ID some white man can tell her, ‘No. You can’t go vote.’ That I am having this conversation with you right now is a movie.”
Whitaker researched historical events such as The Voting Rights Act, desegregation of public schools, and The March on Washington to bring an authentic perception of time and space to Gaines' character. The film was shot in just 40 days due to a limited budget of $25 million. The tight budget resulted in time constraints with Whitaker working 18-20 hour days most of the film. In many cases, he was playing three different ages in one day, so portraying the character with accuracy took a variety of tactics. Whitaker internalized the events that scarred Gaines resulting in an emotionally charged performance. He says he imagined living almost 100 years as a Black man in America and the toll it took on the former butler. He says Gaines was affected by everything. Whitaker says he put all experiences in different parts of his body.
“When I was working on the role I was looking at the history that was going on alongside. Even the stuff that wasn’t in the movie that would have affected me, as the Trayvon Martin situation affected you, and so many of the feelings and all these different things were affecting this character. Then the things that were inside the script, all the moments Lee highlighted and touched, I started to put all those experiences as we do, we don’t even realize we carry them, inside of my body,” Whitaker explains. “That’s really the aging process I went through to age his character was to take the experiences in the film, and around, and place them in different parts of my body. Slowly as I got older, and older, and older, the weight of those experiences and the weight of those different things that I seen, felt, and touched slowly transformed my body. So what you’re seeing at the time when I’m 90 something years old is the breadth of his experiences and emotions and the impact of the experiences in his life displayed on Cecil. That’s what I was trying to bring. When Lee shot me in my face you would feel that weight, hopefully in my eyes and inside of my body, from all the experiences Lee was able to capture in the film.”
Whitaker who also produced Ryan Coogler's breakout film “Fruitvale Station,” a movie about a young man who is killed by a transit officer in California, says like “Fruitvale Station,” “The Butler” makes people aware of the continuous struggles the Black community faces in America.
“It shows the cycles were still trying to break. In the movie this young man is sparked by the murder of Emmett Till. That was what prompted him. It’s trying to just remind us to find ways to break these cycles and move forward any way we can,” Whitaker says. “This is something special because you (Daniels ) looped into the cycles that we’re still trying to progress, so that we can become all that we can be.”
Telling a story that involved the most important events in American history and how those events impacted the Black community is something Daniels feels shouldn’t be relegated to the parlors and living room of our grandparents. He says the story should be told in the public sphere where anyone of any color can learn about the struggle that is still changing the nation.
“It is the story of the Civil Rights movement,” Daniels says. “I think American history is The Civil Rights Movement.”