Fighting for Life and Sneakers in East Bay: Director Justin Tipping Talks Kicks

To see people pick and choose who they’re going to be tolerant of just drives me crazy, especially in today’s political climate. In the language of American history, in that discourse of race, it’s the history of black and white. So someone like me who might identify as Filipino as a nationality, culturally you’re just how you’re perceived to be. So the main lead [of Kicks] is mixed, but everyone thinks he’s black. My cousins who are half-black, half-Filipino, everyone thinks they’re black. People say, “Obama doesn’t acknowledge that he’s mixed,” but it’s like, yeah, he’s mixed, we get that, but you have to understand that your experience in the world and in America, walking your day to day life, you’re treated as you’re perceived. So if that’s your experience, that’s your experience. It’s not denouncing your background. I know who I am, I know who my dad is and love my dad, but he might have not had the same experience as I’ve had, for sure.

Did the fact that you are telling what is ostensibly a black story despite not being black yourself add a sense of responsibility or pressure?

It was always on my mind, but it never scared me. I grew up with black people, I went to a school that was predominantly African American. I have black friends. Also, the Bay and Richmond and Oakland are so culturally specific in that social context, the way people speak—it didn’t matter if you were a South Laotian gangbanger or not, if you grew up on a certain block in the hood, you would drop the n-word. People come up to me and say, “What’s up, Justin? What’s up [refrains from completing sentence].” I wasn’t raised that way, I never say that, but I could have maybe if I wanted to fit in or if I had to be hood for a second. I think it’s on a community-to-community basis. I knew that when this script was going to go out into the world, people would be like, “Tipping? What? What’s this guy’s story?” But it didn’t scare me. I would be dishonest if I didn’t let the characters speak the way they spoke in life that I knew. It would be disrespectful to try to pander or sugarcoat something. That’s not real, not real to the characters.

A lot of your characters are complex enough to seem like you were consciously resisting stereotypes when you wrote them.

I’m for sure conscious. The tragic part of Kicks to me is these kids are all born into this situation. They’re born into a community that’s been socially and economically isolated from the rest of the world, from generations ago. They’re just thrown into this situation and that’s a dog-eat-dog world without equal opportunity, a lot of disenfranchisement. I don’t show Brandon’s mother onscreen as an act of choice, because the cycle of poverty is intertwined with the cycle of violence. [You could] have a single-parent household, because Dad got busted for having weed on him, which is classified on the same level of heroin, so Mom can’t be home and she can’t afford daycare. When you’re just left there, you’re exponentially more likely to get in trouble if you don’t have support around. Also as a teenager if you’re gonna go do some crazy shit, you don’t go to your parents for help. It feels like a weird tunnel-vision world in adolescence.

[With the antagonist Flaco character] I think when you’re at that weird age when you realize for the first time that life’s not fair, and it’s like, “Damn, fuck, I can’t believe this happened to me,” but you’re not yet aware that everyone suffers. I remember hearing Lauryn Hill speak once about how the kids that were beating my ass, sometimes you have to think: What have they been through? It’s probably way worse than what I’ve dealt with. What does it take for somebody to want to exact violence on somebody nonsensically? Something must have happened.

Is the movie intended as a critique of materialism?

I think to an extent, it’s a warning for sure. When it comes to commodity fetishism, that’s when it gets scary. When just obtaining that one thing, that brand, you think will define you, whether it be Jordans in Richmond or a Ferrari on Beverley Blvd., or a Rolex on Wall Street—there’s always social signifiers that you try to elevate your status with. If you can’t afford the shoes, don’t buy ‘em. Save money.

That fetishism is also a symptom of capitalism. You can’t rake people over the coals for aspiring to own material goods in a country that tells you constantly that this is what you should aspire to.

Exactly. In the back of my mind, it was always like: Here’s the dark side of capitalism. It’s great for some things, but this is the culture we’re creating. You mix that with a culture of violence and it’s a volatile mixture.

Masculinity and what defines it are among this movie’s themes. Does that explain why your female characters are ancillary across the board?

Yeah. It was a really tough thing to handle, because I’m a feminist. If you’re not a feminist, what the hell are you talking about? You don’t like equality? In approaching it, it was like, this is the lens of a 15-year-old boy surrounded by other 15-year-old boys. I also have to be true to what they would do. I didn’t want to preach or throw something in that would make it inauthentic, but at the same time, I was aware of that. Every kind of brief brush by they have, I would tell the girls, “Always have the last word. Talk like the boys.” Girls can be violent. When Brandon hits Cameron with the basketball, she’s like, “You won’t hit him, you won’t hit him.” The rest of that scene she improvised. I told her, “Don’t let him call you a bitch. You call him a bitch.” They started firing at each other. I know it’s so minute in the grand scheme of things, but I was trying to give them a sense of humor and give them play, and I think the girl Brandon hooks up with ultimately, he doesn’t seduce her. He wasn’t like, “I got this.” She had the power. She was the empowered one in the situation. I think his mom, even though she’s not in the movie, is the strongest voice of reason. It’s just we’re only meeting her through his voice over. “I know mom’s gonna be mad…” “My mom says this, my mom says that.”

A lot of early Kicks reviews have called your debut “promising.” Does that strike you as condescending at all?

I try not to read ‘em, but I always do. I don’t think it’s condescending. I think it’s funny. I started looking up, like, what David Gordon Green’s first review was of George Washington, just to know. I go read The Hollywood Reporter review and it kind of tears the movie apart. Now it’s Criterion Collection and people are like, “Genius.” I take it with a grain of salt and think back on the other filmmakers who made their debuts. It’s OK. We’ll see.