Mario Van Peebles on his career in Hollywood: “They shut the financial door on Black film for damn near 20 years”

Despite being the son of Melvin Van Peebles – the prophetic independent filmmaker behind The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1967), Watermelon Man (1970) and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) – actor-director Mario Van Peebles is approachable and grounded. The length of his career, and variety of credits, speaks volumes. He’s been mentored by Clint Eastwood, appeared in dozens of films over 30-something years, and has directed countless popular television shows, including CSI, Lost, Empire, Chicago P.D., and Law & Order. 

But it was his directorial debut with New Jack City (1991) that placed Van Peebles at the helm of New Black Realist cinema. With its gritty, urban aesthetic, social consciousness and hip-hop soundtracks, New Black Realism was the 90s new wave for African American movies. Van Peebles stood alongside Spike Lee, John Singleton, the Hudlin and Hughes brothers to demonstrate that Black films matter. 

Two years later, Van Peebles directed Posse (1993), the first widely-distributed Black western to come out of the American film industry in 20 years. Last year, Van Peebles released another Black western, Outlaw Posse, proving he has a gift for politically relevant, socially engaged, action-packed films that entertain. He joined me for a conversation about filmmaking, family and professional longevity. 

Mia Mask: You’ve appeared in films from an early age. You appeared in your father’s film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which earned millions on a shoestring budget. You’ve been acting ever since. When did you know you wanted to follow in your father’s footsteps and become a filmmaker? 

Mario Van Peebles: I wasn’t really following his footsteps. He didn’t appear on the radar for me as a filmmaker until I was about 14. I started acting in my first play when I was 11. My mum, my sister, and I came back to the States after living in Europe with dad and traveling. He stayed to climb the filmmaking mountain, which can take time. We went to San Francisco. She started taking me around auditions. I was a different kid. I spoke a little French and some Spanish and she took me to auditions. I got a role as the lead kid [on stage] in A Thousand Clowns. That was my first professional gig. I just started doing it from there. When dad came back to the States, we would hang out. He started to make Watermelon Man. I was a PA on the set and that’s when I first became more aware of filmmaking at large.

If you grow up on a family farm, you learn about feeding chickens, taking care of horses, ploughing the field. If you grow up in the Van Peebles filmmaking family, you learn about editing, directing, acting. I was able to choose from the smorgasbord of humanity. We had been to France. We had been to Copenhagen. We’d been to San Francisco. Culture didn’t have one answer. It was a choice, a smorgasbord. I learned how to play with kids in Morocco. I adapted, and adaptation played well into acting. 

You directed New Jack City. In 1991 it was a watershed film, as the first film in the New Black Realism movement. These were social problem pictures about urban blight, the crack epidemic, Black-on-Black crime, Rockefeller drug laws, and gun violence. It came out before John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood (1991) and the Hughes brothers’ Menace II Society (1993). Can you reflect on that time? 

In 1971, my father made Sweet Sweetback, which became the top grossing, independent hit of all time. Twenty years later in 1991, I bring out New Jack City, which becomes the most profitable film that year.  It’s a wild coincidence.

Usually, when you make a hit film in Hollywood – whether you’re Black or white – you get more opportunities. But my father never got another serious job offer. My father went to his friend Jerry and asked him: “Is Hollywood listening? I told them there was this big Black audience. They didn’t take it seriously. I had to make this movie on my own, independently. And, it’s become the all-time top grossing independent hit.” His friend said: “Yes. Hollywood is listening. However, they’re not going to use you. Melvin, you embarrassed Hollywood. You made a hit without their money, without their permission, without their marketing team, without their notes, without their soundtrack. They are going to imitate your formula, but they’re not going to use you.” They had branded him a troublemaker. 

Hollywood copied dad’s formula. They made urban action pictures with Black casts and white guys directing or writing. Those urban action flicks ran their course. When those action pictures stopped making money, Hollywood stopped making those movies. Nowadays, if they make a lot of Vietnam-themed movies and those movies don’t make money after a while, they’ll say: Vietnam-themed movies aren’t making money. But they won’t blame it on the colour of the actors in the movies.  

They shut the financial door on Black film for damn near 20 years. That’s what happens. It takes about 20 years for that next generation to grow up and realise: “That’s what I want to do.” The generation immediately following decides: “Oh, that’s impossible.” So, it takes about 20 years for those boys and girls to witness that magic in the movie theatre and say: “That’s what I want to do.” They might be Singleton. They might be Spike Lee. They might be Mario Van Peebles. They might be Tarantino. They might be Ava [DuVernay]. We just didn’t know that the dream was not supposed to be for us. 

I broke into it as an actor first. The movie that broke me in was Heartbreak Ridge [1986]. Clint Eastwood introduced me to the Warner Brothers brass. He said: “This kid can act and direct.” He told the studio I had grown up with a director-dad: “Give the kid a shot.” So, they took me on to do New Jack City when they needed a ‘Blackologist’.

I love that phrase. Someone to translate Black culture. 

I was their Blackologist. So, I did New Jack. I went to Wesley Snipes because I saw him as the guy. Not the best friend or sidekick. I told him, you’re going to be our Pacino in this. Around that time, Spike went to Denzel [to make Malcolm X, 1992] and said, “You’re not the best friend. We’re not going to do Biko through the eyes of the white reporter. This is going to be Malcolm’s story.” The same happened to Laurence Fishburne in Boyz N the Hood. Once those movies made money, then Hollywood said: “Oh! Well maybe we can put Wesley Snipes in Passenger 57 [1992]. We can cast Denzel in The Pelican Brief [1993]. 

I was in a unique position. There was a NYT Magazine cover story in 1991 featuring Spike Lee, the Hudlin brothers, Matty Rich, John Singleton, Ernest Dickerson and myself.  

I remember that cover. 

I was on that cover as a director but benefitted as an actor. Suddenly, they realised Mario not only directed New Jack, but he also acted in it. That was a unique place to be. 

With Posse something fascinating happened. They did audience Queue Score surveys for Posse. Initially, white audiences favoured Bobo [played by Tiny Lister]. He’s the heavyset, illiterate, comic relief. Posse was released and did well. But it really blew up on video because white audiences – hungry for westerns – didn’t know how they would be treated in a western by me. But they enjoyed it at home. Queue Research showed white audiences grew comfortable with Jesse Lee: the sepia Clint Eastwood. (Not unlike what my dad played in Sweetback minus the sex-worker stuff.) So, Posse blows up on video. 

Once they watched it multiple times, the Queue score switched, and their favourite character became Jesse Lee as well. They started to dig it as a movie. After that I started getting offers to play characters that were not written as Black. The whole experience speaks to the power of cinema. That Black Panther [2019] can lead to all kids wanting to be the Panther for Halloween. I was never in London in the 1800s but I [felt I] was there in a version of Oliver Twist. I’m not a woman living in the Pacific Islands, but you can watch Whale Rider [2002] and feel transported. 

You have a tradition of collaborating with your father. You worked together on Posse and Panther (1995), which is an adaptation of your father’s novel and obviously about the Black Panthers. That must’ve been a labour of love for you. 

It was. It had not escaped me since I saw my dad up close make Sweetback. He found an unknown group like Earth, Wind and Fire to do music for him. But if you look at books [about Hollywood in the 1970s] like Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, they leave Melvin Van Peebles out. He made the top grossing independent film, and he’s just omitted?

And, no disrespect to Ryan Seacrest but how is it he’s got a star on Hollywood Boulevard and Melvin Van Peebles – to this day – does not?

Really?!

It’s the whitewashing that the colonial powers do. The guy that changed the landscape by doing it all: writing, directing, producing, scoring, acting…

Heck… when I teach French New Wave cinema, I teach The Story of a Three-Day Pass [which Melvin made in France in 1967] as part of the French New Wave’s legacy. There are many people writing and teaching film who just don’t know the history of cinema.

Part of what I wanted to do in the play MVP [which Mario staged in 2024] was acknowledge. Melvin turns to Mario in the play and goes: “You know, I helped you get in the game, and when they forgot about me, you helped me get back in the game.” My dad gave me my first lines ever in a feature film, in Sweetback. And, I gave him his last lines ever in a feature film.

Poetic. You were close. 

The circle has been out of sight. Once I got the heat from New Jack City, it was like musical chairs. I happened to be sitting in the right chair when the music stopped – as a filmmaker and an actor. I built upon that heat in Posse. Then, they said: “What do you wanna do now?” I said: “I want to do Panther and step back as an actor and just direct it.” We had lots of challenges trying to get that movie made. To this day, it’s one of my hardest movies to find. It won the Silver Leopard award at Locarno. But in America, it’s a very hard movie to see. It’s almost like the movie they don’t want you to see. 

It’s so true. I’ve had a hard time finding it. 

In some ways, it’s a prequel to New Jack City. It sets up that drugs are now being allowed because they are medicating the communities that were becoming a little too militant, too successful with things like the food and breakfast programs provided by the Black Panthers. By letting the mafia control those territories (the inner city if you will) and flood them with drugs and guns, they became what the cops referred to as self-cleaning ovens – where people implode. The Black community turns on itself. 

I had been wanting to work with dad. He had taken me to meetings when I was a kid. I saw the Black Panthers. I knew they put Sweetback on the cover of their paper. And they wrote that the revolution is in cinema now. They had chapters encouraging people to go see Sweetback. They were integral to the success of Melvin, and, therefore, our family. No one had done the Panther story. When we went to Hollywood, they loved the story. But they wanted to make one of the lead Panthers white. 

We said: “That’s not historically accurate.” They said: “Look Mel, we want white folks to go to the movie. Martial arts weren’t invented by white folks. The Karate Kid [1984] ain’t gonna be Japanese. Boxers look like Ali and Tyson but Rocky ain’t gonna be Black. Dances with Wolves [1990] ain’t gonna star no Native American. We can have ‘exotics’ around, but it’s got to have the dominant culture in a dominant way to get the dominant group to go. That was the belief. 

The Panthers had big white support like Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando and Donald Sutherland. They asked: “Why don’t we have Jane Fonda’s granddaughter [Bridget] play a young Berkeley student who meets five Black guys from the hood and teaches them to read and give them Mao’s Red Book and they become the Black Panthers?” It sounds outrageous but there was a series of ‘white-chick-saves-the-hood-movies’. The woman who goes into some tough school and befriends the hard kids. That whole deal. We refused to do that.

The Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds (1995) version.

Totally. We refused to do that. We made Panther the way we saw fit. It became the hardest movie of the Van Peebles family to get. But it was really a beautiful thing. My father and I clowned each other in interviews. If they liked the movie, he attributed it to his fantastic writing overcoming my mediocre directing. I would attribute it to my directing overcoming his flat writing. 

It was lovely. That’s so fun to deal with. I wanted the movie to be understood by someone who knew nothing about the Panthers. And he wanted the movie to be real and credible to someone that knew everything about the Panthers. It was a better film for having two fathers. We did so many projects together. We had a blast. As father and son, we did all you could do. 

Mario Van Peebles is in conversation at BFI Southbank on 9 February

Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western runs at BFI Southbank in February and March.