Before Barack and Michelle Obama moved to the White House, they met in their twenties and slowly began the courtship process. The new independent film Southside With You takes a fictional look at what their first encounter could have been like and the results are genuine and heartwarming.
Actors Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter play the young Barack and Michelle in Southside With You, and they don’t just look the part, but more importantly, sell their performances to engage the audience. Both actors have worked on big-budget studio movies in the past but jumped at the chance to tackle something smaller and more intimate.
The duo recently traveled to San Francisco to speak with us about Southside With You and this is a transcription of that conversation.
Q: So the obvious place to start would be to ask if President Obama has seen this film yet.
Parker Sawyers: I just missed a call from him (laughs). But seriously, we haven’t heard from the White House or the Obamas yet, but we would love to. I know John Legend, who executive produced this film, is familiar with them, so the Obamas definitely know about it.
Q: Hey, you might get that call soon. Especially since the White House screens a lot of films and also invite the actors and filmmakers.
Sawyers: That would definitely be very exciting.
Q: Did each of you feel compelled to mimic or play the real Obamas to some degree or did you prefer to just bring your own interpretation of those characters to the movie?
Sawyers: I felt we had to work backwards and distance ourselves from the real Obamas.
Tika Sumpter: We didn’t want to play caricatures.
Sawyers: Everything we’ve seen is just their public persona. We haven’t seen any home videos or what they could really be like behind the scenes. It was very important to develop the younger version of those characters so we definitely had some fun doing it.
Q: When you say fun, what kind of fun are we talking about?
Sawyers: I changed my walk. I usually can do a good impression of an older Obama, so that and being playful.
Sumpter: The great thing for me is I’m playing Michelle Obama at 25, so nobody has really seen any video of her from that age and that allowed me to bring my own interpretation of her to the movie. Her brother’s book really also helped me see what she was like during that time. She had her own swagger and confidence of who she is and in this movie she’s not chasing after anyone, which I love.
Photo credit: Gardenia Zuniga-Haro
Q: Usually in movies it’s the other way around.
Sumpter: Absolutely, and it’s so refreshing to see it done this way.
Q: Both of you are used to being on big Hollywood movie sets, with a smaller production like this one what things changed and what stayed the same besides the obvious financial hurdles?
Sawyers: We used a lot of natural light, but that’s only because our director wanted to.
Sumpter: It didn’t feel that different to me and it’s probably one of the smoothest sets I’ve been on because our director was so organized. I look for confidence in my directors because they are the ones in charge and at the end of the day they’re the ones who can make me look great or make me look crazy.
Q: That’s true. It’s all put together in the editing room. There’s the movie you shoot on set and the one that gets constructed in the editing room.
Sumpter: Absolutely.
Q: Has that ever happened to you where you feel you’ve knocked a performance out of the park on set and then when you see the finished film you see something completely different?
Sumpter: That happened to me on Get On Up. We filmed this amazing scene that informed why my character acted the way she did, but then it got cut and didn’t make any sense.
Sawyers: I’ve had a strange experience because I’ve had small parts in big films and in my first supporting role I started the movie with three lines and by the end of it I had many more. Then we had to come back to do pick up scenes and that gave my character a baby.
Southside With You is now playing in limited release.
