Махершала Али шинэ киноныхоо дүрийг сүнслэгээр бүтээхийг зорьжээ

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There’s always a certain difficulty to doing press,” says Mahershala Ali, two-time Academy Award winner and one of the finest actors of his generation. “There are things you sign up for that you think, ‘oh, this would be enjoyable, or I should do this because of X, Y and Z’. And then because of something along the way, or in the process, or in how the film turns out, you find that it can be difficult to have this responsibility of talking about it. But it makes a huge difference if you love the project.”

He doesn’t name any examples, but a couple of possibilities spring inevitably to mind. There was the faintly fraught press tour for Green Book – the 2018 road trip movie that won Ali a deserved second Oscar but was beset by criticisms of its racial politics and historical inaccuracies. More recently, there have been the interviews about the aborted Blade movie, the much-anticipated Marvel blockbuster fronted by Ali that fell apart after creative rifts behind the scenes. Originally, Blade was to be directed by Bassam Tariq, the effervescent Pakistani-American filmmaker now sitting in a London hotel room next to Ali and me. “The problem,” says Tariq, turning to Ali, “is that you’re not a good liar.”

What a relief, then, that both men are here to talk about a project they seem to have boundless enthusiasm for: the sui generis religious satire-thriller Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. In the film, directed by Tariq, Ali plays an ex-military hitman struggling to support his children after the death of his wife. It is a film about faith – Muslim faith, specifically – with one foot placed squarely in garish modernity: Ali’s man of righteous violence must contend with a world of sinister Christian militias and sleazy porn empires.

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Your Mother is, this is to say, a somewhat difficult film to describe, in both plot and tone; the most relevant touchstone may be the cult 1999 Jim Jarmusch film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, in which Forest Whitaker plays a modern hitman living by the code of the ancient Japanese samurai. “There’s a man in an urban environment, and he’s trying to follow these ancient sets of ways,” says Tariq. “I was like, that’s being Muslim in America, right? That’s who we are – we’re kind of like Ghost Dog.”

Tariq started writing the film shortly after finishing his debut feature, the Riz Ahmed-starring Mogul Mowgli. It was the early stages of Covid. “The world just stopped,” he says. “I thought I was going to be this big director and all this stuff, and nothing was going the way I wanted it to.” It brought him back, too, to the last time the world seemed to stop for him – in 2014, after the birth of his first child, when his wife was in hospital with a postpartum infection, and he was left to scramble around looking for breast milk, his infant child unable to digest formula. (This same pursuit drives much of the action of Your Mother.) It was a difficult, unmooring time that tested his faith.

All these things were poured into the film – his personal history, and the pervasive sense of mortality that accompanied the pandemic. “I’m sure it found its way into the story,” he says. “People dying ‘before their time’. But it’s also selfish, because you’re kind of thinking about the death of your career, too. There’s a lot of death happening, but you’re like, ‘Oh s***, my family’s gotta eat.’ It’s all exactly things that were on my mind.”

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A few years later, after Tariq had grown close with Ali while planning the Blade movie, he sent him the screenplay for Your Mother. “The feeling was essentially like, finally,” says Ali. “You know, to get a script of this ilk. It’s not easily definable, or something you come by very often, or at all.”

Ali, 52, wears a striking paisley jacket, with a baseball cap and orange-tinted shades; he exudes a kind of star power built on calm and dignity, the same qualities he brings to most of his roles, from benevolent drug dealer Juan in Moonlight to set-upon police investigator Wayne Hays in True Detective. Ali is Muslim, having converted in 2000 (his birth name was Mahershalalhashbaz Gilmore).

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It is unusual, I suggest, for actors of his profile to make films so earnestly wrestling with faith. While Hollywood has produced a fair few big-budget Christian films, the same is axiomatically not true for Islam. Is there an added sense of responsibility there, I ask? “I feel like my responsibility is to tell great stories,” Ali says, almost statesmanlike. “My responsibility is to make good choices and do the best absolute work I can do to humanise the men that I play. Because it’s all I can do, you know? To spiritualise each character. “

There is a slightly amusing juxtaposition between these two men: Ali cerebral and sincere, Tariq a little looser, with an almost labradorish energy. Both are warm and intelligent, and clearly get on. “Every day on set, Mahershala would put one Oscar down on a table, then put another Oscar down,” says Tariq. “Then he goes, ‘All right, tell me again, what was your note?’” They both laugh.

Neither Ali nor Tariq say the word “Blade” once during our interview – there is a sense, at this point, that everything worth saying has already been said. (Ali recently said that the “failure” of that film was a question for Marvel boss Kevin Feige, noting that he had “uprooted” his family and relocated to Atlanta for the project, which Marvel kept delaying and re-delaying until it was ultimately abandoned.) And yet, there are vestiges of that film found within Your Mother, particularly in the elaborate, ambitious action sequences wherein Ali’s character wields a sword. The extensive physical training he had undertaken for Marvel did not, ultimately, go to waste.

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Both men sing the praises of stunt coordinator Adam Hart, who was tasked with executing pretty heavy-duty combat sequences in a very short space of time. “What I wrote in the script for the fight scene was: ‘Epic fight scene’. “That’s all I wrote, bro,” says Tariq. “The fact that we pulled it off, the way we did, feels sort of miraculous,” says Ali.

Tariq shoots me a glance: “Can I ask Mahershala a question?”

Go ahead, I say.

“This is just what I’m feeling right now,” says Tariq. “The response to [Your Mother] has been so enormous for me, and this thing feels so profound, that I now just want to write something stupid. Do you ever feel that way? Like, do you want to go do a romcom, or – not to dig at Adam Sandler – but something like an Adam Sandler Happy Madison thing?”

I smile: to some extent, this is a variation on what is almost a stock interview question at this point. There’s probably not an actor alive who has not been asked by a journalist: “Would you ever do a romcom?”

“Whoa, that’s a great question,” says Ali, delivering what is almost a parody of a stock buying-for-time response. But then the clichés evaporate. “I know I have an answer to that on some level, and part of me knows what you need to hear,” he says. “Because part of that is that the question comes from fear, and it comes from a fear associated with success – and having accomplished something that you’re not necessarily even conscious you’re trying to achieve.

“Like, you,” he says, looking squarely at his director, “clearly want to do something meaningful. Because all the films you ever talk about are these arthouse films that are deeply meaningful. I think it’s hard to admit to ourselves that we want to climb a higher mountain.” And so I think the thing is to be honest with yourself about that and to be open to failure.”

Ali keeps talking about the purpose of art, about finding a truth – “and finding the prism and colours in that truth” – for several minutes straight.

“Because even in comedy, you better find the truth or it won’t be funny,” he concludes. “And it’s an act of faith. It’s an act of faith knowing that what showed up for you last time will show up for you again. You find the seed, you plant it, you water it – and maybe it flowers. Maybe it doesn’t.”

Reading between the lines, it sounds like no, Ali is unlikely to be signing onto The Waterboy 2 any time soon. But if he keeps making films like Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, I don’t think anyone will begrudge him. Filmmaking is an act of faith too, and, for Ali and Tariq, this faith has finally paid off.

‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’ is in cinemas from 20 November