Back in early 2016, the unpublished manuscript of Angie Thomas’ debut novel, “The Hate U Give,” was at the center of a bidding war among the major publishing houses and generating buzz among Hollywood producers as prime source material for a movie.
That draft also made its way into the dedicated and determined hands of Amandla Stenberg.
“She was reading a book before it was published—and with no script—because she was wondering about her next move,” says director George Tillman Jr. of his film’s star, who was 17 years old at the time and has appeared in “The Hunger Games,” “Everything, Everything,” and “The Darkest Minds.” “You just don’t find that in a young actor, and that alone shows a lot.”
Stenberg now leads the film adaptation of the best-selling book as Starr Carter, a black teenager who lives in a predominantly black neighborhood and attends a majority-white prep school. “Amandla felt like the character,” Tillman explains. “She grew up in Inglewood and also went to a private high school. She was going through the same dilemmas as Starr, and she naturally had the spirit I wanted Starr to channel. She was the only Starr I looked at; I never looked at anyone else.”
“The Hate U Give” sees Starr as the sole witness to the death of her childhood friend at the hands of a white police officer. Like the numerous real-life headline-making acts of police brutality against black people, the unjust murder sparks local protests and gains national attention, leaving Starr to decide whether she should speak up.
Though the story is set amid the Black Lives Matter movement, Tillman “never really looked at it as an issue movie. It’s a fresh coming-of-age story about a girl whose biggest flaw is not being herself, and the police brutality and all of these things, they’re layers on top of that, and great obstacles to be able to confront,” he explains. As Starr, “Amandla really wanted to do the best job she could do. She’s very instinctive and wanted to find the truth of the role. From here on, I feel like we’re going to see so many great things from her.”
Along with Stenberg, the cast includes Regina Hall, Russell Hornsby, Anthony Mackie, Common, Sabrina Carpenter, Issa Rae, Algee Smith, and KJ Apa. The latter is an 11th-hour replacement as Starr’s white boyfriend, after footage of the role’s initial actor, Kian Lawley, making a racial slur surfaced online. Tillman was just two days away from delivering a director’s cut of the movie when he decided to call for reshoots.
“One of Starr’s main lines in the movie is, ‘If you don’t see my blackness, you don’t see me,’ ” he says. “With what the movie stands for, we must all respect one another. It was tough going back seven days [to] reshoot some emotionally tough stuff, but the entire crew came back, and Amandla channeled everything back in and was able to do it.”
Tillman hopes that “The Hate U Give,” featuring a script by Audrey Wells and a Thomas-approved ending tweak, leaves audiences inspired by Starr’s plight as well as enlightened about what the lives of African-Americans—the victims of so many of these episodes of police brutality—are really like.
“Part of what we wanted to do was take stereotypes and clichés and turn them on their heads,” he says. “As African-Americans, whatever happens and no matter how tough things get, we keep pushing. Humor is part of that, food is part of that, family is part of that. This is how we talk, this is how we congregate with each other. I hope people can walk away from this movie with a little more understanding and that our black skin will not be a weapon that’s used against us.”
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