美国国家公共电台 NPR Ava DuVernay Hopes You Hear 'The Heartbeat Of The Boys' In Central Park 5（在线收听）

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

How does someone become an adult after being robbed of a childhood? A new Netflix miniseries examines this question. It's based on the case of a group of black and Latino teenagers known as the Central Park Five. In April 1989, a woman was brutally beaten and raped in New York's Central Park. Five boys were pressured into false confessions and convicted. All served time.

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FREDDY MIYARES: (As Raymond Santana) And everything was going on. I couldn't really follow what was happening. I didn't get it. Inside, I started reading the articles - how they wrote them against us from the first days, all the transcripts, the straight-up lies they told. I watched my tape. I don't even know who that [expletive] kid is. I don't even recognize myself.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) I know, Ray.

MARTIN: That's Freddy Miyares, the actor who plays Raymond Santana, one of the five. The real Raymond Santana reached out on Twitter to the director and screenwriter Ava DuVernay, and he asked if she would tell the story of what he, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam and Korey Wise went through. DuVernay said yes. She talked with our co-host Noel King about how this project got started.

AVA DUVERNAY: I get a lot of tweets. It happened on Twitter. It was shortly after Selma, and I got a tweet from Raymond Santana asking, what would be my next film after Selma? - Central Park Five.

And this story is one that I knew. I was a teenager on the West Coast when they were teenagers on the East Coast, so I remember it being in the news. I'd recently seen the documentary by Sarah Burns, so I paid attention to the tweet this time. And it meant a lot to be asked by them.

NOEL KING, BYLINE: When you sat down to talk to these men for the first time, what were some of the things they told you that made you think, oh, there's so much more here than we know?

DUVERNAY: Well, the personal stories for Antron McCray, for example, whose family dynamic completely broke apart. He was a part of a gorgeous small family unit - his mother, his father and himself living in Harlem. And on this particular night when he's brought in, his father is in the room with him. And his father is kind of blackmailed and pushed and coerced into forcing his son to confess...

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MICHAEL KENNETH WILLIAMS: (As Bobby McCray) Listen to me, 'Tron. I need you to do what the police want you to do. You got to say what they want you to say.

CALEEL HARRIS: (As Young Antron McCray) They want me to lie.

WILLIAMS: (As Bobby McCray) No, don't think of it like that. Just say what they want you to say.

DUVERNAY: ...Which the son does after much protest. And from there, their relationship was never the same. The story is so poignant, but it's also so telling in terms of the fracturing of family that happens when, you know, one person is incarcerated.

KING: Well, that part really comes through. I kept thinking as I was watching the movie, the whole family might as well be behind bars.

DUVERNAY: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the best thing to liken it to for people that don't have anyone who's incarcerated is grief. You know, most of us have lost someone in our life, and we know what that feels like. So it's this idea of separation but a presence that never allows the grief to change into anything else except a deep absence that is inescapable.

KING: Your series is very blunt in its portrayal of police and prosecutors. These teenage boys - at this point, they're boys. They're brought into interrogation. They are told, you'll get out of trouble if you confess. You show their faces very close up. And I wonder, was getting in that close - was that a choice to show us, to remind us that these were kids?

DUVERNAY: Well, yeah. I mean, every decision in the film was a choice as a director. But I think the proximity of the camera to the subject was less about showing that they were kids and mostly about showing that they were terrified.

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ASANTE BLACKK: (As Kevin Richardson) Please just sign it, please.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Angie, just because you waive an attorney right now, it doesn't mean it's forever. Right?

KYLIE BUNBURY: (As Angie Richardson) I don't even...

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) You get your brother home, you and your mother. Figure things out with a lawyer. We'll clear this...

BLACKK: (As Kevin Richardson) I don't want to stay.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) ...All up.

BLACKK: (As Kevin Richardson) Angie, I don't want to stay here anymore. I'm tired of being here. I don't want to be here anymore.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) I don't think...

BLACKK: (As Kevin Richardson) Please sign it.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) We don't want to be here doing this, OK?

BLACKK: (As Kevin Richardson) I don't want to be here. I want to go home.

DUVERNAY: OK. I'm a black or brown kid in a closed room with white men who are authority figures, who have guns on their belts and badges. And so, yeah, the proximity to the camera and the choices in camera movement and framing and composition - all of that - was to bring you into the heartbeat of the boys as they - their adrenaline starts to rush from the terror of where they were.

KING: As recently as late November 2018, Linda Fairstein, who was the sex crimes prosecutor - in the film, she's played by Felicity Huffman. She was insisting that her office did nothing wrong. And I wonder, while you were researching this film, while you were doing interviews, did you have an opportunity to talk to anyone involved in the investigation or the prosecution?

DUVERNAY: We made the opportunity available to them to speak with me, and many refused. Some did speak to me and asked that it not be revealed that they did. But the character that you're speaking of - her real-life counterpart refused to speak to me, yeah.

KING: I know that you saw the film with some of the men. What did they think? How did they react when they saw this dramatization of their lives on screen?

DUVERNAY: A lot of tears, a lot of relief on their part, I think, feeling that their story was finally going to be told and seen and heard and just a very intimate, personal, emotional moment that, I think, outweighs anything that I've experienced as a filmmaker up until this point. My goal was to tell their stories. And to, you know, get the well done from them with tears in their eyes was everything I need.

KING: Do you think that these men are at peace with what happened?

DUVERNAY: No. No, they're not at peace. No amount of money can bring back your childhood. Everything's been affected by this. Many people in this - that I've come across across the country over the past four years don't know how the story ends. Just think Central Park Five - actually think they're just still incarcerated or that they got out but they did it. Not everyone knows about the exoneration. There's so much you can't get back. So...

KING: Yeah.

DUVERNAY: No, I think they're far from peace. But I do hope there's satisfaction for them in at least being able to finally have their side of the story heard and seen.

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MARTIN: That's filmmaker Ava DuVernay speaking with Noel King about her new Netflix series "When They See Us." We should say Netflix is one of NPR's sponsors.

We also reached out to former prosecutor Linda Fairstein for comment. She told us her attorney sent documents and videos related to the investigation to the series' producers and that she would only agree to speak with them after they had reviewed the materials. Fairstein said she never heard back from producers after that. She also called the depiction of her in the series grossly inaccurate and said the film is a, quote, "fictional dramatization of events."