When has Mario Van Peebles ever handled a snake?
Thats no mere Superstition.
SYFYs new horror thrillerSuperstitionis a family show, much likeThe Godfatheris a family movie.
and executive producer Laurence Andries (Alias, Six Feet Under, Supernatural).
Den of Geek: First, I wanted to say thanks so much for doing this.
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Just so long as I dont have to listen to you drink blood.
I wont be drinking blood.
Youre an actor and a director.
Theater and movie people are filled with traditional professional superstitions.
Do you have personal superstitions?
Thats an interesting question.
I think being around people that have a good sense of humor.
Its bad luck to be around people that dont.
And when youre around people that dont, they draw that to them.
So you dont dust off the directors chair or knock on wood before calling first shot.
You dont have artistic rituals like that?
No, I just avoid grumpy motherfuckers.
Would you ever produce Macbeth?
I would love to.
I havent thought about it.
Hell yeah, its Shakespeare, why not?
I havent thought about it.
There are a lot of pieces out there.
Thats one of the nice things about getting to do what we do.
He found a common denominator, and hes got a sense of humor in there as well.
And theres the superstition of it not being producible.
Youve produced and directed in every genre.
Is there any that are more fun?
This is actually a really fun genre.
Ive been wanting to do this for a while.
I think that and westerns.
The Hastings, the family at the center ofSuperstition, they face a kind of double prejudice.
Do you think we keep supernatural workers at bay in society?
Now, Ive had a couple encounters myself.
I went to see a woman who did a past life reading on me.
Theres a lot out there we dont understand.
There are elements that go on around us that we dont understand that we take for granted.
I have had some encounters with things that are unexplainable.
As I think many people have.
Have you ever had that?
I have a thousand questions on things like that.
Again, its hard for me to say I believe or disbelieve.
I can only tell you what Ive experienced myself.
He did a lot of past life work that was very interesting.
Some of it tied in and made a lot of sense, but who knows?
Some of it was very interesting just in terms of knowing things about my kids.
If you have children, you know that they come in with different back-stories.
One of the superstitions we deal with on the show is someone reads the grounds of a coffee cup.
My director of photographer had them do that to him in Morocco.
They were right about the birth of his daughter and other things.
I saw the first episode.
In it the matriarch gets into old-time Nubian magic.
We go to quite a few places, in each episode.
Most of which is stuff you’re free to google the source of it.
Hollywood is influential and amplifies myths, or superstitions that exist culturally anyway.
I think the Hollywood ones are based on something, and it depends on what we latch on to.
The show has a sense of humor about it.
Its not taking itself too seriously.
We have a sense of humor about it.
You have a family thats definitely open to admitting that we dont always know everything.
Were always in the process, just like life, of learning.
We have our different areas of expertise and were still in the process of learning.
We dont know every damned thing.
We dont make a run at explain everything.
Thats where most of us are afraid of the unknown.
This is a family that deals in the unknown, in the quantum physics of it all.
The show militarizes supernatural warfare.
Do you see this as the natural progression of weaponry from movies likeFearless Vampire HuntersthroughNear Dark?
Theres a bigger question here.
The whole notion of whos the bad guy is interesting because, who is destroying the planet?
Who is polluting the air?
Its not the birds or the bees or the sharks or the mummies, its the five species.
In a kind of a strange way, depending on your perspective, were the bad guy.
So it gets into some tricky areas that way, which I like.
I like humor and I like it to be a fun show to watch.
Its a bit of a scramble.
Its a bit of an ad lib.
Its how do we bravely go where no one has gone before?
We dont always know the answer.
With vampires, its clear, its the silver bullets or the stake, theres a very clear mythology.
How do you see Jordan PeelesGet Outaffecting the horror genre?
Its interesting because what would people of color do in a horror paradigm?
Do we behave differently?
Theres a sense that people of color dont do the same dumb shit that somebody else would do.
And if you wouldnt do it, we wont do it.
But it still goes wrong.
That makes it a little more solid that way.
I think theres a certain humor and swagger that the actors have and sometimes a gallows humor.
There will be people who die on this show.
There will be things that go wrong and mistakes will be made.
Its an interesting show in that way because its finding its own tone.
I just made an independent thriller thats coming out in theaters calledArmed.
Its a mind-bender thriller, but at the core of it is gun sense.
Its about a guy whos heavily armed and goes into a tricky area, and how he handles that.
How he looks at that.
Theres a way to entertain people but still have something to say that has nutritional value.
I thinkGet Outis the ultimate case of the appropriation of black bodies.
I like shows like that.
They entertain you and you say wow, theres a message.
Theres something in there about where we are in being shepherds of the planet.
And if we no longer have been that, are we the good guys or the bad guys?
It depends on your perspective.
If there are too many fleas on a dog eventually the dog will want to shake those fleas off.
How are we behaving?
How are we handling it?
Thats why hes sending all this crazy weather.
Its going to be our time soon.
Its not about that.
We really exist more in a grey area.
If you look at George Bushs Global Doctrine, theres an Axis of Evil.
But if you say theres an Axis of Evil then by deduction theres an Axis of Good.
Theres a reductive good-guy bad-guy look at the globe.
Obamas doctrine or somebody elses doctrine might say well, were really more in a gray area.
Weve probably done some things in our name that are not so good.
As we all are.
You have to discern a little bit more than that.
Even the family is going to have to grow.
I dont have to think about it.
I just have to pull the trigger.
Its not that kind of way.
What did you learn from your father [filmmaker Melvin van Peebles]?
What did you learn from making movies with him and then when you made the documentary about him?
So many life lessons I learned from him.
I think, all my life he said Look Mario, there are three kinds of people.
You take control of that imagery.
You do it yourself.
You dont whine about whats out there.
You make it happen.
I think thats the biggest thing.
The other thing was having a sense of humor about life and the human condition.
He was never bitter.
He worked with, and worked for, and directed people of all colors.
He just knew that home was the mosaic of humanity, which was awesome.
It sort of forced us to love the world and love everybody.
And also be critical of everybody, and of course be critical of ourselves.
Hes still got this great sense of humor.
Just having a wicked sense of humor, a get it done kind of dude.
Dont sweat the small stuff, man.
Oh one thing about sweating small stuff.
Your show opens with snake handlers.
Would you handle a snake?
Yeah, absolutely when Im on the other end of the lens.
Some snakes are probably ones that you wouldnt want to play with, but theyre actually kind of cool.
Theyre not slimy at all.
But in general, its not something Id get as a pet.
Ive been to the Amazon.
Ive traveled quite a bit.
Hanging on the wall was a snake skin that looked like it had been peeled off a telephone pole.
It was an anaconda and that was not a snake I wanted to run into.
What are some of your favorite horror movies?
Night of the Living Dead,Exorcist,The Thing, the firstAliens, andBirth of a Nation.
Oh yeah, absolutely, and theyll all be playing their parts in the series youre doing?
All of them.Rosemarys Babyis great.
Theres a lot of good movies.
Those are some good movies, though.
What are your favorites?
Oh, my favorite isAngel Heartfrom the bookFalling Angel.
Mm, DeNiro, yeah, and Mickey Rourke.
Theres something scary about devil movies whether you believe or not.
And the Hammer movie based on Dennis WheatleysThe Devil Rides Out.
Ive never seen that one,The Devil Rides Out?
I will check that out.
So what scares you?
It comes up a little bit in this movie.
Its now hard for us to translate over that we now have a global impact.
We dont know how to harness our power in a conscious way sometimes.
My biggest fear is that our collective consciousness is not raised in time to do something about it.
What about the creepy crawly things that scare you?
I find new ones every day.
I think the element of surprise is always a good scary one.
Its not just a snake, its a snake in the wrong situation.
Its not just a spider, its a spider in your boot.
Its not just a bad guy coming, its the phone ringing and the bad guys in your house.
There are lots of good moments.
Its fear of the unknown, fear of what we dont see in the dark.
Fear that, on some level, we actually get what we deserve.
The other thing is, I do enjoy scaring others.
It was an excuse, because her friends were cute too.
Id crawl around very quickly and they got a real kick out of it.
The bed was safe, so they got to jump up on the bed.
Its sometimes very liberating to identify with the monster.
I dont know if that makes sense.
It makes sense to me.
Nino goes all the way back toDead Endfor me.
The way they teach the kids on the street.
Its a very real thing.
Do you also root for the gangsters?
Absolutely, and the thing is, I knew in that movie you would.
I wanted to double-check that, yes, wed be drawn to the gangster and root for the gangster.
In a gangster picture, typically you emotionally connect with the gangster,Godfatheryou knew and on and on.
But theres a face to the crime.
InNew Jack Citywhen Chris Rock is becoming an addict people in the audience would yell just say no.
When you see the victim of that, its no longer a victimless crime.
Theres one cop whos black, one cop whos Jewish, one is Asian.
It makes it a more complex and interesting world.
One of the things withBAADASSSSS!
(2003) was the studio wrote your fathers character is not likeable enough.
I wasnt really worried about his likeability.
Thats where it becomes interesting.
It looks like the family, the Hastings, are going to be ethically challenged as well.
I wanted to ask about the look of the series.
You have horror during the day and nice things in middle of the night.
When you go for opposing atmospheres, what do you look for in the controls?
Ive done a couple movies with the DP, AJ [Anthony J. Rickert-Epstein].
We did a movie calledWe the Partytogether.
AJ and I would talk color and what we want early on.
We do that with each project and each scene.
Sometimes night will mean you see more.
It kind of depends on what we want to do.
We do a lot with moving light on this show.
It this particular episode were shooting right now we go into this sort of clock realm.
Its like an Escher optical illusion painting.
There is a lot of black and white.
We were playing with the notion of draining color from shots.
Some of the shots we do at night with more of an Edward Hopper kind of vibe.
We were playing with the look of the car he drives or what Isaac wears in particular.
Sometimes it looks a little like it could be from a different century, and thats deliberate.
We play with it and I think each show is going to have its own visual signature.
Ever shoot anything that you yourself look away from when youre watching it later as an audience member?
What have you done that scares you later?
A couple of my first movies were really bad.
I meant from the horror perspective.
Can you scare yourself?
Thats a tough scene.
In Ali, I played Malcolm X and its difficult to watch Malcolm get killed.
It was a really rough scene.
My daughters have trouble with that.
They played my daughters in that movie and that was very tough.
Even inBAADASSSSS!when I had the big roach crawling out of my mouth, that was unpleasant.
There are definitely scenes where I flinch a little bit.
They paid me enough money to ignore them [the sharks].
Superstitionpremieres on Friday, October 20 at 10 p.m. on SYFY.
