“Fast Color director Julia Hart talks representation in superhero movies and beyond”

“I’m not a politician. I’m not an activist. I’m a filmmaker. So I feel a responsibility to myself, to my children, to other people’s children, to at the very least be attempting to create awareness and putting messages out there that are positive and hopeful.”

Last year, I saw a special screening of the movie Fast Color here in Chicago and thought it was a terrific spin on the superhero story: “In this genre-bending supernatural drama, a woman is forced to go on the run when her extraordinary abilities are discovered. Years after having abandoned her family, the only place she has left to hide is home.”

The movie, which debuted at the 2018 SXSW Festival stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw and was co-written by Julia Hart and her husband Jordan Horowitz, and directed by Hart. In this SyfyWire feature, Hart talks about the movie:

“I have always loved the [superhero] genre, but definitely always felt left out of it,” Hart said. “I think a lot of us have until recently. I like to tell genre stories that are grounded, focused on character, where the genre stuff is kind of a backdrop. But it wasn’t until I became a parent that I really started to understand the version of the story that I would want to tell in this genre.” She added, “I realized I had never seen a movie where a mother was actually a superhero as opposed to metaphorically. So that was definitely the germ of the idea to explore both the literal application of it and the metaphor.”

In the original concept for Fast Color, Ruth was a white woman, like Hart. However, that changed once she spotted her ideal leading lady. “When my husband Jordan [Horowitz] and I were writing it, we saw Beyond the Lights for the first time,” Hart recalled. “It was the first time I’d ever seen Gugu in anything, and I was completely floored.” Imagining the English actress as Ruth, Hart and Horowitz began revising the script before even putting an offer out to Mbatha-Raw. Hart remembered, “Let’s write it for her and just cross our fingers. Thank God she said yes!”

“I do think that white filmmakers and storytellers would greatly benefit from — in terms of like their own souls — expanding their vision of the world,” Hart added, “Because the world is so much bigger and so much more colorful than we are.”

Looking to that wider world led to Hart’s crafting of Fast Color’s climactic speech, where Bo declares to a bunch of frightened white male authority figures, “You’re scared because the world is dying and you don’t know how to stop it, but I do. A new world is coming. This is only the beginning.”

Here is a trailer for the movie Fast Color:

For the rest of the article featuring Julia Hart, go here.

For my 2012 interview with Julia about her movie The Keeping Room, go here.

For my 2017 interview with Julia and Jordan about their movie Miss Stephens, go here.

Twitter: @juliahartowitz, @jehorowitz.