'Remember the Titans' at 20: Boaz Yakin on why he wouldn't direct the racially themed movie today

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/remember-the-titans-boaz-yakin-interview-denzel-washington-ryan-gosling-150034313.html

Even 20 years later — and even though it’s by far the most commercially successful film he has ever helmed — Boaz Yakin will still tell you he wasn’t necessarily the right person to direct the beloved football drama Remember the Titans.

“I went into it quite reluctantly and with a great degree of anxiety,” admits Yakin in a new interview with Yahoo Entertainment commemorating the Disney-released, Denzel Washington-starring film’s 20th anniversary, which was released Sept. 29, 2000. The New York-born writer-director, 54, was pursued by powerhouse producer Jerry Bruckheimer after making two independent films that couldn’t have been more different from the gridiron tale: his acclaimed debut, Fresh (1994), about a 12-year-old inner-city drug courier, and his sophomore directorial effort, A Price Above Rubies (1998), starring Renée Zellweger as a frustrated Hasidic housewife.

“I’m not a football person, and I’m not a sports movie person, so I kind of let it go,” says Yakin. “Those guys are the ones that used to beat me up in high school.” The inspirational sports movie genre wasn’t established at the time, either. Sure, there had been Rocky (1976) and Rudy (1993), but it wasn’t until after Titans — which tells the true story of the racial integration of Alexandria, Va.’s T.C. Williams High School football team led by African-American coach Herman Boone (Washington) — that they’d start hitting theaters on at least an annual basis.

None of the boldfaced names Bruckheimer typically worked with wanted to make a $20 million sports drama — it’s “a very challenging budget to make a movie of this scope,” Yakin says — thus the producer’s intent on hiring an independent filmmaker. It also helped that Yakin had made a film with a predominantly Black cast in Fresh — though it was a sad state of affairs how few Black directors were being considered in Hollywood at the time, Yakin notes. You could practically name them on one hand: Spike Lee, John Singleton, the Hughes brothers. “Today an African-American would get that job in a heartbeat,” Yakin says. “I don’t even think a white director would be up for that.”

But Bruckheimer continued to push for Yakin, and ultimately Yakin “found the emotion” in the story. And the feeling Yakin helped translate to the screen from an emotional Gregory Allan Howard script is exactly why the $20 million movie became a $136 million hit for Disney. It’s a tearjerker in the truest sense, a life-affirming underdog sports tale of a Black (Washington’s Boone) and white (Will Patton’s Bill Yoast) coach uniting Black and white football players in a deeply segregated, deeply racist pocket of the American South.

Beyond Yakin’s budget restraints, perhaps his biggest challenge was telling a difficult story within the confines of a Disney-friendly PG rating.

“I had to make a movie about racism in the ’70s, and you couldn’t use the N-word and you couldn’t go certain directions with how violent or how challenging it was at the time,” he says. “So I had to find a way to make a movie for kids basically, because Titans is ultimately a kids’ movie. My goal was to make a kids’ movie that parents wouldn’t feel talked down to when they were watching it. A family movie, in other words. But essentially a movie that a 13-year-old kid could look at it and go, ‘This was for me. And I feel respected watching it.’ But to make a movie that dealt with racism in a way that didn’t minimize or soft-sell the difficulty at the time, while at the same time keeping it in a family-acceptable environment, that was a very challenging tightrope to walk in making the film. I think overall we succeeded because of the tone that we managed to create, and the sense of urgency and tension, but it was challenging.”

There were more minor details Yakin had to scrap because of its rating. In real life, Boone was a chain-smoker, which in the original script was used as a device to portray his anxiety. “But Disney was like, ‘Nobody smokes in our movies,’” Yakin recalls. “At times I found myself very frustrated: I’m making a movie and I have no teeth. … I’m like a baby with gums trying to eat this thing. You know what I mean? I felt handcuffed. It was very difficult.”

Yakin was also a young filmmaker charged with directing one of the titans of the industry in Denzel Washington — and knowing that the Glory Oscar winner may not have been in his corner from the beginning. Asked to recall the first time he met the actor, Yakin held a long pause, followed by an uncomfortable laugh, only to defer the question. Later he’d say, “The only reason Denzel accepted that I would even direct that movie was because Jerry Bruckheimer was stacking me up. … He was just starting to peak. [He was] like, ‘Why am I trusting this 30-year-old freaking kid to direct this movie?’”