For some artists, storytelling is a calling that comes at birth. But for Austin-based filmmaker Greg Kwedar, it came in the middle of an accounting exam at Texas A&M.
After discovering his love for filmmaking while working on film sets in Australia, the Fort Worth native decided to drop out of school to pursue his newfound passion. He packed his bags and moved to Austin in 2009. Since then, he has made several shorts, documentaries, and an award-winning feature, Transpecos (2016), a thriller that follows a group of border patrol agents who uncover corruption within their own ranks when they encounter a Mexican drug cartel.
His latest project, Sing Sing, was released in theaters Aug. 2 and marks his largest project to date. Inspired by a true story, the film centers around John “Divine G” Whitfield (played by Colman Domingo), a wrongfully convicted man alongside a cohort of inmates at the New York-based Sing Sing Correctional Facility in the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program. With the addition of the guarded yet gifted Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (who plays himself), the ensemble of prisoners, many of whom are real-life alumni of the program, find purpose in their collaborative efforts to create an original stage production.
Kwedar co-wrote the script with friend Clint Bentley and brought on Austin-based filmmaker Monique Walton to serve as Sing Sing’s producer. Kwedar and Bentley’s journalistic approach to storytelling, attention to detail, and desire to “capture honest human emotion” can be felt throughout the film.
TEXAS HIGHWAYS: How’d you get into filmmaking?
Monique Walton (MW): I’m originally from Long Island, New York. I went to school and took an interest in filmmaking through an intro documentary course. In the class, you had to make your own film and it just taught me it’s a way to connect to people. It felt like a powerful tool. So after I graduated, I started trying to make films on the weekends. I was living in Brooklyn and moved down to Austin to go to grad school at UT, and that’s how I started my filmmaking career.
Greg Kwedar (GK): Once I saw the beauty and power of this artistic process and collaboration, I realized that I always loved movies, but I never thought that that was a space that I could be part of until college. I left my accounting major, stayed an extra year while I was working on film school applications. I decided not to go because I was out in the world having profound experiences that unveiled a more journalistic approach to storytelling than narrative. When I ended up not going to grad school, I moved here to Austin, found some like-minded people who were all in search of community. And we started making shorts and telling stories together.
TH: What drew you to Austin?
MW: The appeal for me was that it felt small and intimate, and the film community felt really accessible. I was really looking for a place to go where I could focus on the craft, study filmmaking, and have a little bit more space to breathe—higher quality of life, lower cost of living, all those great things that make Austin great.
GK: What first drew me here was my girlfriend, now wife, who was finishing school at UT. But what kept us here? I think you can’t create strong output without powerful input, and the city just kind of fills our cup. In terms of my peers, other wonderful filmmakers are here who inspire me constantly, and there’s access to nature, to the access art scene, and great food. There’s a creativity that abounds here, mixed with the kind of hospitality that Texas can be known for.
TH: What has been the most rewarding part of making Sing Sing?
GK: To now be handing this movie over to audiences and seeing it resonate strongly with total strangers in a dark room—it’s really gratifying. When our alumni cast, who are from this actual program, get to be on stage and be showered with love and appreciation from these audiences it is kind of a marvel to witness. It’s something I’m always grateful for.
MW: It invites people to connect to it, as actors, as artists, as just people who understand the community. People feel like they have a way into this world and I think that was one of the initial goals—to really show this program for what it is and how powerful it really is on people.
TH: You spent nearly a decade working on Sing Sing. What were some of the challenges?
GK: Part of the reason it took so long was we had to find our way to capture that energy Monique spoke about that really exists within the program. We would teach acting inside the program as volunteers ourselves. In every one of the experiences, we would feel the potency of it, but then we would go away and try to invent it on the page and do it ourselves. It always felt like an imitation of what was really happening there. We realized the only way to capture that energy was to let the writing process mirror how that functions. We opened our circle and invited the real Divine Eye and Divine G. Once they came on, immediately it was alive in a way it never had been for us.
MW: We had a low-budget movie. We also had a very tight production schedule. We shot in 19 days and that created a bit of a time pressure challenge. We shot in a decommissioned prison, and that weighed on all of us. If you’ve ever visited a prison, you just sense this heaviness and the history of what the place represents. Those first two weeks were hard and strenuous, and in terms of going through the space that literally felt like you were walking miles a day because of how vast the actual prison was. But once we were able to leave that space and move on to our other locations, one of which was the high school, where we shot the dress rehearsal scenes on a real stage, and then the rehearsal scenes, it was like that weight was lifted.
TH: Now that you’re both back in Austin, what are your favorite activities to do in Texas?
GK: Getting out on my bicycle and riding on these open roads. And then sitting in a dark theater, usually the Alamo Drafthouse or the Violet Crown Cinema in Austin. Marfa’s my favorite place to travel. That’s where really my journey began as a filmmaker.
MW: Hiking the Austin Greenbelt, jumping in Barton Springs, and traveling to West Texas. Big Bend National Park was just incredible. Being out there I’ve never heard such silence in my life; it’s pretty life changing.
