Interview with Ballast filmmaker Lance Hammer

Like Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River, another first feature film that took honors home from this year’s Sundance festival, Lance Hammer’s Ballast tells the story of a near-the-edge family just before Christmas whose hard-scrabble lives occur against a masterfully shot, austere and sweeping landscape – in Hunt’s film, the frozen St. Lawrence River in northern New York that forms the US-Canadian border and in Hammer’s, the Mississippi Delta.

Hammer opens his film with what amounts to a visual prayer. Twelve-year-old James (JimMyron Ross), a slight boy in a big parka, crosses a rolling open field, hurrying toward thousands of geese that start up suddenly from the frozen stubble, flying across the vast magic-hour horizon. It’s crucial this occurs first because what comes next – before the barest possibility that James’ hopes might turn out - is almost unremittingly difficult.

Ballast, which opened in New York City on October 1st and has theatrical bookings across the US through the end of February, is one of those films in which it seems like not much happens. Hammer even says he hopes the narrative “has remained minimal and unobtrusive.” Then you try re-capping the plot and realize that the characters’ intertwined histories and ties look a lot like the ancient, vine-covered tree that James’ eyes rest on when his gaze comes back to earth after that first shot.

Down the road past that tree lives Lawrence Baptiste (Michael Smith, Jr.), introduced in wordless grief before a buzzing TV set. His twin brother Darius lies in the next room, having gotten in bed and intentionally overdosed. When a neighbor checks – the brothers haven’t opened their convenience store in several days – Lawrence shoots himself. While he’s in the hospital, James breaks in, steals his pistol and, once he’s home, begins robbing Lawrence, immediately because James’ mother, Marlee Sykes, (Tarra Riggs, whose hare-trigger performance deserves notice at year’s end) can’t keep food in their tiny trailer; also because Darius was James’ father.

Some of the best scenes occur when Lawrence allows James to order him around at gun-point. The massive older man could easily disarm this jittery boy (later he does, in a quiet, deft move that proves the point but doesn’t detour into drama). Meanwhile, in the stillness between them, attention and curiosity start to flicker. After an unglamorous, frightening brush with some thuggish older boys – the pistol merely enrages them – James and Marlee move into Darius’ little house next door to Lawrence. Marlee re-opens the store and, one inch at a time, the three start over. This is nearly de-railed any number of times, none more wrenching than the night, as they share dish-washing, that Lawrence tries to embrace Marlee and she pulls away, furious, misunderstanding, sure “this is all you were after.”

Hammer filmed Ballast in nine Mississippi Delta townships with a cast of mostly indigenous non-professionals, using available light, no music and a script evolving over several months of rehearsal. Trained as an architect, Hammer has an evident expressive ease with space that amplifies his characters’ sparse dialogue and low-key affect. Against the expansive landscape outside, inside scenes are sometimes filmed in silhouette, or characters occupy cramped rectangles of light in one corner of the screen – the view through a door or down a hallway. Or, for example, when seeking gang approval, James wheels his scooter down a narrow, garbage-strewn ally, you can see this path will be a wrong turn for him.

Both Frozen River and Ballast come from white filmmakers who portray communities of color. Hunt’s film vividly manifests the tensions between Akwesasne Mohawks and outsiders in the complicated, edgy bond between the two mothers. But Hammer refrains from this, choosing a different emphasis. So Lawrence’s white neighbor John Dixon (Johnny McPhail) stops by because he’s worried, looks out for Lawrence’s dog and finally coaxes Lawrence out of the house to share a steak. But this means Hammer’s film has the space to dwell more deeply on Black characters’ relationships with one another.

Hammer spoke by phone from Los Angeles about some of these issues the week before a one-night screening in Syracuse of Ballast. Here’s part of our conversation:

What’s the background of your interest in the Mississippi Delta and what are your ties there?

It was accidental. I was traveling in the Delta for the first time about ten years ago, during the winter, and I found myself connected in a way that’s not easily articulated. It was really an energetic connection. I think everybody has this with some place. For me it was filled about sadness, comfort, being small in the landscape. I wanted to make a film there. It took ten years to do that. I just was drawn back there again and again. I would spend months at a time. I did most of the writing there, I made friends, I studied the region, I heard stories. When the first screenplay was done I shot some scenes there but I threw that away because it just wasn’t right. So the film comes out of a second screenplay.

You’ve said there was a collaborative rehearsal period of, I guess, a couple months? Can you talk about that and script development?

The more I learned about the Delta, the more I learned how little I knew. For the second screenplay I realized I had to cast people from the towns where the film would be shot and give them authorship. I wanted specificity but I couldn’t provide that. I wrote a screenplay but it was provisional – I didn’t pass it out – just to give me structure. Once the money was in place I started looking for people – in churches, on the sidewalks, at the Boys and Girls’ Clubs, at some casting calls. I wanted to find people as close as possible to the people in the story. I had to give over the story. I had to embrace the people as real human beings. We talked through every scene. They never knew what would happen the next day, because that’s how life is. If something wasn’t valid, the actors told me. They contributed their own language. I was after that spontaneity. So this took about three months and halfway through the script we had to start shooting. At about the three-quarter point, our shooting caught up with the rehearsal.

The film offers a look at how screen acting is different from stage acting and by that I mean that cinema allows for the audience to ascribe emotions to the characters rather than the actors doing a lot of emoting. Some of the male cast have gotten acknowledgement already and I think Tarra Riggs deserves kudos as James’ mother. She’s on such a hare-trigger all the time. That late scene – when Lawrence tries to kiss her and she pulls away – it’s just wrenching. You really get a sense that everything could be lost.

I’m not interested in acting at all. I was always asking the cast questions – how would you feel in this situation? What would you do? Not how they should feel. Instead I would say, imagine this….If we can get over this barrier, we’re golden. And it would change daily. I was always interested in not affecting anything. If I saw anything theatrical I felt it was my bad writing. When they weren’t finding what was truthful, they’d “act.” When that happened, we’d stop. And then they’d stop me, they’d say, “No, I wouldn’t walk out the door then. Instead, I would….”

Some of the most powerful moments occur with Lawrence and James and the gun. Lawrence isn’t frightened of dying – we know he’s suicidally depressed – and he could easily disarm James if he wanted to. So it seems that Lawrence lets this happen because it’s the only way to create a space where they can interact. It’s a huge contrast with the thugs – the pistol just enrages them!

Well the thugs have a desire to live! And at that point Lawrence just doesn’t care. The gun keeps James there – ironically it’s a device of intimacy. James is trying to learn about his father and this way he can ask. The gun lets him save face. It’s something a boy would do. Children are so savvy and creative.

Would you talk about how you use the landscape? I think it really deepens what would otherwise be very sparse dialogue and an acting style that could be taken as flat. That opening scene when James runs toward the geese in the open field and they rise up against the horizon….

The landscape is about that yearning. The landscape did that and it does that still. In that disturbance, in this awesome spectacle of life and exuberance he sees the order of things. It’s also somewhat melancholic – birds can fly from this place and he can’t. But mostly it ties him existentially to a place and grants reassurance about being alive.

You were trained as an architect. The buildings in this film are so woefully unfriendly and inhospitable. And that narrow alleyway filled with trash that James pushes his scooter down when he’s trying to get the gang’s approval – it certainly embodies taking a wrong turn. Is there a relationship to your training as an architect?

Yes, I think there’s a relationship to architecture, but also to my work as an art director in film. I was always struck in the Delta by all those tiny cramped spaces that are just largely uninhabitable in their decay and then you step outside and the horizon extends forever. It’s odd and it’s visually interesting, that contrast between the people being stuck and the natural setting. Then when you shoot those two things together there’s such irony. I worked for a long time as an art director on high budget films. We were creating reality, often very artificially. To me, perfection means you don’t need to change a thing and that will resonate all the more. The goal was to find spaces where we’d have to do nothing. It wasn’t a style. I was seeking accuracy. Editing is another matter of course.

Ballast could be compared to Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River and it’s certainly intriguing that they’ve come out the same year. You’re both white filmmakers making films about communities of color. Frozen River deals very overtly with the tensions between the Akwesasne Mohawk Indians and the surrounding white residents along the St. Lawrence River, especially between the two women smugglers. But you really refrain from that – obviously there’s evidence of a persistent, systemic racism everywhere in the poverty, but the relationships between black and white characters aren’t taken up with that. It seems to me a way of you sort of stepping aside. And that really creates more space for the black characters to interact with each other.

That’s an astute observation. The first screenplay actually did deal overtly with race. But you know, I wasn’t born there, I didn’t have the authority – even though I’d spent five years there at that point, it still wasn’t my place. I loved the place and the people too much. I needed to completely re-tool the story. But I can speak with authority about grieving, about hope, about dignity in the face of overwhelming odds. I tried to make a film with universality, a film that could take place in Poland or the Ukraine or the Delta. This film does contain very specific issues of the place and that required collaboration with the actors and the people who live there. It is the most impoverished region, with the highest rate of drug use and the worst violence in the United States. I took some risk. It could have been about the white kids in the Delta too. The schools there are in tatters. It’s the worst school system in the United States. These are well-known facts. In this year that the film’s been out – and I travel with it – people see I’m white and some of them hate it before they see it. I’m proud of this film. It does take criticism. I’m pretty frustrated with people who say only a black filmmaker could make this film. Artists are the ones who change things.

Do you have some next projects in the works?
A few things. There’s one film that was supposed to be shot before this one. I have been writing a lot, but this is a confusing time. I honestly don’t know what I should do next. I’ve been distributing this now and that takes a lot of time. I don’t multi-task very well. The other day I had a spontaneous burst of creative writing and that felt pretty good, so we’ll see.

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Nancy is a founding FilmSlasher who lives near Syracuse, New York in the US. Reach her at nancykeeferhodes@gmail.com.