Emmys 2019
Special Issue 2019 Issue

Ava DuVernay’s Fight to Tell the True Story of the Central Park Five

In the four-part Netflix series When They See Us, the director acts as a conduit for the full narratives of five wrongly accused men by painfully peeling back the layers of a tale so often told wrong.
Ava DuVernay on set with actor Caleel Harris.
GUIDING LIGHT
Writer-director Ava DuVernay and actor Caleel Harris during the production of When They See Us in New York City last year.
Photograph by Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix.

It’s nine P.M. on a Tuesday night in early April. Ava DuVernay is ensconced in a sound studio deep in the Paramount lot—on Michael Bay Avenue, no less—jamming to finish the mix on the first episode of her upcoming four-part Netflix series, When They See Us, before her April 17 deadline. The series is ambitious, and in many ways the culmination of DuVernay’s filmmaking career to date. Over four episodes, it will tell the story of the Central Park Five case—in 1989, five black and brown teenagers were wrongly accused of the assault and rape of a female jogger on the grounds of Manhattan’s most treasured landmark. The men were exonerated years later, in 2002, and the case has long been a prominent example of the justice system’s endemic racism and the dangers of a credulous press, among other institutional failures.

The broader story is at once central to our understanding of 1980s New York City and contemporary American history. (Within weeks of the boys’ arrests, Donald Trump spent $85,000 on full-page ads in four New York newspapers advocating for the reinstatement of the death penalty.) The case has been written about exhaustively in the 30 years since and was the subject of the much-lauded 2012 documentary The Central Park Five, directed by Ken Burns, along with his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon. DuVernay, though, is showing something that has not often been as prominent in the discussion of the case: the before, the during, and the after from the vantage point of the five boys whose lives were forever altered that April evening—and she’s doing it because those men, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, Raymond Santana, and Kevin Richardson, asked her to.

None of which is exactly DuVernay’s concern tonight. On this night she’s all about the sound. Dressed in typical director attire—blue jeans, faded sweatshirt, and sneakers, along with her signature braids and black-rimmed glasses—DuVernay applies some lip gloss before launching into pages of notes: More sounds of New York here. Fix a poorly recorded line reading there. Bring the beat of the music up when we see a gaggle of boys running through the park. She jokes, she cajoles. She’s deadly serious but also trusting and playful with the 10 or so sound mixers and producers who are working late with her to try to make this thing sing.

“Come on, that’s an improvement,” she says after a sound designer corrects her request that, whatever the instrument is (a guitar), it come up at a pivotal moment. “At least I didn’t call it an oboe.”

DuVernay is laughing, but it’s clear that this project has taken its toll.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she tells me after the sound session is complete. “By far.”

Guardian Angels demonstrate outside New York State Supreme Court, June 1990.

By Richard Drew/A.P. Images/Shutterstock.

The defendants in court, February 1990; the April 22, 1989, New York Daily News front page.

By James Estrin/The New York Times/Redux; Inset, from The New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images.

It’s been an exhausting professional stretch for DuVernay, who went straight from the March 2018 London premiere of her big-budget Disney debut, A Wrinkle in Time, to pre-production on When They See Us. The series, with 117 speaking parts, multiple actors playing the same character, and a 25-year time span, was both logistically challenging and emotionally draining. She shot all five hours in New York City in just 66 days. The subject matter was so dark that DuVernay provided a crisis counselor on set. She spent a lot of her own time counseling others, too.

“It wasn’t a very healthy thing to do,” says DuVernay of the decision to co-write and direct all four episodes. “But they asked me to do it, and I wanted to tell their story. Their story wasn’t told when they were boys. It was told for them and it was twisted and it was lies. There was so much more to it, and I wanted to tell it for them.”

DuVernay has been advocating for criminal-justice reform since she began making movies. Her second feature, Middle of Nowhere, tracks a wife’s journey of self-discovery while caring for her incarcerated husband; her Academy Award-nominated documentary, 13th, explores the entrenched racial bias of the U.S. prison system. When They See Us feels like a culmination of all this work, harnessing DuVernay’s outrage and activism into one real-life story that tragically wove those narrative strands together, allowing her to delve deep into the rippling effects of five people’s incarcerations and transforming them into emotional and affecting drama.

The series will land on Netflix six weeks after the 30th anniversary of the assault, and will illustrate just how little has changed.

“I wanted it to come out this year because [it’s a reminder] of how far we’ve not come,” says DuVernay. “And for a key player in it to be the leader of the free world makes it all pretty relevant and pretty important to take stock 30 years later.”

DuVernay, 46, is too old to be a digital native, but she acts like one on Twitter, where she has amassed more than two million followers. She uses her handle, @ava, to highlight the work of others, rail against the current administration, and even cultivate new projects. (In 2017, she agreed to direct Lupita Nyong’o and Rihanna in a heist movie after the idea was suggested in a viral meme.) After she saw the Burns documentary, she began following the Central Park Five Twitter account, run by Raymond Santana, one of the men wrongly convicted. That follow turned into an exchange where Santana asked DuVernay to make a movie about the case. It was mid-2015, and she was knee-deep in 13th, yet, despite her heavy schedule, she couldn’t deny their request.

“I found myself at a dinner in Harlem with Kevin [Richardson], Yusef [Salaam], and Raymond. It was very powerful to have them all together,” she says. “The thing that really struck me is no one’s ever heard their story beyond ‘the crime,’ or the night itself. The documentary does a beautiful job of recounting that night, but when I sat with them and they told me about everything else, that was really fascinating.”

The series is gripping, if difficult to watch, especially the early scenes of five boys, ages 14 to 16, going about normal teenage lives: Kevin plays the trumpet and is trying to make first chair; Antron loves baseball and wants to be a star; Korey may be skipping school but he’s falling in love.

Defendant Antron McCray with his mother, Linda, July 17, 1990; a full-page ad in the May 1, 1989, New York Times, paid for by Donald Trump.

By Gerald Herbert/New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images (McCray).

Defendant Yusef Salaam and mother Sharon on their way to court.

By Phillip Schoultz/A.P. Images/Shutterstock.

The case led to two 1990 trials. In one, Salaam, McCray, and Santana were found guilty of rape, assault, robbery, and riot, and sentenced to the maximum, 5 to 10 years in a youth facility. Richardson was convicted of attempted murder, rape, sodomy, and robbery and was also sentenced to 5 to 10 years. Wise, the oldest of the boys, was tried as an adult and convicted of sexual abuse, assault, and riot and sentenced to 5 to 15 years. Santana, Richardson, McCray, and Salaam all went to juvenile detention for five to seven years. Three of them received their college degrees. But when they were released, they were required to register as sex offenders, which limited their ability to find real work. Santana couldn’t secure a job and turned to dealing drugs, which got him thrown back into prison.

DuVernay chose to construct each of the series’s four episodes around a single aspect of the criminal-justice system the five encountered: the police investigation, the courtroom, incarceration, and post-prison life. She and her team spent months researching and interviewing the men. Sarah Burns, who co-wrote and co-directed The Central Park Five with her father, gave DuVernay the raw footage from each of her interviews, so she was able to move quickly from the night itself and the trial, which were exhaustively covered by the documentary, and excavate the emotional toll for the teenagers. The men and their families also made themselves available at times to the show’s cast, which allowed the actors to offer the occasional uncomfortable question, such as when John Leguizamo asked Raymond Santana’s father, whom Leguizamo plays in the series, why he signed his son’s coerced confession.

“I was asking him, ‘Why did you sign those papers?’ ” says Leguizamo, who received an answer that spoke to the logic-bending gravity of the case. “And he said, ‘Because they were innocent.’ They believed that because they were innocent, that somehow the power of innocence clears you or some kind of mighty justice was going to be on your side and everyone will see the truth. But, obviously, that’s not the way life really works.”

Arguably, the most tragic story of the five is that of Korey Wise, who at age 16 went to the jail the night following the attack accompanying his buddy Salaam. (He wasn’t on the list of boys the police were looking for.) Wise was coerced into a false confession, and after the verdict was announced he was sent to Rikers Island (before being transferred to other maximum-security prisons in New York State), where he spent much of his time in solitary confinement, not as punishment but to keep him alive. He had little contact with the outside world and limited protection on the inside. He experienced years of assault and violence and very few visits from his family. By 2001, Wise had spent 14 years in prison, at which point the crime’s true culprit, Matias Reyes, confessed to prison authorities after a conversation with Wise in the yard of Auburn Correctional Facility, in Auburn, New York, an act that began the process of exonerating all five men.

“I’ve never met anyone like him. Every time I sit with him and every time I talk to him, I think, How are you walking and talking?” says DuVernay. “When you hear, see what he’s gone through, he’s a walking miracle, he really is. And he’s really brilliant. I call him “the Prophet,” because you sit down with Korey for a while and you come away with some gems. I’m lucky that I have that.”

While each of the other boys are played by two actors, one older and one younger, for Wise, DuVernay cast only Moonlight’s Jharrel Jerome, 21. It’s a move that showcases the young actor’s range: he’s equally convincing as a 16-year-old and again as a young twentysomething inmate. (DuVernay gave Jerome a four-week break in between Episodes Two and Four to bulk up and grow some facial hair.) He would stay behind during lunch, living as much as he could inside Wise’s cell, to try to feel what solitary confinement really meant.

“Things like that helped me get to that darker, heavier mind-set, where it was a lot less talking and more thinking, as opposed to when he was younger, it was more talking, less thinking,” says Jerome.

Wise and Jerome often hung out together off-camera, eating pizza and checking out the latest sneakers at Foot Locker. Wise shied away from discussing the tragedies he experienced, rather telling Jerome about the brief moments of lightness and joy he lived through during his time in prison.

“If he had a story to tell about jail, it was about the one or two friends he would meet. It was about how bad the food actually is. It was about what it was like to play basketball and to work out,” says Jerome. “I felt like he was trying to make sure that I knew that there’s more than just the pain and the hurt. That he spent all these years fighting to be a better person, even though the world was trying to make him the worst person he could be.”

Wise is half deaf in one ear, a disability that went untreated in his youth and caused him problems in school with reading and writing. For Jerome to master his slower speech, he spent two months with a vocal coach trying to suppress his own fast-paced Spanish pattern, forcing his tongue down on his lower palate and speaking with a deeper resonance.

“So it was all about finding how to speak like him,” says Jerome. “And once you speak like Korey, you become Korey.”

Harris, Marquis Rodriguez, and DuVernay on set.

By Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix.

In March, Netflix flew the five men to Los Angeles to screen the whole four-part series, and DuVernay had the surreal opportunity to sit behind them while they watched themselves on-screen.

“I’ve never experienced anything like it, to watch them watch themselves, to watch them learn the other person’s story because they only lived their own,” she says. “And when you get into Episode Four [which centers completely on Wise’s case] you’ll see that Korey had some abusive challenges in his home. They didn’t know that. They didn’t know what he went through in prison. Episode Four was the one where they all broke down crying. Afterward they embraced him in a circle, all of them wrapped their arms around him. They didn’t know what the 14 years looked like, and they were finally able to see some version of it.”

“I enjoyed watching their experience, only because I enjoyed seeing something outside of my experience,” Wise told me. “It was a lot of emotional pain, but I truly enjoyed the emotional roller-coaster ride.… When it came to my part, [for them] it was more like ‘Wow. I didn’t know.’ They had heard … but they didn’t know it was really real.”

What continues to surprise the cast and filmmaker alike is the positive outlooks the men managed to maintain. “It’s incredible,” says Leguizamo. “I wondered myself, Could I move on? Would it break me? Would I be able to function? Would my kids be able to function? Would they be able to forgive and move on, or would they be broken by bitterness, acrimony, you know? Distrust?”

“I hope people bear witness to it, even though it might be hard,” says DuVernay. “I’d like to think people are courageous enough and challenge themselves to sit through something that’s hard.”

Niecy Nash, who plays Wise’s mom, Delores, in the series, was inspired enough by the story that she joined the Innocence Project to bring more attention to wrongfully convicted men. She’s weeping real tears in the scenes when the verdicts are handed down and the boys are taken from the courtroom. And though she’s hopeful this series can serve as a springboard, she’s also realistic—some wrongs can never be undone.

Ethan Herisse, Aunjanue Ellis, and Pernell Walker in the film.

By Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix.

She tells the story of sitting on a panel in Atlanta in mid-April with Richardson, Santana, and Salaam when someone in the audience asked what they could do to help. Santana responded, “I used to think I would be healed if I finally got married, had children, had my own family, got my driver’s license. I’ve done all those things, but I’m still not whole. I don’t know what to tell you I need.”

Nash believes some self-reflection from the people who took these boys down this path would be a good start.

“I’m hoping that people who only know the story through the media will understand it through the lens of those who lived it,” she says. “I’m also hoping that the media will have the takeaway to be more responsible in what they report. Not just to be first but to be factual. I’m hopeful prosecutors will look at themselves and say, Let me not build a career on a lie. Let me do the right thing, and be about justice. And I’m hoping there will be some comfort for all the families involved in actually having their story told.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of years Korey Wise spent in prison. He was in prison for 14 years.

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