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Focus Features releases The American Society of Magical Negroes nationwide on March 15th, 2024. NYC MOVIE GURU: When it comes to entertaining the audience and provoking them emotionally as well as intellectually, which of those three elements was most challenging to tweak in the editing room? Kobi Libii: They all work together because it's easy to pull on one thread and then something else falls apart. I think that, in some ways, the hardest part was the humor just because it's such a balance. I wanted it to be a funny film. It makes me laugh. Laughing makes these really difficult conversations bearable, but you can start laughing too much where it's harder to take some of the weightier conversations seriously. Then, also, you can unbake it and then it's almost a different genre of film. So, that, I think, is something that we spent the most time doing. The emotional core of the story is the emotional core of the story whereas with a joke, you can add a joke in or take a joke out or have the joke with the button at the end of the joke or just have the joke, but not the button at the end of the joke. That tweaking as you screen it for audiences is when you literally see what makes people laugh. NYC MOVIE GURU: Hitchock once observed that there's something more important than logic: imagination. Do you agree with him as a filmmaker? KL: I'm not at a place in my career where I'm ready to disagree with Hitchcock. [laughs] There's an emotional logic, which is the way I would think about it, which sometimes isn't a literal logic. On mythology, when you're building a mythological world, there's a spectrum of detail that on the one hand, there's like a dictionary of the Elvish language and verb tenses, and on the other end of the spectrum, it's just "Go with me." and finding the right level of gesture, trope and actual detail that lets people drop into the logic of a crazy world without really explaining all of the mythological details. That balance is really tricky. There is a logic to it, but it's not a literal logic; it's an emotional and almost rhythmic logic, I think. NYC MOVIE GURU: What was the process like to know when and how to incorporate the exposition about the American Society of Magical Negroes? KL: It's a little bit of trial-and-error. It's a little bit of, "Oh, I think that they can find out this." and then, "Oh no, that's a little bit too much. I'll cut that one line of mythology early." There's a little bit of putting things up in front of people and seeing what's confusing. One of the most helpful things about audiences is that they will tell you what's confusing, when they're not confused and when there's too much information. They're incredibly useful about that and you gotta kinda get in front of them to know exactly when they get stuff. But, otherwise, it's just rhythm. It's like any conversation: "When do I get a sense that you've got it in my answer?" And I'm like, "Ok, I feel like I've said enough. I feel like you get the gist now and now I can stop talking." It's just that, sort of, intuitive sense of rhythm, but about, in this case, it's about mythological information. NYC MOVIE GURU: How important is originality for you as a filmmaker? KL: I don't aim for originality; it's just a reflection of my voice. I know that there are artists where it's authentically the thing that they want to make. If they could do anything in the world, it's an extremely commercial action movie. That's awesome. That's just their voice. I'd probably have a much more vibrant career if that's where my artistry went. But my brain just goes where my brain goes, so it's not an attempt to go off the beaten path or to mix genres in some inventive and clever way. This is how it all falls out of my brain, so this is what you get. NYC MOVIE GURU: If Aren were to have children or grandchildren, do you think he'd tell them about the secret society? If so, how? KL: I don't know. I feel like he'd be a good soldier about it and not tell very many people about society. I feel like he'd be respectful about it in that way. That's my first instinct. But, at the very least, by the time that he's a grandpa, he's like, "Let me tell you about some of my stories." and his grandkids are going to be like, "Oh my god. He's going to tell that crazy story." NYC MOVIE GURU: Through his performance, Justice Smith captured Aren's wide range of emotions, some more subtle than others. Which of those emotions was most important and challenging to capture? KL: I started my career as an actor. As a technical process, actors tend to think less about emotions as they do about behavior, action and what's happening. Emotion is often a byproduct. It's what we see as an audience and it makes sense as an audience member and as a critic. You metabolize it. But as a former actor and also a person who's working with former actors, I tend to think less about emotion and more about what he's doing. I think the thing that's most impressive about Justice Smith's performance is less the scenes where there is big emotion, like the climactic scene, than the really intricate work he does learning. I think that you can really see the gears turning in his head and see the lightbulb going off as he understands himself and understands what systemic racism has done to him. I think that playing that kind of self-exploration is so tricky and delicate. It looks incredibly natural and obvious when you see it, but it's actually really hard and rare. I think he does such an elegant job of that. NYC MOVIE GURU: What do you think are the basic elements that turn a satire or comedy into a classic? KL: Who knows, man? The movies that are classics to me are just the ones that I can just keep watching over and over again. I think that there are some things that have a richness to them that makes it worth revisiting---either a richness to them where I get something new out of it every time or such a shot-through-the-heart, beautiful simplicity to them that it's just a pure experience every time. Network and Playtime are classics which I get something out of every time I watch them. I sort of have the same experience watching Groundhog Day every time, and it's an amazing experience because it's such a perfect film, but it's a perfect film because of its purity and simplicity as opposed to its multi-layered complexity. NYC MOVIE GURU: Do you think that art has to have something to say? KL: There's as many different kinds of great art as there are people. There's art that's fairly didactic that I really find to be beautiful. There's art that's abstract and vague that I find to be beautiful. To me, the thing that I always come back to is a Eugène Ionesco quote which I'll paraphrase very crudely: if something is an essay, it should be an essay. Part of what you're doing with messages in art is trying to be really responsible about, "Well, this does need to be something that's only a movie, in this case, could capture." It's gotta be so of-that-language and of-that-medium that you couldn't summarize it pithily in a tweet or in an essay or in a novel. I don't really care if something has a message or not because different artists think differently about that intentionality, but I just care if it essentially must need to be a film to be fully realized. 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