Interview: Timothy Ware-Hill and Arnon Manor (‘Cops and Robbers’)
Among Netflix’s recent slate of original animated content is Cops and Robbers, adapted from the spoken-word poem by Timothy Ware-Hill. A mixed-media response to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery which gained international attention in May of last year, the film is directed by Ware-Hill with Arnon Manor “for all the Black men, women and children who have been victims of racial profiling, police violence, loss of life and other injustices just for being themselves.”
Bringing together over 30 individual artists, students and VFX companies collaborating around the world, each uniquely interpreting short segments of the poem in their own style, Cops and Robbers is produced by Lawrence Bender with Manor and Ware-Hill and exec produced by Jada Pinkett Smith, Neishaw Ali and Janet Jeffries. In the first of three pieces focusing on new Netflix animated content Skwigly writer Martyn Warren speaks with directors Timothy Ware-Hill and Arnon Manor about the production of this unique and compelling short film.
How did you both meet and what made you two become collaborative creators on Cops and Robbers? I read that it started out as a poem.
TW-H: Yes, it did start of as a poem. The poem existed for a few years prior to when I released the original source video of Cops and Robbers after the video killing of Ahmaud Arbery was made public. I saw it online. I was just infuriated and needed a way to express myself about my frustration and anger and so I dug out my poem Cops and Robbers, grabbed my iPhone and a gimbal and jogged in my neighbourhood while reciting the poem. I released it onto social media and it went viral and that’s kinda how it began. From there, Arnon happened to see the video on Instagram and he and I didn’t know each other. It was great because he was moved enough to reach out to me on Instagram through my DMs. I responded back and that was the beginning of our relationship and the start of our collaboration.
AM: Yeah for me to follow up from that, when I watched the Ahmaud Arbery video it kind of really shook me. We were all in a really sensitive time anyway. It was in the beginning of May and so COVID and the frustration of the last four years of the Trump administration and racism and everything else. When I saw Timothy’s video poem, it just hit a chord immediately, it was so powerful. The words were beautiful and haunting and he was running, kind of like Ahmaud Arbery was in his neighbourhood, and the performance was so incredible and to me coming from my world of filmmaking, animation and visual effects, I immediately saw an animated version of this and that’s when it started. So I reached out to Timothy with this idea of “Hey, why don’t we animate the poem?” and collect lots of different groups and animators from around the world to create a collective of expressions about what the subject brings to people. And thankfully, Timothy said “Great, let’s do it.” which was an amazing journey. We had no idea about Netflix, we just wanted to make something to continue the message.
Arnon, you worked on special effects for major blockbuster films before becoming a director on this film. When did you want to transition into a director and why did you want to co-direct this film?
AM: I’ve always been a filmmaker. I’ve been in visual effects and animation for a long time. I actually went to college and studied art and animation. My first animations were all stop frame animation and I got into computer animation and that led me into visual effects. But really that was always my background and, even though my career has been in visual effects in all its capacities, I always continued to be a filmmaker, to write, direct, produce, make things on the side. For me it was another artistic expression, but certainly one with a real message. The significance in it is very different than anything I’ve ever done before.
Timothy Ware-Hill (Image courtesy of Netflix)
Timothy, before making Cops and Robbers you did live action short films with similar themes. Why did you choose to use animation for this particular short and what was the experience like for you?
TW-H: It was a wonderful and surreal experience, to say the least. I’ve always been a fan of animation, always. To this day I go to bed with a cartoon on every night. Last night it was Bob’s Burgers that I was watching. I cannot tell you a single night where I have gone to sleep without some form of animation on my television. So it’s been a world that I always loved to explore. It taps me into my childhood and it allows me to escape in a different way than live action film does. To take my words from Cops and Robbers, words that are rooted in my experiences as a black man, words that are not necessarily the language of children and to put it in an animated form, I think allows a broader audience to step into the reality of which I exist. At least that’s what I hope. I hope that through the medium of animation that it allows people to also come down long enough to receive the message in a way that they might not receive through live action. As you said, I’ve done a lot of live action shorts with my poetry. I recorded quite a few that way and I have my followers who follow those, but I think being brought into this world of animation, it’s allowing a wider audience and now, with Netflix, a worldwide audience to hear these words and to receive the message of what this piece is trying to convey.
AM: If I can just add to that, I think it’s interesting because me and Timothy have been talking about this as well. We can express ourselves differently in animation. The video poem that Timothy did originally did stand on its own and it was powerful and it still is. I watched it very recently again and it’s as powerful as the first day I watched it. Especially in this country, every day, every week it feels like there’s another video of something that happened. Another bodycam, another witness cam. So we’ve seen all that and not that we’re desensitised to it because I don’t think we are, but with animation at least on my perspective on what I saw, animation can allow us to create another world, another viewpoint that has not been seen by what we see on the news and Instagram and other kinds of news outlet of the real things that are happening in news footage. So with animation you can create a fantasy world and even a surreal world, but actually express it in a way more so than real world footage can. That was the intent.
TW-H: But also making sure that the audience knows it’s not a fantasy. That’s the balance, that we are using fantastical elements through the animation and visual effects. It’s to hyperstylise and exaggerate reality as opposed to saying that this isn’t real. We’re saying “No, it’s really, really real.”
AM: Timothy, I never said this to you, but before it came out I showed it to my girlfriend’s grandparents who are very white, very conservative and older people and they both cried watching it. I was really surprised. They were both moved in a way I wouldn’t have thought they would have. I was shocked they had that reaction.
TW-H: If people go in, everyone is going in with a preconceived notion. There are certain people who won’t watch it because they already made their mind up what the story is about or they read our interviews and judged our interviews, but if those people, and when I say those people I mean people who are touting all lives matter or blue lives matter, if they stopped to watch this film they’d realise that this film isn’t an attack. It’s not an attack on police in no way shape or form. It’s only stating of people’s reality, of black communities’ reality and the things that they have gone through and it doesn’t say “Police are evil.” It poses the question at the end: do you think cops remember being kids? It asks them to tap back into their humanity, to remember why they chose to protect and serve, why they pledged that oath, why they put on that uniform and place that badge across their heart. And so I think that’s why even your girlfriend’s conservative white parents were moved by it because once you see it you realise it’s not what you thought it would be. You can let your guard down and just receive the message and that’s the beauty of animation.
There seems like a lot of different styles of animation incorporated into the production. What was the decision to use different styles instead of a singular choice?
AM: There were two ideas behind it, actually. One was a practical, the other was a creative and they kind of married together in a really good way. From a practical standpoint, when we first started I reached out to a lot of people I knew first before we started reaching out to other people and other animators. The idea was that we didn’t want to raise any money. We wanted to do it completely free and again we had a very strong message behind it so the hope was that people would see the message and want to participate, but from a practical perspective I knew it would be easier to ask people to do five to ten seconds of animation or less as opposed to doing three to four minutes. So there was a practical aspect to go and ask people to do a few seconds worth of animation, much easier than to spend even if it’s at one company or a group of people to do four minutes, so that was the practical aspect. Than from the creative, we realised as we started reaching out to people all the different animators and studios just pulled their own medium and tactile expression through the different medium. And we didn’t want it to be uniform, that’s kind of the beauty of it as well. It has a life of its own with different types of animation styles. And even the types of animation styles were different within themselves. The stop motion, very, very different, the CG very different, the 2D very different so even within the mediums themselves we had different styles which was part of the overall emotional aspect of it.
Arnon Manor (Image courtesy of Netflix)
What was it like to work with the animators from around the world and what new challenges did you both face when directing the team and using a variety of styles?
TW-H: The beautiful thing about this is that we had animators all over the world who are acting as allies through their artistry in helping tell this story. We called it our quilt; it’s a patchwork of all these different styles of animation, different viewpoints and perspectives that becomes this beautiful tapestry of this quilt. The thing about it is that, especially our allies overseas who don’t have the American experience of racism – they have their own versions of it – but to deal with the specific black American experience, there was a lot of information that I had to give from my perspective as a black man to help shape and guide the direction of how they should tell the story. Not necessarily how they should sketch the lines, that was more Arnon’s field. He said “You’re animating on the twos” and “You’re animating on the ones.” All the technical things I learned, my educational process was that through Arnon and through the animators. My way of educating the animators was through telling my story and through telling the history of the American experience. I keep saying black American experience, but the black American experience is the American experience because there is no America without black people.
It was beautiful to watch them take these stories and translate them in their own way, to help bring life to this piece. One of the challenges that I can speak of – and I know Arnon probably has many others that he can talk about – is the time difference, but we eventually found a rhythm and a way to make that work. That’s the biggest challenge that I can think of, as far as working with the animators all over the world. In fact Arnon and I have never physically met.
AM: Yeah. We never met.
TW-H: This is like the . . . What’s one of those dating services where you just meet virtually? I feel like I’ve been dating Arnon for a year and I still have yet to formally meet him. It’s been a great relationship.
AM: It’s an arranged marriage, but it’s been working great.
TW-H: So I look forward to the day when we can give each other a hug.
AM: Which is interesting. Just to add to that, I think from a practical perspective this whole project was done virtually. The epitome of that is the fact for us, as directors and producers, we have never actually met in person, but that goes with everybody. We’ve never met anybody of our entire crew during this entire production. Our entire post-production, editing, music and sound effects were all done remotely via Zoom meetings, email and virtual production tools. That was challenging, schedule wise, to watch the same takes. So we’d get emails from our animators and they’re like “Hey, are you watching version three?” “Oh shit, I’m watching version two!” “Version three? When did that arrive?”
We didn’t have a big production team behind us in the normal sense. Timothy’s in New Jersey on the East Coast, I’m in California on the West Coast, our production hub was in Toronto, Canada and we had people around the world. It was really incredible.
TW-H: We did all this during the COVID lockdown and what I have been hearing lately from some of our animators is that it gave them a place to escape from their sorrows and the hardship of this year. It gave them something to do and I must admit, it was the same for me. I don’t know how this year would have been if I didn’t have an outlet as an artist. I would hope that, regardless of whether this animated film would have introduced itself into my life, I’d have continued to create because that’s what I do anyway, but this short created this family of people that I didn’t expect this year. That’s my silver lining for 2020.
AM: We started this based on the Ahmaud Arbery video killing that came out in the beginning of May and then the George Floyd murder took place at the end of May, so we started the process when protests started and the Brianna Taylor murder. That’s something that also everybody who worked on it has been saying to us, that it was not only an outlet for COVID but an outlet during the protests, during the time of unrest that took place, especially in this country, but it was worldwide during the summer and that was the topic we were discussing. We were kind of living it on a day by day basis. It was really fascinating.
Cops and Robbers (Image courtesy of Netflix)
How did you partner with Netflix and what was it like to work with such a major streaming service?
TW-H: I reached out to my friend and mentor Lawrence Bender, who’s one of the producers on this, and I shared an earlier working progress with him of the animated version of our short and he was immediately moved and he wanted to be a part of it. He started to reach out and share with other people in the industry and it worked its way through this network of people, got to Jada Pinkett Smith and then got to Netflix, who saw it and they were moved by it. That happened really quickly. Netflix mentioned that it was their first year of releasing short films, there were two other shorts and we joined last. Since then Netflix has been putting their entire machine behind us, which is beautiful. It’s the perfect outlet for this short, for our baby, because Netflix in my opinion is leading the way in films of diversity and inclusivity and making sure stories are being told about and by people of colour, about and by women, about and by LGBTQ people. It’s, in my opinion, the perfect fit and we’re just honoured that Netflix believed in our piece and wanted to help spread the message.
AN: I think when we first started on this we really had no true idea how to release it. Our objective was to create something as powerful as we could with the resources that we had, through our connections trying to put it out in the world in some way that hopefully people will see it and it will go viral and it will spread the message. That was the very naive goal – then when Lawrence saw it and Jada and other people, we realised we had something very powerful. Netflix came on board and that platform is the biggest platform in the world. It’s now out in 190 countries and they really did put their machine behind it and in terms of the filmmaking process, we showed them the work in progress and kind of gave them the opportunity to give us some notes and, to their credit, they kind of said “no, what you guys are doing is amazing” and they gave us free reign to finish it in the way that we needed to.
Now that the film is out, what are you both working on next and would you want to return to animation?
TW-H: In the new year we will continue to push this film and push the message. As Arnon mentioned, everybody did this for free, from the animators to the entire post production team. They donated their time and talents for this story and even the money we received from Netflix we donated to black charitable organisations to continue to spread the message and fight for equal justice. That’s what’s in the near future, at least for me.
AM: I think both of us are creators. I know that Timothy has his projects, I have my projects. We’re continuing to work on our own individual projects, but we realised we created something that’s moving people in a way. I’m connected to this and I know the impact of it, but the message of allyship is a very important part; Timothy is a black man, I’m a white man, but we have to co-exist and be allies to one another in the cause. That’s a really important aspect of this, so hopefully this platform will actually spread the message in a really powerful way. We have a lot of professional animators, going back to the process, as well as amateurs and students coming into the profession, so it’s a way to amplify their voices as well. A lot of people are just excited about it and having the opportunity to see their name on Netflix for the first time. That’s another layer to this, it wasn’t done by a Hollywood machine, it was done at a grassroots level. Everybody who worked on it gave their time outside the norm. We want to amplify that and the message.
Cops and Robbers is out now on Netflix