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Finding 'Ballast' in the Delta's Emotional Weight
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It led to a few, truly only-in-Mississippi moments. Lawrence tells James in one scene that he must leash the dog when taking him for a walk, because "if he scents a deer, he'll strike out."
"That Mississippi dialect just came out," Smith, 38, says with a laugh, in a telephone interview. "There was so much I said that was just off the top of my head."
Riggs was so nervous, despite her stage experience, that she "went in a room and cried" on the first day of filming. "But it was a good story. It made sense to me. I was allowed to create a real person, not just a movie character."
The characters are more complicated at the end than at the beginning. And it may be the only Southern movie ever made that does not cater to race or accents or sexuality or even the notorious heat.
Despite rave reviews and major awards at Sundance this year (for direction and cinematography), Hammer has been distributing the film himself. It has earned all of about $50,000 in a few weeks of limited release. According to Boxofficemojo.com, "Ballast" hasn't played on more than four screens anywhere in the country at any one time. There has been the inevitable question at film festivals about the cultural propriety of a white director making a film entirely about black people.
"It never occurred to us in making the film, and I was surprised when I saw that," Riggs says. "The question is whether or not you are qualified to do the story. It never occurred to me that Lance could not do this."
And so "Ballast" is out there, a film named for the way a weight in your life can stabilize you or drag you down. It's about a place so barren and so Godforsaken lonely and poor that it feels like the rain in November comes down not on your face but on your soul. It will make you want to run for the freight train that barrels by the roadside and jump on and ride it up to Chicago, down to New Orleans, out to Los Angeles, anywhere but here.
And yet the place has some sort of unnameable beauty in all the little churches and the towering oaks and the levees and catfish ponds and the graveyards of the dead who will never leave, many of whom are related to you. The Delta, like the film it inspired, worms its way into your heart and does not leave, a mark that is as much a scar as it is a name.
