In discussions of people like Michael Jackson, some defenders insist on distinguishing between the artist and the art, but a bio-pic is necessarily about both. Jackson’s sublime pop-soul confections—“Billie Jean,” “Rock with You,” and countless others—remain extraordinarily popular, and the people with the strongest attachment to this music tend to share an attachment to its creator. “Michael” is not an ambivalent meditation on the complicated relationship between goodness and greatness but an unabashed celebration of its subject, based on the bet that, a decade and a half after Jackson’s death, audiences are ready to celebrate him, too.
This past November, when the trailer for “Michael” was released on YouTube, it was viewed more than a hundred million times in the first twenty-four hours—a promising sign for Lionsgate, which, with other companies, has invested something like a hundred and fifty million dollars in the film. The title role is played by Jaafar Jackson, the son of Michael’s brother Jermaine, with a shy smile that’s faintly familiar and frenetic dance moves that are strongly familiar. But, to the extent that “Michael” is about a man under pressure, that man is Joe Jackson, the star’s domineering father, played by Colman Domingo with an intensity that would not be out of place in one of Fuqua’s more combat-driven films.
In his career, Fuqua has worked to make himself difficult to categorize; not long after the success of “Training Day,” he went to Ireland to film “King Arthur,” a battlefield epic starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightley. His goal, often, has been to give audiences movies that feel like thrill rides, but nowadays he talks more about the responsibility to tell stories about Black people in particular. He fought hard to make “Emancipation,” a 2022 slavery drama starring Will Smith. And he tends to describe “Michael” less as a potential blockbuster than as an act of historical reclamation. “Michael’s too important a character for our culture to just walk away from,” he told me.
Fuqua’s résumé includes seventeen features and half a dozen documentaries, along with film and television projects for which he served as producer or executive producer. (“The Terminal List,” in which Chris Pratt plays a renegade Navy SEAL, will release its second season on Prime Video later this year.) But he has never been nominated for a major award, and, though he lives outside Los Angeles, he is much more comfortable working out at his local boxing gym than appearing at industry events. Still, his profession occasionally requires self-promotion, which is how he found himself walking through Park City, Utah, on a bright January morning, heading to a promotional panel at the Sundance Film Festival. Fuqua is tall and broad and looks like a former football player, although in fact his sport of choice was basketball: he earned a scholarship to West Virginia State, a historically Black college, and then transferred to West Virginia University.
When Fuqua arrived in Utah, “Michael” was nearly finished, and he was taking a break to focus on a very different man under pressure: Nelson Mandela, the subject of his new documentary “Troublemaker,” which was having its première at Sundance. On the street, Fuqua was stopped by autograph collectors clutching posters for “Training Day” and “The Equalizer.” He signed them quickly, then retreated into a makeshift greenroom on the second floor of the Filmmaker Lodge. There he met his co-panelist: Billie Jean King, the tennis trailblazer, astonishingly sharp and trim at eighty-two. “It’s an honor,” she said, and Fuqua bowed respectfully. He gets along particularly well with athletes, perhaps because he admires them so much; he says that one of the most difficult things he ever did was accept that he was not going to play professional basketball.
Onstage, Fuqua and King, who was promoting her own new documentary, talked about the link between sports and activism. Fuqua once directed a documentary about Muhammad Ali, and King shared her memories of getting to know him: “He’d go, ‘Billie Jean King, you’re the queen.’ ” Fuqua had been pleased to discover, during the research for his film, that Mandela was an amateur boxer. He liked the idea that a liberation hero who is often memorialized in America as an icon of nonviolence was in reality a fighter. “The only way you’re going to change anything—you’ve got to win,” he said.
