Walter Thompson-Hernández on his new film 'If I Go Will They Miss Me'

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of maximumfun.org and is distributed by NPR.

Jesse Thorn (0:23)

It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn. Kids, think about the world in mythical, magical terms. Am I a princess or a prince? Do I have magic powers? Is the monster that I saw on TV here waiting under my bed? When I'm at school all day, what are my parents doing? Like hero stuff, right? My guest this week, Walter Thompson-Hernández, made a movie that's sort of about that. If I Go, Will They Miss Me is set in Watts, a working class Los Angeles neighborhood, not that far from LAX. Any time of day, look up, you'll see airplanes headed to or from the runways at the airport.

The movie's protagonist is a kid named Anthony, Little Ant. He looks up at the sky and sees the planes. He imagines them as his friends and family members, arms outstretched, soaring above. That's what we see on the screen. Little Ant thinks a lot about his dad, Big Ant. Why is he gone? Where did he go to? He's probably a hero doing hero stuff, right? Little Ant imagines his dad as Odysseus, the hero of the Odyssey, off fighting the Trojan War.

All these things that Little Ant imagines, we see.

If I Go, Will They Miss Me is one of Thompson-Hernández first feature films. The other one is called Kites. It also just came out recently. Prior to those films, he made a basketball documentary for Netflix. And prior to that, he covered LA for The New York Times. He wrote some incredible pieces about Kobe Bryant, Nipsey Hussle, and Cowboys in Compton. We will get in to that, I promise. Because look, if there's anything anyone in Los Angeles wants to talk about and I'm in Los Angeles, it's how The New York Times writes about Los Angeles. I am really excited to welcome Walter Thompson-Hernández onto the show. Let's get right into it.

Walter, welcome to Bullseye. I'm so happy to have you on the show.

Walter Thompson-Hernández (2:26)

Thank you for having me. It's cool, man. Cool chat so far.

Jesse Thorn (2:29)

How did you come to connect the world of your childhood with the world of mythology?

Walter Thompson-Hernández (2:38)

When I was seven or eight years old, it's like such a clear memory, right? I'm like seven or eight, and there's like hundreds of airplanes flying above our neighborhood and our home.

Jesse Thorn (2:50)

Because you grew up by LAX.

Walter Thompson-Hernández (2:51)

Like right under the LAX flight path. And I think I've like, I've researched the number. I think it's like between seven and 800 planes fly above our homes every single day, right?

Which is complicated. But what that did for like my friends and I was that, you know, it was like a, the only show in town, right? We would like look up and sort of imagine where these planes were coming from and think about narratives and stories about who was on them. And then what it also did, I think was like, help us kind of create myth and mythologies that we kind of created about these imaginary kind of airplane people, you know, that we invented and sort of thought about and who wore these like huge white t-shirts for no reason, you know? And then we sort of like, we're learning about Greek mythology at that age, you know, and it's, I don't know, man. I think mythology is like a really beautiful way for all people, I think, to, to make sense of mystery and, and sort of understand a very complicated world. And that's kind of what we did.

Jesse Thorn (3:43)

Did you know anything even now as an adult about like black mythology around flying, like the people could fly or Tar Beach or?

Walter Thompson-Hernández (3:50)

That's a great books, right? Like, I love that book so much now as an adult, but as a child, you know, my, my father's black, my mom's Mexican, but I didn't know about any of those books, right? I didn't know about like Song of Solomon by Tony Morrison, which is one of my favorite books now. I didn't know about any of this. I just knew that there was something in the sky and we had questions and I think we, you know, we're creating our own mythology, so to speak.

Jesse Thorn (4:11)

I had those two books as a kid, they made such a huge impact on me.

And my kids, when they were picture book age, we had Tar Beach. And Tar Beach is by the great quilter, poster maker, painter, Faith Ringgold. And it's like this story about New York in her childhood, and being on the roof, having a picnic on the roof of her apartment building, and imagining as a kid that she can fly and that she owns everything that she can fly over.