It’s a fine October weekend, and I’m on the phone with God himself.

Well, more accurately, I’m on the phone with Morgan Freeman, who has played God a couple of times, as well as any number of human saints. Glory, Shawshank, the new Batman movies – he’s the go-to guy for tempered nobility and placid wisdom.

And as befits his stature, the subject of our conversation is fairly heavy stuff. We’re talking about race in America, and the excuses people use to justify keeping old barriers alive.

“Tradition,” he says, and even from Los Angeles, you can hear his lip curl when he says the word. (Also, yes, the man’s voice is as mellifluous and expressive as it is in the movies.)

“Let’s look at India for a split second,” he says, “where they’re trying to change attitudes about their caste system. They have – or had – a very iron-clad caste system, from the well-to-do to the untouchables. And how does that remain? Tradition. I think that’s what we’re stuck with.”

We’re talking about the mentality that led to the events depicted in Prom Night In Mississippi, Paul Saltzman’s documentary about Freeman’s 2008 efforts to integrate the high school prom in his hometown of Charleston. Black and white students had historically held separate events. Freeman proposed a single, integrated prom, which he would pay for himself.

As the documentary shows, the students were mostly fine with the idea; it was the older generation that showed the most resistance, hiding behind the excuse that an integrated prom would fly in the face of long-established tradition. Of course, as Freeman points out, those traditions date back to the good old days when Americans kept slaves – a history that refuses to disappear.

“It’s with us today,” he says. “You ride through the South, you see all kinds of monuments and testaments to heroes of the Confederacy. Me, I think of it as treason, but you know, that’s neither here nor there.”

Integrating the prom, Freeman explains, is one way to nudge Charleston into the future. “What we’d like to develop up there,” he says, “what I’d like to develop up there, is education. A different sense of being. And I think that’s on the way. It’s never a quick thing; you can’t change ‘tradition’ without offering something better, [something] that people can realize is better.”

And then there’s the added challenge of doing all this in front of Saltzman’s cameras. “I thought it was a good idea, his wanting to document the whole thing,” Freeman says. “Neither of us knew what to expect, but it seemed like as he was doing the filming it just got more and more intricate for him, more interesting and more immediate.”

Freeman is scheduled to drop into Toronto to introduce a benefit screening of the film tomorrow night (Friday, November 13) at the Varsity Cinema. After that, he’ll be gearing up for next month’s promotional push for Invictus, in which he plays Nelson Mandela for his old friend Clint Eastwood.

“He just shoots the same way every time,” Freeman marvels. “He shot the same way when we did Unforgiven. He shot the same way in Million Dollar Baby. He told me one time that when he worked with Sergio Leone, he learned a lot about filmmaking, and one of the things was ‘Move it fast, get it done.’” 

Interview Clips

Morgan Freeman describes Charleston, Mississippi:

Freeman on the election of Barack Obama and the political divide in America:

Freeman on the new generation's attempts to transcend ingrained racial attitudes:

normw@nowtoronto.com