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Filmmaker Magazine: Bless Their Little Hearts itself doesn’t end in a call-to-arms or moment of radicalization. If anything, it seems like it starts after that moment has already taken place; in the opening scene, guys are talking about robbing banks. You talk about Third Cinema — a lot of those films end in a kind of manifesto.
Billy Woodberry: I don’t know that [this film] is so political. Maybe it’s implicit. It’s about life outside of work – life without work. For this couple, one part is missing because [the husband] is not at his previous job, where he knew he’d bring a salary to her, and together they’d have consistent, regular contribution. He lost that. And the question is: What happens in the process, when a man loses his work? Which is what was happening to a lot of people at that time, in the different industrial places. We imagine he was a worker in a factory – maybe not a big works, but a supplier related to a big works. When we loses that, he needs to try to assess what is his place, what is his contribution – what is he doing in this family, in this couple, in this life? And he tries not to accept fully that that’s his condition. He tries to get any work so he can contribute.
His struggle to do that goes against the more general suggestion that people like him didn’t want to work. Maybe the politics is a kind of solidarity with the part of the working class that was experiencing that or dealing with that. It makes them present, it makes them the subject. Even our colleagues, they didn’t necessarily make movies about these people. Charles [Burnett] did, but not everybody. They made films about other social groups, other segments of the population.
Now when people talk about what’s happening with the working class, they come back with a kind of fiction about the “white working class,” as if the working class in the United States for a long time hasn’t been a multiethnic, multiracial class. [The film] offers evidence of what happens with that section of the working class after work. Because, a lot of times, people work together in dynamic industries – the auto industry, steel – but they don’t go home together. They don’t socialize together. The social segregation disguises how people live their lives after the job. The film offers, maybe, a way for them to see themselves – to see their class situation in another form.
Billy Woodberry in conversation with Steve Macfarlane and Madeline Coleman
