Towards the end of Look At Me: XXXTentacion, the new documentary on the life of the late rapper XXXTentacion, director Sabaah Folayan, invisible behind the camera, interviews four of the film’s central sources — X’s mother Cleopatra Bernard, aunt Deandra Ellis, frequent collaborator John Cunningham, and manager Solomon Sobande — as a group. This time, they aren’t being asked to fill in the blanks on X’s childhood or his career. Instead, Folayan wants them to unpick that the legacy of a man whose music was violent and vulnerable in equal measure, who played up to his reputation as a supervillain until suddenly he didn’t. For the first time in the film they are asked to confront the fact that XXXTentacion, born Jahseh Onfroy, was indeed an icon to a generation of kids. But that when he was shot dead in an apparent robbery at the age of 20, he was still facing the charges of aggravated battery, domestic battery, and false imprisonment that had lingered over his short, incendiary time in the public eye.
Sat up straight, one arm resting on the breakfast counter in her own Florida home, as formidable as she has been throughout, Bernard rhetorically asks Folayan, “How do you fully redeem yourself if every time, on every corner, it just keeps popping up?”
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Folayan replies without a moment’s pause: “How do you fully redeem yourself without ever admitting that you did something wrong?”
The tension between those questions animates Look At Me: XXXTentacion, produced by FADER Films and out today via Hulu. It’s an unflinching look at a walking, screaming, vivid contradiction, a subject so compelling that he was impossible to ignore and so transgressive — both literally and superficially — that he was rejected outright by others.
Folayan was in many ways an unlikely choice to helm the project. Her only other feature-length film, 2017’s Whose Streets?, was an on-the-ground look at the Ferguson uprising, and she made clear from the outset that she wouldn’t make a puff piece about Onfroy. In fact, at the Q&A that followed the film’s premiere at SXSW in Austin a few weeks ago, she said she’d been so taken aback by the idea of directing the project that she thought about flunking her first interview with FADER Films.
But FADER Films insisted that Folayan was the right person. "Her responses from the jump were thoughtful and thought-provoking," executive producer and FADER co-founder Rob Stone says. "She was able to express very complicated issues involving mental health, violence, and societal structures. I interviewed 12 directors. Sabaah was the 12th and clearly stood out to me as the right choice." She flew to Florida to meet Bernard — who, along with Stone, Sobande, and X’s attorney Bob Celestin, is credited as an executive producer on the project — knowing that nobody would be hired for the project without her assent.
“And something told me, just level with this human being and be here as a person first and foremost,” Folayan says now over a Zoom call from the patio of a Los Angeles hotel. “Don't be too attached to the outcome of this as an interview. And so that's what I did. I was like, ‘I'm here because my instinct told me to come here and that this was something that I needed to do.’ And it was. I felt this really strong gut instinct that this was something that I was particularly positioned to do. And as scary as it was, I think any artist knows, or journalist knows, when you have that gut instinct about something, you sort of follow it.”
As Folayan laid out in our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, it was essential to follow that instinct to its endpoint, laying out X’s contradictions in full.
The FADER: During the Q&A in Austin, one of the first things you said was when you were brought in to talk about potentially taking the helm of the film, you almost tried to tank the interview. You had quite a lot of reservations about the film and you were sort of trying to push the project away because it seemed complicated. What was it that made you want to push the film away? Why did you feel uncomfortable?
Sabaah Folayan: Well, because the film was being made by people who loved him, and there's a built-in bias there. I wasn't going to do it if the expectation was going to be that I was going to share that bias. The only way that I was going to be able to do it is if I was going to be able to be completely frank and completely honest. A lot of times when you see a documentary about a public figure that's sort of sanctioned by their estate or by their camp, it glosses over the more difficult aspects. And that I think would've been a waste of my personal talents, expertise, and reputation.
When did you start to think that you could work within a structure like that?
I was greeted with enthusiasm when I talked about being an activist, when I talked about being a feminist, when I talked about the fact that I believe survivors. I don't believe survivors have any incentive to make up these allegations in most cases, and they agreed. And that suggested to me that these were people who were intelligent in terms of the way to access the trust of the public. And they also struck me as people who were sensitive and really cared about what I saw as Jahseh's core mission, which was actually to reach and touch people on an emotional level and create some kind of transformation and some kind of change in terms of the way that mental health, isolation, depression, and suicidal thoughts often don't get the support or the treatment that they need.
Was that your impression of Jahseh before you came into the project as well?
It was my impression of him, just from loose understandings and passing him on the internet and understanding the sort of milieu. And being older than his generation, but still understanding kind of this evolution of this pain that has been coming through the music and that has been coming into hip-hop. As we see rock and punk and hip-hop kind of blending in these younger people, you see this thread of real pain at the state of the world. Kurt Cobain was one of Jahseh's favorite influences. And I think, similarly, this was an artist who seemed to be transmuting this sense of torture that I think that we're just not paying attention to. So I had that sense of him, sort of connotatively, and then as I started to do the research, really understood just how deeply connected he was to those ideas.
Cobain is often portrayed as a victim of his own success in an industry that had gone mad, but that’s not the case with artists like Jahseh. Why do you think that is?
I think that the mainstream media is a little bit slow to catch up on the complexity and the nuance that exists in the Black experience. I think that they see an appearance, they see tattoos and they see blackness and they pile on a whole entire set of assumptions and give themselves permission not to dig any deeper.
What were your first conversations like with Jahseh's family? Was that very early on in the process that you were talking to Jahseh's mom?
After interviewing with The FADER, Cleo was next. She was really the decision maker in terms of who was going to be hired as a director. Something told me, just level with this human being and be here as a person first and foremost. So that's what I did. And I was like, "I'm here because my instinct told me to come here and that this was something that I needed to do." And it was. I felt this really strong gut instinct that this was something that I was particularly positioned to do. From there, it just opened up into a really, really long conversation. And at that time, her grief was so, so raw.
That was a critical component of this filmmaking process and this storytelling. I was asking myself, can I use the documentary filmmaking process to facilitate some type of catharsis or some type of reconciliation with the narrative of a person's life that could hopefully leave the participants in a slightly better place than when I found them? I think that this is the potential of storytelling. I think that this is the potential of interviewing, and this is the way that it's used in other settings.
You talked about your past experience, your interest in mental health and how sort of foundational that is in your process and into your outlook. First of all, how did you find that mirrored in talking both to Cleo and to the rest of Jahseh's family? Were there differences in the way that you thought about mental health?
Mental health is ubiquitous. Even if you're not talking about it specifically, you're talking about it. It's a question of our consciousness and who we are and why we do the things that we do. So it wasn't an explicit thing. There weren't many moments where we were analyzing concepts around mental health. It was more creating the comfort level to be transparent about painful and difficult moments, creating the comfort level for people to be able to grieve with me during interviews. [For] a lot of people, it was their first time talking about these things on camera. So there was raw processing. And I was grateful that I had had the preparation to sort of just hold that interpersonally. Perhaps a therapist or some other type of professional would've been better qualified, but I was happy that I had a little bit of that experience and that training. But I think it's one of those things that was just in the air. And I knew from the very beginning that I wanted this film to speak, first and foremost, this film should speak to a 15-year-old boy. So there wasn't really a lot of space for kind of high level analysis. It had to be embedded in the facts and the emotional turns of the story.
Was that 15-year-old in your head from the very start?
Absolutely. I know what it feels like to be mentally and emotionally not getting your needs met anywhere because you're torn between… you're supposed to be a kid and there's all this authority, but you have these feelings, these thoughts, these insights, and these experiences, and there's nowhere that's really validating that. I've always seen and felt that need, and that was why this was really exciting because it's like, here's a moment where kids are actually going to listen up and I can meet them where they're at and have the conversation with them.
The film doesn’t insist upon globalizing its every idea, but there are obviously parts of this story that apply to the world outside, to culture more broadly. What are these things that you see reflected in X's story that are happening elsewhere — things that perhaps aren’t being dealt with properly?
One of them is housing insecurity. The poverty and the isolation that a lot of everyday people are facing — this is what puts a young woman like Geneva in a situation where she has to choose between her safety and her shelter. Another one is the criminal justice system and the way that it's just being wielded, like a hammer against all different types of tools, all different types of problems that really deserve all different types of solutions. We just have this one crushing machine. Those two things I think are huge factors that families all over the country are facing and dealing with. Parents who have children who are going through these experiences and don't have the tools they need, they're just getting to the criminal justice system, and it's quite unfair. And not only that, but what kind of predicament does that put us in as a country over time if we're not able to meet the population need for different types of social services?
It’s tempting to think that X’s story was a perfect storm of all these issues, but maybe the problem is that his story is more common than people think?
I think that's it. I think X was explosive in every way. He was magnified, his energy was huge. His power was magnetic. He could speak to 10,000 people at once in this way that was just so on point and correct. But I think if you just dial down the energy level, you have a really, really common story. And that's why he connected with so many people, because it is so many people's story.
What has the response been like so far? Has it been what you expected?
It's been much, much better than I could have possibly expected. I have to be honest, I was terrified. I was terrified. I did this project as an act of faith in certain principles, certain guiding principles about the process of storytelling. And there was no guarantee as to whether or not people would actually be able to interpret the intentions that I had put in. Would they be just too frustrated by the idea of even memorializing someone who's done something so violent? And so I'm really encouraged so far — critics, fans, men, women who've survived domestic abuse, people who are struggling with mental illness, everyone so far seems to find a connection to find a place in this film. And that was absolutely my biggest hope and goal and intention. It was to try to look at this from the perspective of a whole, to try to create a tool and a space where we could meet and have a dialogue that was constructive.
I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that we should respond as a community when acts of violence are committed. And I think that's where #MeToo and cancel culture, that's the intention behind it. I don't think I'm hired for this job if it isn't for that cultural pressure. I felt like the way that I could help was to take the conversation further. What happens after that moment of reaction? Where do we go and how do we collectively evolve? And how do we do something other than polarize ourselves further and further apart?
