In 2021, Bassam Tariq got the opportunity of a lifetime.
The filmmaker, born in Pakistan and raised in the United States, only had a pair of features under his belt – a well-reviewed documentary called “These Birds Walk” (directed with Omar Mullick) and a narrative feature called “Mogul Mowgli” starring Riz Ahmed that was also well-reviewed but hardly anybody saw. But he was hired to mount a hugely anticipated Marvel Studios project, “Blade,” based on the half-vampire character created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan and immortalized on screen by Wesley Snipes in three movies (and a robust cameo in “Deadpool & Wolverine”).
Tariq had one of the hottest stars on the planet signed up to play the title role, two-time Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali, and the excitement of countless Marvel fans, eager to see a new iteration of the beloved character. (Ali even made a brief vocal cameo as the character in a post-credits scene attached to 2021’s “Eternals.”)
A year later Tariq had left the project and, after another director was briefly attached, “Blade” fell apart altogether. (Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige later said he felt like a “gigantic loser and a failure” for not getting the movie made. Ali has seemingly left the MCU behind, telling GQ, “If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it.”)
But out of the ashes of “Blade,” something greener and better emerged, with Tariq and Ali reteaming for “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.” The idiosyncratic action movie, which is will debut at the Toronto International Film Festival before playing other festivals and opening later this fall, stars Ali as a soft-spoken, middle-class assassin. When his wife passes away, leaving him alone with three children (including an infant, still breastfeeding), he has to figure out a way to get out of the life he’s made for himself while also providing a future for his family.
The movie has a rhythm all its own. Most of the film is Ali’s character searching for breastmilk for his child, but it’s punctuated by breathless action set pieces, gloriously staged and performed by Ali (drawing on his training for “Blade”). Both halves of the film are equally as edge-of-your-seat – the real-world stakes make the more fantastical elements come alive (and vice versa). It’s like if the Dardenne Brothers made a “John Wick” sequel – spiritual and meaningful and deeply entertaining. You’ve never quite seen anything like it.
Tariq said he actually started writing the script for “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” before working on “Blade,” during the pandemic, but the idea goes back even further. In 2014, after his wife gave birth to their son, she had an infection. “We weren’t sure if she was going to make it out or not,” said Tariq. Their son would only take breast milk, and she was in and out of consciousness (and in a part of the hospital where infants weren’t allowed).
“Basically, I was looking around for breast milk for my son all around New York City. I called a few places. I think they thought I was like a prank caller, like it was a weird thing to ask for,” Tariq explained. “And I think things have changed now. But at that moment, I do remember like feeling utterly helpless.”
He remembers questioning his faith at the time – if he did everything right in his life, why was this happening to him?
“I’ve always had this struggle with faith. The idea of even bringing a child into the world requires you to have to take a leap of faith in something because you don’t know what’s going to happen with this kid. And I was like, I did this and this is how you treat me?” Tariq said. “I felt like all this anger.”
After the experience (his wife and son were fine, don’t worry), he realized that his son really needed was him – “just to be a present father and not someone that was running around wild.” He remembers taking his son, after he fed, and holding him really tight. His son calmed down. Tariq realized, Oh, that’s what he needed. Just needed me to be me.
“That’s what I was searching for in the essence of that in this entire crazy film,” said Tariq.
When Tariq was writing an early version of the script for “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,” he didn’t have a name for Ali’s character. So he just wrote “Mahershala.” It was only later, on “Blade,” that he got a chance to work with the actor.
Tariq said he was working on “Blade” for about a year-and-a-half and had moved his family to Atlanta, where pre-production was well underway. Tariq confirmed that his version of the movie was set at least partially in the 1920s; Ruth Carter was their costume designer, and when she went to make Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” she brought some of the unused costumes from “Blade” with her.
He didn’t really get to know Ali until afterwards. And he never told him about the script for “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” while they were working on “Blade.”
“The system was cool, and we were a part of it, but you knew that there was somebody else that’s running this thing. You’re there on their time. It’s a different thing. But I think we connected even at that point definitely on spirituality and our modalities of what this work is like, what this work means to us,” Tariq said. “I think that’s where I felt like I had a real kinship with him and I think we both had this desire to finish something.”
As Tariq remembered it, Ali told him, “I like to finish what I started.”
“And there was something that we were starting, with these ideas and this stuff. Even though the film’s incredibly different from whatever we were doing with ‘Blade,’ I think the ideas of what we wanted to talk about were very close to him and me, particularly when it comes to sexuality and fatherhood,” said Tariq. “I think we both wanted to make a kick-ass action movie, and how do we do it in a way where the violence has weight, and it also changes story and character.” It was important that the action not be, in Tariq’s words, “a long guitar solo.”
There were other things that he took from his time on “Blade” that he applied to “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.”
One was that he wanted to shoot the movie in Atlanta, where he was preparing to shoot “Blade.” (For a while most of the Marvel Studios movies were shot there; they have since decamped to London, with its even-friendlier tax incentive programs.)
“Atlanta was this incredible place where my kids were a part of this beautiful Black Muslim community. I’m not Black, my wife’s not Black, but they just took us in, and we had an amazing time just being there with them for the whole year,” said Tariq. “As I was writing this movie, it’s like I made a prayer of like, I would love to come back here to make this movie. When everything lined up, it was like, Let’s come back here and make this movie. Mahershala agreed with me too and that was really something that was that was quite exciting.”
He also learned lessons from working with Feige, who Tariq described as “always pushing things.” “I would see him in rooms and all that, and unfortunately, we didn’t get a lot of time together because his time was so stretched with so many projects,” said Tariq. But he picked up on how attuned Feige was to the audience. Tariq admitted that he came from the art house world where “you’re kind of like, Who cares about the audience?”
But he would study Feige as he talked about what he described as “cheer moments.” Tariq was puzzled but intrigued. “It was really cool to like understand that there are things that, when somebody’s taking time out of their life to watch your film, you want to honor that time. And I think that was something that I really felt like, Oh wow, they really care about that,” said Tariq. “I find that they’ve done a really incredible job of maintaining a core audience. That’s something that’s really commendable. And that’s something that I want to learn more about and learn to do as I build my own career.”
When crafting the movie, Tariq was inspired by Jim Jarmusch’s 1999 crime thriller “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,” which similarly put the lone gunslinger trope in a modern, urban environment, and leaned on spirituality as a governing principle for a killer who still has honor. (Shortly before we spoke, Tariq was invited into the Criterion Closet and one of the movies he chose was – you guessed it – “Ghost Dog.”)
“What makes ‘Ghost Dog’ so great is that even the mob people are so human, they’re bumbling. They border on caricatures, but then there’s a humanity to it. It was a massive inspiration for this film. And I think what there’s this man that’s trying to live in modernity, but he’s trying to hold on to these ancient codes,” said Tariq.
He said he remembered watching the film and thinking, That’s being Muslim.
“Because you’re holding on to these principles that nobody else holds on to anymore – these ideas of you’re going to pray five times a day, you’re going to look northeast. If you’re an observant Muslim, you know where the sun is, and you always know where northeast is,” said Tariq. “There are these things that just feel quite quote unquote ancient. When I saw what Ghost Dog was doing, I was like, He’s basically a Muslim.”
And it helped that Ali was also a big fan.
It even inspired the fact that Ali’s character Latif uses a sword as his holy weapon in “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,” since Tariq loved the scenes in “Ghost Dog” where Forest Whitaker is training with a sword. He was always disappointed he didn’t use the sword.
Ali was instrumental in maintaining a singular tone throughout the different shades of “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,” where it swings from a domestic drama to something far larger and more oversized. “You’ve seen a lot of films that when they go into action scenes, the whole language of the movie changes, and that’s always been such a pet peeve of mine,” said Tariq.
Coming from the world of documentary films, Tariq said, “you can always smell bullshit really quick.” He said that a lot of times acting that doesn’t feel authentic will instantly take him out of whatever he’s watching, and he wanted to avoid that at all costs.
“The thing that Mahershala is really able to do is to anchor us emotionally where we are. And I wanted to create something that I think we can emotionally be anchored in, as wild as it gets,” said Tariq. “Because I think being a father is like you’re always balancing a lot of different plates. That’s just what it feels like. It just felt right in a way.”
We wondered if the movie’s religious and spiritual specificity was a turnoff to any potential backers and he said Alana Mayo, the president of Orion Pictures, an Amazon MGM Studios label, never blinked. He pointed to other Orion movies “American Fiction” and “Nickel Boys” for the types of movies that they were willing to make.
“These are films that are doing things in a very different vernacular. The film language or the film grammar of ‘Nickel Boys’ being released by a big studio just doesn’t happen. It’s something that you’d expect to see at some small festival. But the fact that they were able to give it the life and give it the breath and what it deserves, I think that that is something that really excites me about somebody like Alana,” Tariq said.
“I didn’t want to do something that was really small,” said Tariq.
And “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” is not small – it has scope and scale and wonderful set pieces, many involving an evil right-wing cult leader played menacingly by John Cho, his mouth full of gold teeth and a cowboy hat perched atop his head. The sequences are so satisfying, in fact, that you can imagine Feige finally seeing the movie and feeling even more like a loser for not locking these two down for his cinematic universe.
When Tariq was done with “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,” he was reminded of a story that he once heard about Philip Glass. He was a taxi driver. And after he did his opera “Einstein on the Beach,” Glass went back to driving a cab “because all the money that it made just paid for its production.” “He was never romantic or woe-is-me about it he was just like, ‘No one’s asking for me to do this, I have to just do this because I’m compelled to do it,’” said Tariq. “That’s something that I’m trying to remind myself as I’m back writing again, bleeding on the page, is that no one knows what this is, but I feel compelled to continue to do it because I do think that there’s something really exciting that I still want to say.”
And he’s not ruling out a return to franchise filmmaking. (It’s hard, in fact, to imagine producers watching “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” and not being dazzled by its soulfulness and craft.) Tariq said the he really loves the recent “Planet of the Apes” movies “because they say something, and at the same time, they’re still this incredible spectacle, and you’re in awe.” He feels similarly about the work of the Daniels and “Project Hail Mary,” Christopher Miller and Phil Lord’s sci-fi epic from earlier this year.
“There’s something great about those swings and I hope this film can live in in that world of those films that have taken swings. That’s what we need more of. I’m getting older now. I’m turning 40 this year and I’ve got young kids. I want them to be inspired to write outside of their own box of you whatever people are telling them to look at or read,” said Tariq.
