Sixteen-year-old Starr grew up in a poor black neighborhood, but after she saw her best friend gunned down in a drive-by gang shooting when she was 10, her parents sent her off to a wealthy white private school. I thought all that was important in capturing the vibe of what Angie put in the book.Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark But the spirit was still there, like at the very end when everyone’s standing around Mav’s store, when King’s glancing over at his store and saying, ‘I see your store’s doing good,’ we see people coming into the store or Mav working in there. Lewis and the barbecue joint, which was very important to us. When I started the script development stage it felt like it was hard to maintain so many of those characters, so we just put it into Mr. We had the store owner, the barber shop, the church, and it was this village that raised us. "I was very excited about the neighborhood because where I grew up in the '80s and '90s, the community was such a big part of our neighborhood. "It was more about keeping the mood and the vibe of the neighborhood ," notes Tillman Jr. Several of these characters (and we mean in that in every sense of the word) are notably absent on the big screen. One of the more enjoyable aspects of the book are the anecdotes of all the community members: Lisa checking on the older residents, Fo'ty Ounce entertaining the whole block. A little bit here and there just gave us those nuances: Obviously the three years they spent in prison was talked about, and the relationship with Carlos, but it’s those small things that I saw my mother and father do that help us believe in the love and believe that these two are trying not to make the same mistakes they made in the past." "Especially in terms of Lisa wanting to move out of the neighborhood and Mav wanted to stay - all those things gave us a complexity that we don’t really see with a mother-and-father relationship of African-American descent. "I wanted to show the nuances of their relationship in terms of their love for one another, their sensuality, their sense of leadership, and their differences," says Tillman Jr. The film had to portray those same sentiments without the benefit of a few hundred pages to lay it all out. In the novel, readers become incredibly familiar with the history of Maverick and Lisa's relationship: The infidelity, the breakup, the jail sentence. And what does that mean when so often young black kids have to get this talk and are forced out of their innocence into a world that so often sees them as a threat?" We see Starr at such a young age 7 is such a young age to be involved in this very adult conversation. There’s a deleted version of the book where it starts with that scene it didn’t work for us but for the film it gave us this very important background scene for the character, and it informs so much of what she does and how she reacts later on.
"When I saw one of the first drafts of the script, and it opened with that scene of the family I was like maybe we should start the book out that way, too," laughs Thomas. The Carter family sits around the table as Maverick (Russell Hornsby) explains to a young Starr (Kai Ture) and Seven (Hassan Welch) what no child should have to hear: What to do when they got stopped by the police.