Mudbound: the cast and director on being tipped for Netflix's first Oscar success and why other distributors were too scared to touch it

The film opens at the end of the story, and in the exact same place as the novel: with two brothers digging frenetically through the mud, as sunshine turns to pouring rain. They are Henry and Jamie McAllan (played by Jason Clarke and Garrett Hedlund), the chalk-and-cheese brothers who are burying their bigoted father, known as Pappy (Jonathan Banks).

Neither the McAllans nor the Jacksons, the other central family, are rich. But the power balance between the two skews heavily to one side as a result of race, the McAllen family being white and the Jackson family being black. In the Forties, so-called Jim Crow laws reigned in the South: the races were segregated and being black was dangerous – whether you’d just fought for your country or not.

Even on the front line, American black and white men did not fight alongside one another. Instead, the 125,000 African-American soldiers were segregated into their own units for the entirety of the war – and the segregation in the military remained until 1948, when President Truman signed an Executive Order. In the film, Ronsel Jackson (Jason Mitchell) becomes a member of the 761st tank battalion, known as the “Black Panthers”, the real-life unit that was under the command of General Patton.

Ronsel’s family, meanwhile, are sharecroppers – meaning that they live and work on land owned by someone else, and must give a portion of their crop as rent. Such an arrangement was commonplace during the 100 years between the 13th Amendment that was the beginning of the end of slavery and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But in reality, it was little more than slave labour, even in a time of supposed emancipation.

When it came to casting Ronsel’s mother, the laconic, wise and weary Florence, Rees had only one name in mind, and one few else may have thought of: the nine-time Grammy-winning R&B singer Mary J Blige. In fact, Rees wanted her so much that Blige didn’t even have to audition.

“I'd never seen Mary act at all,” says Jason Clarke, frankly, of her casting. “I was like, ‘pfff it's a big role. It's a key part of the film, Dee. I hope she's getting it right.’ But I spoke to Dee and she's a smart cookie with her choices. And she's been proven right.”

More than that: Blige’s is the name most frequently being tipped for one of those Oscar nominations. But Mudbound is by no means her first screen role. Her film debut came in 2001, in the lead role of a little-known drama called Prison Song. Her biggest was in the Lifetime television film Betty and Coretta, in which she played Malcolm X’s wife Betty Shabazz.

But of all the roles she’s played, Florence is the one most departed from Blige herself. It required her to remove every facet of the glamorous persona of Mary J Blige.

“It was a learning experience for me because I didn't realise that I was so vain,” Blige says. “Florence had, what, three dresses. She didn't wear any make-up. She didn't have any lashes, she didn't have any nails. So I had to strip away all these things that the world thinks you need to be beautiful.”

But this period of adjustment, in fact, came rather easily to the 46-year-old singer. And not least because she was undergoing a transformation in her own life. At the time of filming, her marriage of 13 years to her manager Kendu Isaacs was in trouble – and it had been for a long time without her acknowledging it, she realised.

“[I just knew] something's wrong. And I just can't prove what's wrong but I'm sad and I'm miserable,” she explains. Since she finished filming, their marriage has ended in a messy divorce and a legal battle that is still ongoing.

“I just gave that five years of misery to Florence,” she says. “Once I disconnected from Mary J Blige and gave everything to the character, the character gave something to me. Florence gave me a lot confidence and she helped me a lot.”

Blige also took inspiration from her own childhood. Though raised in the projects in Yonkers, New York, she was regularly taken to visit her grandmother in Georgia, where she remembers “seeing everything that was in that film”, from the dirt roads, to the sweltering heat and the mud.

“We even had to get hands in the dirt and pick beans and pick peas and hang clothes on the line,” she recalls. “I watched my grandmother kill chickens for dinner.”

The memories are fond, though, because she felt safe there too. She doesn't remember experiencing racism. “[My family] had white people who loved them,” she says. “And my aunt Lara Bell worked for a white family who loved her. So I've never heard my grandmother speak of racism. I had to deal with it in the music business. But I never heard them speak about it.”

Mudbound premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January and received a rapturous response from both the audience and the reviews that followed. But then… nothing happened. For a fortnight, meetings with film distributors went nowhere.

“They were like, 'this is a black film' or 'this is a race film',” says Rees. “Which just shows the lack of intellectualism in our country, that people can't think of it in more expansive, interesting terms... The studios were afraid of this film.”

It came to Netflix’s attention via an unusual route: Adam Sandler. Having seen and loved the film, he got Netflix’s chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, to watch it, who promptly made them an offer and one that wouldn’t be contingent on any modifications and would allow the film to be marketed as an ensemble piece, as Rees wanted.

“If it weren't for Netflix, this film wouldn't be seen,” she says. “Netflix is a place for auteurs and risk taking. I think that it's a credit to them that they’re bringing it to a global audience.”

Mulligan, however, had no doubt that the film would be picked up. “The response in Sundance was so unanimous. Watching it with an audience and the standing ovation, I had no doubt that it was going to find a home.”

Mudbound is indeed a multi-layered piece, and it’s as much about PSTD as it is about race. When the young soldiers return from the war, it is through their shared trauma, and the devastating impact that it has on their day-to-day lives, that the two bond – in spite of their skin colours.

Actors Jason Mitchell (Straight Outta Compton) and Garrett Hedlund (Tron: Legacy) looked to their own families for inspiration and channelled their grandfathers' experiences, both as young men in America and at war.

For Hedlund, the issue of PTSD is close to home, as he had two grandfathers who fought in the Second World War; one was stationed in the Philippines, the other in Germany. The latter would talk freely about his time in combat. The former wouldn’t speak of it at all.

“I took my mom to Sundance and we'd all just seen this film for the first time and she had tears falling down,” he recalls. “My grandfathers and my father aren't around any more, and she said, ‘I got to see them all again.’”

Meanwhile, Mitchell’s grandfather, who lives in Bush, Louisiana, fought in the Korean War but still cannot read or write – not that that stopped him from running his own barbershop for 68 years. “He overcame everything,” says Mitchell with pride. “He told me that all black people could do on [Louisiana State University] campus was pick up trash. And he was like, ‘I want my kids to go to LSU.’ So he did what he had to do until he got to this point where he could send all his kids to LSU.”

But the past does still weigh heavily upon him, Mitchell says, to the extent that if he sees a policeman he will turn and walk the other way and whenever the subject of a white person comes up, he'll lower his voice to a whisper – even if he's only with a family member.

The racism in Mudbound plainly depicts the sort of events that would cause Mitchell’s grandfather to feel this way. It's harrowing to watch, with much of the aggression doled out by Jonathan Banks’s patriarch, Pappy – who is the sort of man that can’t even share a room with a black person without bristling with anger and hatred.

But the weight of the role lay heavily on Banks, a man that Mitchell warmly describes as “so dope” and “the sweetest guy”. After one particularly violent scene, Banks was left in tears over what he had to depict.

“At the end of that scene, I walked into the hotel bar – and he's just sitting there all by himself,” remembers Hedlund. “I just walked up and he said, 'You guys just did something that you're going to be proud of for the rest of your life'.”

In the case of Clarke’s character Henry, who buys the farm the Jacksons work on, his racism is more subtle, manifesting itself in a sense of superiority rather than out-and-out hatred. By contrast, Henry's wife Laura, played by Mulligan, who reluctantly moves with him from the big city, develops an unspoken friendship with Florence, both trapped, as it were, in a dirt-ridden life that they do not want but have no power to change.

Clarke and Mulligan have worked together before on Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation The Great Gatsby. But they have, they say, known each other for 11 years, when Mulligan was only known on the big screen for playing Kitty Bennet in the film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Clarke was beginning to find work outside his native Australia.

The film on which they first met also served as a brutal introduction to the cold heart of Hollywood for Mulligan. Having been cast in a very minor role in the John Dillinger biopic Public Enemies, at the insistence of director Michael Mann ("I remember it, Michael had to have Carey," Clarke says), she flew over from London for the job. But it didn’t go entirely as she expected, as she drily recounts, point by point: “Dyed my hair peroxide blonde, shot the scene, got cut. Went to the premiere, didn't know… Walked the red carpet, loving life. Sat down, saw a flash of the blonde hair past the screen and I was like, 'where's my... scene... oh...'”

Since those early days, Mulligan has achieved a rare thing in the industry: she’s worked with nearly as many female film and television-makers as male. She’s also been cast in Rees’s next production, a biopic of journalist Gloria Steinem titled An Uncivil War.

Bessie, the HBO film that Rees wrote and directed in 2013, won four of its 11 Emmy nominations – including the award for Outstanding Television Movie. And when it comes to the question of who among their number most deserves an Oscar nomination for Mudbound, both Clarke and Mulligan answer without pause: “Dee.”

But both remain frustrated with the sexism that pervades the industry when it comes to allowing women behind the camera. “If this film was directed by a man, he'd be offered the next Star Wars,” says Mulligan. “Because it's such a good film and if that happens to a man in this industry, they immediately jump to the top of the pile and they get offered everything under the sun.”

Indeed, turning out an epic film in 28 days in the sweltering heat takes the sort of organisation and work ethic that few of us could muster. But the film also serves as an educational piece, shining a light on parts of 20th century history that many of us don’t know much about.

“I hadn't thought about the fact that there were black American soldiers fighting in the war, risking their lives for their country or getting killed and then survivors coming home and being treated the way that they were treated,” Mulligan readily admits. “I hadn't ever seen a picture of a black man fighting in the Second World War. It wasn't something I'd ever given thought to. I knew there were black soldiers but to imagine that they would then return to a segregated society and not be lauded as heroes the way that their white counterparts were was really shocking.”

The cast and crew were also painfully aware that racism is still commonplace today, and that the events they’re depicting are all-too familiar. While shooting the aforementioned scene of racist abuse that made Jonathan Banks cry, news of an attack was being passed around on a mobile phone.

“Someone sent me a picture and said this just happened in Atlanta,” Blige recalls. “And it was a video of [a black man] hanging from a tree. And I said you gotta be kidding, this is still happening. I just pray that this film opens the eyes of people and let's them know that not everyone's bad but we're all in this together.”

Mudbound launches on Netflix and in cinemas with Curzon today