The complexities and subtleties of race relations in America and, specifically, the U.S. court system, are explored in Marc Silver’s riveting courtroom documentary 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets, which revolves around the 2012 Florida gas station shooting and murder of black teen Jordan Davis by Michael Dunn, a middle-aged white man. Citing “loud music” as the inciting factor in the crime, Dunn fired ten bullets at Davis and his unarmed friends as they fled the scene.

As a companion piece to our conversation with Jordan’s mother, Lucia McBath, we spoke to Silver about the filmmaking process and how he approached inserting himself into the lives of Jordan’s family and friends. 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets opens this week in limited release and will air on HBO in the fall.

I interviewed Lucia a couple of months ago. She said of you that…
…I was a bastard. [laughs]

No, not quite! [laughs] She said you were very shy when you two first met.
When you’re walking into someone’s life, particularly when they’re living through a death in the family, you don’t want to go in there like a bull in a china shop. I didn’t want it to seem like I was stealing her story for my own needs. I stepped very sensitively into that space and time they were in, which was weirdly a couple of weeks before the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin verdict. It was really inspiring meeting them and learning who they were as parents. They continue to parent children. They became great spokespeople.

She shared so many brilliant ideas with me when we met, and we were only together an hour. You must have had some fascinating conversations with her.
We didn’t really cover a lot of what Lucia became with her activism in the film. We felt like the power of spending time with her was audiences being able to empathize and have feelings for these kind of families who sit behind the news. We hear these stories all the time these days, and I think it’s hard, in a news context, to get underneath the skin of the people involved. We were keen to get as intimate as we could with the feelings Jordan’s parents were going through so that other parents could see what it would feel like if this were to happen to their children.

The murder stemmed from racial tension that was actually very subtle, when you break it down. Mr. Dunn was afraid of the loud music, of the color of the boys’ skin, because it was foreign to his isolated life.
Absolutely. The more we dive into who Michael Dunn is as a character, the more we realize how unaware he was of his own racism. He almost became this metaphor, in film terms, for a part of America that is also unaware of its own racism. The impact of that conditioning led to Jordan being killed, but I think it quietly invites audiences to reflect on their own unconscious biases. There are certain things he says that actually a lot of audience members would agree with. Hopefully they ask themselves, “Why do I fear blackness? How have I been conditioned to have that sense of fear?”

The film instills empathy, which is the most important thing. Mr. Dunn clearly had no empathy.
You know what? His family has never apologized or even commented on Jordan’s death. My hope is that the film is seductive in the way it invites you to consider issues that are hugely complex and subtle, like you said.

Someone tries sushi for the first time, and they hate it. They say, “I’m never going to try it again. I hate all sushi.” Elsewhere, a white person says, “I had a bad experience with a black person, so they’re all bad.” One is clearly more extreme than the other, but I think both of these dismissive, blanket statements actually come from the same place. It’s a matter of fearing the unfamiliar.
Absolutely. It basically boils down to this fear of the “other.” You have to question where that comes from. There are people who say that that’s what white supremacy has done, that the history of the U.S. is built on this fear of and destruction of the “other.” I think, in many ways, that’s what Michael Dunn, the shooter, came to represent. He was almost unable to handle these young black men who were talking back to him. He was angry that he was being spoken back to by these people he deemed to be inferior.

I spoke to David Oyelowo a while back about playing Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma. He said he was a good fit for the role because he’s a Brit, and can therefore approach the material objectively. Would the same apply to you?
I’ve thought about that a lot. I wondered whether me being British was positive or negative or whether it would impact the way I told the story. In many ways I feel it gives me the luxury of having this bird’s eye view and see these invisible, systemic links in this country. On the other hand, I think this story has very universal themes of justice and parenting and race and power and inequality. Those issues are universal.

What was your approach to the story cinematically?
Funnily enough, I’d done a film previous to this which was shot in Honduras, Mexico, Arizona—every frame was gorgeous and there were these big, dramatic vistas. I got to Jacksonville for this movie, and it was winter. It felt very cold and grey. I was worried that there might be nothing to film there. I was stuck in a courtroom with no windows. Walking around Jacksonville, I realized that no one walks in Jacksonville. You go around in your car, go home to your gated community, receive information not from other people, but from the media. And you go to shopping malls. There didn’t seem to be a place where people cross paths with each other. That became a cinematic motif throughout the film. That’s what gave us the idea to film lots of freeways and traffic and listen to radio phone-ins.

That’s how we dealt with life outside the courtroom. Inside the courtroom was very fixed and limited. We were feeding mainstream media a live feed, so we couldn’t show any of the jurors. It was very restrictive. I think that led to the close-up photography. Tiny details on people’s faces became hugely revealing. People were thinking about things much deeper than what could actually be revealed in the courtroom.

You expect Jordan’s parents to leap out of their seats several times, but they just sit still. It’s chilling.
I really felt for them. They were told not to show emotion in the courtroom because it would affect the jury. Every day, the judge had to ask Michael Dunn if he was satisfied with the way the day had gone and how he was represented. You can see the frustration on Jordan’s parents’ faces. At the time, it felt like the rights of Michael Dunn were more important than the rights of Jordan, who wasn’t allowed to be referred to as “the victim.” Race wasn’t allowed to be discussed either. The defense attorney said, because Michael Dunn hadn’t been charged with a hate crime because he wasn’t heard using racist language at the time of the shooting. So race couldn’t be mentioned. Then, you step outside, and everyone’s talking about race on the streets and on the airwaves.

It’s a great time right now for documentaries, but it’s also harder than ever to stand out from the crowd and be unique. There are so many fundamental documentary tools that are now considered cliché. Going into the film, was there anything you were determined not to do?
I didn’t want to have any talking heads, and I didn’t want to have so-called “experts” who weren’t connected to the story. I had this unwritten law that we were only going to speak to people who were directly involved in the case. I guess I cut the film in the way you would cut a fiction film. There are people out there who make great talking-head films, but I prefer telling stories in a way that’s less about data, more about empathy. Ultimately, you can get data on Google. To get a sense of understanding you watch film.

Was there any footage that was painful to leave out?
Lots. I spent my first Thanksgiving with Ron’s family, which was obviously the anniversary of Jordan’s death. There’s a beautiful scene where they pray and toast Jordan. Also, there’s an amazing scene with Ron, who used to play baseball. He and Jordan used to practice and play catch together, but now he catches baseballs thrown by a machine. We talked to him about Jordan as he played with the machine. In Jordan’s absence, you got to learn a lot about who he was.

Talk to me about when you were in the process of shuffling your footage around and organizing the film’s structure. What was the most difficult thing about that?
I think there were two main things. One was the sheer amount of data there was when it came to the trial itself. I was on one camera and we had two remote-controlled cameras. There was a lot of material. Cutting a trial to make it interesting is hard, because they take a lot of time to unfold. Another thing was representing the grief Lucia and Ron were suffering. I think there’s a fine line between exploiting that and manipulating an audience and at the same time observing it. It was also difficult to represent Jordan without ever having met him. He’s the star of the film, and yet he’s the only one who’s not with us. We had some VHS material and some cell phone clips and family photos, but we didn’t want to use those things in an exploitative way. You get to learn who he is through his friends and girlfriend and parents. You get to know him better through them than through us showing pictures of him.

3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets is a courtroom documentary revolving around the 2012 Florida gas station shooting and murder of black teen Jordan Davis by Michael Dunn, a middle-aged white man. Citing “loud music” as the inciting factor in the crime, Dunn fired ten bullets at Davis and his unarmed friends as they fled the scene. Director Marc Silver takes a bracingly minimalist approach to the trial, presenting the unfolding case unadorned, allowing the story to speak for itself.

I spoke to Jordan’s mother, Lucia McBath, about working with Silver, what we can learn from her son’s death, passing on the values of the civil rights movement to younger generations and much more. 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets opens this week in limited release and will air on HBO in the fall.

I wanted to get your reaction to something I saw recently. When asked about the recent string of unarmed black teens being killed by police officers, Neil Degrasse Tyson said, “Okay, this is really bad. But in a way, we’re making progress. When I was a kid growing up in the Bronx, stuff like this happened all the time. Back then, it wouldn’t even make the local paper. Now, it’s national news.”
I agree, absolutely. These kinds of crimes have been happening in communities of color all along. It’s nothing new to us. But now it’s really being exposed. This is just not acceptable. What happens in our communities affects all communities. We’re all an extension of one another. How can we, as a nation of people under the premise of God, condone what we see happening and not make it our business to make change?

I think it’s an issue of education. A lot of people aren’t educated and cultured enough to treat others with real empathy.
Absolutely. We’re always afraid of what doesn’t look, act or think like us. We’re such a diverse country, and that’s what makes us great. But when you have individuals in this country that are afraid of that or believe they’re losing control, they will use any means necessary—systemically, civically, educationally, legally—to try to stymy the growth of our nation and perpetuate fear. When you start telling people they’re not worthy, you’ll see an uprising. I don’t agree with violence and destruction, but it’s just a result of a need.

I think what this film does that’s so important is remind us that Jordan was a human being, a person with interests and hobbies and friends and family. Sometimes it feels like Trayvon Martin is a stereotypical thug to some people, and almost a mascot martyr to others.
We wanted to make sure that people knew who Jordan was. That was the tragedy of Trayvon’s case, that no one ever got to know who he was. He was demonized from the beginning. We were not going to let that happen with Jordan. We were going to tell the truth. We wouldn’t let the media decide for themselves who Jordan was. We’re doing that for his friends, too. Jordan wasn’t hanging out with a bunch of bad kids or doing anything wrong. They came from two-parent households and were all in college. It’s a matter of changing people’s perceptions of the young black male.

What struck me about Dunn’s case was that it almost felt like a generational thing. He said things like “gansta rap,” which is a pretty antiquated term these days. He’s from a generation that still harbors a racist philosophy.
He had all those hours and days sitting there to think up this stuff. “Rap crap.” That was all stuff he created. When people are not exposed to others who look and act differently then them and isolate themselves, this is who they become. This is what they think. If we can help your generation to dispel those kinds of biases, then we’re on the right road. I’m a civil rights baby and my parents were civil rights leaders. I’ve seen that mindset; there are a lot of people in this country who have not. I also think my generation has neglected to give our children knowledge about civil rights. It wasn’t just for black people, but for all people of color. Our generation made it comfortable for you to live in the result of all that hard work, but we didn’t teach you those values. I admire the Jewish community so much. Out of the Holocaust they have risen. They are strong, highly educated people who decided that they’d never forget their past and wouldn’t let their children forget their past.

As a person of color I have to grapple with this reality of being looked at as different every day. I have to go out of my way to accept people even when they say uncomfortable things about me. I have to be the bigger person. I think about this every day, but white people don’t have to think about this, ever. They don’t have to. Some of them do, and I think that’s wonderful and considerate.
But it’s not a part of their existence. They don’t have to think about it.

How do we get them to think about it?
[Sighs] I actually end up doing that a great deal. The easiest way, for me, is to share an example of my life. Anything that I might be able to get them to relate to. If I can share an instance of what I’ve experienced as a black woman and the way’s I’ve been looked upon—even as a fair-skinned black woman—I can hopefully get through.

Talk about meeting Marc for the first time.
He’s kind of a shy person. I was feeling him out. My first thought was, “Okay, he’s a Brit. What does he know about gun violence in this country?” But I understood very quickly that he’s very intuitive with the human spirit and addressing issues of racism. I thought it was refreshing, him being from outside the United States and being able to see what was happening in our country with race and guns and violence. He just has compassion for the human experience, and I so admire him. During the trial we’d have little dinner parties, and he’d come and just be normal with us. He’d allow us to be normal as well—cry when we needed to, get angry when we needed to and not be filmed.

The most startling moment of the movie is when Rhonda tells the truth on the witness stand and basically blows out Michael’s case. What was going through your mind as you sat there?
From the very beginning, my question to the attorneys and detectives was, “Why are we not prosecuting her? She was accessory to the crime!” She told Michael to take her home, not call the police. In my mind, she was just as guilty. I was being told the whole time not to worry about it, because she was cooperating. I didn’t believe she would tell the truth. I had serious doubts. So when she got on the stand and told the truth, it was like an elephant coming off of my chest. She was the one person who could dispel the lies. I don’t know what compelled her to do it other than that she didn’t want to go to jail too. When people ask if I give her sympathy…[trails off]. Thank you for doing the right thing. But for me, that’s as much as I can give.

As an audience member, I was absolutely flipping out watching some of those courtroom scenes. How did you stay so calm?
We were told by the judge that we couldn’t show any emotion. Michael Dunn had more rights in that courtroom than we did. He was allowed to show pictures with his family, but yet, we weren’t even allowed to call Jordan “the victim.” Everything was done to make sure the jurors didn’t sympathize with us. We were told not to sit in the front row. As Michael Dunn is up there on the stand, lying, we had to just sit there. When you see me and Jordan’s father looking down, it’s because that burden was so heavy.

Tell me about the conversations you’ve been having with people at screenings and Q&As.
What we have been hearing and seeing has been so encouraging. A lot of people don’t really know about the case, but of those that do, they don’t know the intricacies of what happened and what brought us to the trial. For them to be able to see these biases that existed going in, it forces them to look into their own hearts and say, “Is there anything about that story that resembles how I feel?” If we can do that, we’ve done well. We just want to open up the conversations.

With so many super-stylized, feels-like-fiction documentaries overpopulating arthouses and streaming services these days, it’s nice when you happen upon a doc that just gets to the damn point. Marc Silver’s 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets is an upfront, streamlined, jaw-dropping courtroom documentary with a hard-hitting message that doesn’t dance around the truth.

The film revolves around the 2012 murder of black 17-year-old Jordan Davis by Michael Dunn, a middle-aged white man. It was the night of Black Friday in Jacksonville, Florida: Dunn, with his then fiancée, Rhonda Rouer, pulled into a gas station parking lot, parking next to Jordan and his three friends, in their own car. Citing loud rap music as the inciting factor in the subsequent altercation, Dunn opened fire on the unarmed teens as they fled the scene. None involved deny any of these facts, a unique setup for a trial documentary.

There’s no epic courtroom battle for Silver to deride drama from; instead, he finds and accentuates the complexities of the fascinating subtext and subtleties that emerge as the trial unfolds. Dunn’s defense hinges on his state of mind at the time of the murder, claiming he feared for his life despite the teens’ lack of deadly weapons and the fact that the deadly shots landed as they were in retreat. Dunn’s only hope was Florida’s controversial stand-your-ground law, but his case wasn’t enough; he’s currently serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole.

Silver was able to film a large part of the trial with a multi-camera setup, which yields the most chilling footage we see. The peculiar, infuriating thing about the trial was the fact that no parties involved were permitted to suggest racism as a motivating factor in the shooting. It’s clear, though, from Silver’s footage, that race was at the front of everyone’s mind sitting in that courtroom. It’s a bizarre thing to watch people shift uncomfortably in their seats as they try their best to ignore the proverbial elephant.

The trial’s most pivotal moment comes when Rouer, recounting the events of the night, divulges information that contradicts the statements of her own fiancée. It’s the biggest breakthrough the Davis family could have hoped for. And yet, we see Jordan’s parents, Lucia McBath and Ron Davis, sitting calm and still, without so much as a roll of an eye. Their instructions were to not react to any of the courtroom proceedings with any measure of emotion, so as not to sway the jury. Knowing what we know, however, we can only imagine the magnitude of what was going in inside their heads.

It’s Silver’s clinical, gimme-the-facts presentation that gives the film its power. The nature of the injustice and the psychologies of his subjects are more than interesting enough to carry us through a full-length feature, and in recognizing that, he shows restraint. The only bits of sentimentality that peek through are in a handful of sequences in which Jordan’s parents and friends paint a picture of who he was as a young man. Though not the focus of the film, these decidedly more humanized segments give the story shape and further outline the gravity of what Dunn has done.

Minimalism is 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets‘ greatest strength, the honor of Silver and Jordan’s parents its greatest virtue. Film’s like this guide the conversation of race and acceptance that’s so defined mainstream media as of late and ensure we don’t use the memory of victims like Jordan Davis, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown as pawns in a larger social debate. They were people, not symbols, and only with that in mind will we ever make progress.