Time to get serious

A period drama set amid the explosive racial politics of the 1960s South. An all-female ensemble cast. An inexperienced director.

It sounds like a recipe for a movie that would send studio executives running. Yet “The Help” – a complex tale of white women and their relationships with the black maids who clean their houses and care for their children – didn’t just get made.

The DreamWorks film, which arrived in theaters Wednesday, is vying for the attention of audiences more interested in substantive fare as Hollywood begins to shake off the popcorn movies of summer.

Based on Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel, the film project had one thing going for it: the book’s popularity. It stayed atop best-seller lists for close to two years.

Still, some critics carped about a white author writing in a black dialect for a pair of maids who serve as two of the book’s three narrators. Others felt the white narrator – an idealistic college grad named Skeeter Phelan, who persuades the black maids of Jackson, Miss., to tell their stories to her and causes a sensation when she publishes their tales anonymously – was too much of a savior.

Despite those concerns, with so many juicy parts for women, casting the film’s leading ladies was not particularly hard.

Octavia Spencer, best known for her small but powerful role in Will Smith’s “Seven Pounds,” came aboard first to play Minny Jackson, a sharp-tongued maid with an abusive husband.

Spencer had met Stockett, and the author actually wrote the novel’s character with the actress in mind after they spent a memorable day walking around New Orleans before the book was finished.

“I was 100 pounds heavier then and on a diet. I needed some breakfast and I was complaining,” Spencer, 39, recalls with a laugh. “So the complaining back and forth and the ability to speak up for herself, I know that part of Minny really, really well.

“Plus the fact that we are both short, chubby, gorgeous women – I know that part of her really well too.”

Oscar nominee Viola Davis (“Doubt”) was more circumspect about agreeing to the role of the stoic house servant, Aibileen. After all, it was 2010 and this was a role as a maid – in a uniform, no less.

“There is huge responsibility within the African-American community. I mean huge,” says Davis, 45. “There are entire blogs committed to saying that I’m a sellout just for playing a maid.”

Director Tate Taylor persevered, spending hours making Davis feel comfortable with the role and ensuring that “The Help” would not be a watered-down portrayal of race relations in the 1960s South.

“My key objective was to give this movie street cred, especially within the African-American community – to represent them and not sugarcoat it,” says Taylor.

He found his Skeeter in 22-year-old Emma Stone (“Easy A”), while Bryce Dallas Howard, 30, landed her first role as a villain, playing against type as Hilly Holbrook.

As head of the Junior League, Holbrook starts a segregationist initiative to encourage whites to install separate toilets in their homes for their black servants (an effort, she says, intended to stem the spread of germs).

Taylor was determined to film in the South to give the production authenticity. The movie was shot primarily in the small town of Greenwood, Miss., population 15,000.

History lurked around every corner – the nearby Tallahatchie River, for instance, is where in 1955 a group of whites dumped the body of a 14-year-old black boy, Emmett Till, who reportedly had whistled at a white woman. The slaying helped mobilize the civil rights movement.

The actresses recently gathered to discuss their roles and racial issues. Some highlights:

Q: What did being in Greenwood do to your performance?

Davis: When you are shooting right around the corner from the Tallahatchie River and you know that … Emmett Till’s body was found in that river … and you know (Michael) Schwerner, (Andrew) Goodman and (James) Chaney (the civil rights workers killed in 1964 about 100 miles east of Greenwood) and the history of that and the history of Medgar Evers, and the fact that those people look just like you, it’s hard to relax.

And then Baptist Town, where we shot the exteriors of Minny and Aibileen’s houses, it’s an all-black community, 85 percent unemployment, not a single high school graduate in years. It’s hard to separate, to have fun, to say, “OK this is pretend, we are in a movie. Let’s have a great time and eat fried chicken and cook cheese grits.”

Q: Was there an extra sense of responsibility you felt in playing these roles because of the history?

Spencer: There are a lot of people who don’t like the idea of us playing maids without knowing anything about the story. Not knowing how proactive these women are in their community and how they are propagating change.

Q: Did that give you pause before signing on?

Davis: Yes.

Spencer: That’s one of the reasons that you were constantly talking to Tate. They had lots of consultations, text messages, emails about the role, making sure Aibileen wasn’t a passive character.

Davis: A Mammy.

Spencer: That’s the thing I hated about “Gone With the Wind.”

Stone: The weirdest thing for me was going to the houses (in the community) and we would meet the housekeepers who were in uniform working for the family. Viola would be in costume and these women would be in uniform and they would avert their eyes when they were shaking my hand. It was mind-boggling.

Howard: There was this one woman, she was in her 70s, she was in uniform and she had worked there since she was 14 years old. This was the third generation of women she had worked for. …

I asked her if she had read the book. … And she said, “I could tell some stories.” As an outsider doing this movie, it was an incredibly eerie thing to be close to this world and see that not much has changed.

Q: Was it hard to leave your characters behind?

Davis: It was hard for me to shake Aibileen. Those first couple of lines that Emma says to me, “Did you ever dream of being anything else?” – that just breaks my heart. I don’t think anyone has ever asked her that.

And to be in the bodies of those women who never had any hopes of being anything other then what their grandmothers and their mothers were. That’s something.