Emilio Estevez: The Public, dad Martin Sheen and a plea for compassion

Filmmaker and star of classics including Mighty Ducks and The Outsiders Emilio Estevez has an important message for moviegoers.

Emilio Estevez would be primed to cash in on fans’ nostalgia obsession.

All those movies and TV shows that people grew up with are being rebooted, revived or reunion-ed. Audiences can’t get enough of reliving their youths.

So now there’s a Top Gun sequel happening, a Dark Crystal TV prequel, Bill & Ted are off for another adventure and Beetlejuice will slink across our screens once more.

As a leading member of the Brat Pack, Estevez’s star power in the 1980s and early 1990s is hard to overhype. He was in all the movies hot young actors wanted to be in: The Outsiders, St Elmo’s Fire, The Breakfast Club, Young Guns, The Mighty Ducks and Mission Impossible.

But you won’t find Estevez cameoing in the Young Guns reboot due for next year. He was also the only member of The Breakfast Club who didn’t do a guest spot on TV show, Psych.

Instead, Estevez has been busy on his own projects, writing, directing and starring in stories he wants to tell.

Also in a library, but in The Breakfast Club Picture: Universal Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

This week, his latest film The Public is released in Australian cinemas. The feel-good movie about public libraries and homelessness is Estevez’s desperate plea to moviegoers for kindness in a world that doesn’t prioritise it.

“We are in a place in history where we could all use some compassion and some empathy, and this is a compassion and empathy-driven motion picture that asks us to look at the poor and the marginalised in a way that we may never look at them in our daily lives,” he told news.com.au.

“I’m proud we tackle some of the difficult issues of our time, but by the same token, the movie does its job in that it’s entertaining. I think that took some people by surprise. In some ways, critics felt I might have trivialised some of the issues we were addressing.

“But in fact, it’s a spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down, right? So this is more like gluten-free cheesecake.”

Estevez wrote, directed and starred in The Public

Starring alongside Alec Baldwin, Christian Slater, Jeffrey Wright, Michael K. Williams and Jena Malone, Estevez plays Stuart, a librarian at the Cincinnati Public Library, where the movie was filmed.

But not just a custodian of books, Stuart and his colleagues have become more like social workers with the influx of homeless people who seek out the library’s shelter during the day. On a particularly cold night during a bitter winter that has claimed the lives of those without somewhere to go, Stuart joins 100 homeless men to barricade themselves in.

It becomes an act of nonviolent public disobedience, which an uncaring DA played by Slater and a hostage negotiator played by Baldwin are determined to end.

The experience of writing and making this story gave Estevez a better understanding of his father Martin Sheen’s history of civil protest against nuclear weapons, for conservation and other causes.

“During the eighties and nineties, I watched (my father) get arrested, oftentimes carted off in handcuffs,” Estevez said. “He’d be reciting the Lord’s Prayer at the top of his lungs and so often he looked like a lunatic. I understood it fundamentally but I didn’t understand it spiritually.

“I came to understand it spiritually when I started developing The Public. The movie’s resolution is truly a reflection of that. It’s a reflection of his influence, it’s a reflection of a world that I’d like to see.”

With his father Martin Sheen in 2010

While Sheen isn’t in The Public, he did appear in Estevez’s two previous films, the Robert F. Kennedy drama Bobby and The Way. The Way, in particular, was a family affair, with Estevez’s son Taylor also working on the production.

Sheen has since declared The Way, a tale of a man on a pilgrimage after the death of his son, his favourite movie that he has been involved with. But the devout Sheen wanted The Way to be a more Catholic movie.

“I pushed back on that,” Estevez said. “I told him, ‘I respect your faith and I respect you want to make this a Catholic role, but I think we need to make this film more accessible’, so my task was to make a film that could be embraced by any denomination.”

Estevez only made The Way after the original funding for The Public fell through. The Public was slated to be his Bobby follow-up, having been inspired by an article from former librarian Chip Ward.

The Public gave him a better understanding of his father’s activism

“In 2008, we were up and running, we were casting and putting together the crew, and then we hit the economic crisis. So we lost funding and I had to pick up the pieces and figure out what we were going to do next.

“Twelve years in the making, the world has become a very different place and the issue of homelessness, especially in the US, has been top of mind. We shot The Public in 2017 and just in the last couple of years, it’s become sadly more relevant than when we were shooting.

“Homelessness and mental health will not be solved with one single resolution or legislation. It’s the moving of the collective consciousness towards saying, ‘I’m not OK with this, I’m not OK with people sleeping on the street’.

“In seeing this movie, I hope audiences look at individuals experiencing homelessness with a different eye, that these are people who are human, they have a past and this is not how they expected their lives to end up.”

Much like his father, his sense of public service comes across strongly, not just when he speaks but in the three movies he’s made.

“I think there is a purpose for all of us. I think it comes down to public service and community service. What can we do to make things better, not just in our own homes but in the lives of those around us? And it’s up to politicians, pastors and community leaders to do that.

“We haven’t seen a whole lot of that.

“Hope is one of the reasons I made Bobby. I remain a person of hope, rather than being an optimist. I think being an optimist is a kind of foolish these days.

“But I am a person of hope.”

The Public is in cinemas from today

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