'Barry' director on race, identity and why the young Obama matters

Vikram Gandhi didn't direct the Netflix biopic Barry because he cared about Barack Obama. He made it because he cared about a kid named Barry.

Gandhi set out to discover who Barack was before he was Barack, back in 1981. The film follows a portion of Obama's life then as a student at Columbia University, and how it shaped who he would grow up to be.

"I don’t know who Barack Obama is," Gandhi told Mashable in a phone interview. "I didn’t study that. I studied who Barry was. I related with Barry. The things that he’s struggling with are things that people around me have struggled with, I’ve struggled with, and I think that I still struggle with. Barack Obama’s the president; I have no idea what that’s like, but I know what it’s like to be a confused kid, a 20-year-old kid in New York City trying to figure out where you belong."

The 1981 iteration of Barack Obama held particular resonance for Gandhi, who studied at Columbia some 17 years later. He remembered the classes, the bars, the diners -- he even lived next door to the building that once housed a future president. The film is an intersection of two identity crises: What it means to grow up and what it means to be mixed race in America.

"There’s an experience and a common thread which is the feeling of trying to figure out what your identity is, where you fit in and people misunderstanding you or trying to put you in a box and how one has to push through that," Gandhi says, listing the cities and countries that played important roles in Obama's life. "This seemed like it was a way to talk about America -- sort of a contemporary American experience of being a young person we could see in 1981 New York in Barack Obama."

But this is a film about Barry, and it holds true to that title, never uttering the full name that he would embrace in later years and use to run for the nation's highest office.

"Part of the reason he’s Barry is just the name has been put on him," Gandhi says. "It’s been adjusted and tweaked and easy for people to pronounce, easier for a kid named Barry to get by living in California than it is for a guy named Barack -- that’s like a word you’ve never heard before," Gandhi says. "There’s compromise in Barry, and there’s a hesitation and an awkwardness as opposed to a strong step moving forward with Barack."

"I think there’s that kind of hesitance in Barry that we try to show, which is being tugged in every direction and having to figure out which direction you choose," he adds.

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With a subject so prolific, Gandhi's team had to cast the perfect young actor to embody the future president without distraction or disingenuousness. Among others, he had a headshot for now-24-year-old Devon Terrell, who Gandhi interviewed over Skype.

"The second I was talking to him I was like ‘That’s the guy,'" Gandhi recalls. "He didn’t have an accent, he had an Australian accent when we spoke. There was a lot of work that we had to do in order to make sure he could sound like [Obama], but I just knew I needed a focused actor to do that. I can do accents -- if I can do accents, so can anybody who’s doing this for a living. That wasn’t really a concern, and he looked enough like him. He just had that drive and charisma that I knew we could make it happen."

From when Terrell arrived in New York City to when the cameras started rolling, he had three weeks to nail the voice, accent and attitude of a young Barack. Gandhi gave his young star homework, from books about Obama to the president's personal writings and videos of him on the web. He insisted that Terrell be Barry at all times -- even the crew were instructed not to respond to him unless he sounded in character.

On screen, Terrell captures Obama's essence, infusing it with the restlessness of youth and conflict like an embodiment of the questions he yearns to answer.

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"America is an inherently ethnically diverse place and a melting pot, and the idea that that’s what America is and it’s going to become increasingly more and more like that -- that’s something that’s been thrown into question recently with the White nationalist rhetoric that’s come up in the last election. So what I thought was extremely personal and interior meditation on identity through Barack Obama’s youth ended up becoming now a very political issue."

In a crucial scene of the film and trailer, Barry describes his background to a couple, at a loss for what it says about him as a person.

"My mom's from Kansas, and my dad's from Kenya -- I only met him once though. I grew up in Djakarta and Honolulu and spent a little time in California and then I ended up here." "That's some kind of gumbo. You know what that makes you, young brother?" "No sir, I don't. I really, really don't." "It makes you American. And you don't ever have to choose."

"I used to think that was maybe the corniest line in the movie," Gandhi says. "But now I feel like it’s the most important one."

Barry is now streaming on Netflix.