Oscar winner Ridley aims to bring messages home

Home is where your family is.

And although John Ridley was in London filming his new Showtime series “Guerrilla” when civil unrest broke out in Milwaukee this summer, it was, he said, almost like being here.

“I was getting texts from my parents,” he said Saturday. “Real-time updates. My sister lives here. Her kids live here. It’s one thing to see things happening from halfway around the world. It’s another thing when you have family members here. That was a whole different experience.”

Ridley was born in Milwaukee — in the 4200 block of N. 18th St., he rattled off — and grew up in Mequon. He was in Milwaukee Saturday to give a “state of the cinema” address at the Milwaukee Film Festival.

His acclaimed ABC series is called “American Crime,” but the prolific Oscar-winning screenwriter of “12 Years a Slave” is living the American dream.

And by joining the Milwaukee Film Festival’s board of directors, he hopes to spread the wealth.

“If I can bring dollars and use my profile” to help disenfranchised communities, Ridley said, “then that’s what I want to do.”

His body of work reflects a similar passion for political social engagement.

“At its best, entertainment is an apparatus for delivering empathy,” Ridley said. And “it’s incumbent on me to find stories that matter and find ways to present them that isn’t a dry dissertation on history or a polemic about race, class or ethnicity.”

Sadly, he is finding plenty of material in current events.

“There is an extremely vocal group of individuals who … when they talk about being maligned or disaffected, it becomes news," he said. "But another demographic has to get shot to be on the news.”

Ridley said the “media was amazingly complicit” in this, and blamed “people we look to for leadership” for focusing on “our fears, rather than on the things we can accomplish.”

“Guerrilla,” about the Black Power movement in Great Britain, is set in the 1970s, at a time when people “reached a point where there was no recourse available to them except to rise up.” It also touches on immigration and the racial divide in ways that are “particular to the U.K. but are very global.”

Similarly, the racially themed first season of “American Crime” was filmed during events in Ferguson, Mo., and aired during protests in Baltimore.

“And I thought, ‘This is unhappy synchronicity.’ ”

Last season, “American Crime” dealt with race but also with sexual assault. The third season, which will air this winter, deals with workers' rights, reproductive rights and the opioid epidemic.

"But it's really about the price other people pay so people like me can maintain a certain lifestyle," Ridley said. "There’s a crime going on that a lot of us … are complicit in, and (the question becomes,) do we maintain the complicity or do something about it?”

Ridley also is producing a miniseries on the Atlanta child murders for FX, and a series for Marvel Comics that is “super-, double- and triple-top-secret.”

He said that by joining the Milwaukee Film Festival board, he hopes to act as “an influencer” on aspiring film artists in the area and become part of an effort to give people “with unique interests … an environment where they can work.” That, he said, includes working with the festival to find “spaces we can repurpose and develop for media entertainment."

"I don’t see why,” like other cities, “Milwaukee can’t have growth … that is focused on entertainment.”