Coss Marte always had a mind for business, he just chose the wrong one initially. In his pitch for his fitness company Conbody to potential investors, he always knows he can get a “wow” from people when he tells them he was clearing $2 million a year as the head of an illegal drug operation at the age of 16, not only well aware of how to turn a profit, but running an organization with plenty of employees. After receiving a prison sentence, he was a model citizen, becoming what the justice system was ideally set up to achieve when it was unlikely that he’d reoffend, but he also found a sense of purpose while he was incarcerated, passing the time with intense physical workouts when he heard his cholesterol was too high, shedding 70 pounds before he was released. As he told director Debra Granik, who had become interested in people getting back on their feet in their post-prison life, that if he were stay out of trouble for five years on the outside, the statistics suggests he’d never be behind bars again and “Leave No Trace” filmmaker decided that she’d keep the cameras rolling for that time and then some.
The resulting five-part series “Conbody Vs. Everybody” stands out even amidst Granik’s already extraordinary filmography as she observes Marte “transform his hustle,” as he is apt to say with a fitness startup where he embraces his status as an ex-con rather than run from it when he can sell people on getting in shape as he did without any additional equipment. Within seconds of meeting the charismatic Marte, it seems as if there would be nothing to deny him success, yet over the years that Granik spends with him, watching him build the business from scratch, first fulfilling orders of lightly worn Air Jordans out of a closet and doing social work on the side to be able to rent out a small studio to eventually taking up space inside a Saks Fifth Avenue for a proper gym, the demands on him seem intense even before adding in visits from a parole officer and the limits placed on his mobility as part of his probation, creating a vicious cycle that can be seen again and again as he brings on new employees after their own release.
If there’s a common link between Granik’s work beyond its quality, it’s shining a spotlight on those who are threatened to be left behind by society, from her unforgettable debut drama “Down to the Bone” in which a working class mother’s drug addiction was fed by living just above the poverty line, to her wonderful previous foray into nonfiction with 2014’s “Stray Dog” about a big-hearted Vietnam vet who just keeps rolling on his motorcycle though the road never gets any easier, and when seeing Marte threatened with becoming just another statistic despite his indefatigable spirit, his impressive management skills and brilliance at branding, it becomes evidence of a fraying social safety net where as much is asked of people trying to turn around their lives after some missteps, there should be more expected of society as a whole to offer them a smoother path forward. (As Sultan, one of Conbody’s first employees says soberly, “The only thing America likes more than a comeback is a great downfall.”) And beyond being a magnificent personal profile of Marte and all of those he brings into his orbit – more than being able to put a roof over his head in New York, a driving force to make Conbody a success is to keep expanding and offering opportunities to others like himself – the series is a great portrait of the forces that shape the U.S., from entrepreneurship to political activism as Marte supports his brother’s run for city council and protests against the construction of new prisons at the expense of other more pressing needs.
Well worth both Granik’s time and yours, the must-see series is now streaming on the Criterion Channel and the filmmaker graciously took a moment to talk about getting to turn the camera on her native New York – and being unable to turn it off, having the canvas to tell such a rich story and like her subject, producing something that can’t be ignored.
From what I understand, this was originally intended to be research for another project. How did Coss become a central focus?
The other project I looked at was more of a traditional narrative, and it dealt with returning to prison. I quickly asked during the research process, “Oh my goodness, how do people not get re-ensnared? What does it take to break the revolving door of recidivism?” Coss was recently returning to New York City from prison. He was at ground zero, meaning he was hellbent on doing this process called re-entry, which is like a rocket reentering the stratosphere. You can blow up and not have a successful re-entry. It’s easy to have that happen. He was doing everything in his power to come back and land back in his neighborhood safely and reintegrate step by step. And when I met him, he was open to the idea of creating a chronicle around this, [acknowledging] “Yes, re-entry is going to be multi-step. It’s going to be intense. The stakes are high. But I am interested in getting involved in recording this. I don’t think non-justice impacted people know what it takes or what parole is and what the various years of re-entry look like for a person returning home from a U.S. prison.”
With a five-part series, you really get to see what that looks like when it moves beyond Coss to the various people he’s able to bring in as Conbody employees who are also getting back on their feet. What was it like to to build something where you could move away from him as a central character – particularly in episode three – and still in essence tell his story?
It took us a very long time on the editing level. I work with a Herculean editor, Victoria Stewart, and she was faced with even more experiences that we could remotely fit into this film. As it is now, it’s in five chapters, about five-and-a-half hours, and it felt that the answer to that extreme puzzle was going to lie in the spontaneity with which Coss started to grow his family. He would get a letter from somebody inside saying, “When I get out, is there a position? Is there any way I could come and see you? Is there a way I could observe one of your classes? I too used fitness to survive inside and would like to try my hand at maybe making a living as a fitness instructor. Could I learn from you?” All of a sudden someone would show up at the door and Coss would turn to them and say, “You know there’s a film crew here. Would it be okay?” So the spontaneity of how that family started to burgeon is ultimately how we structured the film.
In part three, you’re quite right. All of a sudden they’ve gotten this little Jalopy-style bus to go mobile [as a gym] and Derek, the newest trainer is on the bus and they get home from an exhausting set of rounds of being out in the world and both, [he and Coss are] trying to do street marketing for their their fledgling enterprise and the first woman shows up, Syretta, [who’s] been referred by one of Coss’s mentors up in Queens, Sister Tesa, so Sister Tesa enters the story. Then Brother Zach, a Jesuit who is a charismatic activist working with people who are behind the bars who are going to come out and providing scholarship and housing opportunities for people coming home, he gets involved in the story. So the story started mirroring the way that Coss energetically and ferociously hops around the metropolis of New York, building bridges, making bonds, welcoming people, opening the doors, and that’s a lot to keep up with.
The environment has always been such a part of understanding the characters in your films and you’ve never made a film in a city before. Was that an exciting opportunity?
I guess it was something I’ve been waiting for my whole life as a New Yorker for — to film here. I had filmed in upstate New York and Southern Missouri, Pacific Northwest, and the opportunity to go down the block felt incisive. It was both great and also got me in the biggest pickle of my filming life, which is there’s no stopping, right? If you can always go down the block, there’s not that many reasons why you can miss a shoot. You can’t say, “Oh, I can’t get there.” And it can make you nuts because it becomes very hard to resist. Each borough has its urban textures that are irresistible. I’m not going to be all boastful about New York City, but I think we know as a brick-and-mortar extreme monument to the built world, our country values at the very least that New York City has endless texture. The peeling paint, the breaking cement, the crumbling cement, the old metal. There is just not one inch of this city that does not have an insanely irresistible level of photogeneity. And that can make someone who’s scopophilic or gets off on photography kind of nuts. Luckily I had these comrades – this talented group of cinematographers and artists – who also feast on the city’s infiniteness.
I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t looking for it, but there are obviously some things that you couldn’t capture with your own cameras, such as a conference for mass incarceration businesses that Coss attends and there ends up being some cell phone footage. Were you actually all that interested in showing that side of the story – the prison industrial complex – or were there limitations that prevented it?
Yes, I think it’s extremely hard. I’m thinking about some of our most intense, deep dive journalists and documentary filmmakers who do expose that — if Laura Poitras was doing a piece about the Prison Industrial Complex, she would find all the veins, the ways to get in there to understand what we need to know about it. I don’t have those chops. What I did know was that it was going to be crucial to try to find some way to depict what Coss saw when he went to such a conference, and I knew it was going to be hard, but very important to look. It’s all out there. It’s all on the internet to show the product lines and the extreme race to the bottom to make money from the biggest carceral systems of the world, corporations that want to cover the globe with enormous prisons.
Of course right now, it’s happening at a level that we had no idea was possible, all of this recent, renewed attempt to lasso huge populations and incarcerate them and detain them was going to be one of the biggest building booms for the prison industrial complex that the world was ever going to see. I don’t think we were prepared for that. And I don’t know how to depict it. But the prison industrial system really depicts itself well. They do a great job demonstrating their products. making carnivals and festivals and trade shows to demonstrate their batons, their tasers, their electrified instruments, their new bedding, their rec rooms with exciting photography how they’re building $85 billion complexes, going over budget and finagling backdoor deals with politicians. They do a great job showing the breadth and incredible talent of their industry and they do the lion’s share of heavy lifting, portraying themselves, which I guess on some level is good in the sense that it would be very hard for filmmakers to do it. Because a lot of it’s behind closed doors, as we come to find out.
There’s tremendous power in what you captured as well, and I know you can’t probably ever let go of a project like this, but what it is like to reach the point of release with with something that you’ve put so much time into and you see the growth of all these people in front of your lens?
Like the United States’ relationship to veterans of combat and and our many wars, there are veterans of this war that we have waged, which is called mass incarceration or the war on drugs, or the racialized war on poor neighborhoods of America, and like any war, there’s huge fallout, there’s PTSD, there’s trauma and generational trauma. No one escapes a war. No one escapes incarceration without trauma. But there’s also this very important factor called post-traumatic growth. That’s real. And we don’t fully understand it. We don’t fully know how to talk about it. Combat veterans have written magnificent work on it. Carceral scholars have written extremely beautiful work on it. People who’ve served long sentences or who have been released from solitary or death row have written about it. There is a need in our culture to fully understand this, but I feel that [can come with] the more films that get made that chronicle postcarceral growth and the ascension that people can reach when they’re welcomed when the society decides it would like to provide a first or second chance for those who have not had that first or second chance.
I think when people are dealt a very difficult hand through the widespread financial trauma that happens in poor neighborhoods of the United States, what would it take for our society and for non-justice impacted people to be invested in providing the core ingredients that are needed to lasso life and grab a hold of it and see the positive that can happen? And Coss would say, “That’s not rocket science. What do people need when they come home? They need a job. What’s the greatest crime mitigator that the United States would ever see? Employment. If someone has a job, they don’t have to steal.” So none of this is so complicated in that way of thinking about it in broad strokes. All that growth is very available for our nation to explore, especially if we consider decarceration and curtailing and ending mass incarceration and looking at what the next chapter of American criminal justice could look like.
“Conbody Vs. Everybody” is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.