(dramatic music) - Hello everyone and welcome to Amanpour & Company.

Here's what's coming up.

- This is the Chinese government that, you know, it says it wants a stable relationship with the United States and other countries, but its aggressiveness is something to see.

- The US versus China.

As Trump distances himself from longtime allies, Beijing looks to fill the gap.

Nicholas Burns tells me what he learned working as America's ambassador to China.

Then... Mark Kerr!

Winning is the best feeling there is.

It's 40,000 people and they're cheering you on.

The Smashing Machine, wrestling challenges in and out of the ring.

Director Benny Safdie joins me to discuss his acclaimed new film, starring The Rock as mixed martial artist Mark Kerr.

Plus... - Almost every generation, our family being touched by some sort of gun violence, whether it's the Jim Crow sort, whether it's at the hand of the state troopers later on, my grandfather's murder, time and again we've been touched by it.

- The true cost of violence on black life in America.

Michelle Martin speaks to award-winning journalist, Trimane Lee, about gun violence, mortality, and the toll of reporting on the black experience.

[music] Amanpour & Company is made possible by The Anderson Family Endowment Jim Atwood and Leslie Williams.

Candice King Weir.

The Sylvia A. and Simon B. Poita Programming Endowment to Fight Antisemitism.

The Family Foundation of Layla and Mickey Strauss.

The Philamon M. D'Agostino Foundation.

Jeffrey Katz and Beth Rogers.

The Peter G. Peterson and Joan Gantz Cooney Fund.

Charles Rosenblum.

Monique Schoen-Warsaw.

Ku and Patricia Ewan.

Committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

Barbara Hope Zuckerberg.

And by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Welcome to the program, everyone.

I'm Christiane Awanpoh in London.

We begin in China, where President Xi Jinping is steadily strengthening his global influence as America retreats from its leadership role in the world.

For years, Washington and Beijing have gone head-to-head for economic, military and technological superiority.

But in the age of Trump 2.0, the stakes are higher than ever before.

At the United Nations General Assembly last week, China sent a clear message that it's ready to step in as the world's responsible superpower, making pledges on everything from trade to climate.

It may just be for show, but it's notable, as President Trump continues to lash out and distance himself from once staunch allies.

Our next guest is sounding the alarm about what he sees as a dangerous trajectory that needs immediate course correction.

As U.S.

Ambassador to Beijing, Nicholas Burns witnessed China's push for power close up, from its cyber attacks on America to its designs on Taiwan.

And he says he left the country even more hawkish than when he arrived.

And joining us now from New York, former Ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, welcome to the program.

- Thank you, Christiane.

Nice to be with you.

- So I'm really intrigued that you, you know, you were already hardline and hawkish, and you went and came back even more hawkish after being ambassador.

What on earth happened?

- Well, there are a thousand things that happened.

I think a lot of us who served as foreign ambassadors in China leave with a very different view than maybe when we arrived.

And I did arrive, I think, quite skeptical of Chinese power and Chinese attentions.

But Christiane, let me just list a couple of them.

The People's Liberation Army pushing out in the South China Sea against the Philippines and Vietnam.

The People's Liberation Army pushing out against the Japanese in the East China Sea.

The unconstrained, opaque buildup of the PLA, particularly its nuclear weapons force.

The degree of aggressiveness of the Chinese state towards the United States, Japan, Europe via cyber means, which our former FBI Director Chris Wray talked about publicly here in the United States for the last few years.

And the fact that there's no level playing field for the thousands of American companies trying to do business, intellectual property theft.

And so this is the Chinese government that, you know, it says it wants a stable relationship with the United States and other countries, but its aggressiveness is something to see.

And so that's part of why I came back feeling the way I do.

So the question is why and what you attribute it to.

You wrote, "I saw up close the true nature of its authoritarian government and its ambition to undercut the United States at nearly every turn.

Look, the United States is the world's only superpower.

How is China undercutting and what do you think its actual aim is?

Well I think the actual aim and frankly the stated aim of the government of China, the Communist Party of China, is they want to become the dominant, if you will, strongest power in the Indo-Pacific, and that's a direct challenge to the U.S.

But I guess I'd answer it in a different way, too.

You remember, I think we all remember this now iconic photograph of Tiananmen Square, September 3rd of this year, the 80th anniversary celebration of the end of World War II.

And who was there?

It was Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, the Iranian president, an axis of authoritarian leaders.

And it wasn't just a photograph.

The Iranians mass-producing drones for the Russian war effort.

The North Koreans contributing troops for that effort.

China contributing what we believe is 90 percent of the microelectronics to the Russian defense industrial base.

I mean, they are actually working together in a way that's quite injurious to Europe, given the existential nature of the crisis in Ukraine, and to the United States.

So I think my statement that they're trying to undercut the power of the US and its allies, I think that statement has been confirmed.

And just in addition to your list of what they're up to, Russia also, according to recently released reports, is helping China with its aerial and its air force, you know, formations and strategies and things like that.

So it's quite big.

But again, so do you think, because the Chinese apparently think, and they've said it, that the US is a fading power.

Essentially, he started saying that, Xi, in 2020.

And maybe they're seeing an opportunity to jump in that whole Sparta-Athens thing, which we all thought they didn't want to do, but now they're really doing it, challenging the existing power in the world.

- They're certainly doing it.

And when I arrived in China four years ago, the mantra from Xi Jinping personally was, "The East is rising and the West is falling."

He meant by the West, Europe and the democracies of East Asia and the United States.

And I don't believe that the West is falling.

I certainly don't believe, despite all of our problems, and we have many here at home in a very divisive moment in American politics and American society.

I mean, look at still the strength of our private sector, our tech companies as they compete with China on artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, still the strength of our research universities.

So I wouldn't count the United States out.

And frankly, Christiane, what was really interesting to see and powerful to see when I was in the job in China was the degree to which Japan is strengthening itself militarily.

And the Philippines opening up bases to both the Japanese and the United States for Taiwan contingencies.

And the degree to which, and this very much surprised me as someone who's lived in Europe, as you know, the degree to which Ursula von der Leyen and the European Union and Mark Rutte and NATO have now seen that Europe has strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific that are quite close to those of Japan and the United States.

I think the Chinese were very surprised that the Europeans turned against them when China supported Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

China claims to be neutral.

It's not at all neutral.

It's supporting the Russian defense machine.

So I don't think everything is going the way exactly the way that that Xi Jinping intended.

Okay but you also heard them at the UN and you heard President Trump at the UN and you basically heard them saying and have been written about as the adults in the room on various issues including climate.

In other words, they see it as, and some analysts see it as, an own goal by the United States.

Because even though President Trump identified in his first term this competition and went after addressing it, it appears that President Trump is also retreating from traditional American global leadership.

And they see an opportunity.

So in their minds, yeah, the West is falling.

Well, the Chinese certainly see an opportunity.

We dismantled USAID.

The Trump administration did.

I thought it was a catastrophic mistake.

And you see the Chinese moving into countries where prior to this year, the United States Agency for International Development had been very effective.

We dismantled, the Trump administration dismantled, the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, which was another major mistake because it leads CCTV and CGTN basically to be a mouthpiece for Chinese propaganda around the world.

And I think Chris Channaway has been most destructive on the part of President Trump is that he's disavowed our allies.

He's questioning Canadian sovereignty, questioning Danish sovereignty in Greenland, and in the Far East, putting these extraordinary, and I think ill-advised tariffs on Japan and South Korea and India, three countries that the United States really needs in its corner to limit China's expansion.

So I think it's been President Trump's disavowal, if you will, of many of our alliance relationships that has been the most serious mistake he's made and the Chinese are clearly trying to take advantage of that.

And it's said that the United States could challenge China or whatever the right word is you know fend it off with allies but not alone.

So again do you think this that you've just outlined the you know distancing allies and and the tariffs and arresting South Korean workers in the United States and all of that.

That's also, I mean tell me what you think about that.

I'm very much opposed to it.

I mean the United States obviously is still an extremely powerful country.

We're proud of that.

But one of the major lessons of my entire diplomatic career going back to 1980, but also my time in China over the last four years is we really do need those allies and they reinforce the power and the purpose of the US.

You know, the allies were with us, the European allies, the Asian allies on the issue of Tibet and Xinjiang and religious freedom, but also on the issue of Taiwan and also challenging China to be more transparent about the extraordinary growth of the People's Liberation Army and without the allies the United States is going to be less effective in the world and so to me that was the primary lesson that I learned in competing and living in China and trying to compete with its government.

A bipartisan group of congressional leaders just recently went to China it's the first time for many years but about about six years and it was aimed at improving at least communications.

So what do you think the U.S.

should be doing now to address the worries that you're expressing.

Well it was very worrisome to me and to many of us in the Biden administration that during that you remember the balloon crisis.

Yeah.

When China effectively shut down communications with us for several months following it.

Believe it or not, I really worried at the time we didn't have sufficient connectivity among our senior military officers should there be an accident by mistake in the South or East China Sea.

And so it's very important.

And the problem is not on our end.

I mean, the United States is willing to have its senior military officers be in contact with the PLA.

The problem is on the Chinese end.

The PLA is an opaque institution, highly secretive, not accustomed to dealing with other countries.

That's a real problem for China's neighbors like Japan and the Philippines and certainly a problem for the United States.

And so President Biden pressed Xi Jinping, and I certainly did on his behalf on multiple occasions and discussions with Chinese officials.

It's in our common interest to have channels of communication that we can use in the event of a crisis, particularly, as I said before, a crisis that is spawned by some accident.

And we've had them happen before, unfortunately, in the U.S.-China relationship.

So that, I think, is a very important step, Chris John, that the government should take.

- And there are parts of the military that are apparently doing better and are stronger than the United States.

For instance, their Navy.

I don't know what you thought about the message that was sent by the current Defense Secretary, Hegseth, essentially rounding up and bringing together in a command performance hundreds of American commanders from all over the world to essentially tell them off for being woke, overweight, and lecturing them on a warrior ethos.

And then President Trump got involved as well.

The pictures honestly look like something that you might see in the, you know, in the PLA or North Korea, and there've been, you know, satirical reports thereof.

But what do you think Xi Jinping thinks when he sees that going on in the Pentagon?

- Well, I hope, I think that the Chinese do perceive an opportunity, as we've been discussing, as they see the United States withdraw from some of these very important traditional partnerships and alliances, and they see an opportunity to separate us and to divide us from our allies.

I mean the Chinese charm offensive right now towards Japan and South Korea and India.

We all saw that when Prime Minister Modi went to the Shanghai cooperation meeting in China just before September 3rd.

And so it's something that we need to be very mindful of.

And you know I don't know all the specifics about what happened when Secretary Hegsaeth spoke to our generals and admirals, but I do know this.

We have a first-rate officer corps.

I worked with them very closely throughout my career, particularly in China, and you know lectures on physical fitness to 50 year old admirals, probably not the best thing to do because you know we rely on them, their analytical ability, their soldier statesmen, and we rely on modern technology more than anything else to try to make sure that the world is peaceful.

So I thought the message was really inappropriate by the Secretary of Defense to the generals and admirals.

And one last question, do you think there's an inevitability to all of this given President Trump's tendencies in he's already outlined or articulated the idea of certain big powers being in charge of certain regions, otherwise known as spheres of influence.

Do you think that this administration is okay to leave China ruling its part of the world, Russia ruling its part of the world, even if it threatens Europe, and the U.S.

hunkering down behind Fortress America and Fortress Western Hemisphere?

I'd be very surprised, Chris John, if that's where this administration, the Trump administration, came out in its internal debates, and it would be a disaster for American global interests if that was the case.

And you know, I think it's interesting to see -- look at the shift that President Trump has made just in the last several weeks in being now much more supportive of Zelensky and Ukraine because he, Trump, has been disappointed by his own admission, by Putin's refusal to be at all cooperative.

And I anticipate he will have the same disappointment with President Xi Jinping, because the Chinese are going to offer lots of bouquets for the coming meeting this month between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.

But in reality, they are very reluctant, really, to give way and to compromise on issues that we care about, whether it's human rights or the cyber offensive of the Chinese government or what they're doing in the Indo-Pacific to press all of our allies and partners.

So I anticipate there'll come a time in this administration when the Trump team will kind of revert back, I think, to where the Biden administration was.

And that is, we need to compete with China.

We also need to work with it when our interests align.

Of course, we want a peaceful relationship, but toughness on these issues is the order of the day.

And I think that's where they're on top.

- All right, former ambassador, Nick Burns.

Thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Next to one of the year's buzziest movies, in "The Smashing Machine," real-life wrestler Dwayne Johnson, also known as The Rock, takes on the role of a mixed martial artist, Mark Kerr.

The film tells the story of Kerr's struggles with wins, losses and addiction.

Here's a clip from the trailer.

Oh my goodness!

What is out?

This is truly shocking.

There's just an empty space.

When he's distant, it's hard.

Sacrificing everything.

What do you have for me that's so strong?

Adivine.

A day without pain is like a day without sunshine.

This isn't bad.

This isn't insane.

I want him gone, all right?

This is it?

That's it.

And the mind behind the movie is Benny Safdie.

He's written and starred in acclaimed shows like The Curse, alongside Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone, and he's also one half of the Safdie Brothers, film-making duo behind hits like Uncut Gems.

But he joined me to talk about going it alone this time.

Benny Safdie, welcome to the programme.

Hello.

Thank you for having me.

I'm so the Smashing Machine.

Already it's a pretty aggressive name.

I know you got it from the documentary and we'll talk, but you said it's about radical empathy and that you had to make this.

Why?

- Yeah.

Well, it's interesting 'cause like, I think that there's certain things in life that just kind of strike you.

And Mark Kerr was one of those people, you know, where when I saw him and I saw A, what he was doing, which was so kind of violent and aggressive, but at the same time, he was very soft-spoken and very beautiful in front of everybody else.

And I realized that here I was watching a man who was struggling very deeply in his life and A, he didn't let it define him, and he also kind of put that to the wayside for the benefit of other people.

And for better or worse, I felt that I've had that feeling in my life.

And when I saw somebody who was as strong as he was physically, and I could relate to him, I thought, you know, it would be amazing if everybody in the world, you know, could get inside of his brain and have the same feeling where they can relate to going through something intense and kind of wild, but then realizing that maybe it's okay.

Life is going to be okay.

Don't let your struggles and sadness define who you are.

And I feel like, yeah, that's just been an important thing for me.

But it does.

I'm going to drill down a little bit more into that.

But you know, when you say people can identify maybe, et cetera, as you know, MMA, UFC, it's pretty divisive.

It's been politicized in this current political environment.

But even back in 1996, when John McCain was, I think he was running for president or something, he called it human cockfighting.

And he sent letters to the governors of all 50 states asking them to ban the sport.

How did you contend with that?

And as a companion, how did you, you said you went through that same feeling of, you know, this, you know, being being aggressed and how to get get over it.

Well, it's it's interesting because I went to a UFC fight with my stepfather in 2002.

And at that moment in time, it was very experimental.

You know, you had these people comparing different styles and seeing which one would be the greatest.

And I think it's the thing that I always found interesting is because it is so outwardly violent, that kind of initially rubs people the wrong way.

But, like, if you look at something like boxing, which has been around for much longer and is much more accepted, there's an invisible injury that happens, which I think is very sad.

You know, when you see some boxers really go through kind of -- they call it punch drunk, but it's really -- their brains are getting hurt.

And maybe just because you don't see that, the world accepts that a little bit more.

And I love boxing.

I was part of a boxing gym here in the city, Mendez Boxing.

And when I started learning, I took it for like, I started doing it for 10 years until it closed in 2019.

You'd walk into this environment, which is seemingly very aggressive.

There's lots of sounds, noise, testosterone.

But when you get in there, and I really wanted to learn this craft.

And I found it to be one of the most loving and supportive places that I could be on the planet.

And I thought that contradiction is unbelievable.

So somebody's saying to me, "Hey, I want to spar with you, and I want to beat you up."

And I look at them and think, "Really?

Me?"

You know, it's like, it's a really interesting thing to feel.

And that's kind of what I wanted to get across in the movie, that you have this kind of -- you can exist in two places at the same time.

You can have this intensely violent fight, which, in the movie, I wanted to really show it and experience it with the sound in a movie theater, where you feel these fights as real as they are, ringside, the best seat in the house.

But then you realize that these are people who have feelings.

They care about each other.

They want each other to succeed.

And when somebody loses, they say, "It's okay."

You know, that I think is a really interesting thing.

And I don't think that strength and vulnerability have to cancel each other out.

And that was a very important thing for me in this movie, is I wanted it to be that they can actually be part of the same thing.

That vulnerability can be a strength, you know?

Well, you really do make that happen in the, you know, use of Dwayne Johnson as the star, because he just physically is massive, so that's the strength part, and, frankly, he stands out bigger, larger, taller than anybody else in the film.

Um, but he's also unrecognisable.

I mean, I swear to God, I kept thinking, "Is this... "Is this... Is this AI?

Is this CGI?

"Where is he?

Where is the guy?"

You know, but it's all prosthetics and et cetera.

So I just wanna, I find it weird that they like each other.

I don't understand.

I don't get that part of this.

And it was clearly, you know, you made that clear in the film that he and the others, they felt sorry for the people they defeated.

- Yes, very much so.

And it's like, I think it's like, I was doing a rehearsal with one of the fighters and I did these intense processes where I would become a part of the scene and I would work with them for like an hour, hour and a half.

And we would improvise and we would talk through things.

And as I was talking to one of these fighters, I said, "Well, you seem to really love the people you train.

So what happens when one of them gets knocked out?"

And he said, "Do you want to see?"

I said, "Please, show it to me."

And it's what you see in the beginning of the movie when he gets down on the ground and he's like, "Do you know where you are?"

And he says, "Yes, do you know what happened to you?"

He says, "I lost."

And he goes, "You did, and it's okay."

And I think that that level of compassion amongst the people that are A, on the same team, but when I would watch early fights with Mark, I would see that he wouldn't initially raise his hands in the air and run around the ring excited, he wanted to see if the other person was okay.

And there's something really interesting in MMA specifically, and it's like it doesn't really get talked about but as I was like really getting into it I thought, "Oh, this is great."

You know, talking to Baz Rutten who's in the film and is an MMA legend in his own right, the idea of the tap out, you know?

You're basically getting somebody in a position where you could really hurt them.

Yeah.

But you're not.

And you say, "I'm putting this pressure to let you know I could do it, but just tell me.

I win, you lose, it's okay."

And then they tap out.

Because the point isn't not to hurt the other person, it's to win in that match.

And so I find that really interesting, you know?

So I wonder, I found, we've got one clip which I'm going to play in a moment, but I want to ask you about the phenomenon around The Rock, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

So here he's being Dwayne Johnson and not The Rock.

That was his nom de guerre or whatever when he was wrestling and throughout his career up until now.

I found it really interesting that there was a scene in which he was having a, you know, a real existential moment with a journalist who was asking him, "So, and what if you lose?"

He couldn't even entertain the thought of losing.

He just said, "Well, I can't even answer that.

It's never happened."

And then, I don't know about spoilers or whatever, you can tell me what he wants to do, but I've also heard that he's had in his contracts in the past that he cannot lose a fight on screen because he's the winner.

So tell me about that whole concept.

Yeah, well, I can't answer the second part.

But what I can answer is in that moment, you know, we're dealing with somebody who's undefeated.

And I wanted to tell a move, I wanted to make a movie where, because normally in these kind of in these fight movies, the thrill comes in the wind.

And I wanted to see if I could do something a little different, where sometimes maybe the thrill can come in the loss and that journey, you know, and experiencing their life.

Because one of the best things that I've ever happened was I witnessed a fight between a friend of mine who happened to be my trainer.

He happened to win the fight.

But what I found so exciting was my emotional connection to him when he was fighting.

And so I wanted to create that for the audience where you know and love this person and then you watch them fight.

And what's that experience like?

And to touch on the point of how he doesn't know to lose, here's somebody whose entire identity is caught up in being undefeated, the greatest.

And I said to Dwayne in that moment, "Really try.

Really try to think about it, but it's not there.

You don't have the actual reference point to look at to answer this person's question.

And you're not being arrogant.

You're being truthful."

And I think that's what's so interesting in that moment is-and that was the person who was interviewing.

I did a lot of work with him, too, where I said, you really need to try your hardest as a journalist to get this information from him.

And so he comes out and he really pushes.

And my favorite moment is when Dwayne looks off and you could really see him like cycling through the Rolodex in his head.

And this is where his acting, I think, is just so incredibly subtle.

And you said something earlier that he's not the rock.

And I think it's, we're seeing a different side of who that is.

And who Dwayne is, is he's this magnetic, incredible personality who people really love.

And I think what makes it so special about this movie is you're seeing that he's struggled with a lot of pain.

And it's truthful, because I personally don't think you could give a performance like this if you didn't feel these things.

And so now you're seeing that he was this person with this pain, and how much more incredible does that make somebody?

They're not letting that define who they are, you know?

Let me play the clip.

It's Dwayne Johnson as Mark, obviously, and Emily Blunt as his girlfriend Dawn, and they're at a fun fair here.

Mark is kind of scared to get on, but this sort of goes to your point about this great big hulking massive figure who also has some, you know, is soft on the inside to an extent.

Here we go.

There's no way I can avoid that.

Why?

Because of my tummy.

You know what that would do to my tummy.

I would get sick everywhere.

No, it's about perspective.

Okay?

On the inside, you don't feel it.

It's like you're not moving.

You're like pinned against the wall.

You're gonna love it.

You're gonna love it.

Does it move on the inside?

It moves, but it's moving so fast that you can't even feel it.

Thanks so much.

I really want to go on the ride with her, but I have a sensitive stomach.

Is there the center part in there?

That's the thing that stays still, right?

Can I stand in there, in the middle part?

In the center part?

Yes.

No, that would be a serious liability issue.

Well, where would you recommend I stand then?

Because I don't want to get sick on the ride, but I do want to ride with her.

I would suggest you don't go on the ride.

If you can't handle it.

Well, it's not that I can't handle it, it's just I'm choosing not to go on it.

Okay, I'm going to go on the ride.

I mean, it's hilarious, and it goes to the point that you've just been making.

He... I wonder, you talk about that a little bit, but also, Emily Blunt, I understand that because she knew him already and starred with him in a different movie, she was also instrumental in getting your message to him about wanting him in this film, right?

- Yes.

What I found really amazing about Emily was when I acted with her in Oppenheimer, I could see her.

It was a very small scene, but in that scene, I remember saying, like I had read that my character, when she, in real life, Katie Oppenheimer, rejected his handshake.

It was so effective to him that he went home to his hotel and he cried.

And that was very interesting to me.

And when she looked at me, I felt the same thing.

And I thought that was an unbelievable performance in a half a second.

So then when it came time to try and figure out who Dawn was going to be, I realized I was showing a relationship that's a different kind of love story.

You know, it's a very toxic relationship where two people maybe don't necessarily get a -- they don't get along all the time, but there's this intense attraction and affection for one another.

But it's like magnets.

When you push them together and they're the same pole, they're never going to connect.

And I wanted to show that.

But in order to show that, I felt, in a realistic way, you had to have a base of true kind of a foundation of care.

And because Emily and Dwayne have this really interesting friendship with one another that they developed on a movie that's much different.

But I think it was helpful to have that kind of that play.

clip, there's such a shorthand amongst them.

And my favorite thing in that is she's, she is going, she has the cake powder on her face.

He holds the napkin while she eats and then he hands it back to her and she then takes it back.

It's such a subtle performance thing that only could happen with two people who were friends.

He's looking out for her and it's very subtle and beautiful.

And I think a really telling thing here is also when he's the guy stands up to Dwayne as Mark and he says, "Well, if you don't want to go on the ride, I suggest you don't go on the ride."

And I remember talking with Dwayne in that moment, I said, "You're a big guy.

You don't want him to say that to you."

And he's like, "You're right."

But he doesn't want to be offensive and he doesn't want to be aggressive.

And so we came up with, "It's not that I don't want to ride on it, it's that I'm choosing not to."

And so it's like, again, there's this idea of control that he has.

But even in the way that he's speaking to him, he's really trying his hardest to not be what he represents.

Because he knows what his outward appearance says to other people.

And all he wants to be is desperately seen on the inside.

And I know I've walked outside and I have certain things that have hurt me in my life that nobody knows about.

And yet when you walk outside, people don't see that.

And so that's part of what this movie is.

Talking about Oppenheimer, you played Edward Teller, as you just said.

Christopher Nolan, one of the biggest directors working today.

You've also worked under Paul Thomas Anderson in Licorice, of course.

Licorice Pizza.

He's just come out with an amazing new film.

Oh, great.

I love it.

Another Battle, etc.

It's brilliant.

Now, he's also cast you in The Odyssey, which is coming out next year.

Nobody knows anything about it, except some tickets have been released and they're sold out.

Can you tell us anything about it?

Well, it's interesting, because if I told you the scale... You'd have to kill me.

No, no, not even that.

You wouldn't even believe me.

The scale of which was created.

And I guess the one thing I could say is it really felt like I was in that period of time, which was a very long time ago.

And that's an incredible achievement in its own right, you know.

So it really was, I had, I love, I love working with Chris and I love working with Paul and it was, it was an amazing experience to kind of stretch different muscles.

And I think for me, when I go and I act in somebody else's movie, you know, it's nice to have to listen to somebody else because I find it's important, you know, when I then go to be a director, I know what that feels like.

You know, there's a certain level of vulnerability of you have to make decisions and they could be wrong and you feel nervous and so maybe it makes me a little bit more empathetic when I have to ask people to do that too.

Well, talking about working, I'm sure a million people have asked you this and maybe you're tired of it, but you have worked with your brother, Josh Safdie, many, many times.

You've had amazing films together, Good Time, Uncut Gems.

You impacted the careers of people who went on to become massive, massive stars, Robert Pattinson, Adam Sandler, etc.

Now you're not working together and he's got another film out, Marty Supreme, and both of you are generating a huge amount of buzz.

Are you competitive now?

Well, yes, tell me what that's like.

Is it like, I don't know, what is it like?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting because we were on a path to working on movies together because the first movie we made was about our childhood and it made sense to make that together and then the next movie we wanted to make was Uncut Gems and that just kept getting pushed further along the line.

And when we got there, there was a kind of reckoning inside of me of like, "Well, what do we do now?"

And it just became clear like, "Okay, well, I would like to explore this and he would like to explore that."

And so it was just a natural progression of things.

And I think it's kind of exciting that the two of us get to go out there and do what we love.

I'm going to ask you a cheeky question.

So let's say he wins an Oscar and you don't.

Are you going to be like, Dwayne, it's okay, I love you.

It's okay, it doesn't mind.

I don't mind losing.

The truth is, I made this movie to explore certain things about myself.

I made it to explore certain aspects of Dwayne, and I wanted Dwayne to go through this process of discovery.

I made it because I love combat sports and I wanted people to go into the ring, to see the ring from the best point of view and I wanted them to experience that and see the things that I saw in there.

And it's a very personal movie for me.

So in that sense, I'm just proud and happy to have made it.

So I can't really attach it to a specific outcome, you know?

And I'm just really excited to be with it and get it out there.

And if it connects with people, that's awesome, you know?

- Well, I really appreciate it.

Thank you very much for talking to us.

- Well, this was great.

Thank you so much for all the great questions.

- And "The Smashing Machine" is out today in theaters worldwide.

Now to a deeply personal examination of the African-American experience.

Our next guest is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.

Trimane Lee has dedicated his life and career to exploring the intersection between black life and politics.

He was one of the first national reporters to cover the fatal shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin back in 2012 and the social justice movement that it sparked.

His new book, "A Thousand Ways to Die," covers gun violence and systemic racism to discovering his own mortality through a near-death experience.

But as he tells Michelle Martin, reporting on such traumatic topics does take its toll.

Thanks, Christian.

Tramaley, thank you so much for speaking with us.

It's really a pleasure to be here.

Thank you.

It's a really, gosh, I don't even know what to say.

It's a powerful, surprising book that you've written.

Surprising in some ways, very revealing and very vulnerable.

For people who only know your work, you know, through your journalism, I think it might come as a surprise that you share so much of your own story.

So I guess I wanted to start by saying that this isn't the book you started out to write.

Tell us about that.

Not at all, Michelle.

I didn't set out to open my entire self up and pour myself onto a page the way I did.

Originally, the book that I was writing was about the literal cost of gun violence in this country, the cost in a dollar amount, as a way to speak to the cost that we pay as communities and families every single day.

But as I was writing this book, and I almost met my own death, it forced me to really look at widening the aperture on violence and how we experience violence within our communities, certainly, but also the silent kind of violence that we carry within us in terms of the trauma that we carry, much of it tied to the gun and gun violence, but also the long trail of systemic violence that's almost required before it triggers our approach.

We should just tell people what happened is you had a heart attack.

I mean, you're only 38 years old, former college athlete.

People can see that.

You, former college football player, didn't have a history of high cholesterol, didn't have any of those other kind of markers.

And you had what is commonly called a widowmaker.

I mean, you had a blockage in your artery that was so profound that it could have killed you.

The way you describe that, I don't want to take you through that again because I'm sure it was traumatic to experience, but you didn't even go to the hospital right away.

It was a very curious decision as I look back now.

But two years into writing this book, I suffered this Widowmaker heart attack, a 98 plus percent blockage in my left anterior descending artery, the big one that supplies most of the blood to your heart.

And with none of those markers, I had to wrestle with what it was that literally almost broke my heart.

And at that time, my daughter was 13 now, a big girl hard to believe at 13, I was five going on six years old.

And she was asking me, Daddy, how and why?

And to answer her, as I promised her when she was still in the womb, I'd never lie to her, I had to be really honest with myself about what I was carrying.

And that was a career of chronicling black death and survival on the front lines of it.

As a young police reporter on the streets, often finding a young man shot dead that looks just like me, seeing the pain in his family's eyes, it was almost always a him, and seeing my own family's pain, but then also carrying a family history going back to the Jim Crow South of almost every generation, our family being touched by some sort of gun violence, whether it's the Jim Crow sort, whether it's at the hand of the state troopers later on, my grandfather's murder, time and again we've been touched by it.

Why do you think you made that connection?

Because it isn't obvious, as you point out, a bullet and a blocked artery are very different things.

Yeah, it was it was all those things, Michelle, in my physical healing, and my emotional and spiritual healing, which took a couple years.

There wasn't a day that went by for a number of years where I didn't think about dying.

And I was concerned whether I'm going to make it through the night was that kind of emotional weight that I was carrying.

But as I got healthier, I took a journey of mindfulness and meditation, and really a clarity set in and examining like how did I of all people end up here?

And then I had to think no further than all of the sleepless nights that I had for years.

For a very long time it was hard for me to sleep because I'd be wrestling and mulling over the stories I was telling, the literal physical damage on bodies that I was seeing, and understanding what it was, what it means, I should say, to carry that and never fully unpack it.

And to cope with that, especially as a young man and a young journalist, what I did was throw myself even further into the work or drink or take over-the-counter sleep medication.

I was doing all this stuff to calm my, you know, subconscious.

And so it all just kind of made sense to me.

And it also, it certainly shifted me as a person, as a journalist, as a man, but without question, it shifted the trajectory of the book, I would say.

One of the things that you do in the book is you trace-you start out with a lot of the stories you've told as a journalist, which is a person was shot.

This was the impact on that person.

This is what we know about why it happened.

This is where the gun came from.

But what you also do in this book is you trace the people in your life, in your family tree, who have been affected by gun violence.

And then you put them against sort of the backdrop of all the violence that had been taking place around them in their community.

Did you know before you started this book that so many members of your family had been touched by gun violence?

I did not, Michelle.

I grew up always knowing about my grandfather's murder in 1976, two years before I was born.

And so I knew intimately, or as intimately as I could possibly know, the space that his absence created, and the pain and hurt that it sent through my family, my aunts, my uncles, and certainly my mother.

But it took some investigating, investigating and reporting to discover the first murder in our family back in 1922 in the Jim Crow South, when my grandmother's 12-year-old brother was shot and killed in a neighboring sundown town.

What's a sundown town?

Explain that for people who don't know that term.

Yeah, so for many of us, we thought sundown towns were colloquial, meaning these places where black folks couldn't be after dark.

But in this situation, in this particular sundown town, Fitzgerald, the white men of the community actually came together to vote to make sure black folks didn't have a proper place in the community and couldn't be there at certain times.

And the newspapers, contemporaneous accounts of what happened in this town, they said that Fitzgerald handled the Negro problem the way no other city in America could.

And so this is where my grandmother's 12 year old brother Cornelius was shot and killed.

And then my family joins the great migration, joining millions of other black folks fleeing the South for better opportunities in the North, in Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, all across the North, landing in Philadelphia first, and then South Jersey.

And in 1951, another of my grandmother's brothers was shot and killed by a state trooper under mysterious circumstances.

And so to think that in the course of just a couple decades, my great grandparents lost two sons, one in the Jim Crow South, one in the North.

But then still 20 years after that, in 1976, as I mentioned, my grandfather was murdered.

So my grandparents had an apartment in Camden, New Jersey, and a man came to rent the apartment and left a deposit for $160.

He disappeared for many weeks.

When he came back, wanted his money back, my grandfather told him that it was non-refundable and that he could see him in court.

And they had a court date set.

And instead of going to court, that man came back and shot and killed my grandfather.

And so that violence, that murder cascaded through my family.

As my mother described it, it's almost as if you have a limb shorn off your body and for the rest of your life you're trying to adapt and cope.

And I think about my own grandmother who lost two brothers and a husband to murder.

And then to think that we think about these connections to the violence that we carry within us, the stuff that we inherit, the fact that I exist because of an act of gun violence, because my grandparents met in New Jersey.

And so it was the killing of my great uncle Cornelius that sent us into the migration and that my grandparents eventually met.

It's just all these ties that bind me to the violence, but also the pushing forward through the trauma.

I'm trying to relive with you how it felt when you learned all this and you had to take all this in.

Can you even describe that?

There have been many moments where I had to sit back and just exhale.

But there was a moment when I discovered the death certificate for Cornelius.

Cornelius, the 12-year-old.

I was going to ask you about that.

So tell us about that.

Tell us about the death certificate.

You have a copy of it in the book.

That's right.

And it was so striking in the mundanity of it all.

It said, "Age 12, cause of death, gunshot wounds."

And I couldn't help but think about young Tamir Rice, who was a 12-year-old, shot in Cleveland, Ohio, and his chubby face, and thinking about Cornelius's face and how those words, "Age 12, cause of death, gunshot wounds," should never be in proximity to each other.

And what that is like where my own daughter is 13 years old now and imagine your child being gunned down and there was no law enforcement response, no investigation.

There was there was just nothing because it wasn't shocking for a black boy at that time to be shot, killed, shot and killed.

So it was one of many moments where I had to reckon with what my people have had to harbor all these years.

I have to wonder though, did that not weigh on you?

Reporting all this.

I'll tell you what, by the time I got to reporting on the darkest parts of that history, I did have a clarity and a freedom.

So I had been writing the book for two years with the original impetus, the idea of cause.

I had my heart attack and I was forced to sit down.

I had to heal.

So for about a year and a half, I didn't put a single word on the page.

Maybe two years.

I kind of separated myself from it because in part, I attributed recounting some of these stories of my earlier career to the heart attack, right?

The weight of everything, sitting neck deep in people's grief and my own.

But by the time I had this clarity about what it was that almost led to my ends and almost shattered my heart, I felt even more mission driven to go back to the very beginning.

Because at that point, I knew it wasn't just me.

My family was one of millions of black families who experienced the literal violence of the braided rope and the bullet in the Jim Crow South.

And then the idea of, again, widening the aperture on what violence actually is, the systemic violence of being- And what is that?

When you say widening the aperture, what do you mean by that?

That it includes the literal violence, and then our response to losing someone to that violence or witnessing that violence.

But it also means the kind of deprivation that my family faced in the Jim Crow South of being tenant farmers, meaning they were forced to work on land that they would never own.

And around settlement time, when Cornelius was killed, December, is always a time where you balance the debt, right, and credits.

And without fail, black families were always ripped off at the time.

That's a form of violence to keep you in debt.

And then to join the Great Migration, to land in what was hoped to be a promised land of the North, to find jobs, certainly, less violence, certainly, but slum conditions often, right?

You couldn't live in certain places.

We had communities where they would draw a red line around the neighborhood.

You couldn't get insurance.

You couldn't buy or sell because of these deeds of covenants, where some of these deeds of covenants had baked into them that if you're a white person, the homeowner, you couldn't sell to a black person, let alone access to quality foods, right?

Some of these systemic issues that I consider violence that leads to the kind of ecosystem that is ripe for gun violence still persist today.

And so when I'm grappling is so far beyond the bullet of what we've experienced.

One of the interesting historical facts that you talk about is how firearms were literally traded for African slaves, for people who were about to be enslaved.

Yeah.

I had never thought about that.

Just could you say more about that?

The discovery of that, that was another one of those discoveries that, you know, brought so much to bear.

This idea that there is what I've described as this psychic connection, this ethereal connection to guns and black folks.

And so in my exploration, I really wanted to go back, not just to the beginning of my family's exposure to gun violence, but really examine the dynamic between black people, period, before we even got here, and guns.

And so for many of us, we were educated to understand that black folks were either simply just kidnapped, or they were some natural byproduct of wars that were already occurring on the continent of Africa.

And then Europeans, eager to take advantage of a labor force to supply labor needs for the Western world, came over and made some deals.

When in reality what we see, and the abolitionists of the time were noting this, is that European powers, especially as gun technology is rising in the early 18th century, were applying regional African powers, different warring factions with guns to create instability, to create war, to create more enslaved people.

And so the idea that our bodies were literally bartered for guns, and that we were forced out of Africa with the muzzle of a gun at our backs, and then introduced to the Western world, which would have been hellish for these enslaved Africans, and greeted by more white men with more guns to maintain what would be a hundreds-year system of servitude and violence, I think that can't be lost on us.

That our literal bodies were traded for guns, and we continue on to experience a specific kind of gun violence.

One of the things that you point out in the book is that African Americans disproportionately experience gun violence, particularly police violence.

But I do have to say, a lot of white people in America get killed with guns.

That's right.

So I just wondered if you thought about that, if you were kind of reflected on that.

Well, certainly.

And in the book, I say that, you know, gun violence in America isn't a black American problem alone.

It's an American problem.

And even though we are disproportionately killed by police and face disproportionate gun violence, period, about 40 plus percent of the gun deaths in this country are white.

And so in some ways, not to counter the notion in the book, because I wanted to use a specific lens here, as long as gun violence in this country is considered a black American issue, then we don't have to address any of the other broad issues, like the nature of gun death in white communities, or the pipeline from legal to illegal in this country of guns.

And so certainly it's an American problem.

We think about the issue around school shootings and these mass shootings, which disproportionately impact white folks.

And so clearly this is just one slice, one lens to view a very, very American issue.

And part of our issue with guns is that it's so connected to this sense of patriotism and I dare I say manhood.

So much of our manhood is attached to violence in this country.

And so no wonder white folks as well as black are being killed so frequently.

One of the points that you make in the book is because gun violence is so often associated with blackness, often in very dehumanizing ways.

I have to ask you about that.

Doesn't that in some way kind of reinforce the problem that this is a black problem and therefore it doesn't command the attention and the urgency that it would if it were seen as the national problem that it is?

Well, I think there are a couple of issues here.

I think because it happens so frequently and it's so disproportionately in our communities, that it's also ignored.

It's treated as garden variety, it's treated as routine, it's treated as normal.

And so therein, our trauma and our hurt and pain and loss, financial and otherwise, goes ignored.

And so until we can point to the problem and speak to the specificity in which race has played a role in how we've experienced this gun violence, because white folks aren't dying by the gun because they're black, but we are because we've been conditioned and cordoned off in certain communities that have been disinvested in and deprived it.

So we're experiencing not that's why it's a thousand ways to die.

Long before you get to the trigger being pulled.

There's a host of other issues that need to be addressed that manifest and culminate in a disproportionate gun violence.

And so it's almost like policing.

We're both under policed and over policed.

It's also like media coverage.

Our communities are also under covered and sensationalized, so we can't continue to ignore the problem, and especially for black folks.

And this is a bigger question for black and white, actually.

We have to understand that we are not the violence that we've experienced, right?

There's nothing inherent or innate in us.

Lest we forget in recent weeks, the president's own words, when he talked about the threat of occupying major cities in this country, and he said, it's not a matter of five years, 10 years, or two years.

These people are born to be criminal.

And so what I want to do in this book, and I want to make it clear for black and white, but especially black folks to understand this, that there's nothing inherently violent or wrong with us.

If we want to truly understand the violence we've experienced, let's look at the machinery around us and the long continuum that got us here.

And so we've experienced it a certain way, and so it requires a certain research reporting, analyzation, and recording of it.

Jemayla, thank you so much for speaking with us.

- Thank you, Michelle.

- And that's it for our program tonight.

If you want to find out what's coming up every night, sign up for our newsletter at pbs.org/amanpour.

Thanks for watching and goodbye from London.

(upbeat music)