John Burr on ‘The Gates’ and directing James Van Der Beek’s final performance
In his final performance, James Van Der Beek plays against type as a villain in John Burr’s new thriller, The Gates.
Dressed all in black with his hair slicked back into a bun, the 1990s heartthrob is the picture of contemporary masculinity, a pastor who lives in a palatial mansion and looks like he probably hosts a podcast. The character is Jacob, an Evangelical church leader who spearheaded a gated community in the suburbs of North Texas for like-minded Christians, and when three Black men (played by Mason Gooding, Algee Smith, and Kevin Powers) try to take a shortcut through the neighbourhood on their way to a party, they see Jacob attack a woman in his home. Suddenly, they find themselves trapped and hunted by the trusted community leader who will stop at nothing to protect himself.
When Burr began thinking about actors who could play the villain, he knew he wanted someone who was known to audiences as the consummate good guy. Van Der Beek, who died in February after a years-long battle with cancer, is mostly known for playing the title character in the beloved ‘90s teen drama series, Dawson’s Creek, which made him Burr’s number-one choice to play Jacob.
“I had never seen him play even a vaguely antagonistic character,” the director said in his recent interview with Far Out, “So when I sat down with him, I didn’t really know exactly what to expect”.
What he quickly discovered was that Van Der Beek had found layers to the character that had not been on the page. “I was really blown away,” Burr said, “He had come up with an ethos for this guy, for why he believed so strongly that the ends justified the means”. Part of the reason that the actor was so eager to take on the role was that it allowed him to tap into his own experiences of faith.
“He really was a spiritual person, a Christian, but he also had [a] broader perspective,” the director explained, “So to have him really connect with the story, with this character like this, really made me believe that this personal story that I was trying to tell could be something special.”
Burr conceived of the project all the way back in 2020, when the pandemic gave him the time to explore some of the lessons he learned growing up as a mixed-race kid in Texas. In The Gates, the three protagonists are childhood friends, but they approach their predicament from very different places. Derek (Gooding) is a mixed-race law student from a wealthy neighbourhood who has lived a certain type of privilege his whole life. “He’s been able to blend and code switch and get along with people from all kinds of backgrounds,” Burr explained, adding, “He feels that his experience is indicative of the Black experience, because it’s been the only one that he’s had.”
When the three friends see the pastor commit murder, Derek’s first instinct is to call the cops. As long as truth is on their side and they lay out all the evidence, he reasons, they have no reason to fear the authorities. Kevin (played by Smith) comes at the situation from a completely different angle. He grew up in a slightly different neighbourhood not far from Derek’s, but the small variations in their experiences have led him to be more wary and distrustful of others, particularly law enforcement. His first instinct is to get out of the neighbourhood as quickly as possible, or, when that option proves impossible, to call their friends to help get them out.
Burr decided to explore these ideas through the lens of genre filmmaking; specifically, he wanted to pay homage to the 1993 Stephen Hopkins thriller Judgment Night, which stars Gooding’s dad, Cuba Gooding Jr, as one of a trio of friends who witness a murder and find themselves hunted by the killer. With that as a structure, he was able to dig into the ideas of race and perspective that he’d been grappling with and see how the characters’ different belief systems would come to the fore when they were faced with a crisis.
Another theme that the director was keen to dissect was the particular cultural phenomenon of Texas Evangelical Christianity. “It was something that I felt pretty passionate about exploring in this film, because I do think that the Texas Evangelical community is something that is specific in very certain ways, and it’s so pervasive,” he explained. As the three protagonists journey through the neighbourhood trying to find refuge from Jacob and report the murder, they are met with incredulity, hostility, and, at one house, a kid with a shotgun.
Faith plays a role in how the police respond to the situation as well. Although you might expect an all-too-familiar story of blatant racism and brutality, the cop who shows up on the scene is driven more by his religious affiliations, according to Burr, than his race-based preconceptions.
“It was important to me not to show any of these people as just one thing, and nobody is wilfully malevolent,” he said, adding, “This movie is very much about instinct and about how one can be programmed to follow a certain belief system, whether that’s faith or something else. And so this [police officer] character looks up to the Jacob character as a paragon of society, of the leader of this community that he really respects and someone who represents the Word of God.”
Ultimately, faith is both a driving force behind the villainy of the pastor and the driving force behind the characters who break ranks and question his authority. Meanwhile, Van Der Beek helped ensure that Jacob didn’t become a two-dimensional bad guy. “James did see the nuance [in the character],” Burr said, “As a believer, he saw the good in religion and spirituality, but he also saw how humans are flawed [and] that power can corrupt.”
The Gates was shot in just 18 days in the late summer of 2024, with nearly all of the production taking place at night, but no one involved with the film knew about Van Der Beek’s illness. Although he was diagnosed in August 2023, he didn’t disclose it to the public until the end of the following year.
“We learned along with the world when he went public after production,” Burr said, adding, “I was so lucky to have worked with him. I feel fortunate to be able to bring his last performance to the world while also being heartbroken.”
