Fresh Air

Spider-Man: Brand New Day continues to break box office records, after having the biggest U.S. opening weekend in history. Tonya Mosley talks with the film’s director, Destin Daniel Cretton. Long before Marvel, he worked in a group home for at-risk teens. He says it's an experience that shaped everything he's made since then, and became the movie Short Term 12.

Also, we hear from Harriet Clark. She was a baby when her mother was a getaway driver of a robbery of a Brink’s truck in 1981. The robbers were members of a radical offshoot of the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. For 37 years, Clark spent Saturdays visiting her mother in prison. “She figured out how to mother me in some of the most difficult conditions possible,” Clark tells Terry Gross. Her novel, The Hill, draws on her experience visiting her mother in prison. 

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Poet and writer Clint Smith says we are taught to think of slavery as something that happened a long, long time ago. But then he learned that his grandfather's grandfather had been enslaved. “This person who was so central to my life and my own identity is someone who was only a generation or two removed from a family member who had been born into slavery," he tells Terry Gross. Smith is the author of the bestselling book How the Word Is Passed, about distortions in how the history of slavery was taught to him and other children -- and the ways many Americans deceive themselves about that history. He's also the author of the collection of poetry called Above Ground.

Also, critic at large John Powers reviews the new TV series Lanterns. 

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Colman Domingo is nominated for two Emmy Awards for two very different performances — in the Netflix comedy The Four Seasons and in HBO's Euphoria. "I can go very deep with my characters," he tells co-host Tonya Mosley. He talks about doing comedy with masters like Tina Fey, filling in for Jimmy Kimmel, why he loves being in his 50s. 

Also, Lloyd Schwartz reviews a remastered album of Handel arias by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. 

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China produces at least 70% of the world’s drones, electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries and solar cells. And with the U.S. stockpile of munitions diminished from the Iran war, would the U.S. have what it needs to defend Taiwan if China invaded? Terry Gross talks with New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos about his latest story, “The Future Made in China.” “The irony here is that we are in some ways beholden right now to the Chinese factory in order to produce the munitions that we need to defend American interests from China. That’s the exquisite problem that we've found ourselves in,” Osnos says. 

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Cretton grew up in Hawaii, and says movies expanded his perspective: “That is how I traveled. That is how I was exposed to other cultures. That's how I understand how kids grew up in high school on the mainland,” he tells co-host Tonya Mosley. He explains how his job at a group home for at-risk teens inspired his film Short Term 12, how he relates to Peter Parker’s loneliness, and how his difficult relationship with his father helps him with directing.

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