During a July 2004 interview with Terry Gross on the National Public Radio program "Fresh Air,"
Mario Van Peebles explained that he did not want to put any child actor in the same position he was put in on the set of
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), especially because he felt like, as a thirteen-year-old, his father had given him no choice but to participate in a sex scene with a much older woman--partly by threatening to confiscate the bicycle he had received as a Christmas present if he didn't perform. "I didn't enjoy it at all. I didn't want to be in that scene. I didn't want to have to give that bike back--that bike had a banana seat!...I didn't want to make anyone do that scene twice, so in
O Retorno de Sweetback (2003) I just used the original footage of me as a kid in "(Sweet) Sweetback('s Baadasssss Song)" during that scene. So the kid I cast (to play the younger version of me,
Khleo Thomas) wasn't going to have to do anything like that. And that's just something that I wanted to do--I said, 'well, I'm not going to repeat, do unto someone else what I didn't like having done unto me. ' But I did want to show the scene because I thought it was a point in my life, and it just showed something interesting about Melvin, that he was sort of like that 'Great Santini-esque' father--almost that which does not kill in a
Friedrich Nietzsche-esque way you makes you stronger."
