![]() So I think just the inclusion of more people and adult women and people of color and stuff, just kind of broadens the landscape of storytelling in those genres.ĭEADLINE: You’ve made this point to me before that it’s down to us to make these films, to make these plays, to make the music or whatever you want to do and not wait to be asked or told. Not only did Hollywood stop making those movies, but Black people were never allowed to really make them in the first place. We’re not allowed to go into that era for some reason. I feel the same with the Biblical movies. So we weren’t allowed to go into the Old West, just cinematically. We’re not allowed to go into the Old West where one fourth of every cowboy was Black. It’s almost like an unwritten rule we’re not allowed to go into these genres. There’s always been, I feel a veil of non-allowance that where we as Black people aren’t allowed to go. Place us in a Biblical era, there’s so much we can do and so many more stories we can tell that’ve never been told before. If you place us in the cowboy days, there’s so much we can do. If you place like Jeymes and Baz in space, there’s so much we can do that we’ve not seen before in space. Well, in this film it’s very regular, right? So there’s so much you can do with that era. The fastest driver in the hood, it’s just Chantelle. Where I grew up, the fastest person in the hood was a girl called Chantelle. In those days you meet your best friend, maybe in a gladiator fight or a chariot race, right? People race cars illegally all the time. You meet your friend having a fight with him, right? You might have a fight in a school playground. You used the word, everyday, and that’s the thing we are able to assess it because I could see it through the everyday but also as a spectacle. I just thought this was a brilliant way to show how much we are all similar, how much really nothing’s changed whilst showing how much I love that genre.ĭEADLINE: Absolutely. There’s so many little things it doesn’t cover where I’m fascinated by those things just because of the everyday necessities in life. I feel that the Bible, just as a book, so much minutia it doesn’t cover, like where Jesus bought his sandals from or where people will get their hair done. So I wanted to tell a story about the environment that I grew up in but set in those days and kind of show how nothing’s changed and how alike we all are. So they’ll be telling us these stories and then you’d look at the films and although I loved those films, the environment and the people just looked nothing like the environment and the people I was growing up in. Mostly it was when you were growing up and your parents telling you and our relatives… I’m from a Nigerian background, my dad was Roman Catholic. For me, I wanted to tell a story based on the environment that I grew up in but based in the Biblical era, right? Because what would happen, guys, is we learned everything you ever learned about the Bible. DeMille and William Wyler who made Ben-Hur. TriStar PicturesĭEADLINE: Yeah, and Charlton Heston and all those other epics by Cecile B. Teyana Taylor as Mary Magdalene in The Book of Clarence. Because Victor Mature was in some of those films that I watched. Omar Sy, the minute I spotted him in your film I thought of Victor Mature… What’s so funny about The Book of Clarence is how, for instance, you’ve put Black faces in roles that back in the day would have been played by white actors. And I think that’s what happens a lot with the Bible as well, with the Biblical era.ĭEADLINE: OK, I get it. ![]() So it’s not that you hate Westerns, it’s that you’re not fed the ingredients you need to tell the story to include you. Now the guys are going to become cowboys. If you set the Hughes Brothers movie Menace II Society, which was released in 1993, a hundred years earlier, it was Western, right? The cars become horses, the guns are still the same. ![]() A Western is just the geographical time and place the story is set. The number of women I would speak to that say, “I hate Westerns, I hate Westerns, I hate Westerns.” And yet now I’m seeing little girls, cheerleaders, doing whole routines to the soundtrack and the scenes of The Harder They Fall. So it’s easy to tune out of these things. People like us are never fed the nourishment and the vitamins and the ingredients that we need to make this an all-encompassing genre. I think the reason why we tune out of these things, just like with Westerns, it’s because we’re never fed. JEYMES SAMUEL: Yeah, we know we’re just in a place and time that we’ve never been. The Partnership: How Making ‘Nyad’ Employed The Documentarian Skills Of Chai Vasarhelyi And Jimmy Chin & Evolved Their Marriage TooĭEADLINE: All praise to you because I usually run so fast from Biblical movies, but this one answered my prayers.
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