DISCOURSE SHE HAS TAKEN
A conversation with Talk To Me director Kasi Lemmons
By Robert Newton
There are not a lot of people like Kasi Lemmons working in Hollywood today. We’re not just talking demographically rare, as in there are only so many 46-year-old black actors-turned-filmmakers on the scene. No, Kasi Lemmons deserves special notice because of something else; Kasi Lemmons is a gifted visionary who makes great movies.
Lemmons, whose first name is pronounced “Casey,” got her start in the business on television in the 1980s, her big break coming on “As The World Turns” on which she played Nella Franklin from 1986-89. Her first film role was in Spike Lee’s School Daze in 1988, with the high-profile Silence of the Lambs coming in 1991. She shrewdly seized the opportunity to direct her own script for 1997’s Eve’s Bayou, a compelling story of a dysfunctional family set in Louisiana in 1962. The film starred and was produced by Samuel L. Jackson, and while it did not score big at the box office, it was universally praised by critics, with Roger Ebert calling it “a reminder that sometimes films can venture into the realms of poetry and dreams.” The satisfying and schizophrenic The Caveman’s Valentine (also starring Jackson) followed in 2001, with her fantastic words play Talk To Me coming to theatres this month.
Talk To Me is based on the story of Petey Greene, a prison disc jockey who became a Washington, DC radio icon and Emmy-winning TV personality after his release. He helped define the turbulent 1960s, and with her film, Lemmons has helped define Greene, something she says she could not have done without a rock-solid cast.
“You hire great actors,” Lemmons says of her two leads, Don Cheadle (as Greene) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (as WOL-AM program director Dewey Hughes). “I attached Don Cheadle myself, but before I came on, Terrence Howard was semi-attached. Don and I had been in touch for a year or so, during the process of trying to get it made.”
Ejiofor, whom audiences will know best from Spike Lee’s thriller Inside Man, was not a cinch, either.
“Chiwetel was on a very short list, but was not a shoo-in for everybody,” she explains. “He flew himself to L.A., though, and had an absolute chemistry from the very start.”
Even Lemmons, for all her skill, was not prominent on studio Focus Features’ radar.
“I knew there were no women on their list,” she says, “and I had to win the job. I had seen a couple drafts of the script over the years, and I started to fall in love with the story and what I could do with it. I knew what it should feel like and sound like, and I had to be very specific and very dynamic with them.”
The biggest stumbling block for fact-based features such as this is striking a believable balance between the truth and the drama, something that Lemmons honed in on early.
“I wanted to preserve the absolute emotional integrity,” she notes, “but on the other hand, the reason I got the job was that I saw it as a movie — not a biopic — depicting a relationship between these two guys. It’s very human, with a very ‘Butch and Sundance’ friction to it. I didn’t approach it as the true story of Petey Greene, because he’s still just a character, and seen from Dewey’s point of view. The more I focused on the relationship, the more the characters would reveal themselves, and you want that feeling of effortlessness.”
Lemmons effortlessly builds the tension, defines the timbre of the time and draws out her characters, which shine through the darkest of times.
“It was such a release,” she says of the film’s defining moment — a free James Brown concert meant to quell the rioting in Washington after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. “I realized how badly I needed this movie to speak loudly and capture that ‘mad as hell’ feeling. I enjoyed everything about it — especially the activism — and we were such a great company, and not all black, either. We all got in the same head, though, and when James Brown (Herbert L. Rawlings Jr.) started in, everyone was singing ‘I’m Black And I’m Proud.’”•••