The critic will debut Is That Black Enough for You?!?, which features Harry Belafonte, Samuel L. Jackson and Whoopi Goldberg, at the AFI Film Festival.
Produced by David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh, the feature covers works by Melvin Van Peebles, Gordon Parks Jr. and Sidney Poitier and films including Blacula, Shaft and Coffy.
Docu was conceived as a book but rejected by publishers?
The reason that came from publishers was “No.” There was no further explanation. I don’t think I ever got “No, thank you.” Just “No.” It was puzzling because I thought it fit into the critical and social analysis that we were getting from other books. And also to offer this point of view about Black culture that is rarely seen in these kinds of books. If you’re asking me why people said no, your guess is as good as mine. A lot of the film is the things I wanted to do with the book. Obviously, it had to be shortened enormously, but I also got the advantage of being able to use scenes from the movies. I’m also hoping that people are inspired to go and seek these movies out.
Idea ending up as documentary?
As I talked about the book, some people would say, “It sounds like a documentary.” I’ve talked to Steve McQueen about it, and he goes, “Well, the way you described the connection between Sergio Leone, Ennio Morricone and Isaac Hayes, that would be a great thing to show.” When I was talking to Soderbergh about it, he just said, “It sounds like a good documentary to me. I’ll produce it.” The next thing I knew, we were shooting the interview with Harry Belafonte that’s the spine of the piece, and Steven’s the cinematographer.
Over the course of wanting to do the book people would start passing away because they were older subjects. I met Diahann Carroll, and she said, “Well, this sounds great. Let me know when you’re ready to go and I’m happy to be on camera for you.” And she died the day we were shooting Harry Belafonte.
We were shooting and cutting some things together, I would have some sense of embarrassment, thinking, “This is a little too much flourish.” Both Steven and Fincher went, “Why are you going to cut that? That’s a movie moment.” And I would go, “Oh, so you do this stuff on purpose?” That really freed me up, the idea that I can use the medium. All these things I’ve tried to observe and pay attention to are all things I could do. Rather than being cowed by it or intimidated by it, you just say, “Well, if I were making a movie, how would I do this?” Oh, wait, I am making a movie.
Poitier during the 1970s concludes the film?
I would ask Poitier to do interviews in other venues, and he would talk for about two hours about why he wouldn’t be interviewed, and I was like, “We can just record this!” He responded: “No, young man, let me tell you why.” And he’d tell me all these astonishing anecdotes, all of which were off the record, about things he’d experienced. I can’t think of anybody else in film with his narrative. He went from being somebody fighting to get into movies to becoming a movie star to the biggest movie star in the world, and then two years after that being irrelevant because of social changes and having to reinvent himself. Poitier’s story is too much a part of that decade to not include in the documentary in some way.
