‘The Color Purple’ Director: This Movie Is ‘Sacred Healing Work’
Blitz Bazawule could care less about The Color Purple’s recent award nominations. The film’s director isn’t worried about the movie-musical’s Best Picture snub at the Golden Globe or wowed by the musical’s five Critics Choice nominations and three mentions on the Oscars’ shortlist for its music. He understands the significance of such accolades, but says he prefers to focus on how viewers will receive the Broadway musical adaptation.
“I honestly do not pay attention to any of it,” Bazawule tells Rolling Stone, the day the Critics Choice nominations were announced. “The work we did, I believe, is sacred healing work and that’s the metric that I’m most interested in.”
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The Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg-produced film premieres on Christmas Day, and stars Fantasia Barrino (Celie) along with Danielle Brooks (Sofia), Taraji P. Henson (Shug Avery), Colman Domingo (Mister), Corey Hawkins (Harpo), H.E.R. (Squeak), Halle Bailey (Nettie), and a number of others. Beyond the film’s sprawling landscapes and glittering costume design, the musical’s African and hip-hop dance styles and swelling orchestrations bring vibrancy and new life to the tale of a Black woman’s harrowing journey to independence in 1920s Georgia.
Ghanaian filmmaker and artist Bazawule (Beyoncé’s Black is King) didn’t go to film school or attend a performing arts conservatory. In fact, he was the least known of the 10 candidates to interview for the director gig. After receiving playwright Marcus Gardley’s script for the film, Bazawule says he knew that a groundbreaking epic like The Color Purple required a fastidious attention to detail. For three months, he sketched the film frame by frame, added voice-overs and sound effects, and shared his two-hour storyboard with his fellow crew members. Some laughed. Others cried.
“If these pencil sketches and ink work can inspire this level of emotionality out of my crew, then when they bring their brilliance, it’s just going to elevate all of this,” Bazawule recalls.
Bazawule wanted the film to take viewers on a century-long journey through African American music. He recruited Ricky Dillard for gospel, Keb’ Mo’ for blues, and Christian McBride for jazz. Composer Kris Bowers (King Richard, Bridgerton) served as the glue and was hired six months prior to filming to transform Negro spirituals and the blues into large-scale orchestrations. Hip hop seeped through the score, too.
Public Enemy’s 1992 performance in Ghana forever changed Bazawule’s perspective on the Bronx-born musical genre. By college, he’d earned the nickname “Blitz” for his lightning-fast lyrical delivery and later began recording rap music and touring as Blitz the Ambassador. Bazawule looked to hip-hop visionaries like Mobb Deep and Jay-Z when collaborating with Bowers on the music.
The music had to also feel organic, he says. Just think of the opening scene where clapping horse hooves merge with the delicate strum of a banjo. The camera pans over to a young Nettie (Bailey) and Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) squealing and smiling as they play pattycake.
“A lot of musicals struggle from this problem: the music comes out of the sky, and when it comes out of the sky there isn’t a source for it,” Bazawule explains. “Something that my whole team understood as very important was that we were going to create sounds that were diegetic and environmental.”
Though adapted from Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epistolary novel and the Tony Award-winning musical, Bazawule says he was forced to cut serenades like “Somebody Gonna Love You” and the aching “Celie’s Curse/Mister’s Song,” which Mister sings in search of forgiveness.
“It was very important that we didn’t misconstrue him and give him a frivolous singing moment, just because it’s a musical,” Bazawule says. “We had to be thoughtful about who gets a song, why they get a song.”
Bazawule continues, “People only sing when the words are not enough,” and Mister’s stream of invective and abusive acts spoke for him. Harpo, played by the talented Corey Hawkins, who struggles to assert his manhood, got a new song, “Working,” penned by Bazawule.
While building the juke joint, the hammering, chiseling, and sawing creates a backbeat, and the dance numbers resemble the “stepping” performed within traditionally Black sororities and fraternities, says choreographer Fatima Robinson.
Robinson, who choreographed Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, Dreamgirls, and the music video for Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?” sought radiant, joyous movements from African dance to hip hop while working on The Color Purple. More than 50 dancers swarmed the streets jumping, jiving, and shimmying as Shug pulled into town. And during Shug’s steamy performance of “Push Da Button,” the lights go out and people begin daggering, a waist-grabbing, hip-thrusting dance descending from the Caribbean.
“That was the stuff you would see in a club in Jamaica: men kicking over women, and women getting picked up and twirled around,” Robinson says.
The frenzied reaction to Shug’s arrival at the juke joint is akin to Beyoncé playing a 100-person club in Houston, Bazawule adds.
Robinson, who’s known Barrino for more than two decades, hired professionals to teach the former American Idol winner and recording artist to tap dance and watched as the lead belted “I’m Here” without restrain, take after take.
“She’s such an incredible singer and performed from the heart,” Robinson says. “If you ever watched her live perform[ance], she just leaves nothing there.”
When Barrino starred as Celie on Broadway in her early 20s, the burden of playing an abused and illiterate Black woman weighed on her, and she swore to never play the role again. Barrino told Variety that the ability to access her character’s inner voice in the film convinced her to give it a second try.
As the audience enters Celie’s imagination, the music slowly rises. Then, when she makes a discovery or reunites with loved ones, dozens of orchestral pieces chime in.
“Over the course of the film it gets bigger, not only when she has these moments of heightened emotion and imagination, but primarily as she’s also stepping into her power,” Bowers says.
Whenever Bawazule sits down for a movie, he says it can be hard to pinpoint whether the director is Black or white because “cinematic arts are a bit stifling.” When spearheading The Color Purple nearly four decades after Spielberg’s film version, he did not intend to recreate it. His directorial choices were intentional, he says, from those storyboard sketches to music placement, and he hopes the film’s cadence speaks to a Black demographic.
“Cinematic arts are a very young art and it’s very important that it is liberated and people are allowed to show up as themselves,” Bazawule says, “contributing their superpower that is their cultural background and choices.”
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