Breaking Baz: Malcolm Washington Summons Ghosts From His Mother’s Family To Aid Him Shooting ‘The Piano Lesson’ — Telluride Film Festival
EXCLUSIVE: Filmmaker Malcolm Washington says that his screen adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Piano Lesson honors his family’s history, especially that of his mother Pauletta Pearson Washington.
Set in post-Depression era Pittsburgh, the haunting movie is about two siblings, Berniece and her younger, sharecropper brother Boy Willie, played respectively by Danielle Deadwyler and John David Washington. Both believe that they have a claim to a treasured family heirloom – an upright piano carved by their enslaved grandfather with faces of their west African ancestors sold into slavery.
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The history of the Charles family and that instrument is one forged in blood and bullets.
The Piano Lesson will have its world premiere screening at the Telluride Film Festival over the Labor Day weekend and Netflix will release it into select cinemas in the United States and the United Kingdom on November 8. The streamer will launch it on its service on November 22.
Berniece says that the piano in question is haunted and that it should stay with her while her brother wants to sell it so her can purchase land on which his forebears once toiled.
Washington says that he saw himself in both sides of the argument. “How best do we honor legacy? Do we build on it or do we put it on a shelf and look at it and admire it from a distance?” he ponders.
In writing this version, and during the shoot, Washington says “it was really getting to watch that kind of struggle play out” and taking “two parts of my mind and having them wrestle with each other.” The 33 year-old views ancestors as “such powerful forces in our life” that continues to have “so much power” concerning who we are today.
As he was preparing to write the screenplay, co-written by Virgil Williams, for The Piano Lesson, Washington was going through old family photographs from his mother’s side — “and we go back deep, deep in North Carolina,” he says. One image he found was of his grandmother aged about four. This got him to thinking “of the span that this image covers.”
“I’m looking at them, seeing myself,” he adds. “I look at my grandmother’s face, and I see my sister’s face, I see my mother’s face, and here I am talking to you about a movie that I’ve gotten to make to honor them.”
I press him about that faded photograph and he shares that “of course” it was taken on a white man’s farm “in a town called Eden, which is already so beautiful in itself, so ironic.”
His mother grew up in Newton, North Carolina, but Washington stresses that her family was from Eden. “You look at their hands and their faces,” he says. “They’ve lived such a physically gruelling life, but with so much love still.”
That love, he says, inspired his depiction of the family and their descendants in The Piano Lesson. “It’s very much taken from the love I received from my grandparents. They were like the embodiment of what love is,” he adds.
Their presence loomed so large over the production that it’s his mother’s family pictures that adorn the wall. “There are some of our actors’ ancestors — Danielle has some of her ancestors in the movie and on the set,” he explains.
Washington and his company of actors, that in addition to Deadwyler and his older brother John David,, include Samuel L. Jackson, Ray Fisher, Corey Hawkins, Michael Potts, Stephan James, his mother and sister Olivia Washington. He says each was “opening up a portal into ourselves and up into the heavens, into our ancestors and trying to let them come through us.”
It’s true that when we watch The Piano Lesson, and allow it to seep into us, we are able to summon those who came before us. It can also bring pain.
Berniece and Boy Willie’s father was killed for reclaiming the piano and their ancestor was murdered for stealing it in the first place. “There’s hurt there, but there’s so much victory there too, that we try to show the full scope of that and set that within this ghost story that’s kind of humming along on the surface.”
Malcolm Washington can’t play the piano but his mother is a classically trained pianist and vocalist. When she was eight or nine years of age, she became the first Black child to perform in the Miss North Carolina Scholarship Organization. She studied music at the North Carolina School of the Arts, Juilliard, and the University of Texas.
But, says Washington, his mother “has a conflicted relationship with the piano.”
How so, I asked.
“So she was very much at the center of this adaptation for me, because she was somebody that the piano gave a lot of opportunity to,” he started to explain.
“My mom grew up in the segregated South. My mom’s father was a principal of the Black high school in their town; there were two, the Black high school and the white high school. And when integration happened, he lost his job. They lost their standing in the community because all the positions of power were replaced with white people.
“So my mom grew up in this really challenging kind of racial climate, but she was playing classic music, and that brought her all these opportunities,” he says noting his mother’s extensive travels, which eventually took her to New York and Juilliard: “She lived this life that wasn’t available to a lot of her peers. And later in life she became almost haunted by the piano, by how much sacrifice went into learning and mastering that craft.”
Washington says that he “excavated” that story of her becoming “haunted” and it gave him insight into what the piano means to Berniece in the film.
“You can’t cross that emotional bridge because there’s too much between you and that thing,” he says.
His family is so deeply woven into The Piano Lesson. I remark to him that August Wilson has become an important part of the Washington family.
His father, the Oscar-winning actor and film artist Denzel Washington has pledged alongside co-producer Todd Black to bring all ten of Wilson’s American Century Cycle of plays, which chart different aspects of the Black experience in America, to the screen. He was instrumental in filming Fences which he directed and starred in alongside Viola Davis (who won an Oscar). Both Denzel and Viola also starred in the scorching 2010 Broadway revival of Fences directed by Kenny Leon and produced by Carole Shorenstein Hayes and Scott Rudin; Wilson’s widow Constanza Romero was an associate producer.
Denzel Washington also helped bring Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom to the screen. That 2020 movie was directed by George C. Wolfe and starred Ms. Davis, Chadwick Boseman, and Colman Domingo.
However, Malcolm insists that although he has rooted The Piano Lesson in “my experience” the art created by Wilson is ”so much bigger than me and my family. It’s everybody’s family.”
Malcolm wanted his brother to be in the film because he’d “been a fan of John David for so long” and he remembers a summer when they were sharing an apartment in Los Angeles. “I was working on a set as a camera assistant and I was coming home from work every day and it was me and my brother and it was such a beautiful time in our relationship because he’s seven years older than me, so he was much older when I was younger. It was like he was in a different world. I was 20 and he was 29 and it was a time that we kind of got to come together as adults,” he says.
“I remember we’d sit outside on the back porch and just talk about what we wanted our lives to be. So we were dreaming from the beginning and that was a moment that’s always been sacred to me… And in getting to make this movie, of course, I was going to cash my chips in and say, “Okay let’s do this, are you down? I want to do it with you.”
Washington says that having Samuel L. Jackson in the movie was like “everybody’s uncle on set and was so generous and sharing stories, sharing opinions.”
Jackson is also steeped in Wilson’s oeuvre. He and John David performed together on Broadway in a recent production of The Piano Lesson. It was important to have Michael Potts who has also been associated with Wilson’s plays for decades. And he wanted the chance to work with Deadwyler who was coming off of her sublime performance in Till.
The two of them, he says, became “such close creative collaborators” and “we formed such a great kinship.”
We’d been talking a lot about ghosts and I wondered if any had visited the set.
The shoot, he says, was a spiritual experience. Washington has “a strong spiritual core and I feel a strong connection to those who came before. And those in my line are around me still and there was a presence on set that was so palpable that was clearly beyond us. I try to set the tone too. I would burn candles every day.”
He experienced other ghosts when, in preparation, for the film he studied the August Wilson Archive held at the University of Pittsburgh’s Library System.
Washington read the original text for The Piano Lesson and saw the list of actors who auditioned for parts for the original staged reading in 1986 and the first production in 1987 at the Yale Repertory Theatre. “Everybody now is a name black actor from that generation. Everybody was coming in. I’m like, wow, August touched everybody. And there was a beautiful handwritten letter from Mr. Samuel L. Jackson to Mr. Wilson And I realized this is such a storied work that we’re engaging in here, that it just put the stakes even higher.”
Jackson was in the production at Yale Repertory and was the Boy Willie understudy in the original 1990 Broadway production that starred Charles S. Dutton and S. Epatha Merkerson.
Watching The Piano Lesson on the big screen in London, I realized that Washington had been preparing to make this movie his whole life and had clearly studied every auteur going. There were certainly tiny, tiny instances – little moments of time- influenced by Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and I could feel Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line during a moment when the piano is being reclaimed.
Washington laughs, agreeing with my observations.
He says: ”Listen, I could watch this whole movie with you and talk to you about my cinematic reference points.”
And, of course, his parents’ work influenced him. “And my dad’s been involved in all of August Wilson’s work.”
He also worked closely with Constanza Romero, Wilson’s widow “who was this incredible resource, and anything that she wants from me, she got it because she’s been such a great partner with me and opened up everything and supported me along the way,” he gushed.
But he spoke with warmth and sincerity. “I’m a new voice, and that can be so scary with such a revered text and such an important project,” he says adding that Romero trusted him from the beginning.
He refused to be drawn on whether he’ll shoot another film in the August Wilson cycle.
Referring back to Romero, he smiles and seems hopeful that perhaps he will be on board to bring more of the playwright’s work to the screen.
“Anything that would make her happy, I’m more than happy to do, but I’m trying to finish this one first,” he adds.
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