Interview: Blitz Bazawule on directing new film adaptation of THE COLOR PURPLE

The brand new musical film adaptation of The Color Purple hits UK cinemas today (26 January). We were fortunate enough to sit down with legendary director Blitz Bazawule to discuss the film.

Blitz, huge congratulations on the film. I got through many, many tissues throughout it! It was an incredible tearjerker. 

That means a lot, thank you. 

What was your collaborative process in approaching a film with such a cult following but also tells such a great story about people of colour and bringing something new to it?

Well, The Color Purple is a sacred text so if you don't have anything to contribute, it's not something you touch. It's a great stage play, a great feature film, and a great book but once I had leaned into the fact that Alice's [Walker] beginnings of her book talk about this dear God and the imaginative quality he takes, there was a headspace I could explore. 

All of a sudden, I knew how to make it work together: music, imagination and this very dense story of trauma and pain, but also joy. I oscillate very easily so my job was to communicate my thoughts as succinctly as possible. I cast my brilliant crew by sketching  a thousand frames of my movie. I went as far as hiring voice actors to do the voices while I scanned all of the images. It's the only way you know whether 500 people can make the same movie. You work out if they see it as clearly as you do. This movie is massive as it traverses 40 years of life in the American South so the only way I could be sure that it would work is if everyone could watch it and we could all agree. It was about creating a sandbox.  

I never bring boards to set or any of that stuff but I do set expectation around intention, overall  intention, but also micro intention on what the scene is about.  

Which numbers or sequences did you find the most challenging to visualise but also find the most rewarding to create?

I would say when they go to the movie theater because it's not in any other canon. It's not in the book, it's not in Steven's [Spielberg] film, it's nowhere. So there are a few moments when we just made it up! But we did it because it helped us expose Celie's headspace. And for once, she wasn't just a passive character. You saw how she was growing and emotionally finding herself; how to love and who to love. If you don't have access to the internal compass of a character, they appear on the surface as very docile, because they don't do anything.  

The characters do a lot in their heads so that was a big one but I figured out how Celie's imagination was working when she was introduced to new and novel ideas, technologies, and stories. When she first sees a gramophone, a transporter to this giant gramophone world, when she first sees a photograph, we push into the photograph, and she imagines the world with the photograph.  

So when it came to the movie theater, it was the same. She was finally in this place, she had never seen a movie before. So immediately, her mind could transport.  

Once I figured that out, I had to think what period films are ripe for this, so we found this movie called The Flying Ace. I use aviation as a transporter method because at that time in the 30s, there was a new and novel thing when twin-engine planes were  becoming more and more popular, so they created a more and more emotional picture. Not only has Celie never seen a movie, she's never seen a plane.  

Can you talk about the film’s choreography as it channels both the stage production's origins but also feels very visually rich in the world of film?

Yes, it all started with Fatima Robinson who was actually on my pitch deck for the film. She was someone I told the Studio that from day one had to be a part of my film because I knew that we were going to be relying heavily on movement; not just physical movement, but camera movement.  

Fatima is a legendary choreographer; she choreographed Michael Jackson’s music video ‘Remember the Time’ and much of Aaliyah’s stuff so I knew that she understood scale. She had also recently worked on Super Bowl with Dr. Dre, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar. She was the perfect person.

I knew that this film was going to live and die by how big the set pieces were, and how intimate and emotional the small elements were. 

How did you choose which songs you want to rewrite, which songs you didn’t want to put in, and which songs you wanted to be exactly the same as the original stage show?  

Well, I didn't come married to anything so anything that features in my movie had to provide service to the story and my main characters’ journey. There were some songs from the  Broadway show that just didn't do that, and I wasn't going to put them in just because they're part of a canon. Sometimes words are not enough and some characters reached a point when they needed a song. For example, Harpo needed a song at the point he was going to stand by his decision to build a life and a family with Shug Avery, plus his confrontation with Mister.

Words were not enough here so I wrote Cory [Hawkins] a song personally. On the night of the table read, I took him outside to the parking lot and taught him the song. He came back into the room, performed the song and everybody stood and applauded him. That's how we ended up with the song ‘Workin’ in the movie. 

It was the same with Halle Bailey and ‘Keep It Movin’. Nettie needed a song  to tell her sister how she really felt. And in part to her sister, some survival mechanisms. So Halle,  along with Nova Wav, wrote this amazing song. It was more on a need-to basis. 

You can talk about the stage show and the object does exist in the abstract, but actually finding this very tangible world and discovering these spaces, what was the process there?  

So our physical locations are massive. I'm a very practical filmmaker so I like to find places with character. I drove seven hours a day for two months! I found Driftwood Beach on Jekyll Island, which was incredible. I also found a man-made swamp that we could dredge out. It took two months but we built out Juke Joint and then filled it back in with water afterwards.

All of the very, very key locations are central to the storytelling. And I think they ultimately helped a lot in building the world. 

The Color Purple is out in cinemas now! What are you waiting for, Besties?

Interviewed by: Josiah Eloi