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Rachel Samuels Takes Viewers Down Some Dark Streets
Photo: Jack Zeman/Samuel Goldwyn Films/LA DARK STREETS, LLC
Low-key lighting casts shadows upon its characters. A story of deception and murder where the closer one gets to the truth the more dangerous it gets. A femme fatale leads the protagonist through a world of moral ambiguity, only to bring him to his demise. These are some of the things normally associated with film noir. If you keep all that and then add in a couple of singing vixens, a lushly ornate visual palate and a slew of original blues songs from the likes of Chaka Khan and Etta James, you’ve got director Rachel Samuels’ new film noir musical fantasy, Dark Streets.
With her third feature, Samuels has entered unknown territory, creating a cinematic style, while based in the 1930s and structured after classic film noirs, is still an innovative original from start to finish. The story centers upon a New Orleans nightclub owner, Chaz (played by “Mad Men"’s Gabriel Mann), who finds himself caught in the middle of a string of murders somehow linked to his father’s suicide. As Chaz receives new information regarding the murders, he gets deeper and deeper into a world darker than he could have ever expected. Likewise, Samuels takes the audience on a ride that gets more and more disorienting, bringing us further into its Dark Streets.
MM recently got the chance to talk with Samuels about her approach to making Dark Streets, how she balanced the various genres in the movie and the importance of the blues.
Dougla Polisin (MM): It has been eight years since you directed your last feature movie. What have you been up to since then and what drew you to making Dark Streets?
Rachel Samuals (RS): I had a five-year gap between features—The Suicide Club came out in 2000 and I first started working on Dark Streets in 2005. Between directing those films, I wrote two screenplays and created and directed two television pilots for VH1, one of which went into series development but was later canceled. So I was quite busy between films—but as much as I enjoy television and screenwriting, directing features is definitely my first love. My background is as a visual artist and creating cinematic images for the big screen is really at the heart of what drew me to directing. And there’s nothing like a musical to give you free reign to create a fantastical visual world! When the producers of Dark Streets approached me with this project, I jumped at the chance.
MM: The movie was originally a musical play before you signed on to direct. Did this affect the way you approached making the movie? What changes were made to the original script that showed up in your shooting script?
RS: Dark Streets began as a musical play called The City Club, written by our producer Glenn Stewart. It focused very much on these wonderful, rich blues songs, which were woven together with brief dialogue scenes. These same great original songs remain central to the film (in addition to new songs written later), but the characters and storyline were expanded for the film version. In adapting Glenn’s play, our screenwriter Wallace King was affected by events in the U.S. at the time. The Enron scandal and the blackouts in California were the inspiration for new elements added to the storyline and the ongoing mistrust of those in power helped contribute to the sense of paranoia.
However, the music remained absolutely central to the film, just as it was in The City Club, and this did greatly affect the way I approached it. My previous work such as The Suicide Club had been much more about classical narrative storytelling. By its nature of being a film where music was the driving force, Dark Streets was a bit more abstract and less driven by narrative. I saw this as an opportunity to really stretch as a visual artist, and to work on that side of my skill set as a director.
MM: The movie is said to be a “film noir musical fantasy,” which is an interesting classification for a movie. Was the mix of genres intentional from the start? Was it difficult to blend these genres together and what did you do to balance all of them?
RS: The mix of genres was intentional from the start and I see them as being interconnected. Dark Streets explores a particular mood and atmosphere: The surreal dream state of film noir. The blues music that permeates and shapes the film shares that fatalistic mood, while at the same time providing its own fresh angle on it. My goal was to explore the classic noir themes of disorientation and moral ambiguity, but without the classic visual austerity; instead, to see noir inhabit a visually lush, sensual world filled with music and dance. I wanted to create an original take on noir, and I’d never seen it handled in this way.
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by chrisbrown on 12/09/08 at 11:28 am
Interesting interview. Having seen the trailer, I was surprised to read that “Dark Streets” was filmed in a theatre and not in a studio.
I’m looking forward to seeing it come out even though normally “musicals” are not my thing. Could that have something to do with the fact that my brother, Tim Brown wrote several of the songs sung in the soundtrack? Yeah I guess so.
As for the theme “blues musical”: how about the ever poplular “Blues Bros”? Anyway you turn it this seems like something never quite done before. I thought of “Cotton Club”.
Chris Brown in Hamburg
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