For writer-director Kasi Lemmons, making movies has never been a question of black or white, but rather varying shades of gray. “The gray area is so much more interesting and so much more realistic and valid to our experiences,” says the 46-year-old multi-hyphenate. “People are not all good or all bad. They’re complicated. Complicated characters are what interest me.”

Since the critical success of Eve’s Bayou, which won an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature in 1998, Lemmons has been telling stories that defy genre conventions and stereotypes. Her films are poetic (Eve’s Bayou), moving (The Caveman’s Valentine), relevant and sincere (Talk to Me). “I think I’m very intentional,” declares Lemmons. “I’m very deliberate as a filmmaker, so I think about how it’s going to look, how it’s going to feel. Some of my films are more poetic than others. Eve’s Bayou, which I wrote, is more poetic. I tend to be poetic as a writer but as a filmmaker I’m deliberate in what I set out to do.”

Another defining trait of Lemmons’ films is that they feature African-American actors in the kind of three-dimensional roles that Hollywood often saves for A-List actors only. Take Samuel L. Jackson, who starred in Eve’s Bayou and Lemmons’ sophomore effort, The Caveman’s Valentine (and also helped produce both films). He plays two very unconventional leading men in these movies: In the first he is Louis Batiste, a charming, womanizing doctor whose actions are nearly impossible to pin down, let alone judge; in the second he is Romulus Ledbetter, a lonely homeless man who lives in a cave and attempts to solve the murder of a young boy. Both roles are completely unlike anything that Jackson has ever played and the latter especially showcases the emotional range of an actor who is more famous for his roles in action-driven films such as Pulp Fiction and Snakes on a Plane.

But if Lemmons’ films feature underutilized actors in unconventional roles, they are simply a byproduct of the auteur’s personal vision. “The choices I’ve made and the work I’ve done make it difficult to put me in a box,” explains Lemmons. “Eve’s Bayou in some ways is very feminine and The Caveman’s Valentine is a thriller. Talk to Me has moments of great comedy but is a drama and is masculine in its own ways as well. So I can’t ask, ‘Am I feminine?’ or ‘Am I masculine?’ or ‘Am I black?’ I definitely feel black. I respond to the blackness in my own films, but do I think that I could do a Napoleonic period piece? Absolutely! If I liked the story and I related to the characters, I absolutely could. I feel like a filmmaker.

“On the other hand, I’ve been a black woman all of my life,” Lemmons continues. “I respond to characters that I want to see and usually they are characters that I haven’t seen a lot. In Eve’s Bayou, The Caveman’s Valentine and Talk to Me—these are characters that you just don’t see all the time and I respond to that.”

Born in St. Louis but raised in Boston, Lemmons spent most of the 1980s and 1990s working as an actor (including a role in Spike Lee’s School Daze). During this time she attended film school at The New School in New York City, initially focusing on making documentaries (her first film was Fall From Grace, a short documentary about homelessness). “Acting is like my first love,” explains Lemmons of her early profession, “but I have a lot more to offer as a director. I also feel that it is rarer—and I guess that this is where it does matter to me that I am a black woman. I feel like we need our black women directors. We need women directors! There are already a lot of fabulous actresses to choose from.”

While attending film school Lemmons auditioned for “The Cosby Show” several times and on one of these occasions she finally gathered up the nerve to approach Bill Cosby himself.

“I went in and said: ‘Mr. Cosby, I want to show you my short film. Would you mind?’ And he said, ‘You know, what I really need is a writer.’ I said, ‘I’m a writer.’ He said, ‘Write me a four-page scene.’ He gave me some parameters about what the scene had to be about—a married couple struggling with this particular issue—and told me to bring it back to him a few days later. I went home and wrote the scene and then came back (of course, he had forgotten that he had told me to come back). He gave the scene to his head writer, as they were trying to put together a team of women to write a screenplay for him, not part of “The Cosby Show,” but a screenplay for him.”

The screenplay was written but never made. Still, thanks to her experience writing it, Lemmons found her way into the Writers Guild of America. Though she had been writing stories and plays since the age of 12, often composing original scenes for her actor friends to perform, Lemmons kept coming back to a story that had long been occupying her head—the story of a young girl and her family in Louisiana. This story would eventually become the script for Eve’s Bayou.

After unsuccessfully shopping the script with the hope of attaching a director, Lemmons decided to tackle the project herself. In order to convince her producers she was up to the challenge, she produced a short film entitled Dr. Hugo, which starred Lemmons’ husband, actor-director Vondie Curtis-Hall (Gridlock’d, Glitter), in the role that Jackson would later go on to play in Eve’s Bayou. Her producers were clearly impressed. Eve’s Bayou was released in November 1997 and made the “Top 10” lists of several of the country’s biggest film critics, including Roger Ebert.

Lemmons’ latest film, Talk to Me, which will be released on DVD on October 30th, is a project that has been years in the making (the late Ted Demme was originally attached to direct). She describes the film as a “kind of love story between these two men—a platonic love story… reminiscent of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.”

Talk to Me tells the story of Petey Greene (Don Cheadle), an ex-con who became a D.C. disc jockey and icon, chronicling his rise from a jail cell to a radio booth and his tumultuous relationship with his manager, Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Set in the late 1960s, Lemmons read the script in the months leading up to the Iraq War and found herself remembering the outspoken activism of the 1960s, “remembering a time when it was so volatile that there was actually a possibility of change.”

“At the beginning of the Iraq War,” Lemmons says, “people felt scared to say anything because you were going to be labeled ‘unpatriotic.’ People were very, very cautious and I felt like saying, ‘Wake up, goddamitt!’ I felt like screaming at people all the time. Talk to Me is this perfect anti-censorship film in a way. You’ve got this character that is going to tell it [like it is]. Whether or not that’s a mistake, he’s going to have to judge later—but at the moment that he is speaking it, nothing is censoring him. I thought that was kind of exciting.”

Watching Talk to Me, one is also struck by the eerie similarities between Petey’s struggles with fame and those of the controversial and extremely popular comedian, Dave Chappelle. Much like Chappelle, who ultimately found the spotlight uncomfortable, there is a scene in Talk to Me where Petey goes on “The Johnny Carson Show” and, during his routine, tells the audience that he doesn’t know whether they’re laughing with him or at him (Chappelle stated the same as one of his reasons for walking away from Comedy Central’s “Chappelle’s Show”).

“Sometimes you get this authentic, energetic person who’s good at entertaining people and making them laugh, even, but who is not meant to be a star,” says Lemmons. “To me, it was very moving that that’s not what Petey was looking for, and I guess I was trying to speak to anybody who has been in that situation, who has had to wrestle with that—with the difference between what you intend and what you see as your art and mass producing it or selling it. So I felt Dave Chappelle, I felt Richard Pryor—I felt anybody who has been in that situation where you go, ‘Wait a minute, how did I get here? This is not exactly what I wanted.’

Kasi Lemmons has been fortunate in this department, however. The three films that she has made in the past 10 years, although vastly different, have all been born out of genuine passion and love for the material. She has worked with predominantly the same crew for all three productions, including collaborations with composer Terence Blanchard and editor Terilyn Shropshire, and has never compromised her original moviemaking goals.
“When I work with Kasi, I can’t help but feel that she has what I can only describe as X-ray vision into the layers and depths of her characters,” says Shropshire.

“She has an innate ability to bring out the best in the other artists and craftspeople on her crew. She is The Crew Whisperer. I remember when the dailies started coming in on Talk To Me, I sat in a dark theater being humbled by the artistry that was unfolding on the screen in front of me—the performances, cinematography, production design, costumes… the direction. Directors are a diverse breed of artists—each one his or her own force of nature. What Kasi brings to the elements is grace and serenity, with an immeasurable dose of fierce energy and will. The word ‘auteur’ is thrown about too easily, but in Kasi’s case she is building a body of work that possesses her own personal style.”

In other words, Lemmons trusts her own voice. She trusts that what interests her will in turn interest her audience and she has built a successful career on that instinct.

“It’s funny because you were saying that Eve’s Bayou is so different than The Caveman’s Valentine and is so different than Talk to Me,” Lemmons says, “but when I look at all of these films, they look like me to me. That’s me—they’re all really me. And I think that that is important, to make a body of work that is you.”

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