CraveOnline: I was not familiar with the musical before your movie. Did you have to shorten any of the songs or cut some songs out?
Kasi Lemmons: It’s completely different. Black Nativity the play is only about 10 minutes of my movie which is from the church scene, I was about to say in reel five. You don’t know what reel we’re talking about.
I do. I remember when films were divided in reels.
Right, and we’re still calling them reels. We still divide it by reels.
That’s good to know.
The church scene and the dream sequence is basically Black Nativity. Now every production of Black Nativity uses different songs. It’s very open to new infusions of different groups that put on these different songs and you feel like everybody is using the songs that they’re particularly attracted to. The songs that are almost always in Black Nativity are “Rise Up Shepherd,” is pretty much a staple Black Nativity song, and “Fix Me Jesus.” The rest are at the discretion of the person who’s putting on the production, but we had I guess five Black Nativity songs in there. So no, the whole rest of the story was original. That’s what I brought to it, the family story.
Did you write original songs to fill out the rest of the movie?
Yes, we wrote original songs. There are some that are a combination of original like “Motherless Child” and “Silent Night” and there are songs that are completely original like “He Loves Me Still” and “Test of Faith.”
One thing Black Nativity really captured for me is that shock of your first time in New York, which I think some movies take for granted. Was that important to you?
Absolutely, especially from Langston’s point of view. Langston feels like he kind of in some ways owns the streets of Baltimore. He is in his element and he’s learned how to manage there, but if you take any kid like that and throw them in the middle of Times Square, all of a sudden they’re a child again.
Are you still planning to do Agaat as your next film?
I am not sure what my next film is. I’m open to a lot of possibilities and I’m looking at a lot of things and I have a passion project in mind that if you’d ask me if there’s anything in the world I could do next, it would be what I would do next. It’s a script that I wrote a while ago that’s something I feel very, very close to. It also has music in it. It’s not a musical but it involves the classical music world and it’s something that I love. I kind of am liking right at this moment not knowing exactly what I’m doing next.
Are you still attached to the book Agaat?
I still really love that book. We’ll see what happens.
Two of your films you did not write, Caveman’s Valentine and Talk to Me.
Right. I wrote drafts of them.
I’m sure as the director, you did, it’s just credits. How different were those experiences with something you didn’t originate?
Well, I fell in love with them in stages. I read the book Caveman’s Valentine and fell in love with the book. With Talk to Me, I read the script, and it was a very organic process of falling in love. At first I read the script and I was like, “Oh, the script is great. I like it, it’s good, it’s good.” Then the more I read it and worked with the characters and worked on it, I fell in love.
One more question about your acting career, when you got Silence of the Lambs, was that just a job to you?
It was a very special job. It was a very big deal to me. It may have been because it was Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Demme. It was a very big deal to me. I don’t think that we knew when we were shooting it what it would become, 11 Oscars and all that stuff. We had no idea.
I imagine the book was well known enough, but probably not as well known as we take it for granted now.
Yeah, I had not really heard of it. I read it at the time that I auditioned but it wasn’t something that was like, “Oh, this is my favorite book.”
Did you get to go to the Oscars with them?
You know, they did bring me to the Oscars. They did, which they had no reason to have to do that other than kindness and generosity, but they did bring me to the Oscars.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
