The Book of Clarence round-up: A few last soundbites and interviews
The Book of Clarence round-up: A few last soundbites and interviews
Director Jeymes Samuel wants to do other Bible stories, and more.
The Book of Clarence comes out tonight, so here’s one last round-up of the interviews and such that Google news alerts have sent my way.
First, and perhaps most eye-catching, The Wrap reports that director Jeymes Samuel is already floating the idea of making another (quasi?-)biblical film:
As the world awaits the theatrical release of “The Book of Clarence,” the second feature film and first cinematic venture into biblical narratives for “The Harder They Fall” writer-director Jeymes Samuel, the filmmaker already knows the next Bible story he’d like to bless audiences with: The Ten Commandments.
“None story so cinematic as The Ten Commandments, ‘Let my people go!’” Samuel told TheWrap during an interview for his Biblical times-set “The Book of Clarence.” “I want to do ‘The Ten Commandments.’ Give me ‘The Ten Commandments’ and I will show you the meaning of cinema.” . . .
The filmmaker has only told a “couple of studios” about his desire to serve up his own “biggest, Blackest” version of the tale and he already knows who he’d like to star in it, as he’s started writing down notes for the film.
“I believe everyone should be in that movie. Everyone — Mahershala Ali, Idris Elba, Regina King, Denzel Washington, LaKeith Stanfield, everyone needs to be in that movie,” Samuel said, adding that the idea didn’t come about during his creative process for “The Book of Clarence.”
“Not that I was considering it while I was making ‘The Book of Clarence,’” Samuel explained. “I’m a storyteller, when you get the idea for a story…ideas are real things. They come to you for a reason, right? When you get an idea, it’s actually a living, breathing entity — as fully formed as a heartbeat. Everything, any idea, it comes to you to be realized. So I didn’t question whether I was going to make ‘The Book of Clarence’ or not, but there’s other stories in the Bible I want to, not tackle, but I want to do.”
It would be very interesting to see how he tackles that story, but suffice it to say there’s a lot of potential for controversy there—much more than there was with The Book of Clarence, I’d argue. No one cares if you cast white Brits as Romans, but who would play the Egyptian oppressors? Every answer is a potential minefield.1
Anyway, on to other interviews.
Esquire ran a profile of Samuel, with some good background information:
“Clarence is your everyman,” Samuel explains. “Clarence is literally just a dude in the hood, through the eyes of which we look at that era and learn stories. Everyone either is a Clarence or knows a Clarence, right? He wants better for his mother. He wants better for himself. He wants to be someone. And he does whatever he can to just get by. It’s just who Clarence is. He’s a lovely guy! Like, Clarence is me, in the hood. He’s all the people that I knew and grew up with in Mozart Estate. We were all just Clarences.”
The Mozart Estate is the housing estate in west London on which Samuel was raised and which he refers to often (childhood settings are always formative, but probably more so when dealers are selling crack in the stairwells). By the 1980s, when he, his four siblings and their mother lived there — his father, he says, not seeming to want to expand, died when he was “very young” — the Mozart Estate was in a spiral of poor-quality housing, managerial neglect, vandalism and increasingly serious crime, leading to notorious gang conflicts in the 1990s.
Nevertheless, in the Samuel household it was a different story: he describes his mother, a hospital sister, as a film addict, who instilled in him a love of cinema and with whom he would debate over the dinner table, say, the relative acting merits of Laurence Olivier (“I love him, but don’t think he made a seamless transition from theatre to film”). He credits his “wildly energetic and creative” siblings with exposing him to music (his older brother, a fact that probably shouldn’t be in parentheses, is the musician, Seal).
Incidentally, Seal played Pontius Pilate in 2016’s The Passion: New Orleans.
Box Office Pro spoke to Samuel about a certain “white Jesus” moment in the film:
That idea of what Jesus is “supposed” to look like plays into this film as well.
That particular scene is a commentary on my parents’ generation’s fascination with a white image of Jesus, a particular old-school image of Jesus. We all had those paintings up in our house growing up. In my house, we had a 3D image framed in the living room of white Jesus on the crucifix. It was 3D, which meant wherever you went in the living room, Jesus was looking at you. It was a really scary image. I used to look at it for ages. You could not escape the gaze of crucified Jesus. So I wanted to put in a humorous commentary on my parents’ generation.
Screen Rant spoke to Samuel and his lead actor, LaKeith Stanfield:
Jeymes, can you talk about the theme of knowledge versus belief in this film?
Jeymes Samuel: LaKeith would speak on that more, but Clarence's whole ethos is knowledge is stronger than belief. He questions people who say one thing and do another, or they preach one thing and do another. Clarence questions that because it's like a person telling you, "Man, you got to live right," but smoking a cigarette. Like, "Man, you believe what you're saying. You don't know if you know what you're saying to be true."
I'll give you a real quick example: Mike Tyson fighting Michael Spinks, 91 seconds. Shortest heavyweight bout in history. It wasn't that he beat Michael Spinks in 91 seconds, that ain't the thing. The thing is what he does after knocking out Michael Spinks, who had never lost in 91 seconds. He just turns around to his corner and just does this. Michael Spinks believed he was going to win. Mike Tyson knew he was going to demolish him. Knowledge is stronger than belief. Always look for knowledge, you know what I mean?
Screen Rant also spoke to Anna Diop, who plays Clarence’s love interest Varinia, and RJ Cyler, who plays Clarence’s best friend Elijah:
Anna, this film on its scale is absolutely epic. Did the costumes in the real location of Matera, Italy add to your performance?
Anna Diop: Yeah, absolutely. As actors, whenever you're giving as many authentic things, it's so helpful. We woke up every day in Matera, which is one of the oldest preserved cities in the world, and so it's cobblestone and the homes and everything are built out of these caves, and it looks like 30 A.D. That's invaluable. And the costumes, like you said; the set direction. You're on set. There are camels and just it's wild. Yeah, you can't do anything but drop into where you're around.
Next, links to a couple of websites that have non-embeddable video interviews:
WHYY talks to Samuel and Stanfield about the film’s mix of genres.
Arizona’s Family has a 2-minute clip in which Samuel and Stanfield say who they would invite to their own Last Suppers.
Finally, some embeddable YouTube interviews:
Samuel talked to Billboard about the movie and its soundtrack:
James McAvoy, who plays Pontius Pilate, talked to Seth Meyers about his reasons for wearing “guyliner” in the role (“He used to be a soldier and now he’s a bureaucrat . . . and I thought, ‘How do I make it look like he would rather be anywhere else?’”):
Good Morning America spoke to Stanfield and McAvoy:
Black Girl Nerds spoke to Stanfield, Cyler, Diop, and David Oyelowo, who plays John the Baptist. Among other things, Oyelowo talks about his “unhinged” take on the Baptist, while Stanfield talks about what it was like to film the crucifixion scene (and no, that’s not really a spoiler): “It made me think about how, in my everyday life, the things that I’m doing are going to be reflected to me at the end, perhaps.”
There are lots of other video interviews that have popped up in the last day or two, but I haven’t had time to check them all out. So, more later, maybe.
January 11 update: MovieWeb talked to Stanfield and Cyler about the “spiritual turn” the film takes, and Stanfield describes what it was like to carry his cross:
January 12 update: The Los Angeles Times profiled the film and its makers:
But “Clarence” is also heartbreakingly sincere, with some serious plumbing of faith, commentary on systems of oppression and fathoms of emotion in Stanfield’s virtuosic double performance. The actor says he went even deeper than he planned. “Because of the freedom that Jeymes provides on set,” he says, “you feel at liberty to explore, and what you can excavate from that is often really profound.”
At its heart, Samuel says, his film is about self-discovery and redemption. It’s also the story of the Jesus era told through a prism of modern-day Black identity — a movie in which two friends, minding their own business, are suddenly harassed by a Roman stop-and-search, and where a mother, watching her son get crucified, wails: “They always take our babies!”
“The reason I have so much fun in there,” says Samuel, “is because the ’hood is fun. Then it’s heartbreaking, right? So just before a drive-by happens, you’re cracking jokes, you’re having a laugh, doing all the silly things. Then the next minute, you’re at a funeral.”
It’s this complex brew of silly humor and Black joy, social gravity and real tragedy, erudite film references and guest bars by Lil Wayne, that help make up the one-of-a-kind Jeymes Samuel aesthetic. It’s a blender of his many influences — the “Taxi” homage can be seen in the opening credits — but taken somewhere completely, madly new. . . .
For Samuel, it’s all part of the same creative ecosystem. He likes to say he sees music and he hears film. When he’s writing a screenplay, he’s simultaneously coming up with musical themes for characters and scoring the movie. He came up with a different melody for Clarence and for Thomas, and gave them both to Stanfield before filming.
January 13 update: Samuel, Oyelowo, and Stanfield talked to USA Today about the modern political significance of the cross-bearing scene:
Through Clarence, Samuel re-creates Jesus’ carrying of the cross and crucifixion with brutal effectiveness. Clarence struggles to get up the hill with the cross as onlookers throw things and Roman soldiers whip him, and at one point his mother (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) shouts out, “They always take our babies!”
The burden Clarence carries in the scene is “the cross that we all bear,” says Samuel. “That's a thing that we feel growing up in our 'hoods and surroundings, and our parents feel that they always take our babies. There's a lot that has changed, but a lot that hasn’t.
“It was a truth that I had to tell,” the filmmaker says. “Along with the laughs and the smiles and the joy and the laughter, there's also the pain that you don't see coming until the day it happens, but it's always hovering over us.”
The image of a Black man trudging toward his crucifixion “shakes us out of the anesthetized version of that,” says David Oyelowo, who plays John the Baptist and is himself a devout Christian. “We're so used to that iconography of a white, sometimes blond, blue-eyed Jesus with this cross. Having it so far outside of what we have previously seen means you're suddenly able to engage with that in a different way.”
Stanfield recalls a “cornucopia of feelings” during filming. “The cross wasn't unreasonably heavy but also wasn't light,” says the actor, who took his shoes off to feel the stones under his feet. “The imagery of being slashed across the back with a whip did not go over my head and what that could be indicating or mean: power structures and how oppression has been used to keep people docile.
“I almost felt like I was carrying just years and years of wanting to speak the truth, of someone wanting to get by, wanting to release and not being able to. And so it made every step worth it, and it made the blood, sweat and the harder aspects of that worth it.”
The Hollywood Reporter talked to Samuel about the possibility of audiences reacting negatively to his treatment of the Bible in this film:
Are you concerned at all about audiences’ reactions to a story like this which reimagines characters and narratives from the Bible?
We’re going to have to do a lot of educating with it, because people are touchy. We released a trailer and a lot of people said “Blasphemy.” It’s not blasphemous at all. “They’re mocking Jesus!” No he’s not. All the conversations Clarence has are real thoughts that we’ve all had. In The Book of Clarence, he gets to speak to the Virgin Mary and she gets to explain to him and the audience exactly what went on at conception. It’s an amazing scene. When you were a kid and you heard about the virgin birth, you may have believed it because you were a child, but when you get older, this stuff is why people tune out. The birth of the divine is a beautiful story whether it happened or not. And it really irritates me when people say, “I don’t believe in Jesus.” What do you mean you don’t believe in Jesus? Jesus, that he existed or Jesus, the story? Because either way—as Alfre Woodard said, “I believe in the walk of Jesus”— the walk of Jesus is what we all want to strive for. So there won’t be war, there won’t be theft and all the cruel things we do to each other. So I love the fact that there’s a movie set in the Bible days and I can explain to you Matthew 24:5. I didn’t want to ram it down people’s throats because I could have easily started it with that, “For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.” But it’s such a beautiful thing to make these films and have conversation around them. People always see things the wrong way and they call it backlash. It’s conversation. I like the smoke. Let’s talk. Because if we have these conversations, then we’re powerful.
The Root talked to Stanfield about the fact that he has now played both a Judas figure—in 2021’s Judas and the Black Messiah—and a Christ figure:
Having previously taken on the role as Judas in the “Judas and the Black Messiah” and now, coincidentally, an actual Black Messiah in Book of Clarence, we couldn’t help but notice the unique position that Stanfield was in creatively. When this fact was pointed out to the Oscar nominated actor, he reflected on the contrasting figures, sharing that, while starkly different, they both served a purpose for two different reasons.
“I think with both [I was] trying to excavate the things that I think would be valuable for audiences, trying to unpack the things in the more negative role that I think could shine a light on a positive aspect, like Chairmen Fred Hampton,” he explained to The Root. “And in this one, really unearthing the beauty of a journey that goes from one place to an arc to where he learns from himself and from his environment. I think that could be really beneficial to people.”
And The Wrap talked to Stanfield and Cyler about what they took away from their work on the film, spiritually speaking:
“Spirituality is at the very heart of what my experience was here. I mean, I started out [with] many questions, not knowing if I was stepping into something that could be controversial, not knowing if it was necessarily the right move,” Stanfield told TheWrap during a press junket interview for the “The Book of Clarence.” “But, by the end of it, I knew. Literally, what Clarence says [in the film], ‘Knowledge is stronger than belief.’ I left this movie feeling inspired, truly inspired. To know and not to question and believe. My faith was completely strengthened, and I had to call on higher powers to get through because there were some moments that [were] really hard. But, you know you just pick up the blocks, continue to push forward, have faith, and God will see you through.” . . .
From the beginning to the end of filming “The Book of Clarence,” Cyler said the movie was a spiritual “battle.”
“When it came to booking this film, from health issues to other things. But, me and God always stayed right here. This was just a really big test of my faith and my strength with our relationship,” Cyler said. “It really evolved my spiritual life filming it. I think [Samuel] created an atmosphere to where I could feel safe with my boys to where they could be something that I felt good in. Right now, as a spiritual man that I am, I am way stronger just after the filming process because, whew boy.”
Previous videos for The Book of Clarence:
The teaser trailer (August 29, 2023)
The BFI London Film Festival world premiere interviews (October 13, 2023)
The official trailer, the ‘Behind the Scenes’ featurette, and the ‘Hallelujah Heaven’ lyric video (November 28, 2023)
The ‘Hallelujah Heaven’ music video and the ‘Defy’ TV spot (December 22, 2023)
Other previous posts on The Book of Clarence:
‘Jeymes Samuel and LaKeith Stanfield are going to make a Bible movie’ (May 16, 2022)
‘The Book of Clarence gets a production company and a new co-star’ (October 22, 2022)
‘Pins and Needles (formerly The Book of Clarence) now filming in Italy’ (November 25, 2022)
‘The Book of Clarence: a lot of new actors, and a few new plot details’ (December 6, 2022)
‘The Book of Clarence gets a release date’ (March 4, 2023)
‘The Book of Clarence gets a test screening’ (June 5, 2023)
‘The Book of Clarence is now coming out in January’ (August 16, 2023)
‘October release-date news: The Book of Clarence gets a world premiere, Taylor Swift scares off Angels and demons’ (September 2, 2023)
‘The Book of Clarence — the world premiere round-up!’ (October 13, 2023)
‘Talking about The Book of Clarence’ (November 3, 2023)
‘The Book of Clarence gets new posters, sneak-peeks in Atlanta’ (December 19, 2023)
Recall the controversies over Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods & Kings, which “whitewashed” the ancient Egyptians, and Netflix’s Cleopatra, where the casting of a black actress in the title role was regarded by some Egyptians as a form of cultural appropriation.