The Book of Clarence round-up: International release date news, and a few new interviews
The Book of Clarence round-up: International release date news, and a few new interviews
The film has been bumped to the spring in the UK, and it's coming to Nigeria in April.
The Book of Clarence came out over a week ago, and I keep getting news alerts about interviews with the filmmakers. So, rather than keep adding to the round-up I created just before the film’s opening weekend, I figured I’d start a new round-up.
First, a few news items:
Deadline says the film was going to open in the UK last Friday, but it got yanked at the last minute and is now aiming for a release in March.
However, a friend of mine in the UK says he heard about the delay from a local arthouse theatre months ago, so it would seem that this change might not be as sudden as Deadline is making it out to be.
The News Agency of Nigeria says the film is coming to Nigerian theatres April 12.
Among other things, the Agency notes that co-star David Oyelowo, who plays John the Baptist, is of Nigerian descent, and that the soundtrack features Nigerian singers Yemi Alade and Adekunle Gold.
SlashFilm, World of Reel, and other sites have noted that this film, which grossed only $4.7 million in its first ten days in North American theatres, cost $40-50 million to make and is thus “the first theatrical bomb of 2024.”
And now, some of the newer interviews that have come my way.
Director Jeymes Samuel talked to Variety about the film’s premise:
It’s not only Jesus and his disciples who are depicted, but the film is populated with many Biblical figures — Barrabas (Omar Sy), John the Baptist (David Oyelwo), Judas (Micheal Ward), Pontius Pilate (James McAvoy) and Mother Mary (Alfre Woodard). Did you worry about pushing the comedy too far and ruffling church folks’ feathers?
Well, the church people clutched their pearls when they watched the teaser. But if they watch the film, they’ll be holding the Bible high. It doesn’t blaspheme. I do have fun with that time and place, but I do pay total respect to those characters, then I also inform people of things they didn’t know.
Like, “Doubting Thomas” the apostle, Didymus, was a twin. And the Bible doesn’t say whether Thomas had a twin brother or sister; the twin is discarded even in the Bible. Which is why I chose the character of Clarence to be Thomas’ twin brother, to tell the story of an everyman whose brother has gone off to be an apostle. . . .
There’s a great line where Clarence says “I’ve got the cobblestones on lock.” This movie follows in line with many hood classics. How did you want to represent that?
We were always taking new phrases and making them old. Before that scene — I was like, “When you speak to these apostles and they’re looking down on you, how do you say ‘I’ve got the streets on smash?’” LaKeith went into full Clarence mode and said, “I’ve got the cobblestones on lock.”
Samuel talked to The Credits, a website run by the Motion Picture Association, about his approach to the iconic Last Supper scene:
Through the film’s innovative storytelling methods, Samuel set out to solve an age-old problem. The most enduring depiction of the fateful gathering of the Last Supper is the long banquet table painted by Leonardo da Vinci. Yet the practicality of those seating assignments doesn’t work. Samuel wanted to honor this iconic image while finding a workable arrangement. With some fantastic cinematography and choreography, the pieces eventually fit seamlessly.
“My team and I found a way to shoot that Last Supper in the most classic way,” Samuel said. “You have those three tables. They’re just around the room. I visit the apostle’s house many times and you do not look at those tables until Jesus said, ‘One of you is a snitch. The one who dips his bread in the gravy,’ which is what happened. Then I show the aerial shot and ‘bang.’ Three tables, and then I bring the camera down slowly, and the three tables through perspective turn into one and then—freeze. Everyone is in their position of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting.”
Samuel talked to Essence about the many years he spent imagining this film:
ESSENCE: Jeymes, The Book of Clarence was several years in the making for you. What do you think prolonged the production of this amazing film?
Jeymes Samuel: Well, one, I was anonymous. I was an anonymous youth in the ‘hood of London. When I first had the idea for The Book of Clarence, I was a child. I probably was 13 when I decided I wanted to do this, because I was always shooting stuff. I had cameras. I wanted to do a biblical epic where the people look like my neighborhood, like the area I live in, basically the ‘hood. Whereas all those stories were pretty much about the ‘hood, but the Hollywood versions didn’t look like us. So I was there. Then I got older and I had the name of just what it was, and what this film was going to be, maybe about 20 years ago. It wasn’t 20 years in the making, but maybe like 20 years ago I had the name and knew. I was taking little notes and I wrote one song called “Verenia” featuring this Chicago legend called Terry Callier. I approached him and I said, “Look, I’m doing this movie, not now, but one day—I have the song.” And he sang the song for me, with me, and that’s in the movie. He passed away in 2012, and I promised him.
But what made it real was two things: One, 2017, for whatever reason, maybe the spirit took me and I just wrote the script. I just knew where the story was going and I wrote the script. Started composing the score and writing songs, and what made me know I was going to make it was meeting LaKeith Stanfield, because then I had no Clarence. I knew actors then, but still Clarence is a really layered, complex part, and he plays himself and his twin brother. When I met LaKeith, I knew that this film was real. I met him for The Harder They Fall. I was like, “Yeah, we’re going to do that, but we got something else.” Then, I knew the film was real.
Samuel talked to NPR about trying to give people “a slight sense of wonder”:
RASCOE: And what do you want people to take from this film to reflect on when it comes to their faith and to their belief?
SAMUEL: I want people to be inspired by - your faith won't me challenged leaving this movie. But if you have no faith, it may be challenged. You may think of the time where you did have a walking on water moment - right? - 'cause we all go - we all have that moment in our lives at some point. And we experience miracles so often, we just take them for granted. We abuse the magic of life every single day by the way we talk to each other, by the way we treat each other. We are much - there is something greater than us, and we are much greater than we think we are.
I watch a lot of people complain when I say - 'cause, you know, I always say peace to the God, peace to the God. That's how I approach my people. That's how I speak to them. And I see people in comments say, you know, he says we're gods, and that's where the fall of man will happen. Really? But yet, no one would comment if I go, peace, my n****. No one would say anything.
Well, I see the God in you, Ayesha. And when you speak to Jeymes and you see the good in Jeymes, you see the God in Jeymes. You know what I mean? So if we come out from "The Book Of Clarence" with even a slight sense of wonder, man, I've done my job. You know what I mean?
Side note: Samuel also claims in this interview that the Bible says Jesus had “skin the color of burnt brass, hair the texture of lambswool.” He appears to be referring to a highly symbolic vision in Revelation 1:12-16, in which Jesus appears as a man with seven stars in his hand and a double-edged sword coming out of his mouth. It’s kind of hard to take that vision literally as a description of what Jesus looked like during his earthly life, but even if we did take it literally, the passage says Jesus’ hair was “white like wool, as white as snow”—so the passage says nothing about the texture of Jesus’ hair, but refers rather to its colour or brightness, at least within that vision.
LaKeith Stanfield, who plays both Clarence and his identical twin brother, the apostle Thomas, also spoke to Essence, and described how he approached the two roles:
So, what I wanted to do with both the characters was look at them and try to find things in them that I felt made them real to me. With Clarence, there was more context to work with because he’s a central character, and so I was able to see immediately where his humanity could lie in his art. Whereas with Thomas, we just have such less time with him, that I had to find moments to bring definition to the multi-layered aspects of him.
Of course, he’s bitter about something. He’s not happy with his brother. There’s some internal struggle and strife within the family. What could have caused Thomas to feel this way? And what unlocks eventually his love so that we see that he’s more than just a mean brother, because no one’s just mean to be mean. Anyone who’s mean, there’s some reason behind it. In fact, usually it’s because of a lack of love. So I wanted to kind of find that lack of love and where Clarence could fill that in for Thomas, and finding the differences between them on the base level. Then it’s about finding the technical differences between them, how they present themselves in the world, how they walk, how they talk, how they posture. If you notice, Thomas often has his hands behind his back. Clarence is often moving his hands. That was a conscious decision to show kind of the difference in their physicality.
Nicholas Pinnock, who plays Jesus, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the film’s reverent, and sometimes “mysterious”, approach to his character:
There are parts of the film that seem an homage to the old biblical cinema classics, including how Jesus is depicted. You are very mysterious at first, we don’t see your face, much like the Jesus in Ben-Hur or The Robe. How did that approach, being hooded and mysterious, inform your performance?
Jeymes and I were talking about this and I said: “Jeymes, we can’t see Jesus until he speaks.” Because he’s such a mystery. Until he speaks, Clarence has always seen Jesus from afar. Jesus is a mystery to Clarence, so he has to be a mystery to everybody because we’re seeing everything through Clarence’s eyes. And again, I love Jeymes for how collaborative he is. You know genius has no ego. And Jeymes is a genius. But he collaborates really well because that’s part of his genius. So when I suggested we keep Jesus a bit of a secret we included that. From an acting perspective, doing it that way allowed me to play with the mystery, my movement became far more important than anything that my face could do. It became far more of a physical presence and an entity, how I moved was far more important than anything. How I moved had to tell the story. . . .
The film gets serious at times but it is broadly a comedy. Your character, your Jesus, though, is playing it straight and serious throughout.
As I said: Everything is on the page with Jeymes. It was very clear that if Jesus was, you know, too comical, or was farcical in any way, the story falls apart. We as the audience wouldn’t believe why Clarence would want to follow him. So we had to have a Jesus that was biblical, that was traditional in some ways, but still had its own spin and its own individuality. There’s one moment when he’s saving Mary Magdalene from the rocks and he frees her from the chains and speaks to the audience who are stoning and we get a sense of his humor. But this is the Jesus that everybody wants to follow. We had to deliver him with these shades of seriousness among all of the revelry and comedy that the film brings.
Side note: Pinnock also says, “This is the first time in the history of cinema that you’ve seen a Jesus of Black skin.” Well, um, Jean Claude La Marre, director and star of 2006’s Color of the Cross and its 2008 sequel, might have something to say about that.
Pinnock also spoke to Variety about the contrast between Jesus and Clarence:
Your Jesus is a pretty smooth, chilled guy. Was there a particular mood you were going for?
I think with all the comedy and the chaos of Clarence in his world, what Jeymes wanted was an absolute smoothness and calm to cut through it all. And that’s what I tried to deliver as much as possible and just be as noble and soft and gentle with the Jesus that we were depicting. Depending on how old people are, most people know the Robert Powell version of Jesus, and he went through a gamut of emotions, of anger, frustration, torture and serenity. But this isn’t about Jesus. This is about Clarence. So what we see is just a small part of his story. And so rather than confuse the audience or give them too much of Jesus to think about, is was just give them what they needed.
You mention Powell’s version [in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth]. You’ve joined a relatively small number of actors to have played Jesus. It’s also — unsurprisingly — a rather white group. I think there may have only been one Black actor to have played Jesus previously.
Oh wow. I also think I may be the oldest actor. I’m 50.
I don’t think Pinnock is quite the oldest actor, but he’s certainly up there. As I noted several years ago, a lot of actors have been playing Jesus in their 40s lately—from Mary Magdalene’s Joaquin Phoenix to Risen’s Cliff Curtis—and H.B. Warner was 51 when The King of Kings came out in 1927. Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus in The Chosen, is currently 49, and there are still three seasons to go in that series, so he’ll be playing Jesus until his early to mid-50s at least. And then there’s Bruce Marchiano, who first played Jesus in The Visual Bible in his mid-30s and has made a career of playing Jesus ever since, at least as late as his late 50s, and maybe even into his 60s.
Anna Diop, who plays Clarence’s love interest Varinia, talked to Luxury London:
“The story is about a young man who is at a point of crisis in his life. He wants a better life for himself and his mother, and wants to get the girl, but she refuses him because he’s not respectable at the time,” she explains. “It’s a coming-of-age story that happens to take place in the time and place of Jesus Christ.”
The film was shot on location over several months in Matera in Southern Italy, the third oldest known city in the world after Aleppo and Jericho, and a popular filming location, having provided backdrops for the likes of No Time To Die, Wonder Woman and The Passion of the Christ. Diop describes the city as “breathtaking” and says that filming on location helped foster a close-knit relationship with the cast and crew that wouldn’t have been possible in a studio.
“I don’t think we would have bonded as much as we did if we weren’t filming in a place like Matera because there was nothing else to do but to spend time with each other,” she says. “There aren’t places to go out, there aren’t a lot of restaurants, it’s a very quiet place and we were there for many months. We all got really close and I’ve made lifelong friends.”
Oyelowo talked to The Wrap about the film’s mix of reverence and irreverence:
“I’m a Christian myself, and Jeymes is a good friend of mine. I remember talking to him early on about the film and about the fact that I loved its irreverent aspects, but it also had a reverent quality to it, which is a really tough needle to thread. And what I landed on is the fact that Clarence the character, played by LaKeith [Stanfield], is irreverent, but the film itself is reverent, and that was an aspect I really loved about the film,” Oyeolowo told TheWrap.
Side note: The Wrap claims in its introductory paragraphs that 1998’s The Prince of Egypt had an “all-white voice cast”, and that films like 1956’s The Ten Commandments, 2004’s The Passion of the Christ, and 2018’s Mary Magdalene “largely excluded” black people from their casts. But all of those films featured actors of African descent in key roles, from The Prince of Egypt’s Danny Glover (Jethro) and The Ten Commandments’ Woody Strode (the Ethiopian king) to The Passion of the Christ’s Jarreth J. Merz (Simon of Cyrene) and Mary Magdalene’s Chiwetel Ejiofor (Simon Peter).
And now, some video interviews:
Samuel spoke to DJ Envy and Charlamagne tha God on The Breakfast Club podcast:
Side note: At the 4:52 mark, Samuel says, “In 136 years of the moving image, two black people have never been onscreen going, ‘There’s Jesus.’ We’ve never had a movie like that before.” Hmmm. Maybe not a movie, but in the TV series A.D. The Bible Continues, Mary Magdalene and the sons of Zebedee were all played by black actors. (There were quite a few other black characters in that series, too—including a Zealot played by Nicholas Pinnock, who plays Jesus in The Book of Clarence—but I can’t recall if any of them had any scenes with Jesus, who only appears in three or four episodes.)
Samuel and Stanfield spoke to Sharí Nycole of the Just a Thought podcast—addressing, among other things, whether the film is “blasphemous”:
Stanfield and Teyana Taylor, the latter of whom plays Mary Magdalene, spoke to BET about the spiritual and cultural-political significance of the film.
One of the more interesting quotes comes around the 18-minute mark, when Stanfield comments on the film’s slogan, “Knowledge is stronger than belief”:
I think it’s interesting wording, because knowledge being stronger than belief doesn’t necessarily mean that knowledge is better than belief, it just means that knowledge gives you the foundation to move in confidence, and I think we all experience fear, we all experience insecurity, and what makes one courageous versus the other is that in spite of that fear, you move with a knowing, you move with a trust, and the knowing and the trust is that I’m going to do what I’m going to do. And I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m going to do it. And I think that the message that we’re trying to get across, with knowledge being stronger than belief, is that when you’re coming from a place of knowing, you’re unstoppable. Because that’s how you manifest things. It starts as an idea, a dream, it becomes concrete and third dimension, if you know it and you act on it, the works. You know, faith ain’t nothing without the works, it’s very true. . . . Now that I know, I can actually move. I’m not questioning whether or not I can do this, I’m just— I’m moving, regardless, and I think that’s an important message, there.
This is an interesting take on the slogan, as Clarence’s “knowledge” changes over the course of the film, and it’s not clear how much it actually helps him to achieve; before his knowledge changes, his earliest attempts to get out of debt all come to nothing, and after it changes, his agency is taken from him in the deadliest way possible—and in between those points, he basically renounces his greatest concrete success, i.e. the money he took from the gullible crowds who believed in his fake miracles.
Finally (for now), here’s an actor I haven’t seen before on the film’s publicity tour: Babs Olusanmokun—who plays Doctor M’Benga in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Asher the Torturer in The Book of Clarence—spoke to KCAL News:
More later, maybe.
January 31 update: Stanfield spoke to Ebony about the research he did:
Biblical epics—such as The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Story Ever Told—are a timeless film approach that resonates across generations. What biblical epics were you familiar with before shooting The Book of Clarence? Did you dive head-first into research?
I watched little bits and pieces of things such as Passion of the Christ and Ben-Hur. I just wanted to get a sense of what had been captured in terms of how other people interpreted that time. But I didn’t want to dive too deep because I realized we were doing something different. I wanted to build the world we were creating from an organic place. I reserved a lot of that research for other things, things that I wanted to incorporate into the character-specific things and movements. This included how they carried themselves, whether or not they were a little bit more reserved, their posture and the way they looked. I like to put research into those things rather than the technical aspects because I figured that there have been a lot of renditions of biblical epics and stories, but those are all those interpretations. What we were doing here was something different, something special and something that actually wasn’t even rooted in religion, or Jesus, for that matter. It’s rooted in a guy named Clarence, who lives down the street from Jesus, around the corner. I wanted to be as organic as possible. You place people in that time. They’re just like us. So, I wanted to make sure that Clarence felt just like us.
This is the second film where you’ve worked with Jeymes Samuel & JAY-Z. How did the opportunity present itself and how did the experience working on The Book of Clarence differ from The Harder They Fall?
We were on the set of The Harder They Fall, and Jeymes kept telling me about this project that he had in mind for me. It sounded nice, but I had no idea what it really was. I was interested to learn. After we finished wrapping, he sent me the script for The Book of Clarence. From the moment I saw the cover, I knew it was going to be crazy because there was a Black dude on a cross. I was like, “Oh, what is this about?” I hadn’t seen this imagery since my aunt’s house growing up, but she had a picture of a very dark-skinned Jesus. When I was younger, I looked at the White picture of Jesus and said, “Oh, there’s Jesus.” Then I looked at the Black one and said, “Who’s that?” Then I realized that it was Jesus. And I was like, “Oh, so there’s two Jesuses.” She’s like, “No, there’s one Jesus. But he comes in many forms.” . . .
Pop Sugar has an article on ‘The Art of Black Hair in Period Films’ that mentions The Book of Clarence and its hair department head Nakoya Yancey:
"I love being able to show off the creativity of Black hair in the film," Nakoya Yancey, hair department head for "The Book of Clarence," tells POPSUGAR. "From the styles that we chose to the adornments that we used, it was all to further the plotline while staying true to the time that this was set in, which was during the era of Christ."
Still, hairstylists who work on Black period films have a particularly unique hurdle to overcome: a lack of reference photos. "There are virtually no pictures of Black people in biblical-era films or shows," Yancey says. "I looked back at TV shows that my grandmother would watch, like 'The Ten Commandments,' to get a feel of the kind of ambiance that we were trying to create, but I mainly relied on pictures of African communities from periods like the '40s, '50s, and '60s." In the film, you'll notice hairstyles inspired by the Hamar and Afar tribes of Ethiopia; Fulani braids, which are popular in West Africa; and even Bantu knots hailing from Southern Africa. "I wanted to take all the styles that we knew and add a flair to them," Yancey says.
The Washington Post has an article on this film and other recent examples of “Black Jesus” imagery (it counts the Jesus of Mrs. Davis as part of this trend, but I believe the actor in that series was technically Indo-Guyanese), and it begins and ends with quotes from Jean Claude La Marre, director and star of 2006’s Color of the Cross:
About 20 years ago, actor and director Jean-Claude La Marre was looking for his next big thing. His 2003 Western, “Gang of Roses,” starring a majority-Black female cast including Lil’ Kim, was doing surprisingly well on home video. He wanted his next project to be different. Then “The Passion of the Christ” happened. Mel Gibson had financed the movie outside of the Hollywood system for about $30 million. Evangelicals snapped up theater seats like pews on Easter. The film’s success was practically preordained.
“I thought to myself, I’m going to do a Black Jesus movie. It hadn’t been done before,” said La Marre. He would follow Gibson’s model: Raise just under $1 million to make the film independently, tap the country’s massive audience of Black churchgoers to buy tickets, ka-ching. He called the 2006 film, in which he starred as a persecuted Black Jesus, “Color of the Cross.”
There was just one problem. “The biggest pushback I got was from the Black church,” La Marre told me recently. He pitched several prominent Southern California pastors on the project, hoping to drum up early support. But the nays had it.
Samuel and Stanfield appeared on the 85 South Show podcast:
Stanfield talked to the Hot 97 podcast about the growth of his character:
Stanfield and Taylor talk about their favorite scenes at the 6:15 mark in this video:
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)
‘The Book of Clarence round-up: A few last soundbites and interviews’ (January 11, 2024)
‘Box office: Mean Girls breaks a record, The Book of Clarence barely cracks the top ten’ (January 15, 2024)