The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

You start on Musa Jackson, and just in that opening scene, the emotion on his face signals to the audience that they’re about to have an intense experience. Can you talk about the decision to begin the film that way?

Questlove:  I will say that the emotional core of the film — the heart of the film, especially with the interviews — those were actually candid, unplanned moments. And in the case of Musa Jackson, he was one of our very first interviews. And when he came into the building, I thought to myself, “wait… this guy’s younger than I am!” And we checked— we said to ourselves, “wait a minute— 57 years old?! What kind of emotional depth would a five year old even have, to take it all in?” So, initially, we were sort of like, “alright… well, let’s get this guy out of the way and then we’ll get to the folks who were teenagers at the time and who were there for Sly and the Family Stone.” We thought that was going to be our goldmine. We just had Musa talk with absolutely no context whatsoever: we didn’t show him any footage, any photos, or anything else. You know, just as a precautionary measure (because I knew, even for myself, not even believing this event had happened… they had to convince me that this happened when they first pitched it to me), since I knew there was nothing available online about this concert, until we announced the movie. But back in 2017, there was almost literally zero about this concert online. We just asked, “what do you remember from it?” Kind of expecting that his answers would be a quick ten minute recap: “Aw, I was five years old… I don’t remember too much…” And he started out by saying that this was his very first life memory. At the age of five. And when he started describing everything to a T, he started describing scenes that we knew no one was aware of and that we had actually just gotten processed and viewed three or four days ago (it took five months for us to transfer the film over)… so he was talking about things that have never been seen in the last fifty years. And we started looking at each other, like, “Ok: He was definitely there. And, he’s telling the truth!” And then it just so happened that we had The 5th Dimension footage. And we showed it to him, and when he started tearing up, I realized… oh wow. This is much more than just, “I remember going to this thing.” This is our chance to give him back his life, in some sense. Because imagine… even the way I put feelers out on social media when we were looking for interview subjects was sort of like (I couldn’t imagine anyone 75-80 years old being on social media)… I just said, “hey, do you have that crazy uncle who always tries to tell you that story about how he once saw Stevie Wonder and the Staples Singers, in Harlem, at a festival that was kinda like Woodstock?” It was almost like no one believed anybody when they said that they went to this thing. They just thought you were a liar. So for us, to get that emotional outpouring from Musa Jackson, instantly told me on the first day that this isn’t just about a concert. We’re about to give people validation, we’re about to give people their memories back. Even when we’re talking at the very end— I thought the cameras were off. I just wanted to tell him, “wow, man… we felt your emotions.” I am so glad the camera was still rolling, because we had wrapped by that point, you know?

it’s my destiny to tell this story

As a first-time director, it must have been daunting to be handed this treasure of never-before-seen footage. How did you tackle that?

Q: Here’s the deal: Once they came to me with tangible evidence that this event actually happened, and that there was film (over forty hours)… think of the opening credits of The Flintstones where she puts that rack of ribs on the car and the car just falls over. That what it was like to get forty hours of this footage! And, you know, I had a five to six month period just to absorb it before we even started figuring out what we were going to do with it. So my whole thing was like… in my bedroom, my kitchen, my bathroom… I had monitors all over my house, and I kept the footage playing on twenty four hour loop. Even when I was asleep, I’d wake up and check in to see where they were in the show. During those five months, on that twenty four hour loop, if something gave me goosebumps, or made me stop what I was doing (because I didn’t want to do the thing where, you know, “for three hours I’ll watch… I’ll take notes… I’ll watch some more,”), because then it would have been a real task. It would have been a job. So for me, it was keeping it on twenty four hour loop and if something magic happened, I looked and I took a note. And when I had thirty of those goosebump moments, then I figured, “ok, we have a foundation to stand on.”

Can you tell us about when you found the concert footage? Was there an “ah-ha” moment?

Q: It actually started when The Roots first went to Tokyo Japan, my translator took me to a restaurant called The Soul Train Café. And they’d show different Soul documents and what not on monitors all over the place, as you ate. And unknowingly, I watched ten minutes of the Sly and the Family Stone footage, thinking to myself, “this must be at the Montreal Jazz Festival.” Like, I thought it was some foreign, outdoor jazz festival. So, cut to twenty years later. My two producers (Robert Fyvolent and David Dinerstein) got a note to the woman who is my manager now, but she was my assistant then… they got a note to her saying, “we want to meet with Questlove about this Black Woodstock event.” And, you know, being the music snob that I am, I immediately got defensive: “I’m the all-knowing Questlove; what concert event!?” I really didn’t believe them. I was calling Nelson George: “You know about some so-called festival that happened in Harlem, with Stevie Wonder…?” Googling it… and there really wasn’t anything out there. And we live in an age where, you know, if it’s not on the internet it didn’t happen. It took about three weeks for them to convince me to take a look. And when they finally brought in the hard drive, that’s when I had all the fear in my heart! I asked them, “do you really want a first-time driver taking this eighteen-wheeler across the country to tell this story?” And I’ll say that, for me, this film did a lot for me personally as a human being, and helped me to recognize my place as a storyteller. Because apparently everyone knew that I had the knowledge and the wherewithal to do this film except for me! So it took me about three months to not duck calls, and to really accept that the fact that it’s my destiny to tell this story. And I’m really glad I did it because I was so scared in the beginning.