Q&A with Thea Sharrock and Anjana Vasan

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Wicked Little Letters.

Thea, I’d love to start by hearing about your first exposure to the script.
Thea Sharrock: I was sent the script by Studio Canal, and they said look, we have a new spec script by a guy who’s never written a screenplay before, and we think it’s great. And I thought, oh that’s interesting. Then they added, by the way, Olivia Colman is playing the lead, would you like to read it? And I was like, um, yeah, I’ll be reading that one. And they needed this process to happen in a certain way, quickly, due to Olivia’s availability. They didn’t tell me it was a comedy, they didn’t tell me it was based on a true story, they didn’t tell me all the kind of usual stuff that you would pump into a director beforehand. Basically, I went in blind and I read it and it was amazing because I could hear Olivia’s voice in my ear and in my head.  It made a huge difference because Edith is such a complicated character. Already having Olivia in my mind made the first read not only much clearer but it also gave me the freedom to laugh out loud. It’s not very often that you get a script that makes you laugh out loud on the first reading. I just knew. I thought the writing was wonderful, and I knew it was a great script for actors. What I love most in my job is working with really great actors. This was going to be a great vehicle for actors. So that’s what drew me to it.

This was going to be a great vehicle for actors

And Anjana, can you tell us how you came to the role of Gladys?
Anjana Vasan: My agent sent me the script and said Thea Sharrock wants to meet you, have a read, and Olivia Colman’s attached and before she could finish saying Olivia Colman I went, yes! And she went, no, no, no, you read the script, I’m going to set a meeting with Thea. I was like yes, of course of course, and I did all those things. Thea and I met and we really got on and we had sort of the same idea, the same approach, it was a good vibe. We were on the same page. And before I knew it, I was filming the movie. It all felt quite organic and easy. And usually it isn’t; usually you send a tape and you never hear back. Maybe you find out you’re not in the movie when they announce the cast or you see the movie. But this felt like a genuine conversation and a collaboration. And Thea was assembling the most like wonderful group of actors.

You mentioned that you didn’t know it was a true story when you got the script. How did that aspect come into play?
TS: Anjana, it was one of the first things we talked about, wasn’t it? Because Gladys was a real woman. And we talked immediately about how that comes with a level of responsibility. It’s a responsibility when you’re telling someone else’s story, but at the same time, we of course also wanted our own free range, so we needed to strike a balance. And the story is absolutely bonkers. The fact that it’s real, it still makes me laugh. It makes me laugh at British people because I think we’re mental. For example, how about if I told you that the whole invisible ink thing was true? And so was somebody hiding in a post box. Also true. I’d love to say that we came up with those embellishments, but they were already there. This is a story that was waiting to happen. The other thing I’d like to add is that Anjana was wearing a full yellow jumpsuit, a bodysuit, when we met. And when I say yellow, I’m talking like canary yellow.  So if you think I wasn’t going to cast her on the first meeting, you don’t know me well enough!

AV: Yeah, I didn’t do method dressing, clearly. I didn’t think about that. I should have dressed up more like what Gladys would have worn!

TS: If you’d actually shown up to a coffee shop in that…

AV: You know, what I really loved about Jonny Sweet’s script was that, yes, it was based in history, but it felt like it had one foot in the 1920s and one foot now. Something about the way the dialogue worked; it felt modern. I think I love that sort of element of irreverence within the history. I think we’re used to seeing very quaint period pieces and I think this story sets it up as if it is that, but then it completely subverts expectations and feels quite fresh.

How did you approach the visual nature of the film, keeping in mind the time period? 
TS: For me, aesthetically, two things are really important. One is the use of color. The other thing, which is combined within that, is how you work together with your DP, your production designer, your costume designer, and your hair and makeup designers. If we all work very closely together, and everybody understands what it is that I’m looking for, you are more than the sum of your parts. We build the aesthetic together. I think that you have to be even more careful of that when you do a period piece. Because we’re not living a hundred years ago—we’re living right now. That imagination that you need to make somewhere look and feel like it’s a hundred years ago, you’ve got to be coming from the same place and understand those aspects in the storytelling. I knew, for example, that I wanted to keep away from red in the palette as much as possible, so that every time you saw the letterbox, it would really pop. Those kinds of things are subtle, but they mean a lot to me. Some people notice them, lots of people don’t, and that’s totally fine, but it’s something that hopefully adds to your enjoyment of the film.

The character arc of Gladys is terrific. I felt completely different about her from the beginning to the middle to the end.
AV: A lot of that is in the script and it makes it easy when it’s charted properly, and the production details help. Thea and I talked about this. At the beginning you see someone who’s sitting up a bit too straight, a bit too buttoned up. It’s almost like she’s wanting to demonstrate that she can do the job. We also wanted her hat to be slightly too big, because it’s the first woman police officer in Sussex and they wouldn’t have had a perfect fit. She’s trying to fit into a place that isn’t quite accepting. And she’s trying to fit into the uniform. And then you realize that in some ways it’s quite restricting on her because the system and the men around her aren’t letting her do her job and follow her instincts. So actually you see a different side to her when she isn’t in uniform and she’s a bit freer. There’s more of a sparkle to her, I think, when she isn’t in the uniform and you see her brain ticking away. I wanted to chart the physical journey of what that might have been like. By the end, you see someone who is a different person than at the beginning. There’s a bit more to her than meets the eye.

Absolutely. And one of the things that makes this so effective are all the tone changes throughout the film. How did you make the comedy and drama work so cohesively?
AV: That’s probably the hardest thing, getting the tone right.

TS: It is, but the truth is that when you shoot something you break it down, right? You break it down scene by scene, and moment to moment within that. We would always know because we’d rehearsed it, we talked it through. If it was a scene with Anjana, we would have talked beforehand about what we wanted to achieve for the character in that scene. We’d discuss it at length, before shooting, right before shooting, and during shooting. You always know going in. Okay, this is the one where we reveal that her dad is everything to her. For Gladys, so much of her past is an obvious given even though nobody else ever talks to her about it. We were really aware of that going in. I would say for me, the shooting of it on set was never a problem because we always knew what the aim was.

What was more difficult, a much bigger challenge for me, is that you have to keep the whole film in your head all the time. The work that you do in prep is absolutely crucial in that you feel confident that you have a good hold, as much as you possibly can, on the thing as a whole. You need to know when you’re going to have your poignant, dramatic moments and when you’re going to have your laugh-out-loud moments. And then you shoot it with that plan as much in place as possible. Where it gets crazy is in the edit. Sometimes, lots of that works out, and sometimes, lots of it just doesn’t. There are laughs that you didn’t realize were going to be there, and there were laughs that you were sure were going to be there, but they aren’t!  And something you leave room for, something you hope for, is that actors will always bring something extra. However hard you’ve tried to anticipate everything, good actors will always bring something extra. Finding those moments in the edit is amazing. There’s nothing more exciting than an editor saying to you, I’ve recut that scene. Have a look at this. It can be so different from one cut to the next, even with a very short scene, something that’s 45 seconds. You use different cuts, different angles, and you can go from a comedy to a drama. That’s the power of it. And so, tonally, it was really in the edit that I had to keep the ship steered in the right way. And even then, it’s very easy to lose your way. The really scary part is when you start to let other people come in and watch it. If you have a trusted producer, you let them come in, and that’s when you really start to learn—through an audience, of course. But yes, without question, the challenge of maintaining the right tone for this film was the biggest and most important part of the job.

Q&A with Denis Villeneuve

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Dune: Part Two

Just as in the last film, this one starts with an incredible burst of sound, accompanied by some text, that really grabs the audience and lets them know they are in for an incredible experience. Can you talk about that decision?
Denis Villeneuve: When making movies, you try to plan as much as possible in the screenwriting. Even so, there are elements that come to life as you’re shooting. And similarly, in post-production, sometimes unplanned things happen, too. As we were developing various languages for the first one, Hans Zimmer started to do some experiments. Hans had permission to go very close to sound design… as close as he dared! Let’s just say it was a deal with the sound design team. He sometimes went a bit too far [laughing].

And, and as part of that process he developed a language that I absolutely was mesmerized by, but that wasn’t really used in the film. And I came up with the idea to open the film with that kind of… it’s a kind language that was developed from Sardaukar priests. I thought it would be interesting to use it as a kind of prophet, as a way to express some thought right at the beginning of the film… And it was also a nice way to say to everybody in the audience, “shut up!” But jokes aside, it was also a great way to take control over the movie before anything else, before the studio credits, even, which I love. And, for those who are familiar with the books, each chapter always start with a quote or an extract of the princess Irulan’s journal. So I thought it would be an elegant way to start the movie as well.

Casting is one of the most delicate moments of the filmmaking process for me

Let’s talk a little bit about the process of adaptation. You’ve done several adaptations now, and they are just incredible, between Dune, Arrival, and also Blade Runner 2049, in its own way. You make it look easy… and it’s not easy, because people haven’t touched this film [Dune] for decades. You were quoted as saying that when you adapt, you kill. Which is interesting to me, because when I watch your films, I feel like something other than killing is happening. It’s almost more like a reduction, as though you’re bringing the story to its essence. 
DV: But the thing is that when I say that I “kill,” it’s just that it is a violent, transformative process to go from the book – which people love, they are like poems. The books put so much of their strength into the description of the cultures and the rituals and, and of course I could only bring a little bit of it onscreen. So right from the start, I had to make some very bold choices.

One of them was to make this adaptation a Bene Gesserit adaptation. Of course, we looked at the Spacing Guild, the people that make space travel possible. There’s the Mentats, the human computers that are guiding the different families. Both of those groups are almost entirely put aside in my adaptation. I focused exclusively on the Bene Gesserit. It was a way to try to focus on the main theme that was interesting me in the book, which was the use of religion as a political tool.

I think the female characters in this film are just… all of them are impossible to take your eyes off of. They’re just so fascinating. Rebecca Ferguson in general is hard not to watch. She’s just an amazing actress. Can you talk about casting them, and about the decision to bring Chani to the forefront?
DV: Casting is one of the most delicate moments of the filmmaking process for me. It’s a very delicate moment, and you cannot make a mistake with casting… I mean, I’m stating the obvious, but if you get it wrong it can have a catastrophic impact. So I made sure to take my time before shooting part one. First of all, I made all of the casting decisions around Timothée Chalamet. I cast with a hundred percent certainty that he would be perfect for the part of Paul. And then I constructed all of the family, everybody, around him. And Rebecca is one of the first ones that came on board quite quickly, for many reasons.

First of all, I love actors that can make you believe in other worlds, and take you with them into those worlds a bit, like Amy Adams did in Arrival. They can make us believe in aliens, you know? Some actors can bring you into the unknown, and Rebecca is one of them, and she can absolutely do anything in front of the camera. I mean, it’s quite impressive how she was on the set. She’s a force. I can always rely on Rebecca when I need to go somewhere in the story.

And in the book, her character kind of goes into the shadows of Paul. And this time, in the adaptation, I wanted to keep her up front because she’s the most… for me Lady Jessica is one of the most fascinating characters. She’s the main architect of the entire story. And I always thought it’s sort of strange that in the book she disappears, so I wanted to work more with Rebecca. I just love working with her.

I have to ask you about the incredible array and variety of headgear in the film. It’s just unbelievable. You start looking forward to what’s happening next with Bene Gesserit costumes, for example, Florence Pugh’s character. There is an endless variety of interesting face masks! Could you take us inside that process, of deciding to cover up some of the world’s best actors, and what they thought about that?  
DV: Some of the headgear was born in the storyboards. There are some ideas that start there, and other ideas that start as I’m working with Jacqueline [West]. Jacqueline is a fantastic costume designer that is well known for her more historical work. And I wanted a costume designer that would bring some kind of historical consideration to the costuming. I didn’t want “fantasy” costume that would look like it was out of a “fantasy” movie. Dune, when you read the novel, feels like it was written by a historian. That he went into the future and came back with a time machine and filled the book with that kind of historical quality, that kind of gravitas, that kind of seriousness, and so I wanted the costume design to be similarly grounded. I wanted it to have deep roots, and to feel the history of each culture. And Jacqui was absolutely fantastic at doing this. And, yes, we tried to have fun with some of them.

Q&A with Carla Gutierrez

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Frida.

You’ve worked on Biopics before: for example, you edited RBG. How was making Frida different from those other experiences, apart from the fact that you directed?
Carla Gutierrez: I came to it with a personal connection. I mean, I think a lot of people have a personal connection to Frida’s art. But we also felt the responsibility of finding a way for her voice to really carry the story. So, yes, it is all archival… but we really wanted to make it feel as present as possible. And that was both a kind of exercise, and a challenge, and a beautiful process of digging into Frida’s own words and learning that she could actually tell her own story. That was really special.

And, you know, sometimes it was difficult, and a lot of times it was really beautiful and exciting when we discovered things. So I think that was a little bit different from RBG. In this case, it was Frida herself that really, you know, came alive.

your personal connection or attraction to a story is just the beginning

Let’s talk about the challenges of that approach, of letting Frida tell her own story. Because it’s one thing to have that idea, but I’m sure there must have been some points in the filmmaking process where you kind of felt that you were in a corner, creatively. How did you solve those problems while still keeping true to your original vision?

CG: Yes, there were challenges, but also, I think it was a gift. We didn’t have an opportunity to sit in front of her and ask her to tell us about her life! And so we relied on her writings. And they came from letters that she sent to loved ones and her diary. Her writings and her words lived very much in this world of emotions. So she wasn’t describing exactly what was happening in her life— and it was sometimes a bit of a challenge to make those connections, but at the same time, what a gift, right? And we kind of learned to be guided by that. To lean into just her emotions, and that was the exciting part of it. You actually get to hear the texture of her personality, the texture of her life, the feelings of those moments in her life… and I think that is what is unique that our film offers, to present that side of her to viewers, to let the audience really hear her heart and not necessarily hear people talking about her from the distance of history and the academic distance of understanding art.

One of the things that I noticed is how vocal she is about pushing against the patriarchy, pushing against the idea of a “man’s world.” Did this aspect of her story resonate with you in particular, or was it just one aspect of many that you found compelling?
CG: Besides a film that was done, I believe, in 1968 by a Mexican woman, I’m the first Latina to make a film about Frida. And I think that gave me a particular closeness to the subject matter. I think the understanding of growing up as a woman in this culture gave me a unique window into really capturing that experience in this film.

I always say that your personal connection or attraction to a story is just the beginning. Then you really have to do the homework and do the research, right? Because there’s still a distance that you have to go. You know, I did not grow up in Mexico. I grew up in Peru. I also have this sense of history, right?

We did a lot of research to be able to find every writing that there is on Frida that has been published or made public out there. And her writings are all over the place: you cannot find all her writings in one publication. So we had to follow tracks and different collections to be able to like get close to her real voice. And of course there was the cultural knowledge that I brought in from the very beginning. And I think my experience of the gender dynamics in Latin America — that I brought in from the beginning — was valuable. But there was a lot of work that we also needed to do to understand the context and understand the woman.

Q&A with Alexander Payne and David Hemingson

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Holdovers.

Can you start by telling us about your exposure, not only to the screenplay, but also to the world of Barton, and what drew you to visit this type of space?
Alexander Payne: I didn’t know the world. I went to an all-boys school, but it was a Jesuit school in Omaha. I had the idea for the movie, but I knew that one day I was going to have to do research and go out and visit these schools and talk to people and everything, and I just hadn’t gotten to it yet. And then I received a pilot script written by this guy that took place in a private school, a boarding school, and it was good enough that I called him up and asked if he would consider writing a story for me in that same world. Well, it turns out he does know that world. He’s from Connecticut. He didn’t go to a boarding school, but he went to a private day school. And Giamatti went to Yale!

David Hemingson: I wrote this pilot about my own experiences at the Watkinson School in Hartford, where I went for six years. And it was kind of a deeply personal story, because it involved my father, who was teaching there at the time, who I was estranged from, and my mother, who was a registered nurse. We were from a lower middle-class family and it was a strange transition for me. And I had an uncle who was a World War II veteran, a guy named Robert Hale, who was this remarkable guy. He’s the prototype for Paul. I mean, just like, baroquely profane, fantastically kind of stoic. He was like a modern-day stoic.  And he kind of raised me in some of the strictest and most hilarious terms at times, but through it with a lot of love. A lot of aphorisms that are shot through the movie are directly from him.

AP: Once we had the screenplay, I went out there with script in hand and really through just being there and location scouting, was able to soak up that environment.

DH: You were there for how many months? Eight or nine?

AP: I’m always in a place for a lot of months before shooting. I gotta soak up the atmosphere and get it right, or some version of it right. A lot of that came through location scouting. Location scouting is really a magnificent process because that’s when you kind of get to know where you are, because for every house in the film, you’ve been to 30. For every school in the film, you’ve been to 30. And you meet people and talk to them and you lightly weave yourself into the fabric of that local community. It’s limited, it can be superficial, but given the limitations, it sure helps me. My big experience previous to this was going to Hawaii for The Descendants. I was there for about nine months before shooting to get it right. In that movie I was trying to portray a certain class of people and it took me a while to get to know them so that I felt I was representing them accurately.

you lightly weave yourself into the fabric of that local community

What was the process like between you two as you developed the screenplay?
AP: Well the the screenplay developed in a really—to use an overused word—organic way. I knew he was a fine writer. I gave him a premise that I had been sitting on for about a decade. He did the writing, but we developed the story and the feel and the texture of it together. The soul of it. By the time we’re done, it’s personal to us both. And I feel it’s directable by me. And he feels good about it.

DH: It’s great because I worked about 27 years in television and this my first produced feature, so I’ve had a lot of experience and a lot of different genres, you know?

AP: And adapting yourself to different showrunners, right?

DH: Yeah, I had to work with showrunners, but working with him honestly has been, I know you’re tired of hearing it, but it’s really great…

AP: Why would you possibly think I’m tired of hearing that?!

DH: He’s a very generous guy, he smells great, he’s a lovely dude. No, it was a lovely experience and it was great because I didn’t go to film school. I’m kind of an autodidact that way. I was an attorney. But I quit my practice when I was in my 20s to do this because I hated being a lawyer. But I spent 27 years doing this, and he has this incredibly deep and vast knowledge of film. And I kind of had to go to film school on his back by going to CineFile at the corner of Sawtelle and Santa Monica in LA, a great resource. Two guys there, JP and Greg, they’re phenomenal. And they have like 30,000 movies, so in the process of developing the script, I read short stories, and I’d send him a short story and be like, well, this feels like an area. And then I’d get down to breaking it into a loose outline, and we’d start talking about movies—Hal Ashby, for example. I watched all the Ashby, I watched all the Altman, and saturated myself with all these movies and we kind of went from there.

This film is deceptive in a lot of ways. Because it feels like it was an indie film made in the 70s, but it’s made today, with tremendous care and detail. I mean, you have a helicopter that flies. It’s incredibly ambitious in its scale.
AP: Helicopters actually aren’t that big a deal! I was like, oh we got a helicopter. They’re actually not that expensive to rent. But finding the period one was. We had to get one.

DH: Finding a place to land it was quite a piece of work.

It’s this character-driven film but it has so much, like you said, pomp and circumstance happening in the 70s.
AP: We were just chatting outside and I brought up something that happened last night. We screened the film up in Pleasantville at the Jacob Burns Center. And a guy comes up to me afterwards and he goes, I’m a property master. I have to ask, where did you find those rowing machines? You know, they’re pretty hard to find. I said, thanks for noticing! For a three-second shot in the movie, you’re the first to notice! They’re not in the screenplay. Somebody had the idea, I think the production designer said, wouldn’t it be cool if we got rowing machines? We finally tracked them down at Harvard, and they had to go up into the attic or in the basement to pull them out, and then we brought them to St. Mark’s School where we were shooting. It’s a three-second shot, but yes, there’s a deceptive scope to the movie. Even for the smallest details, we tried to make them accurate.

The screenplay is kind of fascinating because we believe we’re going to follow these four kids through the whole film, and then you pull them right out!
I wanted to do that on purpose because when I was writing, I started to think about Dead Poets Society. And I love it, but I don’t need to do that. I don’t need five kids, I don’t need to service all their arcs. I don’t want to!

AP: He’s too lazy (laughs)!

DH: I’m way too lazy. But no, I wanted to get down to three people with very distinct issues that they were holding over on their own lives. In other words, people with pain, people with damage that weren’t getting past it, and I didn’t want to do it for eight people. I wanted to do it for three people. Obviously, it was going to be Paul, and I very much wanted to do it with Mary, because she felt very spiritually and emotionally like my mom in many respects. And then with Dominic [Angus Tully], I felt I was plugging in a lot of my angst and indignation as a kid into him. And I just wanted to see these three people, as opposed to like eight people. I wanted to make it a more concentrated experience.

How did you cast Dominic? He’s tremendous.
AP: It’s tough casting kids. Because you want them to be believable. And not seem too old. I went through this on Election 25 years ago. It’s challenging to get teenagers who look like teenagers, and not like actors in their 20s pretending to be teenagers. The professional kids are often much too professional and too polished. And then you have to worry about the non-professionals and the non-actors having the chops to do it. Anyway, it just takes time. And the casting director here in New York—a woman named Susan Shopmaker—fielded about 800 submissions. We didn’t find Angus. We felt maybe we missed one. We found some of the other parts, but not him. As the auditions kept trickling in, dwindling, but trickling in, we finally did what we were going to do anyway, which is go out to the schools where we were supposed to shoot the movie and just contact the drama departments and ask, who you got? And there he was at Deerfield. When we shot, he was a senior at Deerfield, playing a junior at a version of Deerfield. From Deerfield, I also picked up another actor. The blonde kid in class who says, “He does what in the Cobb salad? I eat that Cobb salad.” He was an actual junior at Deerfield. And not an actor!

Q&A with Reinaldo Marcus Green

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Bob Marley: One Love

Can you talk about the research that you did, and about the consultants that you brought in to make sure you got it right? I was so impressed with how authentic this story was.
Reinaldo Marcus Green: So, I’ll start with the consultants. We had a gentleman by the name of Neville Garrick, who we represent in the film. He had done the album art work, and he also did the lighting for all of the shows. And so Neville was still alive. Rest his soul – he passed away recently. But he was on set every day.

Neville was in the room with Bob. So, we had people that knew Bob and that were in his close circle. They were very, very helpful in, you know, bringing out character details and nuances… of helping us understand what these moments in Bob’s life were like.

When Neville was helping us, obviously he is older now, everybody has their own recollection of what it was like. So you have to… you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but certainly he was there the night Bob got shot, he left, he was the one that drove Judy home. So we knew enough and then we had to fill in the blanks.

there was an outpouring of music, there was an outpouring of this musical genius.

So Neville was a big, a big part of our puzzle. Fae Ellington, who’s a cultural icon in Jamaica, she was there for language and dialect, and to make sure of the historical accuracy of what we were doing. The film takes place in 1976, 1977, and that required a certain understanding of the time period. They use certain words in patois today that they didn’t use back then, for example.

And of course the family helped tremendously. Ziggy was on set pretty much every day. And it was great for us because he walks like his dad, he looks like his dad, he moves like his dad…. Just having that spirit around was really, really helpful.

And, again, it’s usually the characterization. Like, you know, Bob skipped two steps or whatever it was. Those kind of little details that really help add specificity to the performance.

The casting in the film is incredible, particularly the choice to have Kingsley Ben-Adir play the title role.
RMG: Well, I didn’t know Kingsley’s work that well before casting him, or I should say that I didn’t realize that I knew his work. I saw the movie One Night in Miami, but I had forgotten that it was him. And so, you know, when we were searching, we looked everywhere – all over the world – to try to find Bob, and obviously we were looking for a needle in a haystack.

To state the obvious, we were never going to find Bob himself, so I needed someone that had enough of Bob’s attributes. And after about eleven and a half months, maybe a year, Kingsley’s tape showed up. And there were just a lot of really great actors that didn’t even want to tape for the role, because it’s Bob. It’s really scary, you know, and so many things might not go right.

You know, he really captured the look, the feel, the movement of Bob, all of that stuff. And so, when Kingsley’s tape came in, even though he has short hair, and he’s quite a big dude (he’s like 6’2”… he’s a big guy), but still, there was something really interesting about the tape. He had me leaning in, and, you know, not quite grabbing the popcorn, but sort of, that was kind of the feeling… like, man, there’s something really interesting, super intriguing, going on here. It was everything he wasn’t doing, you know? I’d seen so many tapes that were mimics of the Bob interviews online, and he didn’t do that, it was really an interpretation of Bob, and I thought that was very smart of him. And I knew I wanted to meet him, and now, of course, I’m thinking, “okay, if I put him in a wig, and prosthetics, like… how do we get close to evoking Bob?

But he brought that believable baseline character. And so that, that’s really, was the start, you know. But I didn’t know if he could sing, or dance, or do any of that stuff. But I wasn’t concerned about that. I mean, obviously I was— but ultimately it’s about the vulnerability of the performance. I knew if he was a great actor, he’d be able to get the level we needed.

And Kingsley, he did the work. I mean, he lost 40 pounds. He taught himself how to play guitar, how to sing, all the choreography. Just the work that he had to do in seven or eight months, to really just dive into creating Bob.

At the time shown in the film, Jamaica is a nation that is just coming out of colonial rule. Can you talk about that element of the story, and how you incorporated it into the film?
RMG: You know, the first script was a great skeleton for us, and kudos to Terrence [Winter] and [Frank E. Flowers] for getting us there. There was a lot more backstory in their draft. And there was just a lot more movie, to be honest, which was great—if we were making a limited series or something it would have been perfect. It was so, so big, it just was too much story to pack into one film. We were trying to find, like, what is the heart of the movie? What is the movie that we’re going to tell in two, two and a half hours? What’s the most critical time in Bob’s life that we thought would capture the essence of the man?

Now, can you possibly do it all? There’s been 500 books written about Bob. Whose truth is it, right? There are so many stories, you can focus on the Wailers, you can focus on Peter and Bunny. There’s just so many different avenues. But this avenue just felt like the right one for us. It’s 1976, there’s an assassination attempt on Bob’s life… Jamaica was in political turmoil. I didn’t know the intricacies of that when I took this project on, you know? But how do we make that accessible to people that don’t know about Jamaican politics or history? And all the stuff about how the CIA was maybe involved… there’s a lot of, so we had to try to set people in place in time right away. And Bob was at the center of that, but he was not yet a global star. He was a national star. And it was Exodus that really put him on the map, put the music on the map, and that just felt like a critical time to focus on. Like, he went from being just a musician to a revolutionary, truly.

It’s what brought his music to the masses. Now, he also created Kaya at that time, which our movie doesn’t go into, but there was an outpouring of music, there was an outpouring of this musical genius. Obviously, he gets his cancer diagnosis during that time and our movie ends before then, but it just felt like that was the right period of time to try to capture in Bob’s life that gave us some insight.

I’m still learning about him. I mean, you know, I wanted to try to show us the man behind the buttons and the pins and the bags. And, you know, Bob is still something of an enigma to most people. He’s a tricky one to pin down. But hopefully we got some juice from his family, and from things that we didn’t know about.

I understand you premiered in Jamaica. What was the response there like?
RMG: It was incredible. That was incredible. I mean… I was nervous. I was a wreck! So yeah, I was a wreck. That was crazy. Jamaicans… They do not play. Like, they were coming into the theater saying,, “nah.” But then leaving they were like, “you did your thing…” So it was the energy of, ‘we’re okay. We did our thing.’ “It was good,” they said. And “good” in Jamaica is “excellent” anywhere else, I swear! It was very humbling. It’s a humbling place to premiere your movie. They are people who have been through a lot, and the fact that they accepted Kingsley as Bob Marley is a pretty big deal, so I think we did alright.