‘The Piano Lesson’ director Malcolm Washington on confronting legacy with the August Wilson adaptation
In 2015, Denzel Washington announced publicly for the first time his plans to make screen adaptations of the 10 plays in playwright August Wilson’s famed American Century Cycle. “I’m really excited about that,” Washington said at the time. “That they put it in my hands, the estate, and trust me. That’s good enough for me. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
Nine years later, Washington has made good on the promise. He directed 2016’s “Fences,” a Best Picture nominee that won Viola Davis her first-ever Oscar, and executive produced 2020’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” which won two Oscars for costume design and production design. But “The Piano Lesson” is perhaps the most personal Wilson adaptation yet for the screen legend. His son Malcolm Washington is the film’s director and co-writer, his other son John David Washington is the star, and Denzel’s daughter Katia Washington is an executive producer.
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“Our story deals so much with the concept of legacy and lineage and finding power and protection in that – while also confronting that to process its meaning so that you can move forward,” Malcolm Washington tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: Film Directors panel. “And for me, I felt so much strength in knowing that this film would exist in the context of the other two films – and hopefully in the context of the next seven. So at the end of this 10-film-long project, there will be this tapestry that’s unfolded, and each film will speak to a different voice or concern of somebody in our culture. Because we come from a proud culture and have different voices. I constantly worked within that framework of a larger work.” Watch the video interview above.
Based on Wilson’s play, “The Piano Lesson” is about siblings Boy Willie (John David Washington) and Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) and their family’s history with a mysterious upright piano that Berniece keeps in her Pittsburgh home. The play made its Broadway debut in 1990 and has had revivals Off-Broadway (in 2013) and on Broadway again (in 2022) in the years since. The most recent revival hews closest to Malcolm Washington’s film adaptation in the form of its cast. John David Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Ray Fisher, and Michael Potts all appeared in the recent stage version. Deadwyler and Corey Hawkins are among the core ensemble newcomers.
SEEJohn David Washington, Danielle Deadwyler interview: ‘The Piano Lesson’
Of Deadwyler, who has received awards buzz for her supporting turn as Berniece, Malcolm Washington says simply that the “Till” star is a “phenomenal talent.”
“When I spoke to her, we both just connected. We were reading a lot of the same things. We had a lot of similar art references and had a curiosity and desire to take a story like this, and usher into a new space,” Malcolm Washington says. Plus, the filmmaker adds, Deadwyler and Hawkins served to shake up the core group.
“To have them come into the room, the energy in the room shifts,” he says of the new cast additions. “Samuel Jackson’s a damn legend, my brother and Michael Potts and Ray Fisher, they’re all such present performers that they’re going to respond to what you put in front of them. So if you can disrupt them and add something different to the space, they feed off that. And they were interested in rediscovering this story too – in reexcavating their character and finding something new every day.”
The desire to push “The Piano Lesson” as an adaptation extended to Malcolm Washington’s approach as a filmmaker too. The film opens with an arresting sequence set before the main events of the story, an original creation written by Malcolm Washington and co-writer Virgil Williams.
“I thought it was really important to recontextualize the story that you’re going to see just after that,” Malcolm says of the sequence, set on the Fourth of July when the Charles family patriarch (Stephan James) takes back ownership of the family piano. “In the medium of film, we have so many opportunities, and I wanted to honor the medium that we were working in. I wanted to visualize some of the themes that we were going come back to later, and reframe the story to the story that I was really interested in telling – which is Black American reclamation, right? Like a reclaiming and retelling of your history and your identity. So the scene does that while also delivering an experience that’s purely image and sound. It’s just visual storytelling and sound and how those things connect. So using those tools, it was exciting to set the audience up and say, ‘Hey, you’re in the hands of a filmmaker. This is a film.’”
“The Piano Lesson” is streaming on Netflix now.
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