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“You Can’t Tell the Story of America Without a Theft”: Malcolm Washington on The Piano Lesson
John David Washington and Skylar Smith in The Piano Lesson Set in 1936, The Piano Lesson—the fourth chronological entry in playwright August Wilson’s ten-play Century Cycle—is both a family drama and a ghost story. The titular musical instrument sits in the living room of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), who lives in Pittsburgh’s Hill District with his adult niece Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) and her young daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith). As the story opens, Berniece’s brother Boy Willie (John David Washington) and his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) have arrived at the Charles House from Mississippi, looking to sell a truckload of watermelons they’ve brought from their home state. Once inside the home, Boy Willie, who wants to sell anything he can to purchase the land his family was formerly enslaved on, is informed a white man has been coming around, asking to purchase the instruments of Black families. This leads to the central conflict of the narrative, with Boy Willie fighting over his right to sell the piano while his sister vehemently pushes back in opposition; the amount of family history embedded in the piano is plentiful and painful, as ancestors have literally put their blood, sweat and tears into its making and preservation).
As part of Denzel Washington’s agreement with August Wilson’s estate to bring all ten plays in the Century Cycle to the silver screen, The Piano Lesson, directed by Denzel’s son Malcolm in his feature debut, follows Fences (2016) and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020). Honing in on the more unsettling aspects of the family’s past as well as the creepiness invoked by the paranormal apparitions terrorizing the family’s present, Washington’s film is a strong additon to the canon, effectively juggling extended scenes that encompass dense exposition, a budding romance, jump scares and more. The film successfully begins as an American horror story and ends as a satisfying drama in which a deeply suffering family has found a way to move forward.
After being revived on Broadway in 2022 with John David Washington, Ray Fisher, Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Potts, Washington has brought all four of these actors along for his film adaptation, yet the standout may very well be Deadwyler, new to the role but in total control of every aspect of her complicated character.
A few days before the film was set to premiere on Netflix, I spoke with Washington about his appreciation for August Wilson, the themes of the play he wanted to bring to the forefront, and his appreciation for an equally spiritual filmmaker, Terrence Malick. The Piano Lesson is now on Netflix.
Filmmaker: Can you recall the first August Wilson play you remember seeing? Was there one that served as a gateway into his work?
Washington: I think a production of Two Trains Running which my mom [Pauletta Washginton] was in. Growing up, I watched so many movies but I didn’t really grow up in the theater, watching plays, so I had a limited understanding of what theater could really be. As a young kid, I assumed the theater was stuffy or boring, and when I went to see my mom in Two Trains Running, I knew the name “August Wilson,” but just as a name. In our culture, we obviously respect and revere our heroes, and August Wilson is one of them, but when I went to go see my mom’s production I didn’t know what to expect. When I walked out, I realized just how funny August’s work can be. You see people that speak like you, or you have uncles that sound like the characters in his plays do. I had had this transformative experience of, “Oh, [the theater] can be for us. It can be for me.”
Filmmaker: And since then, I’m sure you saw your brother in The Piano Lesson on Broadway several times.
Washington: Yes, I did.
Filmmaker: And your dad has experience with August Wilson’s work, having starred on Broadway in the 2010 revival of Fences (subsequently adapted for the screen in 2016). And though you have a lot of family involved in the making of The Piano Lesson [including his mother and twin sister in brief cameo roles], how did you work to make the material your own? You carried over several actors from the recent Broadway revival (Jackson’s wife, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, directed that production), so I was curious how you brought yourself into the material. Whenever someone adapts a play [for the screen], they’re always asked, “How will you open it up?” But you also don’t want to open up the text just for opening up the text’s sake, right? It could be a trap.
Washington: Or it’s like a dirty word. What does it even mean?
Filmmaker: As if we need to have endless exteriors on display when turning a play into a film.
Washington: Exactly, it’s just for its own sake. I really respect filmmaking as a medium and was excited to get to use its toolbox on this material. Instead of opening up the text, it was more about diving into the interior lives of these characters. Instead of going further out, I wanted to go further in, in a way, and build off of the play’s themes and characters and use them as a barometer while filmmaking [would be] our language. It all came out of character.
Filmmaker: In a play, the narrative is completely told in one long, continuous wide shot, but that’s obviously not the case in a film. How do you break down the compositions, the framing, you want to achieve when reading the text? Are you shortlisting in your head?
Washington: I worked very closely with [our cinematographer] Mike Gioulakis and we had a really strong idea, visually, of the kind of language we wanted to employ. Of all the projects I’ve done, which have mostly been shorts and music videos that lend themselves more to the past, this was a project where I wanted to really be present and in the moment, to find the cinema [on the day of]. When you put on a play, it can sometimes have that rehearsed feeling, but you want the audience to experience it as though they’re seeing the actors discover something for the first time. You want there to be life in the frame and you want it to feel fresh. We took that approach and encouraged all the actors to go along with us. They started over and were open to discovering things on the day, and I think that that led to really grounded yet surprising choices.
Filmmaker: You’ve spoken about how each production of the play has reflected the time in which it’s put on. The play was written at a time when the works of Toni Morrison were top of mind in the public’s consciousness (Beloved won a Pulitzer Prize just a few short years before The Piano Lesson did) and now with this film adaptation, there are elements that may call to mind filmmakers like Jordan Peele who are also using different genre traits to interrogate the complexities of the African-American experience. Your cinematographer, Mike Gioulakis, even shot Peele’s 2019 horror film, Us. I’m curious how you take to engaging with topical artists, how events of the present day bleed into and inform your work.
Washington: I come from a generation that shares certain reference points. Obviously, Peele is one of them, but so is the work of Kahlil Joseph and Noah Davis. Their work is so influential to me. We’re living in a time where the idea of identity is really being reconciled, where people are reclaiming and affirming and declaring their own identity as a culture, as a people and as individuals. We’re also living in a time where we’re having a lot of conversations about processing trauma, where generations are reconciling the trauma passed on to them from generations before. This film that wrestles with both of these ideas very directly, where you have a brother and a sister fighting over the lives, and the meaning of the lives, of their parents and grandparents. I think that’s very much ingrained in this generation and feels so fresh and exciting to explore.
Filmmaker: Did your own familial lineage, or perhaps not lineage but personal relationships with your parents’ and their parents, play a factor?
Washington: Yes, it was about just understanding the totality of their lives, and all that came before and that exists in me now. There are decisions and sacrifices I have to acknowledge and reconcile with, and make peace with, and sometimes forgive, and ultimately make my own decisions about how I want to live my life for the next generation, and how I want to impact the next generation, always informed by the lessons of the past. That was carried into all of us who worked on the film, every department head. We all shared many stories of our family histories and wove them into the film in a really personal way. It was scary but exciting to deal with those kinds of stakes.
Filmmaker: The film wrestles with that kind of history while also wrestling with the country’s. You open the film with an almost-wordless flashback set in Mississippi on July 4th, 1911. As the well-off, white Sutter family lounge about, enjoying the outdoor fireworks, the men they hold as slaves are back at the house and attempting to escape with the sturdy piano that gives the film its title. This sequence, bathed in strong reds and blues, is lit by an ambient light source: the fireworks. It’s almost completely nonverbal.
Washington: Almost entirely, yes. That was something that was really important to us. In any adaptation, it comes with a framing of how you personally see the story, how you tell it through the prism of yourself and your worldview. To me, [The Piano Lesson] was a story of Black American reclamation, the story of our country, in so many ways. Opening the film on the 4th of July, with these really bold color choices that are screaming “patriotism,” and having the action that takes place under that light be of a theft…well, you can’t tell the story of America without a theft. Since all of these ideas are so baked into who we are as a people in the country that we supposedly stand for, it felt like, in order to reconcile with that, we had to frame our story in that way. It’s my belief that the characters that inhabit this story are distinctly American.
Filmmaker: Was the Charles House built specifically for the film? Was that shot on location or on [sound]stages or a combination of the two?
Washington: Actually, I took our production designer [David J. Bomba] to Pittsburgh’s Hill District, which is where the story and most of August’s work is set. It’s his hometown, a place which was really important to August and his work. We went there, on a pilgrimage, and found a street that we fell in love with and wanted to try to recreate. The buildings that you see in our film, the Charles House and the rowhouses connected to it, were built entirely for the production, but completely based, almost to the inch, on a series of houses we came across in Pittsburgh on this one particular street we found in the Hill.
Filmmaker: I visited the house where he was born last year. It’s now a museum.
Washington: That was dope, right?
Filmmaker: And they still perform his plays, outdoors behind his home, every summer.
Washington: Yeah, I actually saw Jitney back there.
Filmmaker: That’s awesome. You can feel the history there.
Washington: Obviously you’ve been there, so you probably already know this story, but August lived with his mother and his siblings behind Bella’s Market [a neighborhood grocery run by a Jewish couple, Lou and Bella Siger]. So, to honor that history, across the street from our Charles House we built out a market and named it Bella’s to tie the film into August’s lineage, to honor him, his mother, and his family.
Filmmaker: I didn’t catch those signs at first glance [in the film]. I’ll have to check again.
Washington: It’s for the neighborhood, for the community. I was like, “If you’re from there, you’ll get it. And if not, it’s all good.”
Filmmaker: When preparing to shoot those extended sequences in the living room or in the kitchen or the dining room, long conversations between two, three, or more characters, did you brainstorm with Mike how to frame these dialogue passages? I.e. when to go in very tight on an actor’s face, when to get the camera off the sticks and go handheld?
Washington: Yeah, a lot. I could sit you down for dinner and walk you through all of these choices [laughs], but I think it ultimately stems from my philosophy that the Black-American experience is a series of interconnected stories that span space and time, connecting us all like a patchwork on a quilt filled with stories from different generations and families. Our film works off of that preexisting structure. We have a throughline to work from, which is the play [itself]. The play is our spine. However, in the film we also branch out into worlds imagined and unimagined, visualizing the memories of certain characters and [sequences] where their memory might be failing them a little. We also have apparitions that appear in the film. How do we represent all of this visually while having the play [serve as the spine of the story]? We were like, “Should we shoot in different formats? Should we play with different aspect ratios? What should we do?” Even though we had been talking [about] anamorphic lenses for awhile, we ultimately landed on using spherical [lenses], as we wanted something a bit more immersive, lenses that made the viewer feel like they could fall into the image. The spherical lenses were very beautiful and handled what we were trying to accomplish, from a lighting standpoint, but then we needed to tone it all back to find our footing.
Filmmaker: Does a sequence like the major one in the third act—ghosts make their presence known and there’s intense cross-cutting taking place between the action happening both upstairs and downstairs—really come together in the edit? Or, at the very least, does it become clearer in the edit?
Washington: While you want to have your nose in the right direction on set, we definitely crafted a lot in the edit, yes, and found so much of the movie and its rhythms in the cutting room. Leslie Jones became one of my closest collaborators and we built such a friendship in that cutting room. It’s a sacred place. If you check her CV, you’ll see that Leslie is one of the greats who comes from a legacy of great editors [Jones is the granddaughter of Oscar-nominated editor Harmon Jones and daughter of Oscar-nominated editor Robert C. Jones]. She really helped me shape that ending and together we found its rhythm, both the really percussive, almost jarring cutting style of that main sequence in the [final act] and then the transition into the quiet, the stillness, the poetic nature of the sequence that directly follows it. We really worked in the edit on balancing tone in those final sequences.
Filmmaker: You mentioned Leslie’s CV. Of course, she was an editor on Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), and you recently presented Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) as part of a series of films that inspired your version of The Piano Lesson. How has Malick influenced your work? When I first saw the poster for The Piano Lesson, I admittedly thought of the poster for Days of Heaven (1978).
Washington: I love Days of Heaven.
Filmmaker: How do you see Malick’s films working in conversation with your feature?
Washington: One thing I love about Malick, especially in The Thin Red Line and very much so in The Tree of Life, is this idea of spirituality and how your connection to God comes [via] elements of the Earth’s. That was definitely something we leaned on, this idea [of] the Earth—its soil, water, fire, each of these elements—being a catalyst for your spiritual connection to something bigger than you. Our film tells a very intimate story and we try to tell it intimately, but it’s connected to this much larger idea of ancestry and spirituality. Those are as big as concepts [get]. I think Malick’s films helped form my consciousness in that way and [taught me] how to think about and photograph them. He’s a philosopher first [laughs]. When you read his scripts, they read like a dissertation on humanity. He’s very much influenced me that way, and then aesthetically, Malick obviously has such a wonderful style that’s so emotive and his images stick with you for years. There’s a sequence that Leslie cut for The Thin Red Line and the way [Malick and Jones] both disconnect image and sound, disconnect dialogue and time, just comes together in this wonderful poem. That’s something we definitely referenced and thought about a lot, in shooting and cutting and generalizing [our work].
Filmmaker: I wanted to ask about the physical design of the piano itself. It’s so often referenced in the text of the play (who and what is carved into it), but depending on how far back you’re sitting in a theater, you may not see any of those details on stage. In a film…
Washington: You can get up on it and go inside of it. We do all of that.
Filmmaker: I’m curious how hands-on you were with its look and feel.
Washington: Very much. It’s the hero prop, the thing we’re trying to imbue with meaning that we’ll reveal throughout. We knew that how we photographed the piano and teased out its story were both going to be really important. Our design is based roughly off of the original design of the piano, as I thought that would be a nice way to honor the first production of the play. But then we build on it, right? We’re mirroring the concepts of the film [with] the making of film, where we’re taking on this legacy that’s been left for us. One thing we always viewed the piano as was an altar that Berniece ultimately comes to and it opens a portal to the past, to her history and ancestors. I thought it was important to make that as real as possible, so we carved images into the piano based on members of my family, of my ancestors, the ones that are no longer with us. When John David [as Boy Willie] is touching the piano and telling [Berniece’s daughter] Maretha about the significance of it, he’s touching the faces on the piano and those are the faces of his ancestors. That’s his great-grandfather that he’s touching. I thought that would be such a wonderful way to charge the set, the piano itself, with so much meaning and energy. There are images of Danielle’s grandparents on that set in her room and every image you see of a portrait or a face is somebody connected to the production. I thought that that would create the kind of atmosphere [we wanted], setting the tone for what we were doing.
Filmmaker: You can really feel that, even without it being spoken.
Washington: Yeah, it’s not spoken about at all. These are all [elements] under-the-hood. Hopefully, you just feel this stuff.
