- Designing a film is...
it's the coming together of a
great team of people
who do all of their, you know,
their best work, and they bring it all.
And so, it's the cumulative effect of all of that.
- I always wanted to work in movies,
before I even knew what that meant.
But, you know, I thought that was directing
or acting or whatever.
But I was in the theater, and I was always artistic.
So I was doing set design on stage,
you know, and I'm talking community theater
in high school and college,
and that kind of thing.
But I realized on the first movie I worked on
that there was an art department,
and it was, you know, literally
the light bulb went off.
- But they want to call me Mother of Blues,
that's all right with me. It don't hurt none.
- We had a limited amount of time.
I mean, no time.
My agent called me on a Monday night
and that was eight weeks away
from the first day of shooting.
So, I read the script the next morning
because I couldn't read it that night.
Met George.
He hired me that day.
So by Wednesday
I started trying to find crew and just started researching
just Chicago, the period,
making the calls about the recording equipment. I mean,
I had done a lot of recording equipment before,
but nothing in the mid-twenties.
I mean, it literally was the dawn...
The machinery was invented
for the era for recording the music
that we were representing in the film.
So, I made a couple of calls to try to research that,
because I knew that that would be a project.
You know, whether we needed to build it,
whether we could find it,
just even what it was.
So, that was of paramount importance.
We found the one guy who built the one machine,
and he flew with it and gave us all a tutorial on
how to set it up.
I was on pins and needles for that one for a while.
I mean, that was like the fifth star of the movie to me,
that equipment, because if we didn't get that,
I don't know what we would have done.
- When I got there, they'd be there to say...
- That's to get the people's attention.
- I just put a lot of focus into coming up with
what those sets were going to be.
Just giving every space...
I just wanted everywhere we looked in those two rooms
to have life.
Getting the details right,
so that then, they can just recess into the background
and then let the actors do what they do.
George said something to me once,
that he wanted the basement
to evoke the hull of a slave ship.
That was another thing that, you know,
obviously I researched.
Just like, all right,
"What is that? What's the shape of that?
What's it feel like?
What could I take that would translate?"
And the day the actors walked onto the set,
I told Viola that, and she just sort of,
her head went down and she,
she just thought about that for a long time.
- I make more money for this outfit
than anybody else you got put together.
They don't care nothing about me.
All they want is my voice.
- What about them songs I give you?
- They're not the right songs.
- I mean, Chad,
he was an incredible human being.
It was my second job with him.
"Get On Up," the James Brown movie.
And the first time we filmed with them
on "Ma Rainey" was in the tent where the band
was all together.
And I built the stage,
literally the stage that was in the tent.
I went back to the same concept
of what we had drawn
in "Get On Up." There's a flashback scene to
when young James Brown is boxing,
as part of a...you know, at a white country club.
And so, just the structure of the stage,
I thought, "Oh, that'll work for this as well."
And when they were all there,
Chad was pulling his horn out of the case,
and I just caught his eye, and I said,
"The last time I built this stage
was for James Brown in a boxing ring."
And he just looked at me with that twinkle in his eye
and that laugh.
And he said, "You sure did."
He was the real deal.
As you can see in the film.
- I got my time coming for me.
- You don't know nothing about
what kind of blood I got,
what kind of heart I got beating here.
- You work on certain projects
and you know that it's going to be special.
It's the process.
It's the journey of finding it,
and when it all works in tandem,
you end up with something like "Ma Rainey,"
and that's, you know, the great joy
of what we do.