Hey, I'm Michael Calabro, and I'm here with Barry Jenkins and Mark Friedberg
and we're here to talk about 'If Beale Street Could Talk.'
The main question I have for you guys, and the one thing I want to talk about
the most is like, if you can pick your one favorite shot in 'Beale Street,'
what is it?
The main character Fonny has this basement apartment,
this Bank Street flat. There's this moment very late in the piece
where our character is sort of spiraling out,
where we place the camera on a 360 degree spin
and just look at every angle of this room.
So much so, that we send the main character out of the room,
and we continue to circle this oblique sculpture.
It is by far my favorite shot in the film.
I mean keep doing your thing, man. It's got weight to it.
[laughs]
The concept of taking someone else's like printed word,
you have to take those flashes of imagery,
translate it to word again, and then use that word as like a text
to be like: here's how we're going to think of this.
Was that like– And then deviate from that.
Yeah!
It's all about communication. And you know I think James Baldwin
was communicating with me, and then I'm communicating
with Mark. I remember the lines of the book. It says:
"Fonny is working on the wood," "It is a very soft wood,"
"he doesn't want to defile the wood."
Those three lines have become this 360 degree shot,
where a young actor is shaping his life
out of this block of wood.
If I told Mark in the beginning:
"So Mark, you gotta build this set,
and everything is going to happen there."
You know, I think you understood that this place–
even though it's very run down, downtrodden, and yet,
so much life, so much intimacy happens.
But that's also the theme of the story.
It's that, our riches are not what we have.
The best things in life are not things.
It's about, the thing that they have is what they have between them.
And it actually empowers the space, and it empowers these objects.
Most of those objects, a lot of people would call junk.
It's stuff you would find.
Artists, we call them opportunities.
Who made the sculptures?
In the novel, he's just a carver.
He goes to a technical school, he learns arbitrarily some wood skills.
It's clear that Baldwin didn't completely understand what those were.
And then he just becomes a guy who carves busts out of wood.
I thought that was a little tame for a guy with Fonny's
audacity and fire.
I also found Fonny to be ingenius. A guy who figures it out.
And I think the way he's making the thing,
relates to the way you shot it.
And that energy, and that emotion, and that's what we wanted.
It's also described in the book that he's in a little bit of conflict
with this thing that he's making.
That's what art making is. If you don't have any conflict, well...
So that for me had to be art that was made.
And then the coolest thing of all happened.
So you liked the art, but there was one thing missing,
there was still like one thing missing.
And so we kept reaching out for art that made sense
for this story. And something that came back
was this– we saw this piece and I was like: "yeah, that's it."
So it turned out it was the work of this 75 year old sculptor
who now lived in Baltimore named Valerie Maynard.
And I'm like: "yeah, that's it. That's cool. We need that piece."
As we started to explore who Valerie Maynard was,
it turns out she that she was a friend of Baldwin's.
And in fact, not only was she a friend of Baldwin's,
but she may have even been the inspiration for the art of Fonny.
My head came off. Completely off–
I think I ran into your office shreiking at that point, when we found out that,
and there's even another part with Tony, her brother Tony.
Who basically is the inspiration for the character Fonny.
Fonny's based on a real young man who went through this actual ordeal.
Whose sister is the sculptor, Valerie Maynard. And so–
So it's clear that art is truth, and that we were definitely
being honest, and true to the material, because it all came to find us.
You know, we were living in a right way with this material.
Otherwise the inspiration for the story
wouldn't have sort of transcended the galaxies to come find us.
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