Welcome to Netflix Book Club
and our very first episode of But Have You Read the Book.
Each month, Me, you and the storytellers will sit down at Starbucks and uncover
how these stories go from page to screen.
So today we're talking about our very first Netflix Book Club pick
Passing by Nella Larsen
and joining me is filmmaker Rebecca Hall and Ruth Negga and Andre Holland,
who star in Passing a beautiful film based on Nella Larsen's book.
I love this film.
I loved this book.
It drew so many ideas up about what identity means
and wanting to belong and one trying to find their space.
But I'm interested to know
how this book came into your lives and what it meant to you.
We can start with you, Rebecca.
I grew up with my mother, who was from Detroit.
She was living in England. She was an opera singer.
There were hints and rumors in my family that her father was African-American
and was white passing, although there was no language for that.
Your grandfather was black?
-Yes. -She knew him?
Yes, he died when she was 16.
I grew up looking at my mother thinking,
You are a black woman.
You look to me like a black woman.
But that's not in your lexicon.
It's not how you are talking about yourself.
It's not how you're living your life.
Because she wasn't given that because her father was passing.
How did that influence your decision to make this film
your experience with this film?
When I read this book, I suddenly had a context.
I suddenly understood, well, this is what he was doing,
and this book was a big turning point for me
because I didn't know that there was a that there was this word passing,
that this was something that many, many, many
people of color in this country did to get better lives for themselves.
To be quite clear about passing, how many times it wasn't
a rejection of yourself, your black self,
it wasn't a rejection of your black culture at all.
It was a choice to choose a
path of access, access to what we would call white privilege.
And that's literally physical access,
also the chance to perhaps
realize your dreams and meet your potential as a human being.
Passing has many different forms throughout the book.
Yeah it's something that we we talked about a lot on the set
was something that I felt was very important
was that every one should be passing.
So there are all the ways in which Irene is passing.
You know, how is she passing as a wife?
How much does she does she really find her husband attractive?
You know, she's not really awake to herself.
Hugh is easy because he's very clearly in the closet
as a gay man, and he's coming up to Harlem to even though he comes with his wife,
you know, he's coming to do whatever he does up there.
Claire is obviously passing.
She's gay when she needs to be. She's straight when she needs to be.
She behaves like a man when she needs to be.
She behaves like a woman, when she needs to be. She's black.
She's white, she's this walking duality.
I just wanted to keep complicating it.
It feels to me like as a culture,
you know, we're in a place where these questions of identity and belonging
are sort of front of mind and top of mind for people, and there seems to be
a willingness to discuss them and to sort of wrestle
with the truth of things that I don't know that I've experienced in my lifetime.
So I think the culture is ready for it.
I think this film has a lot to offer to the conversation.
Hi, Netflix Book Club, I'm Tessa Thompson and I play Irene Redfield in Passing.
It's a story about two black women, Irene and Claire,
whose lives become intertwined when they're reunited.
Let's see how this comes to life from book to screen.
Very slowly, she looked around
and into the dark eyes of the woman in the green frock at the next table.
But she evidently failed to realize that such intense interest
as she was showing might be embarrassing and continued to stare.
Her demeanor was one who with utmost singleness of mind
and purpose, was determined to impress firmly and accurately
each detail of Irene's features upon her memory for all time,
the feeling passed and she turned away with the firm intention
of keeping her gaze on the lake, the roofs of the buildings across the way,
the sky, anywhere but that annoying woman.
Almost immediately, however, her eyes were back again
in the midst of her fog of uneasiness.
She had been seized by a desire to stare the rude observer.
Suppose the woman did know or suspect her race.
She couldn't prove it.
Suddenly, her small fright increased,
her neighbor had risen and was coming towards her.
What was going to happen now?
“Pardon me,” the woman said.
-Pardon me, I don't mean to stare,
but I think I know you.
So in the book, we get the story brought to us
through the third person, but it really does
-feel as though it's... -Yeah, it does.
I sometimes have accidentally said in interviews, it's first-person narrative.
I remember it. It's not. It just feels so much like that.
-Like Irene's story. -Everything is very much
-in her head. -In her head and in her and her point of view
at least her gaze.
So how did you find your way to expanding that out?
Was that a challenge?
Was that something you were sharply interested in making happen?
Oh, very much so. It was the big challenge of the adaptation.
If you're tracking a woman who is quietly having a breakdown of sorts
and isn't even aware that she's having it....
How do you let the audience in on that experience?
when a narrator is unreliable in a novel, it sort of creeps up on you.
But in the film world, Irene is literally breaking things.
She drops a flowerpot out the window.
She drops a teapot.
She's unstable. We think that we are
seeing the truth when we see what she's seeing,
but then her POV shifts, like when she comes down the stairs
she sees in the mirror,
she sees them standing very close together,
and then two seconds later, you realize that they're much farther apart.
This was a sort of very central idea
for me that you should slowly begin to see that she can't be trusted.
She's not seeing clearly.
It was interesting because I 100% agree and felt I saw, you know, the blurry.
I saw that. And then you see her hands, you know, with the trembling, like,
she's not standing on entirely sturdy ground.
It was also interesting because I thought
it was an interesting way of translating from the book.
These two women who have a choice and an ability to identify
in two different ways and how those choices
the results that they bred.
For one, it brought freedom and the other it brought constriction.
Sometimes when adapting a book from script to screen, you can see differences.
So let's talk about a change that was made in Passing.
during the Negro Welfare League dance Irene
and Hugh are off to the side discussing the diversity of the crowd.
Hugh is particularly interested
in determining Claire's identity, especially her race.
Poor man, rich man, beggar man, thief... How's the rest of it go?
Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. All here, to feel more.
There's your friend from Chicago, first time up here and all that.
A case in point.
Irene’s smile had only just lifted the corners of her painted lips.
A match blazed in Wentworth's broad hands as he lighted her
cigarette in his own and flickered out before he asked, “Or isn't she?”
Her smile changed to a laugh.
Oh Hugh, you're so clever.
You usually know everything, even how to tell the sheep from the goats.
What do you think?
Is she? He blew a long, contemplative wreath of smoke.
Damned if I know.
I'll be as sure as anything that I've learned the trick.
And then in the next minute,
I'll find I couldn't pick some of them if my life depended on it.
Well, don't let that worry you.
Nobody can. Not by looking.
Not by looking, Rebecca.
Okay, tell me about the process
from reading this passage to translating it
to what we all saw on a film in this clip.
Well, this passage is pretty interesting.
For me, the spirit of this scene was that
Irene is is making a sort of small betrayal, like she's not actively
outing Claire in this passage in the book as passing, but she's not not either.
Correct. Yeah, yeah.
And in the movie, Irene, he asks, and Irene says
things aren't always what they seem and and really quite specifically, says it.
What is that supposed to mean?
Things aren't always what they seem, Hugh.
I’ll be damned.
In the book, Nella Larsen
has, there's even, I think, a line about.
Irene saying I want to betray her,
I want to tell everyone, you know, and then she doesn't.
So it was this sort of way of showing that, but also keeping it safe
because she's telling someone whose secret she has.
Right.
So we're also highlighting his closeted homosexuality.
So in that moment, she's like, OK, I'll tell you this information,
but I know it's not going to go anywhere because I've also got something on you.
I know you're passing too.
You know, it's this one glimpse of Irene's
-true nature. -I didn't know until that moment
in the scene that Irene could be dangerous.
Yeah.
There's definitely
something going on between Claire and Irene just saying it's not just me.
Did you both see that story? Feel that story?
I'm interested in how you approached or saw the queer storyline in the film.
I think for me and Andre
reading the book for sure, I was aware of that element of the story.
But when we find Brian, I think he's got many other things on his mind.
So I think he may have maybe is curious about that element and story,
but that's really not like prescriptive.
I don't think he landed in a place on it, but there were moments
where, like the wild desire moment where there is this sort of like
that's interesting what’s that?
Andre did something so extraordinary.
There’s this phrase wild desire in the letter from Claire to Irene
and Andre just instinctively took this kind of slight.
“Huh?” And then folds up the letter
and then turns out the light and doesn't talk to her anymore.
It may be Renee dear
that your way may be the wiser and infinitely happier one.
I’m flattered, wiser, as if anything, can rectify the humiliation.
Wait, there's more.
I wouldn't feel this wild desire
if I hadn't seen you.
That's rich, blaming you.
Wild desire.
Don’t give her an inch.
It had this weight of
a man who loves his wife but doesn't
entirely know her or is frightened that he might not entirely know her.
She doesn't reveal herself to him.
I think you're right.
There's a curiosity and also a fear of like,
what is it about her that I don't know?
And do I really want to know?
And what would that mean for our relationship going forward?
For me, playing Claire was about
accessing the part of her that is,
I don't know, she likes to be... Adored.
Don't we all?
Is Irene a thing to Claire?
That Claire wants to have?
No.
Irene represents
perhaps what could have been, you know, if she'd stayed with her community.
You could feel the,
the desire and the love
at the same time as sort of wanting to destroy it from that jealousy.
And that's true of both of them, isnt it?
That kind of whether repulsion...
Differences and similarities create this chemistry between them.
It's just, you know, they both want to be each other
and destroy each other at the same.
-I mean I think... -That's love, isn't it?
For Claire, it’s love.
It's like just a sort of adoration.
And for Irene, I think it's it's it's very dangerous
because when she feels loved by you, it's like...
-It’s overwhelming. -Her world will fall apart.
What she wants to do with that?
Claire is very destabilizing.
And that would sometimes mean that you would sort of staring at her mouth
where you were talking to her or something, which then you can see Tessa
-taking on is like... -Oh, where are we going here?
And it was just like, so charged.
you kind of have to smash a taboo because we're not really allowed to enjoy
being looked at, are we or sort of being adored?
And we're supposed to be very humble and modest about it all.
And Claire sort of does away with that.
She just says, “Oh, I'll take it all.”
I’ll take all your gazing.
In whatever way, shape, or form.
And for me, it was about sort of welcoming
the gaze of others and enjoying it.
And it was actually really thrilling to play. It was very enjoyable.
You liar!
Careful.
You're the only white man here.
Dirty liar.
We need to talk about that ending,
because that had me shook!
Was Claire pushed out of the window?
What do you think?
Did she jump, fell, tripped?
What, what, what, what, what?
I'll say quickly that in reading the book, I was utterly surprised
by the ending. I didn't see it coming at all.
And then in the shooting of that scene, what I remember is that it was
you were very intentional about the choreography of how we were doing it.
And it seemed as though you were really committed
to the idea of leaving it ambiguous. But, surprised? Absolutely.
I don't know, I felt like a bit of a detective at the end
because I was thinking
in keeping with what Nella Larsen and I'm assuming she tried to do
is kind of turn things upside down and disrupt
sort of a traditional narrative of tragedy.
I kept thinking, what does this mean?
What does this mean? What is she trying to do here?
Because it's not a punishment.
It's not a morality tale.
It's not a book that's prescriptive, and neither is Rebecca's film.
It revels in not being that.
And so all the better for it.
This is my roundabout way of saying
I'm not going to answer your question!
Oh, she pushed her...
and he pushed her
and she probably jumped
and she might have just tripped
and it's all possible.
It was very important to me to try and hold all realities in the film.
Nella Larsen willfully keeps it very ambiguous for a very good reason.
But it sort of, she’s also sort of pointing out that it doesn't really matter
because everyone is sort of complicit in something.
And also,
whatever happened, Irene does think that she was responsible.
When you're reading the book, you're like, "What is she?"
"Huh?"
“What just happened?” “One more time, let me rewind back.”
And then when you're watching it in the film,
the ambiguity you speak of because there are so many
points throughout the book and throughout the film
where there is a lot that is unclear.
And to borrow from Tessa's character, Irene,
when she's at the club for the first time with Claire, I think it's perfectly
fitting how it ends because, as she says, things aren't always as they seem.
And that line, I think, speaks for the entirety of the piece.
How a relationship between
a married man and the wife's friend might not be what it seems.
How a fatal accident might look,
also may not be how it seems.
And more directly and literally, we're watching characters
who can exist and move through life in ways
that might not be as they seem.
So I think it was consistent with the larger narrative being told throughout.
I'll say just one last thing. I think there are a lot of people
who don't even know the term passing. We know it.
I think our community is familiar with it, but I do think there are
branches of the world who are less familiar with the term.
So that introduction in such a strong wide way is incredible.
You are all exceptional. Brilliant. Brava. Bravisimo.
It was just amazing.
Congratulations. Let's hug it out!
Me first!
Appreciate you. You’re amazing.
It's amazing. Fantastic.