ShareThisBy BETSY PICKLE
Scripps Howard News Service
Friday, August 03, 2007
Kasi Lemmons is thinking revolution, but she doesn't expect to get one.
That's too bad, because after making a movie about outspoken '60s-'70s radio personality Petey Greene, she's in the mood.
"Looking back at the '60s in general, the president was assassinated, a huge civil-rights leader -- a prophet -- was slain and the government thought that revolution was possible," says Lemmons, director of "Talk to Me." "They were afraid that there might actually be a revolution. We're so far removed from that time when protest might become a revolution.
"I think people are apathetic because they feel impotent. So it was important to me to go back to a time when anything was possible. I mean, it was a devastating time, but anything was possible."
"Talk to Me," now in theaters, tells the story of Greene, who became a Washington, D.C., icon because of his insistence on straight talk about everything from celebrities to politicians to everyday people.
Lemmons, an actor-turned-director ("Eve's Bayou"), had a tough time getting the film made.
"It's hard to get black period films made," she says. "It's hard to get black dramas made. We had some very passionate producers.
"The script had been around for years, like 10 years, and there had been talk of doing a movie about Petey Greene for even longer. I had read a couple of different drafts of it, and I was always thinking, 'This is a really interesting story.' But then one day it was just the perfect place in my life that I knew that I really needed to direct it. It said something that I really wanted to say. I needed to speak that loudly."
Lemmons is grateful to Don Cheadle, who plays Petey, for sticking with the project even when it was delayed. And she was thrilled to have British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor star opposite Cheadle as Dewey Hughes.
"What attracted me was really Petey's voice (and) this fabulous relationship between these two men that I loved so much," she says in a phone interview. "I thought these were great characters with this great edgy friendship where they hate each other and bump up against each other half the time, and yet they realize that they love each other.
"And then to place it all in that time and place, it was irresistible. With the music and the civil-rights movement, I really was drawn to so many things about it."
Lemmons, 46, was a child in the '60s, so she says she worked hard to get the details of the era correct.
"It was interesting because a lot of the actors were even younger than I am so (they) really missed it," says Lemmons, whose actor-director husband, Vondie Curtis-Hall, plays Sunny Jim in the film.
A mother of two, Lemmons tries to remain optimistic.
"I want to believe that I'm bringing my children into a world with possibilities," she says. "I do think that we've been under a cloud that we're about to come out of; I really hope so.
"But the divides are huge, just huge: religion, class, race, greed. The few and powerful are running the world, like a chess game, and everybody else is a pawn. The one thing that I loved about making 'Talk to Me' is you do believe it's possible to change the world still."
