Director Malcom Washington breaks down an scene from 'The Piano Lesson' alongside his brother John David Washington. Malcom provides an elaborate explanation of playing with point of view to guide the audience throughout the movie, working with the "talented" Samuel L. Jackson, and so much more.
Director: Claire Buss
Director of Photography: Dave Sanders
Editor: Lika Kumoi
Talent: Malcolm Washington, John David Washington
Producer: Madison Coffey
Line Producer: Romeeka Powell
Associate Producer: Emebeit Beyene
Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi
Production Coordinator: Elizabeth Hymes
Talent Booker: Lauren Mendoza
Camera Operator: Nigel Akam
Gaffer: Dave Plank
Audio Engineer: Kevin Teixeira
Production Assistant: Nicole Murphy
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Director: Claire Buss
Director of Photography: Dave Sanders
Editor: Lika Kumoi
Talent: Malcolm Washington, John David Washington
Producer: Madison Coffey
Line Producer: Romeeka Powell
Associate Producer: Emebeit Beyene
Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi
Production Coordinator: Elizabeth Hymes
Talent Booker: Lauren Mendoza
Camera Operator: Nigel Akam
Gaffer: Dave Plank
Audio Engineer: Kevin Teixeira
Production Assistant: Nicole Murphy
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Category
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00I'm John David Washington.
00:01I'm Malcolm Washington.
00:02And this is Snakes on a Plane.
00:04Notes on the Scene.
00:26This scene is a sequence where the gentlemen
00:29sing a work song called Burda.
00:30This, like many elements in the movie,
00:33have been carried over through different productions.
00:35So Burda originated on stage.
00:38It was a real work song.
00:39Song also represents a time and experience
00:42that a lot of African-American men in the country
00:45had on Parchment Farm, a real place.
00:49And a lot of pain and suffering for crimes
00:51they most likely a lot of them didn't commit.
00:54They treat you like you let them treat you.
00:56They mistreat me, I mistreat them.
00:58So here we have our gentlemen here,
01:00John David Washington, Samuel L. Jackson,
01:03Ray Fisher, and Michael Potts.
01:06I'm noticing how still the camera is
01:08and how it eventually starts to move.
01:09You'll see in this whole sequence,
01:11this is something that works so well on stage.
01:13And we wanted to make sure that it would fit the medium
01:17of film and honor the medium at the same time.
01:19It starts here, very still, kind of static camera work.
01:23And then it'll go into kind of slower,
01:25more languid camera movements and longer takes.
01:29And it builds to very quick cuts on action,
01:33very dynamic cuts.
01:34And we'll see that play out throughout the sequence.
01:36And everybody got mad at him because he was lazy.
01:39That water was heavy.
01:40And Lama down there singing, talking about,
01:45talking about,
01:46Oh Lord.
01:51We have our three gentlemen here.
01:53You couldn't wait to do that.
01:54I couldn't wait.
01:56I could not wait.
01:57Could not fucking wait.
01:57Look at that.
01:58Yeah, look at that.
01:59This is, look, look, look.
02:00We got one, two, three.
02:02Okay, John Madden.
02:03Yeah, you know what I'm saying?
02:04Drop the play.
02:04Could not, could not.
02:07Oh Lord, Gal.
02:10Oh.
02:12Oh Lord, burden.
02:16So throughout the story,
02:17we play with point of view a lot.
02:19And we'll kind of highlight one person's experience
02:22of the moment to guide our audience through it.
02:24So in this moment, we're doing that with Doker, right?
02:26He carries a lot of the weight of the family.
02:29And he's somebody that carries a lot of secrets
02:32and a lot of pain and pushes that down.
02:34And this sequence also highlights a phenomena
02:37in our uncles of our culture,
02:40where we don't always discuss trauma.
02:44We don't always discuss the problems
02:46that we're going through.
02:47We can sometimes just push it down
02:49and fight through and grit and bear it
02:51just to get through the day
02:52or just to get through the moment.
02:53And then you have these breaks in that, right?
02:55Where it bursts through the seams
02:57and you can't push it down any longer.
03:00This sequence represents that feeling.
03:03Go ahead and marry, don't you wait on me.
03:08I love that, right?
03:09How like, at first it starts with the focus was on, right?
03:13I'm gonna go ahead.
03:14Yeah, yeah, yeah.
03:15And then you pull, is it pull or rack?
03:17I don't know.
03:18Rack.
03:19You rack to, and to me what that represents too
03:21is the generational trauma.
03:24And like this whole Rice and Patches thing
03:25of like his experience with Parchment Farm
03:28is different in ways because it was a different time.
03:31However, it's the same trauma.
03:33And there's a language being said here
03:36as they're like singing and harmonizing together
03:38from his era to his era, past, present.
03:45And Parchment Farm is a colloquial term
03:49for the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
03:51If you're a, especially a black man in Mississippi
03:54in this time and place, you or somebody you know
03:57probably spent time on this farm.
03:58So this song is kind of a harrowing connection
04:01to all of that, where if you start singing it,
04:04other people join in because they shared that trauma,
04:06they shared that experience.
04:08And it's, and how we try to depict it in the scene
04:11is it starts with almost like a joy and connectivity
04:14and then it kind of devolves into something else
04:17that's like much more internal,
04:18much more interior and heavy.
04:21♪ Go ahead and marry, don't ya, wait on me while ♪
04:27You got this kind of nice silhouette shot of him.
04:30It's beautiful.
04:31Thinking about contemplating the history and trauma
04:34that goes into the song.
04:35Do I want to participate with it?
04:36Do I want to engage with it?
04:37Do I want to start to process these feelings
04:40or do I continue to push them down?
04:42Light and shadows are motifs throughout the movie.
04:45From the opening to the end, throughout,
04:47there's always lightness and darkness.
04:49Truth and hidden truths.
04:53And now that was always like a conceptual thing.
04:55So we went to play with shadows in the corners of the room,
04:58the corners of the frame, in the corners of your mind.
05:00Like all of this stuff was kind of things
05:02that we were trying to braid into the DNA of the movie
05:06without outwardly giving up our intentions.
05:08So here, obviously you have dark and light here
05:11playing on that theme.
05:14♪ I go free, ho-ha, might not want you in the ♪
05:20♪ I go free, wow, oh Lord, God, wow ♪
05:25♪ Oh Lord, God, ho-ha, oh Lord, God, wow ♪
05:35♪ Raise them up higher, let them ♪
05:38Can't overstate Samuel L. Jackson
05:41and just the talent that he brought.
05:43And for all of you, this is a scene that
05:46we shot this in one night.
05:48All the singing is live.
05:50Everything's recorded on the day.
05:51All the emotion and the tones,
05:54everything was real in the moment.
05:56There was no ADR later.
05:57There was no clean up this, clean up that.
05:59It was just their voices as an instrument.
06:01And that, I think, really is the emotion of the scene here.
06:05♪ Raise them up higher, let them ♪
06:08♪ Drop on down, ho-ha ♪
06:11♪ Raise them up higher, let them ♪
06:14♪ Drop on down, wow, don't know the difference when the ♪
06:20I give so much credit to the actors here.
06:22They were so generous with their time and their voices.
06:25We burned everybody's voices out by the next day.
06:28For the story, though, it could also mean,
06:29because there's a lot of drinking going on.
06:31I mean, they're pouring up.
06:32So some of that liquid courage or alcohol
06:35maybe breaks the seal of what they're trying to privatize.
06:38And I think that's an important,
06:39and as it's depicted here,
06:41I think it's a subtle thing, though, what you're doing
06:44and how it's working.
06:45It's just not like, hey, they're drinking,
06:47now they're singing.
06:48It's more gradual.
06:49And I think you see that in the energy and the voices
06:52and the enthusiasm, and then it becomes something darker.
06:56I think Michael Potts is brilliant.
06:58He nailed it how he does it.
06:59All that's, I think, working together here beautifully.
07:02We had a brilliant music editor called Del Spiva,
07:05who I think is a HBCU alum.
07:08Okay.
07:09Yeah, yeah.
07:10So Del is super, we talked a lot,
07:12when talking about this scene,
07:14we talked a lot about like step team, like homecoming.
07:18We talked a lot about the experience of like,
07:20if you're at a cookout and somebody,
07:22at the end of the night when everybody's drunk,
07:25somebody starts singing like weak by SWB
07:27or something like that,
07:28and everybody starts joining in with.
07:30Weak in the 80s, I can.
07:31Yeah.
07:32I don't know if y'all can clear that.
07:34Sorry.
07:35But we wanted that kind of really raw feeling to it.
07:39So Del would scrub through all the takes
07:41because we did quite a few.
07:43And we just muddied everything up.
07:45We tried to put in as much of the grunting,
07:47and much of the just like guttural,
07:48emotional experience of it,
07:50and just dirty it all up.
07:51Because that's where all the feeling comes from.
07:53Yeah.
07:54And Michael Potts gave us so much of that too.
07:57And he's gearing up for his solo.
08:04I love that.
08:05This is one of my favorite parts.
08:09So we're starting to pull him out, right?
08:11He's starting to get isolated here
08:13as he kind of has his first moment.
08:14We get Ray here,
08:16but he has like three quarters of the frame.
08:19He's starting to take this whole thing on.
08:21I think too what it's displaying here is,
08:23you know, he's the performer in the family.
08:25He's traveled all over performing,
08:26and he has a love-hate relationship with that.
08:28And here he is with his family,
08:30who he came down here for, up here for.
08:32He's expressing that in a natural way.
08:34It's almost like saying,
08:35if you see like a performer in your family,
08:37just go off on a monologue.
08:39Like, he has this love-hate relationship here.
08:41She has a love-hate relationship with the arts,
08:43but yet he's like, here,
08:44she's a full display of like their joys part moment.
08:47And I think that's great.
08:54Think about like how the new generation
08:55processes trauma or mental health.
08:58I think the younger generations
09:00are more willing to engage in that sooner.
09:02And they put a premium on it
09:04where the older generations are still kind of like,
09:06it's still cast to the side or they'll overlook it
09:09or say, you know, you just have to toughen up
09:11or whatever that is.
09:12But it's like, okay,
09:13you toughen up and this is what you get.
09:14You know, you've compacted all of these things
09:15that you won't deal with yet.
09:17Don't know the difference when I
09:20suckle down while
09:23moving.
09:24Yeah.
09:25I love this solo.
09:29Yo, we were rocking this night.
09:31I was at the monitor, like.
09:33So you see these cuts starting to pick up, right?
09:38Right, yeah.
09:39We're in singles now.
09:47You and your bag.
09:53And Dale brought this rhythm in,
09:55which I thought was really good.
09:56We started going double time.
10:03Hey, ho, when you marry, marry a
10:08fair old man, wow,
10:10when you marry, marry a
10:12When you look at the rhythm of Sam's hands,
10:14we're doing double that,
10:16but we just think,
10:17we assume the audience will kind of just go with it
10:19cause it feels good.
10:21Cause it's a different rhythm than what he was doing.
10:23And so far it's been good.
10:24Put it in your hand, wow.
10:27Put it in your hand, ho,
10:30put it in your hand.
10:33And every day, Sunday gollum,
10:36put it in your hand, wow.
10:38Leslie, our editor, is such a master of movement.
10:42The way that she cuts on these actions here,
10:44I absolutely love.
10:52We bring a flare in at the end.
10:56Just a little beauty for Sam's last moment.
11:00And this should kind of rhyme with the first moment
11:03that we saw him in,
11:04where the first beat of this sequence
11:07is about getting him to engage in this stuff.
11:09And now he has, and we'll end with him
11:11because this was kind of his story and his moment.
11:13And as we settle down, we'll settle with him.
11:26And then we strip all that away now.
11:28And we pull the rug out
11:29and you'll start to hear the creaks of the house
11:31come back in, which suggests a certain silence, right?
11:34You start to hear the sounds of the wood
11:36and the chairs shaking and moving
11:38as they sit back in and settle down.
11:40And it just suggests this deafening silence, right,
11:43of thought that everybody's lost in,
11:46of their own experience of it.
11:51Everybody settles back in.
11:52We're like, no, it's not a musical.
11:54This was a real thing that happened.
11:56You like that real rope, huh?
12:00And our visual language is kind of
12:02mirroring the beginning, right?
12:03So now we're doing these transitions again
12:05from John David to Ray with the rack.
12:07Don't this sound like time to lie?
12:11You can't even sing it lit.
12:13Finding the poetry in the stillness.
12:15What comes to mind for me is Ed Zwick's glory
12:18and the Oh My Lord sequence
12:19and how they are each given their testimony
12:21before the evening, before they, you know,
12:24facing their imminent death.
12:26And there's something about like an exorcism
12:29of spirit and trauma that happens here.
12:31And you've seen the culmination of that.
12:33So instead of necessarily talking about their feelings,
12:35you also said that like the new generation
12:37talking about the, they sung, they got to sing it.
12:39And that sort of outlet and that experience
12:42that they just had together,
12:43even though they were at the Parchment Farm
12:45at different times in the communal sense
12:47has been exercised.
12:49And I think what you're seeing is a great deal of relief.
12:54And maybe in a way, at least for me,
12:58I can say like maybe a hope for like
13:01what can happen like from now on.
13:04I love this silence at the end too,
13:06because I don't know if you remember
13:07when we were shooting it,
13:09it was like, we would do the song over and over.
13:11And then towards the end, we started doing takes
13:14and we just didn't cut.
13:15And I kept telling him to do it.
13:17I was like, don't say your line, just sit in it.
13:18We just sit in it, sit in it.
13:20And I think where you got,
13:22where Michael Potts got that night,
13:24where Ray got of just sitting in that
13:26and finding that feeling and dealing with that themselves.
13:28It was like, so it was like gold
13:30watching that in the monitor.
13:32Which was a nice note because in the play,
13:34you got to keep it moving.
13:36But in this, there's a storytelling
13:37that's happening simultaneously with what we're giving,
13:40which what we're breaking down now,
13:41which you knew that we would be able to capture that.
13:44Look at his face.
13:46Michael Potts is a legend, man.
13:48I'm grateful for the experience,
13:49knowing that I was there when Malcolm,
13:52you know, did his first film
13:53and like what we're going to come to love
13:54and see for the future.
13:56I was there for that.
13:58This particular scene is interesting
14:00because it's been in so many productions.
14:02Passing that down to us,
14:03this symbolizes a little bit of that moment to me.
14:05Yeah, and our take on it.
14:07Exactly.