HBO
Why did you feel this story needed to be told?

GEORGE WOLFE
Well, Rubin (Santiago-Hudson, writer of "Lackawanna Blues") is a very gifted actor and actors are always looking for jobs and a means of empowering themselves, because actors very often don't have a lot of power, so one of the ways they can get it is they can create their own material.

So Rubin, who in addition to being a very good actor is also a wonderful storyteller, he used to come into my office (at the Public Theater where George Wolfe was the producing artistic director) literally, while I was working, I might add, and just start telling all these incredible stories, and I was like, stop telling them and write them down, turn them into a play.

And he'd been thinking about it, and he said, well who should write it? I said, well you should, they're your stories. So then we commissioned him and over a period of I think a year's time he developed the material and then the people on the artistic team, including myself, would go in and see it, I'd give him notes, and he was very diligent and very passionate and very hard-working.

Frequently, when actors tell their stories, the writing is sort of all right and the performances are elevated. In this case, the writing was really very exciting because it had such specificity of character detail and thought, so it evolved to this really, really wonderful piece that was wonderfully written and wonderfully performed and then after its run at the Public it toured all around, and then it ended up in L.A. after which Halle Berry and HBO got involved. I've been speaking with HBO probably off and on for about ten years about doing something. So it ended up a confluence of energies. I had directed Ruben in his first Broadway show, which was also my first Broadway show, "Jellies Last Jam" and at the same time I had helped to shepherd the piece here at the Public and so he trusted me, and HBO was interested in the piece, so that's how HBO, Rubin and myself, we all came together.

HBO
Did you work with Rubin on the screenplay?

GEORGE WOLFE
He had done a tremendous amount of work with on his own, but also working with people, and then I got involved, and I think the thing which started to really open up the piece for me in a very specific way was when he started giving me his CDs with these blues songs on them, and I would just go, oh, that should go here, this should go here, this should go here, and somehow the blues, listening to the music and hearing the energy and the velocity of certain songs, or the primal energy behind certain songs, it sort of made the piece available to me as a director in a way that I really don't completely understand.

I think craft-wise I direct so much from rhythm, and sort of emotionally I direct from the intimacy of the story and so sometimes one leads to the other or one, or vice versa or whatever, so, somehow the music gave permission for my imagination to come out. And then there were certain cultural and political and social things that I felt were intrinsic in the material that I thought it would be fun to play around with revealing through the course of the piece as well.

The piece was very much about Rubin and Nanny and the people in this boarding house, but what I was interested in was what Nanny meant, and therefore what does the death of Nanny mean, or the loss of Nanny? And that sort of became a way to look at the story that in the presence of potentially losing this woman who has defined his life, he goes on a journey and re-remembers the vividness of that world. And with her death, or her implied death, we also understand that that world which was not just a world but a culture, that was crafted because of segregation is no longer in existence and I think is a tremendous loss because that culture was built on community, and that culture was built on caring for those who have less power.

So, in many respects, I think this is an homage if you will and a certain kind of blues poem slash requiem to a world where community took care of community. And so under the Jim Crow's laws, and prior to integration, black people had to have their own government, their own social structures and their own businesses because they couldn't hang out at the other places. And then with the promise of integration all of that was abandoned, and I think that's a tremendous loss. As is the case any time any group in America surrenders its community.

HBO
How has the transition been for you from stage director to film director?

GEORGE WOLFE
I think it was peculiarly easy for me, in large part because I've done so many musicals, which doesn't mean that if you do a musical you can do a film, but I think I'm a very visual director, and because of my job as a producer I've spent so much time working on scripts and because I've worked with so many different kinds of actors, I feel as though all of the skills that have been living inside of me in some sort of strange way, seamlessly translate into working on film. And you know, it's about staging, it's about rhythm, it's about intimacy of character, it's about relationships, it's about telling an audience where to look, and on stage you do that with lights and on film you do that with the camera.

In my shows, when I work with light design, I'm really painting with the light, I'm not just lighting it to make it be clear. To me the lights imply emotion and how you should look at the story and what's going on in the theater, and the camera does the same thing. So I've found it very strangely fluid for me. Fundamentally, you click into the story and you click into creating a visceral experience for an audience, regardless of whether that audience is in the theater or sitting at home in their living rooms or sitting in a movie theater. How do you create the most visceral experience for an audience? And it's the same questions I ask when I'm working on a play, it's the exact same thing that I want to do on film.

HBO
How do you like to work with actors?

GEORGE WOLFE
I think there are two schools of directors, of directing; I think the two schools of directing are, you stand where you are and demand that actors come to where you are, or you go to where actors are and you woo, seduce, charm, engage them in the process of coming to where you want them to be, and if you do that, they end up bringing their whole being along. And so I love working with actors because I think I know how to talk to actors, and I think a lot of directors don't know how to talk to actors, whereas in fact I actually enjoy their sort of mad idiosyncratic thought processes, because I think what they're bringing is they're bringing secrets that they have as human beings, and so I love engaging them in that process.

In film, everything is so condensed. It's almost like what you want the Mona Lisa to look like, and then you instantly create in your head a sort of paint by numbers version of the Mona Lisa and hope that you get it all so that when you get back into the editing room you have all these scraps and pieces that you put together that actually looks like the Mona Lisa. It's sort of like a guessing game because you're trying to create nuance and subtlety and detail, something that you do in a rehearsal process over a four to six-week process, you're instantly sort of doing that, so it's really important to have really smart actors, and that you create an atmosphere of both trust and play on the set, so that therefore you can get incredibly spontaneous and emotionally deep work.

HBO
What do you hope folks will take away from the piece?

GEORGE WOLFE
I hope they find themselves somewhere in the story, I hope they find themselves inside the emotion in the story, I hope they find themselves inside the humor of the story; I hope they find themselves inside the loss of the story.

I hope they find themselves having a very visceral experience because the way I tried to film it and the way I shot it, you feel like the audience is in the room, in the fish fry, in the hospital, they are inside the space of what was going on, and so hopefully that's what that translates is a claiming of the story so that therefore it's their story, they can find themselves inside of the story, and ultimately feel the loss of the story but also be empowered by the story.

That's what as a director I always want, whether it's theater or film or TV or whatever, or a book, that they end up living inside the art that is before them.