This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

A new version of the color purple is in theaters now.

It was released just at the end of the year, just in time for award season.

It's a story that's been told and retold over four decades

since Alice Walker's best-selling novel was first published.

The color purple is unique in the canon of black female literature

because of how many lives and shapes it has taken over the years.

Doreen St. Felix is a critic for the New Yorker.

Alice Walker's novel was first adapted in the Steven Spielberg film,

which I think we're all very familiar with,

in part because there are these scenes that became so iconic.

You told Harpo to beat me. It was that new, Paul.

Old Joy, the Mew?

I tell you, I was out to try to plight at the Northfield.

And the Mew just went crazy.

I think we live in an era of remake after remake after remake.

I wasn't convinced that we needed necessarily to have a new envisioning of this story,

which has been a novel, which has been a film, which has been a musical twice over.

And all of the intellectual worries or anxieties that I had dissipated in the room

because what the film created was a sense of fantasy, a sense of magical realist escape.

I was very moved by the idea that a young black male director

...