Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom with Director George C. Wolfe and Bill Condon (Ep. 278)

The Director’s Cut - A DGA Podcast

Directors Guild of America

Tv & Film

4.6 • 806 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2021

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Director George C. Wolfe discusses his new film, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, with fellow director George C. Wolfe in a spoiler-filled virtual Q&A. Based on August Wilson’s Tony Award-winning play, the film captures the tensions and temperatures that rise over the course of an afternoon recording session in 1920s Chicago with the legendary “Mother of the Blues,” Ma Rainey.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Anytime I was thinking, you know, people always engage you in this dialogue, opening it up, opening it up. And it's sort of like, you can't think that way because then you're thinking an end goal. The process has to be feel more organic than that.
0:18.6	Hello and welcome back to the Director's Cut, brought to you by the Directors Guild of America.
0:24.0	Today's episode takes us behind the scenes of director George C. Wolf's new drama, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.
0:30.0	Based on August Wilson's Tony Award-winning play, the film captures the tensions and temperatures that rise over the course of an afternoon recording
0:37.5	session in 1920s Chicago with the legendary Mother of the Blues Ma Rainey.
0:42.7	In addition to Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Mr. Wolfe's directorial credits include the feature
0:47.0	films You're Not You and Knights in Rodin.
0:50.1	He was nominated for the DGA's Movies for Television and Miniseries Award in 2017 for the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and won in that same category in 2005 for Lackawanna Blues.
1:01.5	Mr. Wolf spoke with director Bill Condon about filming Marini's Black Bottom in front of a virtual audience.
1:07.4	Listen on for their spoiler-filled conversation.
1:14.1	Welcome, everyone.
1:16.2	I was thinking maybe there's so much to discuss in this brilliant movie
1:20.3	that maybe a prism that we can talk about it through
1:25.2	is just the art of adapting a play to the
1:31.3	theaters, to the movies and the demands of this new medium.
1:35.6	So just from the very beginning, all of the stuff.
1:39.4	And I think, you know, it was wonderful to be able to watch the movie several times and just
1:43.1	see how many
1:45.0	brilliant moments of invention there are there that have, that are, you know, obviously not in the play, but clearly this starts with the first five-minute chunk, you know, with that brilliant opening shot where it feels like we're watching two kids that are being lynched and no, they're not going
2:01.3	toward tragedy, they're going toward joy, you know, they're going to see Ma Rainey perform.
2:08.2	And just one thing I thought when I saw it was that with that scene and the scene that follows
2:15.3	in Chicago, you kind of set the terms right away by saying this is theater.
	...

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