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This Movie Changed Me

The Color Purple — Danez Smith

This Movie Changed Me

On Being Studios

Tv & Film, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.6589 Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2021

⏱️ 42 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Color Purple is about the traumas and triumphs of a Black woman named Celie. Set in the Jim Crow South, the story radically centers complicated relationships between Black people, even as whiteness and racism loom in the background. Directed by Steven Spielberg, the movie adaptation of Alice Walker’s classic novel was released in 1985. Both tellings have been beloved companions to Danez Smith, a queer writer and performer. Smith says Walker’s story helped them embrace the messiness of life; “to let life exist best within that brilliant complication that lives somewhere between the joy and pain of a single experience.”

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello, fellow movie fans. I'm Lily Percy, and I'll be your guide this week as I talk with

0:05.1

Dines Smith about the movie that changed them, The Color Purple. If you haven't seen it, don't

0:10.4

worry, we're going to give you all of the details you need to follow along.

0:27.3

When I think about the color purple, the movie I should say, and not just Alice Walker's book,

0:34.6

I think about two sisters laughing and playing, enjoying themselves in a field full of purple flowers,

0:40.7

completely intoxicated by each other's company and disregarding the world around them.

0:51.8

When Roger Ebert wrote his review in 1985 of the color purple, he started it by saying,

0:58.6

there's a moment in Steven Spielberg's the color purple when a woman named Seeley smiles and smiles and smiles.

1:07.2

That was the moment when I knew this movie was going to be as good as it seemed, was going to keep the promise it made by daring to tell Seeley's story.

1:10.7

It is not a story that would seem easily suited to the movies. Ebert was so right.

1:13.0

When you read Alice Walker's book with the color purple, it's hard to imagine that it could ever

1:17.4

really thoughtfully and truly be portrayed in a movie. And yet that's what Spielberg did in bringing

1:22.6

that story to life. The story of Seeley and her sister Nettie, of Mr. of Sophia and of Shug. But most importantly,

1:30.6

the story of this black woman who lived her life fully and imperfectly and truly just all to herself.

1:39.7

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

1:49.0

Me and Shug, I smile, but us still longing.

1:51.4

But more than anything, God love admiration.

1:53.4

You're saying God is vain?

1:55.4

No, no, not vain.

1:57.6

Just wanting to share a good thing.

2:07.6

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it.

2:13.6

Well, you're saying it just want to be loved like it's saying in the Bible?

...

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