Charles Burnett: Interviews

An Interview with Charles Burnett

53 An Interview with Charles Burnett Bérénice Reynaud/1991 Published in Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 323–34. Reprinted by permission of the author. Completed in 1984, My Brother’s Wedding, Charles Burnett’s first 35mm feature, was less commercially successful than it deserved to be (perhaps because it dealt with the difficult issue of class differences within the African American community), and the filmmaker was, once again, faced with the nightmare of waiting years before he could find financing for another project. Then, in 1988, he was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and, in 1989, a Rockefeller Foundation production grant. Meanwhile, Burnett had met Caldecot Chubb, a young producer who admired Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and wanted to help Burnett find financing for the story which was to become To Sleep with Anger. When Chubb joined forces with Ed Pressman in 1988, he took the project with him. Pressman, a self-styled “risk taker,” gave such filmmakers as Terence Malick, Brian De Palma, Sylvester Stallone, and Oliver Stone their first chances, and produced such “daring” movies as Fassbinder’s Despair, David Byrne’s True Stories, Alex Cox’s Walker, Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel, and Barbet Schroeder’s Reversal of Fortune. The making of To Sleep with Anger was further aided by Danny Glover’s involvement. Asked initially to play a small role in the film, Glover became so enthusiastic about the project—which featured an all-Black cast and afforded him the chance to work with a respected African American director—that he agreed to play the role of Harry, accepted a reduced fee, and invested money in the production. Glover’s talent and charismatic presence are among the film’s assets. In addition to the fine performances of Paul Butler, who plays the family patriarch Gideon, and Mary Alice, who plays Gideon’s wife Su- 54 charles burnett: inter views zie, the film benefits from the presence of Richard Brooks (of 84 Charlie Mopic fame) as Babe Brother, the “angry young man” whose materialism , frustration, and confusion become easy prey for Harry’s pernicious influence. Because Babe’s part was developed after the casting, he becomes one of the most interesting characters of the film, at least the most vulnerable, because he somehow embodies all the contradictions of the family, the uneasiness and hidden anger that, before Harry’s arrival , had remained unspoken. Babe’s character is a sort of inverted mirror of Pierce, the “socially maladjusted bother” in My Brother’s Wedding. Babe represents the ambitious young professional, married to another Buppie, but the contradictory resentment he feels towards his more traditional brother Junior (Carl Lumbly), “better loved” by their parents, parallels some of Pierce’s similar frustrations. And Junior is as fed up at being “the good son” as Babe Brother is at being constantly criticized by his family. From the outset, To Sleep with Anger is a dark comedy—in the best tradition of Chester Himes. The ultimate joke comes towards the end of the film: An incongruous corpse imposes itself on the protagonists, who have to fight back to resume their normal social and family lives. For bureaucratic reasons, the authorities refuse to remove the corpse, which provokes a wisecrack among the onlookers: “If it had been a white man’s, they sure wouldn’t have left him there!” As in the original “trickster” stories of the South, Harry is a mythological character, half-sacred/half-sordid, whose arrival disturbs a family ’s (mis)functioning. As played by Glover, he is fascinating and disquieting because he is so ordinary: a braggart, an entertaining storyteller, maybe even a murderer (but there is nothing extraordinary here; if one is to believe the newspapers . . . ). Harry exudes a mute, veiled sexuality , flirting only with unattainable women to better indulge in male bonding; a suave parasite, he shows a surprising lack of resilience when Suzie finally sees through him, yet he remains a mask, a cipher, a void in which the members of the family lose themselves. To express this subtle battle between good and evil, Burnett uses a half-tone palette. With sensitive close-ups, he explores the interplay of feelings, the conceit of human love that always does “too much” or “not enough,” the trials of survival, the daily struggles to assert and retain human dignity. For Burnett, the main character of the film is Gideon, whose strange nightmare is enacted in the pre-credit sequence, and who...