Debut director, Kasi Lemmons, put on hold a solid acting career to risk grappling with a more compelling urge. In three months, she wrote the first draft of Eve's Bayou, a story that had been haunting her for years. A persistent four years later, she had raised the finance for the four million dollar film, that would go on to gross fifteen million domestically, before video release.

Getting that far, that fast in Hollywood, without a film making track record, was no small feat. Kasi was pitching an 'uncommon' black story- one situated beyond the bounds of the 'hood' in locale and sensibility. She had to swim through the political undercurrents that often stifle investment in Black films, particularly those that dare to move beyond perceived market wisdom.

The filmmaker

Kasi Lemmons has a fresh-faced innocence that belies her rich imagination and focused sense of purpose. Her openness and warmth quickly put you at ease. She has an unpretentious beauty and a quiet power that is self assured, subtly seductive and disarming; mirroring the feel and tone of Eve's Bayou.

She shared the trials and triumphs of her auspicious writing-directing debut, with Marc Booth of Nubian Tales at the film's Barbican screening, and later with bfm. She calls Eve's Bayou's success a miracle. Her story shows that filmmaking miracles can be evoked by talet, driven by vision, perseverance and strategic risk-taking.

Getting started

Kasi was discovered after film school by Reggie and Warrington Hudlin, who screened one of her early shorts through the Black Filmmakers Foundation. She continued writing for ten years between acting jobs, being urged on by John Singleton and Spike Lee. She also found help closer to home, from her actor-writer-director husband, Vondie Curtis Hall, who left his own film to act in Eve's Bayou , and provided encouragement and key support from start to finish.

The beginning….

"I was at a point in my career where I was very frustrated. I worked a lot, for an African American actress, I was fortunate, but I felt that I needed an emotional , artistic release that I wasn't getting doing the roles I was doing. I never got that cathartic release, and it started to depress me. So I decided to take pilot season off, when you audition for all the T.V. shows in LA., and write this story that had been haunting me for years.

I wasn't gonna show it to anybody and my husband convinced me to show it to my acting agent, because I didn't know who else to show it to. He showed it to the literary head of that agency, who became enamoured with it very quickly and he started sending it out. We sent it out for four years and people passed on it. We went to every company in Los Angeles at least twice in four years."

It's difficult to make any film in Hollywood, people want so badly to say no. A producer said to me recently, you have to set up the yes- attaching major talent and giving them reasons why it's a good idea. Eve's Bayou was nobody's idea of a good idea. It was a soft film, it was a period piece, it had a lot of women in it, the lead was ten - they thought I was crazy. Even with Sam attached it wasn't easy; but it became a whole lot easier to set up the yes. "

Getting Producers on board

"When I first decided to direct the film, my producers said I had to produce a short film. In film school I'd done short films but they were all docu-dramas. I made a short film ,called Dr. Hugo, which is a little piece of Eve's Bayou, and it had this sexy, charismatic doctor I had my husband play. Sam saw the short film and read the script, and he wanted to be that doctor. He hadn't played that kind of character and he saw it as an opportunity to help out a small film that might not get made without him and play a part he had never played before.

We got all our money from Trimark. They had been making a certain kind of product, a lot of straight video stuff and a lot of leprechaun movies. They decided they wanted to revamp their company and get into the prestigious film business, the art film business. They were looking to make a small classy film with a big star like Sam Jackson. So after being turned down many times by many places- very good naturely because everybody liked the script- I ran into this company and it was the exact place and time for them. Being a tiny company Jackson was a huge coupe, so they overlooked the fact that I was a pregnant black woman.

They really put their faith in me, but they had intelligent, business minded reasons. And then I had talked myself into a state of mind where, if the moment ever came that I was given the opportunity to make this movie, I was absolutely going to do the best job that I could possibly do and not let anybody down. I was going to be prepared and focused and know exactly what I was gonna do.

An interesting happens in the course of four years of making a movie. You become determined to do it and the fact that I was pregnant was not gonna stand in the way. Luck, is being in the right place at the right time - prepared. I had the baby in April; in the beginning of June I was location scouting; I moved to Louisiana in August and I started shooting in October. "

Kasi talks technical

"In the process of talking to directors, and trying to find someone to direct it, I started to have a queasy feeling that it was a very delicate piece of material that could be ruined extremely easily. My producers were saying we had to find a 'sexy' idea for a director. I woke up one day, it was on my birthday, and thought , the writer- directing - is always a sexy idea.

I had an opinion , even when I wrote the script, about the way it should look. When I made Dr. Hugo, to sell myself as a director, I found my Director of Photography in film school. When I was looking for a Director of Photography, I went to the American Film Institute and saw a lot of short films. I saw Amy Vincent's short film and she had the style that I wanted. Then, we did Dr. Hugo together, and we had a deep artistic communication. She got what I was trying to do, emotionally and visually, so we were able to put Eve's Bayou together in terms of the look of it.

We used all different kinds of film stock. Some of it is a new vivid kind of film stock; we used Kodak 72-92; 89 and we used this wonderful black and white stock, which is a very tricky thing because it's technically very difficult to use colour and black and white in the same film. It's easier to de saturate your colour, but we decided we were going for a pristine black and white look and we were going to try to dissolve from one to the other and make it work. It was a little hard to get the blacks, real, real black. They would sometimes come out muddy or have a greenish or yellow tint to them. We had to work hard for that effect.

There were two shots in the movie that required an 11 to 1 zoom. One is Mozelle telling the story in the mirror and the other is the very last shot. It's hard to get an 11 to 1 if you're a little, unpowerful movie. We had to borrow it from more impressive movies, because there are a limited amount in the country working. We borrowed it for two days and managed to shot the Mozelle shot in the mirror and the last pull-back shot, but I really could not have done it without that lens.

One way of looking at editing is like rewriting the script. It's like directing the movie again when you when you edit it, like digging a diamond out and sometimes it surprises you. One thing my editor came up with is in the beginning. We knew that we wanted to go from black and white to colour, but we didn't know how to do it gracefully. Should we pan down to the water then dissolve to colour? One day, I came into the editing room and she had done the white pass the tree; from black and white to colour. So, we built everything around it, for instance the sound goes from mono to stereo.

Movies in the United States are paced a certain way, so the audience becomes de-sensitised and you become very use to seeing a certain type of edit and a certain kind of pace. It became very important for me to let people move through time and space, and I got in a lot of really horrible fights about the pace of the movie. It was one of the biggest battle I fought. Some people say it's slow, but in the seventies we could watch that, and Europeans can watch that, so why can't we watch that in America? Certain directors do it all the time, why can't I do that because I'm an African American filmmaker?"

Reflections and Predictions

"I definitely think there is an opening now to make a different kind of black product and that people are very interested in doing it. Black filmmakers have been ready to tell different kinds of stories for a long time, it's all about numbers and success. The success of Waiting To Exhale was very important to the future of a different kind of black film. I used it at meetings when I was trying to get money, because it had just come out ke a film that crosses over. There is an African American audience that's dying to see something different. Soul Food didn't cross over, but still made forty million dollars or more. I would have been satisfied with an African American audience; that it crossed over was beautiful, because everybody told me it wouldn't.

I thought I could make a drama that anybody could relate to. I had written this script, and I would take it to these companies and everybody would say, 'It's so beautiful- but we can't make it here, whose the audience?' After about the hundredth meeting, I started saying, 'Why aren't people like you the audience?'.

I really believed that it would happen and I was ready to wait for the right people at the right time. I'd rather put it in a drawer and never make it, than make it the wrong way. I turned down a very reputable film company because they wanted a happy ending and they wanted some things that I didn't want to do. I'd written it a certain way and I believed in that. I had faith.

After the film was made: We started to get a very scary feeling because we got turned down for some festivals and there were some people who were definitely not supportive, they called it 'overly ambitious'. Then Roger Ebret saw it in Chicago, he is a very powerful American critic, and was the first person to said this is Oscar worthy. He wrote a love letter review, and the press followed.

In terms of myself, (not getting an academy award), wasn't gonna rain on my parade, I was happy once the film was made and because we had tremendous success. But the fact that there wasn't a Black presence at the Oscars was a little bit disturbing, because there were certainly plenty of opportunities to nominate Black people who were completely deserving. "

The Next Step

"My next project is from a novel written by George Dawes Green called 'The Caveman's Valentine'. It's about a paranoid homeless composer living in a cave in a park , at the edge of Manhattan. It's an urban folktale, it's very visual with breaks from reality, and it stars Sammuel Jackson. They kind of approached me with the project.

I've had to do a lot of soul searching, and what I've decided is that I'm not going to do it the system way. I'm making this film with the studio but I'm making it through Jersey Pictures, which is a little company that Danny Devito runs, they have a very independent style.

Talking beyond this film, I just started to make some choices. I got offered some very tempting things and I turned everything down. I decided that I was going to do it my way. We'll see how long that lasts."