1/17/2024 0 Comments Agony and ecstasy erotica![]() There was a great desire with this film to be immersive, to access emotionally what he’s going through. ![]() The idea of particles was something we talked about as embodying that energy. ![]() His arrival on the scene was elemental, like the Big Bang. You also deploy this visual motif of Richard’s influence being like dust particles through time, and dream sequences with musicians like Valerie June playing rock pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. It’s a part of our reckoning with this collective history that collides in this man. That’s what I want you to play.” That’s why there’s a close-up of that train station with the Colored waiting room, and we hold on that. He said, “I want you to listen to the rhythm of the train. Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” takes the drum pattern from “Keep A-Knockin,’” and the reason why Richard’s drum pattern is so amazing is he took his drummer to the segregated train station in Macon. These are born from struggle, and rock ‘n’ roll fuses them with a backbeat and a holler.Īnd where, as your film shows, would the Stones, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin be without his influence? The music is an amalgamation of some of the most intricate components of American music: gospel, soul, blues. Think of how it fueled revolutions in other countries. Rock ‘n’ roll is more than the music, the spirit and the icons. What do you feel like your film is saying about openness and expression in rock ‘n’ roll? So whether it’s rock ‘n’ roll or gospel, they’re equally filled with a great sense of Richard. He’s at home with the sacred and the profane. He’s born into the flame, so to speak, these crazy juxtapositions, and he’s never given any tools about how to navigate them. He’s going to the more sedate Baptist church, then the Pentecostal church. His father is a minister and a bootlegger. I think it’s this kind of code-switching. It’s heartbreaking how he could only swing like a pendulum between being out and God-fearing. They recognized he paved the way, so 50, 60 years later, you can be Lil Nas X in your fullness. That’s why we have these different Greek choruses, particularly my Black and queer scholars, like Jason King and Tavia Nyong’o, brilliant folks who are able to live who they are in a way that Richard wasn’t able to but who had tremendous regard for him. If I’d leaned solely into Richard, there would have been inaccuracies. I wanted to give him the agency to tell his story, but I saw the need to have a counterpoint to Richard. There was a lot more to Richard to not only excavate, but also interrogate. It was engaging with wonderful archival producers to pull in a lot of material, then interviews with family, friends, musicians. Richard was always loud and proud but not necessarily a reliable narrator. The minute you read just about the first 15 years of his life, you see he’s on this incredible collision course with history. A lot of what was in the popular consciousness was Richard as a caricature, this comic foil. When you zoom out and see the social, cultural context of everything he’s starting and innovating and railing against, it defines what it means to be an icon. He’s rock ‘n’ roll, he’s in the church, he’s back to rock ‘n’ roll, he’s getting married. ![]() Was that apparent early on in your research? Little Richard, who died in 2020, is no easy subject to capture. Filmmaker Lisa Cortés believes that if deacon’s-son-turned-rock-legend Little Richard had been whispering anything in her ear while she was making her documentary “Little Richard: I Am Everything,” it was, “There’s a lot of great music, but honor my spirit, my rhythm and my swagger.” Her electric, informative and history-correcting film does just that, portraying the ecstasy and agony of the Macon-born musician’s life as a roller coaster of innovation, liberation and erasure: what being openly gay did for rock ‘n’ roll, what the rock world never fully acknowledged, and how hard being Little Richard was as a result.
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