The Color Purple director Blitz Bazawule: ‘This film was going to live and die by how big the set pieces were’

Adapting The Color Purple for the screen once more was never going to be an easy feat.

After the enormous success of the 11-time Oscar nominated 1985 film, directed by Steven Spielberg, re-translating Alice Walker’s tale to film would take a creative with a distinct aesthetic and kinetic vision.

Step forwards Blitz Bazawule – the Ghanaian filmmaker, author, visual artist, rapper, singer-songwriter, and record producer. His first film – The Burial of Kojo, won all manner of plaudits in 2018, and Bazawule hit the mainstream when he collaborated with Beyoncé on the 2020 six-time Grammy-nominated musical film Black is King. 

One of Bazawule’s key starting points for the musical adaptation? Making sure that the visual quality of the film was quickly conveyed to everyone involved: “I sketched like 1000 frames of my movie”, he explained while in London late last year. “I hired voice actors, I scanned all the images and found temp scores – everyone who was on the project watched a two-hour pencil sketch movie – with bits of rehearsals in there. That was so important – it was the only way that 500 people could make the same creation.

“This story is massive – it traverses 40 years of life in the American South. The only way that I knew it could work was if everyone could watch it, and then we could all agree. It was about creating a sandbox – I wanted to set expectations around intention: here are the themes of this scene, here are what the colours and costumes in this scene communicate. The clearer I can be, the easier it became for a film of this nature.”

For a film to be kinetic, it had to have a choreographer, and this was where Bazawule tapped Fatima Robinson – who has credits including the film version of Dreamgirls, Beyoncé’s Renaissance and The Wiz Live!. “She was on my pitch deck for the film. I told the studio from day one that she had to be involved,” Bazawule explains. “I knew we’d be relying heavily on movement, not just physical movement but camera movement. I needed someone who knew and understood how cameras worked. Fatima is a legend and she understood scale.”

Bazawule knew that any screen version of the musical had to achieve something different to the theatrical production: “The stage production was tame for its ambitions. I knew that this film was going to live and die by how big the set pieces were and how intimate the small moments were.”

The film could only work, in Bazawule’s mind, if audiences could access the inner aspirations, hopes and turmoils of lead character Celie, played with miraculous, stirring power by BAFTA nominee Fantasia Barrina in the film. Part of accessing that was to go back to the original text, which initially took some time: “It’s deft and hallowed ground. If you’ve got nothing to contribute, it’s not something to touch. For me, for a while, I was very averse to it. But once I leaned into the fact that Alice’s book begins with Celie writing a letter to God, and the imaginative quality that takes, that allowed me to know how it all worked together. Musical, imagination and a dense story of trauma and pain, as well as joy. So I could oscillate very easily between all these different things.”

Of course, a musical film has to showcase its best moments through its musical sequences. Bazawule admits that the scene in the movie theatre – where Celie and her Shug Avery, a liberal character who allows Celie to access her inner passions and truths, was his hardest to crack, especially as it hadn’t featured in the original novel or Spielberg’s film: “It’s not in any other canon. There were a few moments like this that allowed us to explore Celie’s headspace – you could see her exploring, and growing, and not being a docile character. Characters like Celie do so much in their heads. It’s when she’s introduced to new and novel ideas, new technologies, that you can see her imagination at work. When she sees a gramophone, she launches into a gramophone world. When she sees a photograph, it’s the same thing.”

A musical film is different to a stage musical, Bazawule appreciates – something that’s made easier by being an ardent multi-phyenate: “I didn’t come married to anything. There were some songs in the Broadway show that didn’t feel like they needed to fit into the movie, and I didn’t feel I needed to put them in simply because they were part of the canon. I also thought there were some things missing – some characters like Harpo needed a song – the words weren’t enough, so I wrote that one for Corey Hawkins myself on the night of the table read.”

The Color Purple has been released in UK cinemas today.