‘The Color Purple’ Director Blitz Bazawule & Fantasia Barrino On Helping The Traumatized Celie Find Her Voice: “Anyone Who Writes To God Has An Imagination” – Contenders Film L.A.
deadline.comAs far as movies with history go, The Color Purple — about Celie, an abused teenage Black girl in the early 20th century — is as storied as they come.
Based on Alice Walker’s seminal Pulitzer-winning 1982 book, it has been a 1985 Steven Spielberg pic, a Broadway musical in the mid-2000s and a Tony-winning revival play.
So when Blitz Bazawule got the call asking him to direct a film musical for 2023, his first question was: “Why?” “It has been done and done and done, so what can you possibly do with this?” he said at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles event Saturday at the DGA Theater. “It’s sacred work and hallowed ground.
The Color Purple is a critical and important text for so many people who are healing, so if you have nothing to say, you better shut up.” RELATED: The Contenders Film: Los Angeles – Deadline’s Full Coverage Bazawule, a Golden Globe nominee for his micro-budget 2018 hit The Burial of Kojo, went back to Walker’s book for inspiration.
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