‘The Book Of Clarence’ Director Jeymes Samuel On His Reimaged Version Of A Classic Biblical Movie: “There’s So Much You Can Do With That Era”
27.11.2023 - 20:31
/ deadline.com
Jeymes Samuel was intent on putting a “hood” vibe into his Biblical epic The Book of Clarence starring LaKeith Stanfield as the eponymous Clarence, a local lad in the Holy Land who gets by dealing weed and holding chariot races against a no-nonsense Mary Magdalene. Clarence soon sees an opening to make some bucks in the Messiah business but then he realizes that miracles can happen when you least expect them. The Book of Clarence, which also features RJ Cyler, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Omar Sy, David Oyelowo, Teyana Taylor, Anna Diop and Michael Ward, follows the director’s debut feature, The Harder They Fall, which spiced up the Western genre.
DEADLINE: All praise to you because I usually run so fast from Biblical movies, but this one answered my prayers.
JEYMES SAMUEL: Yeah, we know we’re just in a place and time that we’ve never been. I think the reason why we tune out of these things, just like with Westerns, it’s because we’re never fed. People like us are never fed the nourishment and the vitamins and the ingredients that we need to make this an all-encompassing genre. So it’s easy to tune out of these things. The number of women I would speak to that say, “I hate Westerns, I hate Westerns, I hate Westerns.” And yet now I’m seeing little girls, cheerleaders, doing whole routines to the soundtrack and the scenes of The Harder They Fall.
You love Westerns. A Western is just the geographical time and place the story is set. If you set the Hughes Brothers movie Menace II Society, which was released in 1993, a hundred years earlier, it was Western, right? The cars become horses, the guns are still the same. Now the guys are going to become cowboys. So it’s not that you hate Westerns, it’s that you’re not fed the