A New Song of the South

“It’s not that I didn’t have luck as an actor,” says writer-director Kasi Lemmons--a supporting star in several cult classic films, including “Silence of the Lambs,” “Fear of a Black Hat,” “Vampire’s Kiss” and “Candyman”--”but it wasn’t taking me where I needed to go.”

Her highly personal debut film, “Eve’s Bayou,” which opens Friday at selected theaters, has taken her to the front ranks of emerging American filmmakers. It received a rare standing ovation when it premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in late August and has already generated a significant critical buzz.

“We say we want something different from our cinema,” Lemmons, 34, says between sips of iced tea at a West Hollywood restaurant. “I’m not saying that ‘Eve’s Bayou’ is the answer, you know, because some people will like it and some people won’t. But I think that this is one of the answers.”

Lemmons says she was trying to create a new style of storytelling.

“I wasn’t certain at first if it was going to come out as a movie or a book. I have been very influenced by magical realism and the great novelists Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” she says. “I wanted to create a piece that was visual and lyrical with characters speaking in the rhythms that I remember from my childhood [in the South]. Since it was personal, and I didn’t plan on showing it to anybody, I could be totally free with the questions I was asking myself. As a matter of fact, the questions could be more important than the answers. Like: What is reality? What is the nature of memory?”

Her questions, as well as the elusive waves of truth and ambiguity that her film explores, have their metaphorical twin in the dreamy, looking-glass pools and mists of the Louisiana bayou of the film’s title, with its stunning, enclosed gardens of personalities and flowers, its secrets, its wild things and peccadilloes, its extravagant, roiling passions and skies.

“I was trying to create something I hadn’t seen before,” says Lemmons, “an African American Southern Gothic. The story is told from a child’s point of view, and there is definitely something happening on a couple of levels. This is the kind of movie that I would want to see, and I think that is the truest way to create: You make a movie that you would really want to see.”

“Eve’s Bayou,” which stars Samuel L. Jackson (who also served as one of the film’s producers) and Lynn Whitfield, is set in 1962 in a languid storybook marshland just outside New Orleans. The film’s hero clan, the Batistes, are articulate, funky, powerful and gorgeous. The story deals with deeply personal, human dilemmas, rather than racial, sociological or political baggage.

“The Batistes are so isolated and in their own world,” Lemmons says. “There is a lot that they don’t have to deal with because they are the ruling family in a very small town. On the other hand, they have the wherewithal and the money to get their clothes from France.”

“Eve’s Bayou” not only depicts the mysteries of the real world through the eyes of a child, it probes the imaginative dream world of its two seers, Mozelle Delacroix (a radiant Debbi Morgan) and Elzora (Diahann Carroll).

Lemmons allows her camera to tell its stories slowly, lingering over the subtleties and beauties of the faces and of the unhurried, rustic pace of the bayou.

“I had to fight very hard to keep the pacing in the movie. You get these people who feel you should pace it up, but to me, it means something to have this little girl walk out of the graveyard and across the bridge, moving through space.”

Lemmons, who was born in St. Louis, considers herself a student of the foibles, superstitions and rhythms of the South because “both my parents are deeply Southern, and I spent a lot of time in my grandmother’s house in Tuskegee, Ala.” Her film is not autobiographical, although it draws on her childhood memories, some from her own family.

Although she dabbled at writing as a child and as a young actor writing short scenes for friends in drama school, she never considered herself a writer. She attended NYU, and UCLA and finally the film school at New York’s New School of Social Research. But her writing career started, in her words, “by accident.”

“I had gone to film school to be a documentary filmmaker. When I got out of film school, I made this little film that I was very proud of and I got an [acting] audition for the ‘Cosby Show.’ So I showed my film to Mr. Cosby. He watched it, and I can’t even remember if he had much to say about it. But what he said is, ‘What I really need is a writer.’ And I said, ‘I’m a writer. Now, I really wasn’t, but he said, ‘Write me a scene.’ ”

Lemmons (with two writing partners) wrote her first script and received her first story credit on “The Cosby Show” on the strength of that scene. Meanwhile, her acting career picked up. She landed supporting roles in several films that have become cult classics, including “Vampire’s Kiss,” (1988) opposite Nicolas Cage, and Jonathan Demme’s “Silence of the Lambs” (1991), in which she played Jody Foster’s roommate, but her writing career had stopped cold. After “Silence of the Lambs,” Lemmons moved to Los Angeles and made several attempts to script a feature film, with no success. She decided she was not a writer after all. It was then that she turned to the private musings that eventually became “Eve’s Bayou.”

Lemmons’ husband, actor Vondie Curtis-Hall (a notable writer-director), first read the script that emerged from her assemblage of impressions, questions and personal vignettes.

“He was lying across the bed and I was sitting at my desk. I was very nervous. I kept asking him ‘What page are you on?’ and he would say, ‘Go ‘way.’ Finally, I came back in and he was finishing it, and he looked up and he had these tears in his eyes and he said, ‘This is beautiful, this is beautiful.’ Vondie was the one who convinced me to show it to more people. He is so supportive and so proud of me and has been totally behind it the whole way.”

Lemmons’ next task was to secure an agent, who sent “Eve’s Bayou” out as a writing sample. It arrived on the desk of Caldecot “Cotty” Chubb, who had produced a number of quirky films, including “To Sleep With Anger,” “The Crow” and “Good Morning Babylon.”

Chubb was looking for writers to adapt a novel that he was developing. But when he got “Eve’s Bayou,” Chubb recalls, “two pages into it, I felt that I was hearing a new voice. I thought it was extraordinary writing, simply and beautifully written.”

He and Lemmons formed a handshake partnership and began considering who they’d like to direct. “Cotty was bringing up all these wonderful directors, people who I really admired,” says Lemmons. But Chubb also asked her to consider some well-known actors, who had no directorial experience, in hopes their high name recognition would add some cachet to Lemmons’ artful, offbeat little melodrama.

Recalls Lemmons, “I woke up on my birthday and I thought, well, they’ve never done it before, but I went to film school and I wrote the script. So I called up Cotty and my agent and said, I’ve had an epiphany and I’m going to give myself a birthday present; I want to direct ‘Eve’s Bayou.’ ”

Chubb agreed on the condition that Lemmons first script and direct a short film. Lemmons responded by writing “Dr. Hugo,” a 20-minute short, starring Curtis-Hall (he also has a small role in “Eve’s Bayou”), that captures some of the beauty, simplicity, wit and sensuality of “Eve’s Bayou.”

Lemmons credits her director of photography, Amy Vincent (a recent graduate of the American Film institute), with the sumptuous visual appeal of both “Dr. Hugo” and “Eve’s Bayou.”

Since she scripted “Eve’s Bayou,” Lemmons’ writing career has taken off. Her original script “Privacy,” exploring the world of tabloid journalism, was commissioned by Michelle Pfeiffer after Pfeiffer read an early draft of “Eve’s Bayou.”

“Privacy” is in development. Lemmons has also written a script for Whitney Houston, “Eight Pieces for Josette,” which is also in development. Moreover, she has completed scripts for a horror film and a musical, both of which have generated some interest. But her dream right now is to complete a script with her husband.

“We are writing a movie right now,” she says. “My dream is that I will either find material or create material that I feel as deeply about as I did ‘Eve’s Bayou.’ I have a lot of stories to tell. It happened accidentally, but I am a writer now, you know?”