The fate of treasured object threatens to tear a family apart in Director Malcolm Washington’s drama, The Piano Lesson.
Based on the Prize-winning play by August Wilson, Washington’s film follows the lives of the Charles family as they deal with themes of family legacy and more in a brewing battle over what to do with an heirloom piano.
On November 9, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Washington discussed the making of The Piano Lesson during a Q&A moderated by Director David E. Talbert (Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey). He also scheduled spoke about the film during a conversation moderated by Director Kasi Lemmons (Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody) following the DGA New York screening on November 24.
During the Los Angeles conversation, Washington spoke about how his decision to shoot the film in sequence impacted his actors.
“We got to shoot the movie in a way that’s really rare now, which is in sequence. We start out on page one and shoot in order and wherever we got to at the end of today we start from tomorrow. So, if we took the story — today now, we’re going left, we’re supposed to go right — we can pick up from that place. It was so open and everybody just was present and not tied to their idea of what it was before they got into the room or what they might have done on stage before. It was about finding the thing every day and these little moments come up and we just chased them.”
He also revealed how he used lighting to help tell the story.
“There’s like a movement of things happening [like] the way Barry Jenkins lights Black skin. And so, we did a lot of testing. We auditioned so many different lenses and things like that. I have a keen interest on the visual language of the thing. Me and [DP] Mike G. [Gioulakis] were really together on that and how we were going to build this out. Both to make it look beautiful, but it’s not like… my mom does this thing sometimes where I’ll see a movie with her, and she’ll say, ‘It’s shot really pretty.’ And I’m like okay, but did it tell the story? We wanted to do that and let’s tell this story visually in our motifs of light and darkness, and shadow and light, in color, in all of these things. Let’s use these tools and tell this story with the camera and with the lighting, with placement and movement. Just all the tools.”
The Piano Lesson is Washington’s feature directorial debut. He became a DGA member in 2023.