How do film directors bring together various elements to strike the
emotional chords of their audiences? How much of what you see is planned? How much of it is spontaneous? Deborah Pratt, director of Cora Unashamed, discusses this creative process with the
AMERICAN COLLECTION.Question: What's the theme of Cora Unashamed? What's the material really about?
Deborah Pratt: Love. I really felt it was a series of love
stories. The love story between Cora and Joe, the love story between Cora and Josephine, the love story between…
Q: Cora and Jessie.
DP: Cora and Jessie yes, but I was trying to think of Jessie and…
Q: Willy.
DP: And Willy. I think they're all these love stories that weave together and Cora being the through
line of love in that she was willing to take her chances in life, to have an affair with a man who wasn't going to stay around, to raise a child who she didn't get to keep, to open her heart again to invest in Jessie,
and then to realize that she had done all she could do within the confines of being an African-American woman in a small town in the Midwest in 1934.
Q: How did the fact that the story was set in the Midwest,
and shot on location there, challenge you?
DP: Oh I think it was magical, in the sense that I felt it was a part of Americana that we really don't get to see. Again, it was something that was
fresh. There have been films that have been shot in Iowa, Field of Dreams, but not a lot. And most of them have always depicted it as miles and miles of lush green corn. And we came at a time
where it was harvest season and the corn was brown or browning, the leaves were turning. So I really tried to make Iowa a character in the film and utilize that element of time to show a unique piece of Americana.
Q: Cora is isolated in that little town. To what extent were you focusing on that, and how?
DP: I made a very concise choice about the film for two reasons. One,
Masterpiece Theater
by its name is the theater, and there was an elegance about the way the whole script was written. And I wanted the viewer to feel as though they were invested, but invested in a different way. So I tried to create a look that you were always a little bit away, so when we came in, it was always very important to come in. And the other side was it was Cora's world, and she was an outsider, so I wanted the audience to feel like an outsider. So if you look at how I chose to shoot and edit the film, there were a lot of times when she was in the hallways listening as the action passed her by. But we're always with Cora because I wanted to evoke the feeling of what it was like to be a servant in a house a step away from the hubbub of what was going on.
Q: What aspect of the story were you most personally invested in?
DP: I think there were two aspects. One, that it was a love story, that it was an interracial love story, that it wasn't
the South so even though they did talk about the racism that existed, that the brothers couldn't find work, the true history of it, the fact that there was an opportunity to show love between two human beings, and even
back then it didn't matter that one person had one color and another had another, that love can overcome anything including color.
Q: Especially true in the case of Cora and Jessie.
DP:
Absolutely of Cora and Jessie because they so needed each other when Josephine died and Jessie reached out to her. Again I wanted to build Jessie nudging, eking her way into Cora. The culmination scene, and
I think my favorite scene in the movie, is when Cora and Jessie are out picking blackberries and they come across the ribbon that Josephine left. And I had to ask Anne if we could change it so that she picked up
the ribbon and offered to become Josephine for her because she wanted to make this woman happy. And without words, just the idea of holding her hair—and I set it so that you saw Josephine do it two or three
times—and offering that ribbon to say, "I'll be your little girl," said so much about that. And I think it just melted Cora's anger and everything and Regina [Taylor] was brilliant, just brilliant.
Q: That's what Anne said.
DP: (laughs)
Q: We asked her this morning what her favorite scene was and she said that and that addition you made.
DP: Well I had a great script to work with.
Q: The film is really a duet for two actresses. What was it like to work with two actresses when they have very different training and very different
backgrounds but most of the movie really happens between them?
DP: Yes it does, and they're two different women from two different worlds. And I wanted, especially with Mrs. Studevant, I wanted people
to understand her. They didn't have to like her but they had to understand her, and I wanted people to go, "Ooh, I know someone just like that." And I really think that we did that. Cherry
[Jones] was, in my opinion, subtle with the moments that she played with Regina when Regina stepped too far but yet stepping in a way that Cherry wanted to be there. I think another moment I really loved with
Cherry was when Cora and Jessie are in the kitchen making a cake and she's watching. And she goes to make a stand to say, "Come on, let's get changed," and Regina says, "I'll take care of
it." And you feel for her as a mother knowing that she's letting her child go to someone else's arms. So that was really important for me so that when she took her back, when Jessie was grown and
pregnant, it was too late, and such a wrong stand to take. But you can understand why she thought it was the best thing to do because of the mistakes she felt she had made in her life, the choice of her husband
and giving up life in the big city and not being as sophisticated as she had her dreams to be. She put them all on that little girl, all on Jessie. And again that's seen on the bed when she says, "What
about your hopes and dreams?" And Jessie goes, "But he's all I want." And she says, "No he is not!" Cherry was stellar, no question.
Q: Two remarkable performances.
DP: I was so blessed. In truth I am a first time director and I was blessed. Anne Hawkins and Marian Rees gifted me a great opportunity that I will always be grateful for and feel proud that I
gifted back to them this piece of film.
Q: What was the most daunting aspect of the shoot?
DP: Twenty days. (laughs)
Q: Was that made more of a problem by the fact that you weren't in a studio?
DP: Well it was, truthfully, a very short prep time, twenty days to shoot it in. A major period piece that went from
1915 to 1934. So I had to deal with it. Regina had 47 changes, Cherry had 43. We had makeup for aging through three periods. So it was coordinating everything so that we could have actors on the
set in the time it took to get them ready, and get them together and keep it going. So we could pull eight-page days when we had to. And I think, I guess my background as a producer in television really came
through for me because I walked through the door with my shot list and said, "This is where we're going, this is where we need to be." And I had a great team around me also, Marian and my assistant
director and my script supervisor really understood where I was going and supported me along the way.
Q: Was there anything that turned out in the final film to be different than you thought it would be?
DP: I think I'm still in the phase of thinking, "Ooh, I should have…" But I think what I'm thrilled about, maybe not amazed, but thrilled about, is the fact that people get it, they get caught up
in it. I achieved, with these wonderful people, an emotion or a lot of emotions. And I found myself caught up, even as someone who knew every piece of how it went together to the very, very end, caught up in
those emotions. Regina's performance when Josephine dies, and her gravesite and that last scene between Cherry and Jessie's coffin... Hopefully I'm not giving anything away, I don't know when this is airing.
But I felt I was able to detach myself as having given creative input and became a viewer. So to me that's the greatest gift that I could give.
Q: Kathy Honda, [a secondary school teacher] told you, or
I told you, that she showed it to a group of tenth graders and they were entranced. They really got it.
Kathy Honda: They especially loved Joe's poem, and the flashback of the poem and then bringing it
to the culmination of Jessie dying and they just lost it. Students, fifteen years old, like to think of themselves as poetic, especially the girls.
DP: Well that was Anne Peacock, Anne wrote that poem.
KH: My students would like to know which scene scared you the most in terms of difficulty in shooting.
DP: Probably Josephine's death. It was a very tough scene, on a lot of different levels.
In the sense that I was working with a very green six-year-old, and I was asking her to die on screen and Regina had to adlib past the point of dialogue. And my instincts, and I think they held true, were I didn't
shut the camera off. I let her go to wherever she went, and she gave it to me. And the only thing I think I said to her was, "You call her back from the dead. You make her come back."
When I yelled, "Cut," at the end of the first take, which was the master, there was not a dry eye in the house. These grips who are so hard-nosed and jaded, who have been in all these big movies and
everything, were just weeping. And I went in for the tighter shot, and originally had set it up to go in two more times, I then said, "I don't need it, it's here." Because again, I wanted the
audience to feel as helpless as she was. They couldn't even get in to see what was going on, so I knew that I had it in performance. So all I had to do was go in enough to pick up Mom saying, "She's
gone," and tie into Regina. Some things you just have to trust are there, and I trusted it completely. And Tinashe [Kachungwe] was just incredible because I said to her, "When you take your last
breath just close your eyes and just... you're a noodle." Kids are great, "you're a noodle." And she did, but after the first take, when I said, "Cut," she started to cry. She couldn't
open her eyes and she didn't know what was going on. It was all in her ears. And she really gave me the cue as to how emotional the scene was because she just didn't know.
Q: This is a story that,
although it was written originally by a man, and Anne Peacock slapped me down this morning for pointing this out, takes place almost exclusively between women. What do you think the affect was on this film that
virtually everybody in a major creative role was female?
DP: I found it exhilarating. I've worked for twenty years in very much a man's world so it was really thrilling to have that
mentality. I found that there was a different kid of ego that came in, that it was a collaborative ego. It was a real pleasure to deal with. It was an interesting perspective because we always talk
about not hearing enough of a woman's voice. And I think the greatest compliments I got were from men who said, "You know I don't generally like this kind of movie but this one really got me. I really
liked the story." And so to move men through the voices of women and have them admit to it, (laughs) is good for us, big kudos, because Hollywood so often says, "Oh, nobody wants to hear what women have
to say. It's a chick-flick." And it's not. It's a human-flick. It's about love and love transcends sexuality, color, all things, and it gets down to human nature and I think that's what Cora
did. All the elements came together from being in Iowa. I love that it was Marian's home state because she cradled this baby. She really protected it through a very tough, very intense time, and
to her credit again I thank her. She trusted me to take the baby.
