Passing Strange
Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki
Story : "Passing Strange The Movie" tells the semi-autobiographical story of a young black man who leaves behind his middle-class, church-ruled upbringing in mid-1970s Los Angeles to travel to Europe in search of his artistic and personal identity, or what he calls “the real.” Picaresque misadventures with sex, drugs, politics, and art await him in far-out Amsterdam and hyper-militant Berlin. His eyes are opened ever wider, even revealing what he left behind. An absolutely superb cast, ably supported by sparing (but pitch-perfect) costumes, design, and stagecraft, bring to life the emotionally charged story with its astounding original music, narrated and overseen by Stew himself. Lee’s multicamera coverage of the event (including backstage scenes) involves the audience in not only the text but the electricity of the ensemble’s onstage adventure.
Interview with Spike Lee, Stew, Heidi Rodewald
Q: How much input did you guys have? Did you discuss what got seen or was it all your vision?
Stew: All his.
(Spike Lee): It’s just a matter of seeing the show a lot of times, knowing the show, and knowing where the camera had to be at at crucial moments. In fact, we filmed the last three performances, there was a Saturday matinee, an evening, and we came back for the Sunday matinee. And in between the two shows on Saturday, we watched a whole matinee and Mattie [Mathew] Libatique, the great cinematographer and I, and the operators, we watched all together and said, “We missed some shit; we got to get it.”
Q: Did you watch from different places in the theater? Is that the idea?
(Spike Lee): No, no; we had monitors in the basement.
(Stew): There were about, what, 10 monitors, and we were all in this really sweaty room that they made for us to watch. And all the monitors have names of the different camera men, and he was screaming – in a very nice, funny way – he would be screaming by name, “Frank, man, you got to pull back next time! And Joey, who taught you how to shoot like that!” I mean like, he was watching all of the screens at once in real time. And we never stopped and rewound; he was just yelling out and Mattie was up front and me and the actors and the band we were just looking around like, “How do they do this? How does he watch 12 at one time?” They just went over the whole entire film basically, and then we shot it again. We just felt like we were in good hands.
Q: What were the logistics of getting the audience members on board? Did they have to sign their lives away?
(Spike Lee): Some were recruited, some had bought tickets already. You know, when you do big events like that you just hold up “you’re being taped” as a general waver.
Q: Did you guys talk about the look of the film at all? HD is really interesting. Talk about getting close; you really see everything. Like Coleman sweat a lot and you could really see everything.
(Spike Lee): They were all sweating.
Q: Did you guys talk about that at all? Was it always the way you wanted to go?
(Spike Lee): Oh we couldn’t afford to shoot film. And live performances, a lot of time they get burnt with film because at the right moment you need a magazine change. And again, we had to look at the first show during the break between the Saturday matinee and the Saturday evening show, and we just barely made it. Matt and I talked a lot about it; we just wanted to enhance the enjoyment for the audience member, and like Stew said, really give them those close-ups that really only people in the first row can see.
Q: If money weren’t an issue would you have shot in film?
(Spike Lee): No.
Q: How many times did you have to see this show before you felt that you sort of knew it and knew what to shoot?
(Spike Lee): I think I’d seen the show, combined with the Public, about 10 times. But also the operators, everybody who was shooting, they saw it at least once. So you have to be familiar with what you’re doing; I think it would be a disservice to all of the hard work that they did if people just come up and get behind the camera without knowing what the subject matter is.
Q: Spike, thematically this production reminds me a lot of things you’ve dealt with in your work. I was thinking of Crooklyn in particular; was that something that you were conscious of when you first saw the production? Or did you just fall in love with it and not think, “Wow, this speaks to a lot of my films as well.”
(Spike Lee): Well I wasn’t thinking about my films, I was thinking about my own personal experience. Crooklyn is semi-autobiographical and Stew and I, I’m a little older than him, but we’re still the same era. And he was growing up in South Central LA, I was growing up in Brooklyn, and I lost my mother when I was in college. But that was just a small part of it; I just loved the work in general, not just one specific thing. The story, the whole ex-patriot thing, the music, the songs these guys wrote. I keep saying, it’s a giant piece of work.
(Stew): It’s funny you mention Crooklyn; that’s the only movie emotionally, and I’ve never told you this, that’s the only movie that I really can’t get through. It’s the only film I’ve ever seen in my entire life where I actually had to stop close to the end and just be kind of like, “Okay I’ll get back to it.”
Q: Why is that?
(Stew): Because the same thing that he saw in this, I see in that film; it’s so close to home, particularly in that film because I mean he pulls up things like tv commercials from Soul Train era, like things that hit you on a visceral, unconscious level. Like seeing The Partridge Family in a black home I know, that’s my whole story.
(Spike Lee): Black people watch The Partridge Family. And The Brady Bunch too.
(Stew): Exactly. Yeah. And so that whole cauldron that he set up in there. It’s the only film where I really had to stop it.
Q: There are a lot of things about reflection on your life obviously in Passing Strange and I know Spike, since the 25th anniversary of Do the Right Thing is this year, if you could say anything to yourself, the person you were 20 years ago, what would you say knowing what you know now? Both of you can answer this question.
(Spike Lee): 20 years ago? I was 26.
(Stew): I would say Spike Lee’s going to make a movie of your play. [laughter] No. That’s why I have a daughter; because I get to talk to a 17 year old about my life. I don’t know what I would say really; I think I wouldn’t tell myself to do necessarily anything different except maybe just… it’s very difficult to teach a 17 year old or 19 year old like, “You’ve got to see your grandmother,” you know what I mean? It’s hard.
(Spike Lee); Can I say something though? In your play, you are talking to yourself. As a narrator, you are talking to yourself as a youth. [laughing] Wait a minute man.
(Stew): Yeah yeah right right. I guess what I would say to him, I would make this play. [lauging] The play would be what I would say, I guess you’re right. But I mean this is why I mention my daughter, because my daughter’s 17 and she wants to be an artist and sometimes you just want to grab them and say, “Remember all these things, these people are important.” But part of being 17 is that you don’t know, you want to go and hang out with that friend that you’re not going to even know in 6 months. You know the beauty of being a dad is that I can look at her and say, “This is your first boyfriend. Your first.”
(Spike Lee): That can be a nightmare though too. My daughter’s 14.
(Stew): That’s why you make I guess art, that’s why you make Crooklyn, that’s why you make Passing Strange, is to say “Hey look, here’s what we missed; this is what it used to be, here’s what we missed.” But you can’t shake a 17 year old into being what you want them to be, I mean they’re not an adult, they’re not close to mortality and all those kind of things. So yeah you just make a play and you hope for the best.
Q: What about you? What have you learned that you would say to yourself?
(Spike Lee): It’s really hard for me to answer a hypothetical question like that because I didn’t write a play where I can talk to myself like that. [laughter] I’ve been very lucky because every time I was about to make a big misstep the creator or whoever would just… I’d be like one more step and I’m going off the cliff and something would happen and go “Uh uh go this way.” And at the time that would happen I’d be mad and then it would later be revealed that if I went that way it could have been not a good thing. So someone’s looked out for me.
Q: So, for the two of you, when you saw yourselves on the stage and you got to see yourselves from a whole other point of view, how does it affect you? Does it change you? Make you think more about you’re worried about being viewed from this side or that side?
(Heidi Rodewald): Oh god I hate seeing myself; it’s horrible. I think I’m moving around and I’m not, I’m just sitting there. Spike I’m sure was really frustrated with this. There are only like two shots of me where I actually move my body, but in my mind I’m moving around a lot. We’re all the same people we were; I remember being in junior high and some guy asking me to dance at something, and I remember dancing and I really liked him, and we’re dancing and he goes “Come on!” and I was like “I am.” And he was like “Come on!” and I was like “I am though, I am.” So yeah, that’s not easy. But that’s not what this whole thing was about; I’m not looking at myself, I’m just looking at this whole thing going, “Oh my god, this is filmed.” And it’s not only filmed, it’s Spike Lee. It’s crazy; we’re looking at this through Spike’s eyes.
Q: Well I mean do you see things about yourself that you’d say, “In the next thing I want to focus on that aspect or this aspect in a way that I hadn’t thought of before”?
(Stew): No because I think the thing about both of us is we’ve been doing this for a while now. I think if we were 22 we’d be analyzing it to make corrections like, “Oh I think I’ll wear green next time,” or something. But I mean we kind of already know what we look good in and I know my guy in Harlem to go to get my goatee looking way better than it looks right now. When I’m making a Spike Lee movie I go. It’s real easy; you go into the salon, you go into one of them bourgeoisie [only he said “bourgee”] black Harlem salons and you go, “I’m about to be in a Spike lee movie tomorrow,” and suddenly the whole salon surrounds you. And then you come out looking great. So yeah, nothing changed, and the combination we were already comfortable with ourselves, and then you get this guy who’s framing you to make you look as good as you can, so it’s all really cool.
Q: Having said that, did you redirect anything? I mean, they’ve been doing it for a long time and I’m curious.
(Stew): Let me speak because he’s been very humble about this. I was definitely directed in a very particular area because there’s a moment where I get to be with the audience and kind of really sing to the audience doing the “It’s Alright” section, and that’s where the audience gets pumped up. He went into my dressing room the morning of; he waited till the morning of shooting and said, “I need you to get them on their feet.” And the thing is, nobody, including the director of the play, had ever really directed me, especially in my zone. Which my zone is when I’m not in a play anymore and I’m dealing with my crowd. I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and nobody had dared tell me anything about when I’m in my zone. And I do a pretty good job of getting the people riled up, but he said, ‘We need them on their feet; this is the shot I need.” And we had a conversation about my influences and he said, “I need you to roll call.” So if you look at the film you’ll see magic marker on my hand where I’m trying to remember the things that he said. It’s all in the film; I’m like, “Is this going to show up? It’s not going to read.” And so I got all these notes from him that morning and to me it was kind of a moment of truth because he was asking me to do something that I had never done in two years of eight shows a week. It was a challenge and what would have happened if it wouldn’t have worked with the cameras rolling? Shit could have been really embarrassing.
Q: But it did work.
(Stew): It totally worked.
Q: We’ve been given a five minute call so I’m going to ask a question. I love the music in the film; it is absolutely awesome. It stays with you long after you watch it. You say in the film, “When we are in the presence of art we are taking the cure.” This is a very personal journey that you bare for us, similar to what he does with Crooklyn. Talk to the cure; how does that work?
(Stew): I feel like art is like religion in that it offers a critique of society as we know it. There wouldn’t be a need to go to church, there wouldn’t be a need to look at artwork to me if we didn’t want to get a different perspective. Art and religion both say that the status quo is not enough; I want to get another perspective on this. Am I right?
(Spike Lee): You’re right.
(Stew): So it’s like, this isn’t working for me, I need to see somebody else’s vision of how this world could be and what’s wrong with this world and what’s right with it. So that’s why we go to movies, that’s why we read books; we want to see what somebody else is thinking. Tell me something about this world I’m struggling with. So that’s what I mean by the cure; we’re looking for something else.
Q: What’s so universal about it is that in a window to some lives we may know nothing about we find these universal truths that help procure the cure. Spike, I wanted to ask you, you made a conscious decision to film the play as a film. I wonder about that decision as opposed to filming the story of the play; going to Berlin, going to Amsterdam.
(Spike Lee): Well, I saw it twice at the Public, was blown away by it, and then I thought, “How would I do this as a film?” And the first thing I said was, “I don’t know if you could get in film, you Negros would play Dutch people and Germans; that’s not going to work.” And I had someone from Imagine come to the show; I had recently done Inside Man for Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, who own Imagine, and they sent somebody but they weren’t really feeling it, for them to option the play for a film. So then it went away and it moved to Broadway and the thing that was troubling to me was that, and I had this happen to me on 25th Hour where stuff is based upon the award, so we’re going to spend more money on 25th Hour if we get an Academy Award nomination. And with Passing Strange like, well, we’re struggling at the box office so we really need to win a whole bunch of Tonys to keep this thing going. And when they didn’t win those whole bunch of Tonys it was like, “Alright, it’s not going to be that much longer.” And that’s when Steve Klein, one of the producers, approached me about making sure this thing will live on forever, and we filmed the final three performances.
Q: How did you come to empathize with theater actors in comparison with film actors? Can you ever see yourself writing a play?
(Spike Lee): My wife’s been on me years about doing it. A long time ago she said Do the Right Thing should be made as a musical. But I didn’t have to do any directing; Stew mentioned the thing I told him but Annie Dorsen had done a great job and she’d been with these guys forever so it was set in place, it was done. So it was just a couple things that we did structurally but it was not really done as far as directing actors.
Q: But I wanted to get your take on observing the difference between theater actors and film actors. Is there more of a diva-esque kind of thing with film?
(Spike Lee): I didn’t see it, no. I didn’t see any of that; they worked hard. The final Saturday we did the matinee, evening, we came back and shot the final final show which was Sunday matinee, and then we came back the next day after the show closed and shot it without an audience all the way through, stopping and starting. So people’s voices were shot really at the end.
(Stew): I just want to say that the distinct advantage of doing this was that he caught us at a time when we were like a really well oiled machine. He also walked into my dressing room and said, “Do you want to see the movie?” and I said, “What do you mean?” and he just kind of like flicked through a little camera and he showed me all these angles, and I was like, “Wow I’ve never seen that movie before. This is the movie I’m about to step into.” So we all walked in already knowing, it was like, I’ll say the Lakers. It was like the Lakers in Magic Johnson days where you just kind of walked out and it was like, “All we have to do is run these plays and we will win.” And that’s what we did; we just went out and we ran our plays.
Q: You had a sense of community though as much as anyone else. And also the community of the actors, and that’s one thing I think Robin is trying to get at; there’s a community of actors, a community of audience and actors, and nothing like that Broadway/Off Broadway community of New York. Connecting with you before and then seeing you subsequently, it seems a part of this, and about the themes of this show too.
(Heidi Rodewald): And the fact that the actors came into this when we did it at Berkeley, and they went to the Public with us, and they went to Broadway and I guess that’s pretty unheard of. And we held onto that. And it was like we’d all been through this all together.
(Stew): Absolutely. And I can’t over-emphasize the fact that each of these actors knew that the next thing they might be in, the next ten things they might be in, were not going to speak to their souls. This was every actor on that stage’s story. This is every band member in that pit’s story. So I mean, they knew that this might be it in terms of the time in their lives when they can actually give their entire souls to a story that they knew and felt and had lived every line. They all had a family, they all had the church issues, they all had sexuality issues, they all had vocational issues of what you’re going to be; “What? You want to be an actor?” That’s just as crazy as saying you want to be a musician, you know? Crazier in some way; at least a musician you can sit on the corner and make a quarter. So I’m just saying for them, the reason why the performances to me were so intense is because they were living this; this was really their story, and that’s lucky.
(Heidi Rodewald): They all meant a lot to everybody; all of us. It wasn’t like we just brought actors in, I think it was very different from a lot of the plays of a lot of people we met working on Broadway.
Q: Can you talk about what’s next for you?
(Stew): Oh god. Making a record. We’re doing all kinds of things; I’m making a record, we’re working on two sort of theater pieces, one at the Public and one at St. Ann’s Warehouse. She and I will be doing a bunch of concerts next year. We have one at the Lincoln Center on Wednesday. We’re premiering some film we’re in, I can’t remember the name of it, on Friday. Some up-and-coming director. [laughs]
Q: A CD of the soundtrack?
(Spike Lee): That’s been out.
(Stew): Well the CD of the play has been out but she’s talking about a CD of the soundtrack. Good question; I don’t know.
(Spike Lee): It should have been out though.
(Stew): Yeah, I’m not sure about that.
Q: Spike, where do you put this movie in terms of your nonfiction work and your fiction work?
(Spike Lee): It’s part of the body of work.
Q: But which branch would you put it in?
(Spike Lee): It’s a part of the body of work.
(Stew): Somewhere between Bamboozled and Kings of Comedy; that’s where I want to fit in.
Q: I’m just so glad they didn’t decide to recast it for the movie.
(Stew): Oh I was going to tell you; when we first went to Broadway and we had our meeting at a table about eight times as long as this one, we sat down at this table and the very first question out of the Broadway producer’s mouth was, “So, are we planning on keeping the cast?” It was phrased in a very sort of balanced way. And we said, “Yes.” And then there was this silence, this 10 to 15 second silence which you could just hear the wheels rolling and you could see everybody sort of calculating who might be able to play the mom you know what I mean? And then you know what though? In total respect to them, they let it go, there was never a thought or a word spoken after that 10 seconds of silence. But you know they were thinking about who they could put as the mom.
Q: One last question, I’m dying to know; how would you describe what your next album is going to sound like?
(Stew): I’m so bad at describing music. It’s going to be very spare and kind of skeletal compared to Passing Strange, which is very rich.
Q: Meaning like a lot of acoustic stuff?
(Stew): Not acoustic but just very very unadorned because I’ve already done the everything.
Q: Jazzy? R&B feel? Rock feel?
(Stew): Rock music.
End.