Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1184216
H A R R I E T | P E R S P E C T I V E 9 9 When writer/director Kasi Lemmons first contacted me about designing her movie on the life of abolitionist Harriet Tubman, she told me her plan was to present Harriet as the superhero she was. I was in immediately. Kasi and I have been trying to reconnect since our first collaboration, Talk to Me, back in 2006. Working for her was an amazing and life-enriching experience. The making of Talk to Me remains one of my favorite filmmaking experiences on a list of several great experiences. The history of slavery in these United States has been told on screen only a handful of times, and many schoolbooks offer very brief if any detail about the brutal existences of slaves. Slavery is one of the founding institutions of our country, and my feeling is everyone should know of the real horrors of slavery so we don't find ourselves repeating the same grave mistakes. Harriet Tubman's story is the most challenging story I've ever been privileged to tell for the screen. Her journey from birth to slave, to freedom seeker, to abolitionist was marked by countless challenges that would seem insurmountable to most people today. Consider that Harriet made her escape by traveling one hundred miles north from Maryland to Philadelphia alone, mostly barefoot, frequently through virgin wooded terrain covered with non- forgiving thick vegetation, insects of all types, snakes, mice, bears and obstacles of every kind. There were swift waterways to cross. And most dangerous of all the challenges she encountered in the wild were fugitive slave hunters who employed all manner of brutality toward humans, who they considered no better than animals. Once the freedom of Philadelphia greeted Harriet, her experience must have been nothing short of sensory overload. There were people who looked like her walking about freely among the whites of the town. This was not an environment where fear and anxiety filled the faces of free Negroes as they went about their day. Imagine the shock! The goal in telling this story was to present all of the environments and textures as Harriet would have encountered them, whether good or bad, in as accurate a manner as possible. Research played a crucial part in the telling of the story. Books, libraries, audio recordings, newspaper articles, collectors, families who posted slavery era artifacts online, all served as the foundation of the design for this movie, and greatly furthered my understanding of who Harriet Tubman was. Within the challenge for telling Harriet's story, I found the greatest emotional hurdle was reading the script every day, reliving the physically and emotionally excruciating existence of Harriet and all her fellow slaves. I am African-American. Those people looked like my sons and me. The other greatest challenge caught me by surprise when I first entered the Brodess Plantation slave quarters created for the film that Harriet and her family inhabited. The dirt floor, rough log walls, glass- less windows, were part of the roughly 12-foot x 14-foot space that Harriet and several members of her family would have lived. The one room served A. PHOTOSHOP ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN EAVES BASED ON A LOCATION PHOTO TAKEN BY WARREN ALAN YOUNG. THE IMAGE CAPTURES SOME OF THE VERY RARE FREE TIME ACTIVITIES OF THE SLAVES B. SLAVE QUARTERS EXTERIOR. MOOD BOARD.