Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1514626
4 0 P E R S P E C T I V E | J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 I was in London working on The Flash when I got the call about a musical retelling of The Color Purple that Warner Bros. was embarking on. I had never worked on a musical before and was somewhat intimidated by the fact that the original dramatic version of Alice Walker's amazing book was directed by Steven Spielberg and designed by J. Michael Riva. There had been a Broadway retelling as a musical and this was the impetus to reimagine this film. I was excited to meet director/musician Blitz Bazawule in Atlanta and was thrilled to hear that Dan Laustsen, whom I also worked on The Shape of Water with, was to lens the film. This is the first film in my 30-year career that was to be made in the place it was written to be in, which was Georgia. Though our production was based at the Blackhall Studios in Metro Atlanta, most of the script was written to be in a small town in rural coastal Georgia, so we were able to scout Georgia to shoot as Georgia. During my first call with Blitz, he made it clear that we were going to do a new take on an American classic, but with a different perspective. We were going to imbue the film with elements of magical realism seen through the imagination of the main character, Celie. It is a decades-spanning tale of one woman's journey to independence while enduring many hardships in her life. Since Blitz was a musician first, then became a filmmaker later, our early conversations were A P i c t u r e o f M a g i c a l R e a l i s m T H E C O L O R P U R P L E B Y PA U L D . A U S T E R B E R R Y, P R O D U C T I O N D E S I G N E R A