Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/716619
28 P E R S P E C T I V E | S E P T E M B E R / O C TO B E R 2 0 1 6 The whole shoot was a pleasant experience. I'd seen a few dailies and got on with cinematographer Elliot Davis, who did beautiful work. But the first time I'd seen it finished was at Sundance. I'd heard it was good but I had no idea how good it was. It just belts you in the gut and in the heart. It blew me away. And when the lights came up, my buddy Elliot, who was sitting next to me, we were all in tears. I looked around and there was Spike Lee behind us in tears. And then there was a ten- minute standing ovation. That's a rare thing in life and I thank Nate for it because it is what you live for. I've been lucky; I've done some memorable films but I've never had an experience like that at a film festival. It was a joy. We had to do a certain amount of research but Nate had been living with this damn thing for years so he knew every dot of the I and every cross of the T from back to front. When we all arrived, there was a book on our desk called Before Freedom Came and it was a wonderful source and the basis of all the reference for the film. We dug a little deeper into certain aspects of it because we now had a wish list for the script, for the plantations, the slave quarters and the armory. The next step was to scout. It was shot in Savannah, Georgia, because of the rebates. There's a decent amount of crew there now and it didn't turn out to be a bad place at all. It's on the coast. We found four existing plantations which was the main script requirement and what we had to do was to create the slave quarters for whichever would be the Top and above: Mr. Kirkland writes, "The location that became the Turner Plantation provided a generous portion of the main house to play with, even though people were still living there. All the main rooms were available to use, but everything was white and we didn't want that—they were very dull. So Elliot and I chose new colors for the interior of this house."