Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/716619
30 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 set for the infamous scene where a slave owner force-feeds a slave who has refused to eat was a rougher place. It was in this really old barn owned by a character who was retired and rented out his fields to other farmers. We had all these old buildings to play with and that's where we did that scene. We had to alter it a bit—you always do—but you make the scene work with what you have. It's a period film; there wasn't one frame in the film for which something didn't have to be done to the set, in one way or another. That goes for films set in the 1830s, as well as those set in the 1960s, '70s or '80s; there's never a location you walk into that is one hundred percent right. But I was lucky with what I found there and made it work for the scenes, which is typically what I do. 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 I'd never worked with Jason Morgan before and he'd never been a lead guy before, but he came highly recommended from my construction guy on Get Low, who is from Athens, GA, and was unavailable. He told me that Jason was my kind of guy and, God, was he right. We just hit it off. He was everyone's hero. He just kept producing and working very, very hard. I gave him a big hug one day and it was like hugging a wet sponge because he'd just come from the set. There were a lot of great people in the Art Department that I had never worked with before: set decorator Jim Ferrell from North Carolina, Art Department coordinator Sonya Duvall, who was the anchor in the office. We'd all come back to the office from time to time but we were primarily out on set or onto the next set and she had to stay in the office and was very good at keeping things running on track. I later found out that she is a very qualified attorney. For a period movie like this, a Scenic Artist is particularly critical and Anne Hyvarinen was great. She helped out big time—very talented. Top and above: The script required a barn which becomes the place where Nat Turner starts to preach, and a couple of others as well, so Mr. Kirkland designed a barn where one side looked one way and the other side looked a different way for another plantation. The two sides were changed around in size a bit and dressed differently so the one set became two barns for different preaching sessions in the film.