Malcolm Washington Built His Family Legacy Into Directorial Debut ‘The Piano Lesson’: “A Big Part Of This Was Based On My Grandfather”

For director Malcolm Washington, generational Black resilience and complex familial bonds are the underlying themes in front of and behind the camera for Netflix’s The Piano Lesson. Making his feature film debut, Washington enlisted the talents of his family as his brother, John David Washington, plays the lead role alongside appearances from his mother, Pauletta, and twin sister, Olivia. Older sister, Katia and father Denzel Washington are producers. Based on August Wilson’s 1987 play, the story centers around a bitter feud between two siblings (played by John David and Danielle Deadwyler) who disagree about what to do with the family’s antebellum-era heirloom piano.

DEADLINE: How did this adaptation find its way to you? Did Virgil Williams approach you first?

MALCOLM WASHINGTON: He was involved in it many years before this started, but I don’t think he worked on it yet. So, I approached him with a take that I thought was interesting. At the same time, my brother was going to do the film, and I kept talking to him about how exciting this project was when I read it. I talked to him about how we should do the genre stuff, and the spine of it should be death and American reconstruction. Then, I worked on it privately and linked up with Virgil. I brought everything I had been thinking about, and we just clicked and took off from there. 

DEADLINE: Talk about the motifs in your version of the film. It elevates the August Wilson stage play and the 1995 Lloyd Richards film by leaning into gothic horror stylization with ghostly elements.

WASHINGTON: Wilson during this time was in dialogue with Toni Morrison. A movement of the Black Southern Gothic was happening going into the ‘90s, if you look at Eve’s Bayou or The Bluest Eye, Daughters of the Dust, Arthur Jafa or Kara Walker paintings. It’s a theme woven through culture and artistry. Also, societally, we’re just at a time now where we can showcase Black horror with what Jordan Peele has done. It’s a tradition that I wanted to pay homage to here. There’s a spiritual connection between the elements as a conduit to ancestry and God in those artists’ work and the films I’m talking about. All these things are tied together through wind, earth, water and fire. When I broke down the story for myself, this was an element that I felt I could add a lot to because it was just how I thought about the characters representing something else. Wilson’s work, his desire is to draw the Black American experience in all its depth and diversity and different voices. It’s not a monolith. So, I wanted that idea of having a complete elemental thing going where we use these things to tell this story that is mythical, spiritual and soulful at the same time. 

DEADLINE: Samuel L. Jackson starred in the original 1987 stage play as Boy Willie. Now he’s the elder Doaker three decades later. Was it a no-brainer to get him involved in the film? 

WASHINGTON: He was attached to the film before I was, so I came to him with a dream, script and a pitch deck. I was like, “Hey, here’s what I want to do with this. Are you OK if I take this ride? Can we go together?” And he was down. [Laughs.] I feel like any iteration of The Piano Lesson has to go through Sam Jackson because he’s the most experienced person. Of anybody on earth, there’s nobody with more lived experience of The Piano Lesson than Samuel L. Jackson. 

DEADLINE: Do you think if he said no, your dad would have called him? 

WASHINGTON: First of all, nobody can make Sam do anything. He’s an icon. He’s a legend. One of one. [Laughs.] If you look at his work, there’s so many young filmmakers that he’s put his name beside. Like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight, early Quentin Tarantino… he was part of their upbringing,            their rise. 

DEADLINE: He has that entertaining monologue where he’s divulging the history of the piano. Talk about the construction of that scene. 

WASHINGTON: That moment is the whole pivot of the movie. It’s a scene where the movie unlocks itself. Leading into it, some things are hinted at regarding the piano lore, but you don’t really know what’s fully happening until Doaker unlocks the meaning of everything and the movie busts open. It’s a 10-page monologue, but he was already super familiar with the dialogue and the journey he’s telling. I consider that section of the movie a short film, so that’s how I approached it. Sam has this ability as an actor to sustain the audience’s attention for that long, so that was a great start. But I wanted to introduce you to the characters of the family who owned the piano along with the ancestors. 

On the stage, you don’t have any idea who is what. You hear a bunch of names, and you can try to parse it together, but I wanted to introduce you to the humanity of these people who aren’t alive anymore and show you what they look like. So that way, when they come back and you see them, it all connects and turns into something bigger. Filming that day was like watching Michael Jordan have shooting practice. That’s Samuel L. Jackson, and he’s Samuel L. Jackson for a reason. The way he ends that monologue and hits that last line, a chill goes down your spine. 

DEADLINE: What was it like directing your brother John David on set? Was anyone on set playfully jealous wondering why he probably got less takes than anyone else? 

WASHINGTON: No. [Laughs.] But you know what? It’s so wonderful directing an ensemble because so much of directing is just watching and looking at what somebody’s doing on set. A lot of it is also contemplating what’s present in the space right now. What is the actor giving you? Looking into their eyes, what do you see? Each actor that we had required a different language. They required a different amount of takes and collaboration. It was nice to watch my brother and get past the barrier that he was my brother and just an artist. I saw a sensitive, passionate artist and it was wonderful because I thought he brought such a beautiful sensitivity to a hurt Boy Willie. He’s somebody who can be so brash, a character that’s so singular in his wants and how he goes about it, but I thought he brought such a wonderful softness where he just felt misunderstood and wants to be heard, but nobody takes him seriously. As the youngest sibling, I feel that.

DEADLINE: Danielle Deadwyler does some incredible work here. Can you talk about the process of working with her? 

WASHINGTON: She’s so gifted and talented. I’ve been a fan for a while. We reached out to her team and set up a meeting, and when I spoke to her, I knew immediately that we could make the movie tomorrow and that she was our Berniece, and she was going to body this. She brought such intellect, craft, stillness, and weightiness but also was able to be tender and vulnerable, which is hard to do. This is also a character that can be frowning the whole movie, or you can just read into the top layer of her feelings, but her eyes were just these big eyes that were just gigantic, floor-to-ceiling window to the soul. And she is somebody who’s in control of every part of her body, the way she moves through space was just so emotive. Putting her into the chaos of John David spinning around her, then Sam and Michael Potts and Ray Fisher and Corey Hawkins, the alchemy of all those things, created this beautiful and combustible energy.

DEADLINE: Why was this the right time for you to make this film? 

WASHINGTON: I had many things happen at once that made this film possible. We were in Covid deep lockdown, I was very isolated, and I was archiving family photos during that time. I had also turned 30, which was a realization that I’m in a different part of my life, and I had to reconcile that. I was having those identity questions of who I am now. Who am I as an adult? Not in terms of my profession, but of me as a man. I was looking for answers and looking at my ancestors, like, well, who are the men that I come from? Who are the women that I come from? And what does that mean for me ultimately? How do I identify myself in terms of them? So, when I read the play, I was like, “Whoa, OK, this deals with that.” When I started reading it, it was funny and exciting, and then I got deeper into it and there were these really big questions being posed about questions of legacy. That’s something that always concerned me: our ancestors and what they’ve done to give us the space and opportunity to make our lives possible, sometimes from beyond the grave and so on. So, I snapped into focus and wrestled with these types of questions. 

DEADLINE: What do you know of your family’s legacy beyond your parents? Is there anything that stays with you?

WASHINGTON: A big part of this was based on my grandfather. My mom’s dad passed away when I was eight years old. But as you can imagine, he was a big influence on my mom. My mom always talks about her idea of what love really is and what the beauty in it is. It’s based on her parents’ relationship, her idea of masculinity, and what a man is. It’s strength and tenderness; it’s empathy and compassion. It’s curiosity and patience. She always talked to me about him and how I reminded her of him and that his qualities live in me. In that way, he became a marker of all those things for me. When I think of what I want to be as a man, I think of him even though we only shared my first eight years of life together, in this way, he is guiding me. My grandparents passed away within four months of each other, but I found, as I’m super nosy and go through all the cabinets at my parent’s house, that my mom did these interviews with him in that time span. She recorded them and tried to talk to him about his whole life, but she couldn’t even do it. Her friend did it for her because she couldn’t even have that conversation, so she ended up talking to him about his philosophy of love, spirituality and the history of his life and then he passed away shortly after, so she could never watch the tapes and never did anything with them. One day, I found them and started watching them. I cut them together on Father’s Day into a little clip and sent it to her. I felt like I was watching this man teach me from a conversation he had 20 years before about who I can be, the potential I have as a man, and in the process of making this film, trying to connect to that part of myself and learning about that part of myself, and his face is adorned in the piano because his spirit was in this project and in the room with us.