For Lee Daniels, seeing the Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues in 1972 was a life-changing experience that set him on the path to becoming a film-maker.
“I saw it in a Philadelphia theatre when I was 13,” he recalls. “I had never seen a black couple in love. I don’t think America had seen a black couple in love . . . I loved the Harlem setting, the fashion, the music. I could smell the fried chicken jumping off the screen. I knew right away that I wanted to make people feel the way I felt then.”
Now he has made his own film about the iconic singer. The United States vs. Billie Holiday is Daniels’ first feature since his 2013 critical and commercial hit The Butler. Though he has made only a few films, each has left a mark on Hollywood and pop culture, especially 2009’s Precious, which was nominated for six Oscars and won two.
Via Zoom from Los Angeles, Daniels tells me he has wanted to make a film about Holiday for decades. Yet it was only when he read the screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Suzan-Lori Parks, based in part on Johann Hari’s book Chasing the Scream, that he became convinced the time was right.
While Lady Sings the Blues, which starred Diana Ross, was a biopic, Daniels stresses that his film, which chronicles the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ persecution of Holiday, takes a different and specific direction: “Our movie has a more focused narrative . . . centring on how the government targeted Holiday for her music’s political undercurrents.” The film’s time span runs from Holiday singing the controversial ballad “Strange Fruit” in 1939 up to her death in 1959 at the age of 44.
The government did everything in its power to stop Holiday from singing about black people being lynched, Daniels explains, “including planting drugs on her when she was trying to stop . . . they handcuffed her to her bed when she was dying.”
Daniels believes Holiday’s role in the civil rights movement has been underestimated. “When people talk about civil rights leaders, they think of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, but they don’t think of women. Unfortunately, Billie’s public image was defined by being a troubled singer and drug addict.”
The film is partly a celebration of Holiday, born out of Daniels’ admiration for her. “To be a woman, to be a black woman, and to stand up to the government is incredible. I’m not sure that I would have had the balls to do it.”
Trevante Rhodes, who appeared in Moonlight, plays Jimmy Fletcher, an FBI agent sent after Holiday. “The government couldn’t take her down because she was singing ‘Strange Fruit’ — it was freedom of speech. But they could take her down for drugs, and since they couldn’t get white men to infiltrate Harlem, Hoover hired the first black FBI agent. But, ironically, when Fletcher finds out what Billie’s really about, he falls in love with her. So my movie is in essence a love story that remarkably is all true.”
But how to find the right person to play the legendary jazz vocalist? Daniels says he took his time before casting Grammy-nominated singer Andra Day in the lead role. He recalls his manager, agent and partner all insisting he meet with Day — “but I don’t like taking direction from anybody”. Several famous actresses auditioned, but “finally, I went to the Soho House in Hollywood and met Andra . . . and immediately understood what everybody was talking about.”
Daniels sent Day, who had never starred in a movie before, to an acting coach, who showed him a video of her getting into character. “Seeing it, I realised that I had never witnessed anything like it. Like Precious [for which Mo’Nique won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar], I do well with first-time actors, because they trust me.”
“Andra trusted me,” he continues. “Trust means being on the same page with your performers, because directing is almost like making love with them. You don’t have to use words, just your eyes, and when you’re in sync with your actors, real magic happens.”
Daniels talks passionately about ideas of trust — something he returns to when we discuss his family. “My 25-year-old kids tell me whether I’m in the right place,” he says of his two children. “I’m old now [61], and I’m disconnected from this movement, this woke generation of activists out in the streets. But my kids now say, ‘No, Dad. You’ve got to react to the atrocities.’
“We are at a place I never thought I’d see, and that’s what our movie is about, calling not just my black brothers to arms but my white comrades too . . . It’s urgent now to address racial issues. When I was directing, I could smell in the air Floyd’s neck incident, and the craziness in the streets. It was a matter of time, and that’s what prompted me to do the film.”
But although the film is timely now, Daniels doesn’t think it’s a new timeliness. “It was timely 20 years ago, and it will be timely 20 years from now, because America is not going to change any time soon. This election showed us exactly where black people stand in a divided America. It’s not much different than what it was at the civil war.”
The US has long been divided but divisions are never simple. Holiday was sometimes booed off the Apollo Theater stage because she didn’t meet black audiences’ expectations, Daniels says. “She was often asked, ‘Why can’t you be like Ella Fitzgerald, or Marian Anderson, or Dorothy Dandridge, why can’t you represent us more properly?’ . . . It was white people who embraced her and pushed her into fame. What’s great about our story is that it shows that white people wanted her, even though the government was against her.”
Holiday’s courage has inspired Daniels throughout his career. “It made me fearless,” he says, “to not take ‘no’ for an answer, to make sure my movies got made.” Every studio in Hollywood passed on The United States vs. Billie Holiday because they didn’t want to see a movie about Billie Holiday. For Daniels, it was déjà vu. It recalled his experiences not just with Precious and The Butler, but his smash-hit TV series Empire, which he has worked on over the past eight years as co-creator, producer, director and writer.
“I first started working for a studio with Empire, but the execs didn’t really want to hear my viewpoint, or understand the way I see the world,” Daniels says. “The studios are not interested in authentic black stories, they want tales that are easily palatable for white Americans.
“I was taught by my mother to respect white people, to be nice and courteous: keep your head low down,” Daniels contemplates. “It’s deeply ingrained in the fabric of America, because racism is what America is about. In the past, I’ve chosen to ignore that, but now, I’m really looking at it straight in the eye and stopping being embarrassed about talking the truth.”
‘The United States vs. Billie Holiday’ will be released on Hulu in the US on February 26 and on March 12 in the UK
The Link LonkJanuary 27, 2021 at 12:00PM
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Director Lee Daniels on The United States vs. Billie Holiday - Financial Times
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