“It’s all a little overwhelming. When you make something that’s so personal to you, it feels like you’re just making it for yourself or for your people. But then you’re reminded that this will exist in the world,” says Malcolm Washington of his feature directorial debut, The Piano Lesson . The adaptation of the August Wilson play of the same name screened at the Telluride Film Festival before bowing in front of its biggest audience to date at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
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In 2020, Washington, an alum of the American Film Institute’s storied Directing program, was on the lookout for his first feature, writing original screenplays, when he first read Wilson’s work. Part family melodrama and part ghost story, The Piano Lesson centers on the Charles family, whose members congregate to argue over a precious family heirloom, a hand-carved piano that depicts generations of the family.
“I was wanting to make a movie for a long time, and when I got to The Piano Lesson , it wasn’t even that I was seeking it out. But when I read it, with where I was in my life, it jumped out to me,” he says, “You have to think about the decisions that your great-great-grandmother made to put you in this position. Go sit and think about that! This movie coming out is a representation of a long process of me wrestling and engaging with the stories of my ancestors.”
As the son of Pauletta and Denzel Washington, Malcolm isn’t the first member of his family to adapt Wilson. Denzel directed an adaptation of Wilson’s Fences for the screen in 2016 and later produced an adaptation of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for Netflix.
In preparation for The Piano Lesson , which he co-wrote with Virgil Williams, Washington immersed himself in the history and culture of the 1930s, the setting of the play. He also talked to the living relatives of Wilson, who died in 2005 at the age of 60. Outside inspirations ranged from the films of Andrei Tarkovsky to the paintings of Kerry James Marshall.
“I was trying to convince people to do the movie. I went to Sam Jackson’s house, and I brought this huge deck of images and stories and things I’ve collected of what I thought the movie could be. There’s a section where I talk about the first time I see Kerry James Marshall’s Invisible Man series,” remembers Washington. The paintings are rendered in a dark color palette that requires the viewer to get close to the work in order to see the actual image. “I was talking to Mr. Jackson about it, of seeing that painting for the first time, how it was a big influence, and how I wanted to approach this work, where you might have an expectation but when you lean in, it reveals itself.”
To Washington, The Piano Lesson was similar: It’s a story that audiences can pull more from the more they examine it.
The pitch worked and Jackson signed on to star, along with a main ensemble that includes Ray Fisher, Michael Potts, Corey Hawkins, Danielle Deadwyler and John David Washington.
Much of the cast was already intimately familiar with the playwright’s . In order to identify The Piano Lesson cast’s ties to the original Wilson stage play and his extended oeuvre, a flow chart is probably in order. “Sam Jackson and Mr. Potts are like our patriarchs. They’re like the stewards of August Wilson. They’re O.G. Wilsonians,” says Washington. Jackson understudied in the first Broadway staging of the play after originating the work at Yale Repertory Theatre in 1987. Only a year before filming, John David and Fisher made their respective Broadway debuts in a 2022 revival of the play that also starred Jackson and Potts.
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Washington’s older brother, John David, plays the bombastic Boy Willie, who is in favor of selling the piano in order to fund his dream of owning a farm. Of working with his brother, the director says, “When you get an opportunity to make a movie, you go, ‘OK, let me throw all the best stuff I have at this.’ I was like, ‘OK, I’m not going to be cute and like wait a couple years.’ I was like, ‘Bro, I’m making a movie, are you down?’ He’s somebody that has seen my work and knows me as an artist before anybody else did.” John David, who has worked with directors that include Christopher Nolan and David O. Russell, happily took the role.
Production was in Georgia, with interiors, most notably the family living room that houses the titular piano, built on soundstages. For exteriors, filming moved to Canton, Georgia, where production designer David Bomba built out a Pittsburgh street corner according to the research that he and Washington did while walking around Wilson’s old neighborhood.
Many filmmakers who adapt stage plays for the screen talk about the necessity of breaking out of the confined space that the original worked occupied, moving beyond singular and static sets. Washington looked to his performers to help his film feel expansive.
Washington quotes a filmmaking hero of his, Paul Thomas Anderson: “He said something one time where he’s like, ‘You know, everybody talks about set pieces.’ He’s like, ‘The best set piece is a great actor,’ ” says Washington. “There’s nothing that a huge set piece can do that’s the same as watching a 10-page Samuel L. Jackson monologue.”
At the end of The Piano Lesson — once the demons, both literal and metaphorical, have been exorcised and the family has come to terms with the past and present — the screen cuts to black and a small title card appears with the words “for mama.” The director’s mother, Pauletta, plays Mama Ola in the film, the onscreen mother of Deadwyler’s Bernice and John David Washington’s Boy Willie.
“I think about Bernice as a mother, her relationship with her mother, the power that mothers hold over all of us, and the hope that they that they impart on the next generation,” says Malcolm Washington.
As for the title card, he says, “We had to fight for that card, and once we got it, we set up this screening in New York for the cast and crew. Erykah Badu [who plays a singer in the film] is next to my mom and my mom is already weeping because the end of the movie really touched her. I was like, ‘Mom, you gotta look! Look at the screen!’ Then she sees it and she falls in my lap and we just held each other.”
Talking about his mother, the filmmaker is reminded of conversations he had with Costanza Romero, Wilson’s widow. Remembers Washington: “Miss Constanza would talk about how when he was working on his work, he’d look back and say, ‘I hope my mom would be proud of this.’ ”
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