Melina Matsoukas’s Queen & Slim: ‘ushering in the next creators of colour’

Melina Matsoukas, who has directed music videos for Beyonce, has joined forces with writer and actress Lena Waithe for a road movie.

Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith in Queen & Slim, Melina Matsoukas’s feature film directing debut.

Melina Matsoukas’s Queen & Slim is a movie with style to burn, and she’s often asked about the kinds of films that influenced her approach. A few she cites regularly: a late-90s crime drama, Belly, directed by video clip specialist Hype Williams; Wong Kar-wai’s achingly beautiful story of longing and loss, In the Mood for Love; and Y Tu Mama Tambien, Alfonso Cuaron’s road trip driven by desire.

Then there’s another visual influence that comes from a very different place, from life rather than art. “Videos of black people being pulled over by cops,” she says matter-of-factly.

This kind of incident is, after all, at the heart of Queen & Slim, written by Lena Waithe and directed by Matsoukas. It ­begins with an awkward Tinder date that’s about to end when the man drops the woman home. But the couple — played by Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya — are flagged down by a police officer. And everything changes in the course of that ­encounter.

Waithe, talking about that situation, describes it as “every black person’s worst nightmare. If you’re a black person and a cop is walking towards you, immediately it turns into a horror film.”

In shooting the scene, Matsoukas says: “Our goal is to put all audiences regardless of colour in that situation: what it feels like to be a black person in America today and be in the presence of a cop, where you don’t know if you’re going (to come) out of that situation alive or not. I wanted to put them inside of that.”

Before that moment of transformation, however, the film embraced a very different mood. The couple, Queen and Slim — we don’t find out their real names until much later in the film — are having a date in a diner and it’s not going particularly well. They’re talking at cross-purposes: Queen, a lawyer, elegant and on edge, seems a little hostile; Slim is quieter, more low-key, ­curious about what led her here.

There’s a rapid to-and-fro between them as they test each other out, but there’s also a leisurely feel to the scene. Waithe says The Social Network was a bit of an inspiration for her. “I ­really like clipped dialogue,” she says. “I like it when it feels like a table tennis game, when you’re thrown into it.” The scene,­ ­Matsoukas says, is “a quiet moment to digest those ­characters”.

The director had a very precise idea of details that she wanted to bring to it: a long shot that begins with the waitress coming to the couple’s table, the particular style of the waitress’s hair, a Herbie Hancock song, the feeling that, as she says, tells her: “OK, I know where we are, I know these people, it feels like it’s a black-owned diner.”

Slim asks Queen why she took so long to get back to him on Tinder, and eventually we learn something more about the reasons for her tension. “She’s been through trauma,” Matsoukas says. “I chose to use a lot of negative space in my framing as their conversation kind of took a left turn and became awkward.”

Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe on the red carpet this month. Picture: Getty Images

After the date and the encounter with the police officer, the pair become fugitives, and the film takes another direction stylistically. The Ohio couple head south, initially seeking help from Queen’s uncle in New Orleans.

“We’ve all seen the road-trip movie, the journey through ­iconographic America,” Matsoukas says, “but it’s been through the white perspective. And I really wanted to show the black ­experience, as much as I could, in all of America.”

As Waithe and Matsoukas were developing the script, Matsoukas created a timeline and mapped locations, and came back to Waithe.

“Then she would kind of take those locations and weave them through the characters so that they felt authentic to the spaces and places that they came from,” Matsoukas says. “I wanted to show our history, and how that changes, travelling from north to south. Black people in Cleveland live a completely different way from in Louisiana, and I wanted to show those differences and the diversity within our community.”

More broadly, she says: “I wanted to allow the landscape to become another character and inform their ­relationship.”

Music choices were linked to locations: around New Orleans, says Matsoukas, “in the sounds of the little towns you hear bounce music, which is very much from there, and you get to Mississippi and you’re in the blues. Visually, as they travelled from north to south, Matsoukas says, “as the environment and the visuals warmed up, their relationship did. They’d unlayer themselves and become naked to each other, in a way more ­vulnerable, where they were able to find this connection and this love.”

Matsoukas also saw this as “a reverse slave escape narrative”, with “everybody they meet along the way as a different stop on the modern underground ­railroad”.

There’s a scene that Matsoukas calls “the second date”, when Queen and Slim decide to hang out in a tiny after-hours bar, in a place that’s called the Underground, for precisely that reason. “It’s this beautiful safe haven, and this is a community that’s come together to celebrate music and food and joy,” Matsoukas says. “And they’re allowed this quiet freedom for a second to be able to open up to each other and see each other and fall in love.”

Waithe, an actress, writer and producer, and Matsoukas, a ­director best known for her video clips, are both making their feature debuts with Queen & Slim. They worked together on the TV series Master of None: Matsoukas directed several episodes, including the one Waithe wrote and starred in, for which she won a writing Emmy. She also directed music videos, most notably for Rihanna and Beyonce, including the famous Formation video for Beyonce’s Lemonade.

Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith in Queen & Slim

A sketched outline of Queen & Slim was suggested to Waithe; she set out to write a screenplay that was about the trauma of being black in America, but which was also a love story.

Kaluuya — the English actor whose career was launched in a Black Mirror episode ahead of his breakthrough role in Get Out, which was followed by Widows and Black Panther — came on board early in the project. He had made contact with Waithe a short time before to talk about working together. He read the script and was immediately keen.

Waithe says Kaluuya’s presence was crucial. “We’ll both always be grateful to him for seeing himself as Slim and going after the part. He brought a sense of humanity and humility to it.”

For Matsoukas, both actors “really bring their own artistry to elevate these characters. Even before I was on, and Lena and Daniel were having conversations, he definitely inspired certain scenes and lines to be written.

“And then he was able to humanise them, and really embody that character in a way that you just melt into him, you fall in love with every glance and every reaction he has. He, you know, is a true talent, and one of the greatest actors of our time.”

Having cast Kaluuya, Waithe and Matsoukas decided they wanted a relative unknown to play opposite him: they found Turner-Smith, an English actress based in the US who’d had small roles in television and shorts, and had appeared in some video clips. Earlier in her life, she’d thought she’d become a lawyer, and she worked in corporate banking before she decided she wanted a new path. She moved to Los Angeles: the first job she did there was video clip with Williams, the director who’s a touchstone for both Waithe and Matsoukas.

Turner-Smith, Waithe says, “has this sort of light in her life, she’s very joyful”. As the more guarded, distant figure at the beginning of the movie, she keeps a hint of that warmth: and for the audience, this means “there’s always a desire to know more about who she is and what was behind her eyes”.

Queen & Slim is written and directed by black women, and it has two black leads. This may be unusual still, Matsoukas says, “but there’s somewhat of a renaissance happening now. I think it’s by force, honestly.

“There’s a thirst from audiences to see a different perspective, and from us to represent ourselves on screen, because we didn’t really have that coming up. So by supporting each other and working together, I think it’s forcing our industry to diversify. And we’re also ushering in the next creators of colour.

“We really enjoy working with each other, and having very authentic stories told from our perspective. So that they are real, you know, and they aren’t filtered. I think that’s really important.

“I think it’s about dismantling the power structure that exists currently, and having a greater role in the development and ­creation of stories” — not to mention, she adds, “the financing”.

Queen & Slim opens on March 12.