Jay-Z, Jesus and me – Jeymes Samuel on The Book of Clarence
Writer-director Jeymes Samuel talks about working with the rap superstar on his wildly ambitious comedy, The Book of Clarence.
‘We’ve never, ever, in the history of Hollywood, had a movie like The Book of Clarence,” says Jeymes Samuel, the writer and director of said movie.
We’re certainly not inundated with New Testament comedy-dramas in which the Jews are played by black actors, the Romans by white British and Irish actors, and where the cast formation-dance to disco classic Nights Over Egypt. LaKeith Stanfield (Atlanta, Sorry to Bother You) stars as Clarence, a weed-dealing, chariot-racing Jerusalem street hustler in AD33 who notes the success of Jesus and sees dollar signs. Maybe he should get into the messiah game.
Jay-Z is one of the producers and features on the soundtrack alongside Doja Cat and Jorja Smith, while the cast includes David Oyelowo as John the Baptist, Benedict Cumberbatch as a beggar, Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Clarence’s mum and James McAvoy as a Biggus Dickus-style Pontius Pilate.
An ambitious and delightfully bonkers blend of Ben-Hur, Life of Brian and Hamilton, it’s often very funny. When Mary insists she was a virgin when she became pregnant, Clarence turns to Joseph and says: “You believed all this?”
It’s only Samuel’s second film, after The Harder They Fall, an ultra-violent black western starring Idris Elba that was also co-produced by Jay-Z. Samuel is also a singer-songwriter who composed the scores to both films and has produced records by the Feeling and Mr Hudson.
Not bad for a man who grew up on a crack-riddled estate on Kilburn Lane in west London. “How many black people from the ’hood are directing on an international scale in England? None,” Samuel says when we meet in the gleaming offices of Sony Pictures in central London. Yes, he’s full of himself, but fair enough.
Oh, and he’s also the younger brother of pop star Seal. “Kiss from a Rose was written on Kilburn Lane – isn’t that the craziest thing?” he says.
Samuel, 44, doesn’t advertise the connection: “It didn’t open doors for me or anything.” I believe that, because he’s a force of nature. Jay-Z has spoken of his friend’s “childlike wonderment”, and Samuel’s conversation pinballs from his favourite Joni Mitchell album (Court and Spark) to his fantasy of remaking Minder with Cumberbatch as Arthur Daley and Tom Hardy as Terry McCann. He launches into the Minder theme song in a lovely tenor. The project would be perfect, he says, for Guy Ritchie, who “shoots London better than any other filmmaker, even if you don’t like the film”.
The Book of Clarence was partly inspired by the biblical extravaganzas Samuel watched as a child – The Ten Commandments, The Robe, The Greatest Story Ever Told.
“I love those old epics but I didn’t relate to the people in them,” he says, citing the example of Hugh Griffith, the Welsh actor who played an Arab sheik in Ben-Hur. Samuel looks Griffith up on his phone and shows me a picture. “He’s as white as snow!”
He thinks, though, that it makes sense for the Jews to be black in The Book of Clarence. “They weren’t rich dudes – they were all in the ’hood.” The Romans, meanwhile, “had to be English. You know the drill: John Mills, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton.”
Samuel’s mother, a nurse, instilled his love of old movies. He talks about “terraforming” his estate by inviting local drug dealers to “film noir Sundays” at his place. “We’d watch Double Indemnity or Night of the Hunter and I’d give them homework.”
Samuel, whose son appears in the new film, still lives nearby and he bonded with Jay-Z over their similar backgrounds.
“I’m from Mozart Estate, Kilburn Lane, he’s from Marcy Projects, Brooklyn, and it’s like we’ve known each other forever. We speak every single day – we kind of live in each other’s brain spaces.”
Raised as a Christian, Samuel believes in intelligent design. “Have you ever heard scientists break down the Big Bang? It’s the most hocus-pocus … give me the guy who walks on water.”
Childbirth, he adds, proves that women are “literally magical creatures. You’re telling me this was all an accident, Ricky Gervais?” (The comedian is a vocal atheist.) Samuel says he had no trepidation tackling religion on screen ("trepidation is dodging the police") and sees the message of tolerance in the film as “important”, especially in light of the bloodshed in Gaza and Israel.
The film’s storylines are based on the Scriptures and historical record. In one scene McAvoy’s Pilate commands Clarence to walk on water.
“In Matthew 24:5 Jesus says: ‘For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many’,” Samuel says. At that time “there were hundreds of people saying they were the messiah. The Romans used to say, ‘Go on then, walk on water’, and crucify them en masse”.
His favourite screen Christ, other than Nicholas Pinnock, who plays him in The Book of Clarence, is Robert Powell in Jesus of Nazareth.
“It’s controversial but I never thought Jim Caviezel was a perfect Jesus (in The Passion of the Christ). I thought Mel Gibson should have cast Vincent Gallo (the US indie star).” That would have been a very different movie. “Yeah, he would have killed Satan.”
The Book of Clarence is referenced by a character in The Harder They Fall, which suggests Samuel wants to create a linked movie universe like Quentin Tarantino, whose cine-literate stylisation and use of pop music are a clear influence.
The Harder They Fall was co-produced by Lawrence Bender, who produced several of Tarantino’s films, and came about after an argument Samuel had with Bender in a members’ club in Malibu over the use of the n-word in Pulp Fiction by a white character played by Tarantino.
Bender “was saying that, in his estimation, black people like it”, Samuel says. He disagreed.
“No black person has a relationship with a white person who talks to them in that fashion. I was explaining to him, ‘But we have a thing called auto-erase: when we watch something, in order to love it, we have to erase these things’. In order for an Asian person to like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which is a beautiful film, they have to erase Mickey Rooney (who played a stereotyped Japanese character).”
His argument with Bender was witnessed by a black woman and her white husband.
“She said, ‘I agree with everything you’re saying’,” Samuel says. He talked about the racially insensitive things he’d seen on screen, including on Netflix. It was then the woman’s husband introduced himself as Ted Sarandos, the co-chief executive of Netflix. “He said, ‘You and I are making a movie together’.” The Harder They Fall premiered on Netflix in 2021. Malibu members’ clubs, eh?
Samuel has a knack for acquiring influential supporters. Jay-Z, who “speaks fluent cinema”, helped him with a scene in The Harder They Fall when the hero, Nat Love (Jonathan Majors), encounters his enemy, Rufus Buck (Elba).
Samuel was trying to work out a way to delay their gunfight. “Jay said (slips into a perfect Jay-Z impression), ‘You’ve never been in that scenario where a person’s coming after you. How you neutralise it is, Rufus has his back turned, he’s nursing a drink. Nat be like, ‘Pick up your gun’. Just don’t pick it up. Nat’s not gonna shoot an unarmed man’.”
Jay-Z is set to produce Samuel’s next film, a continent-spanning epic he can’t talk about yet.
“All I can say is, it’s awesome,” he says. “And after that I’m going into space.” I think he means directing a sci-fi movie but, such is the ebullient ambition of Jeymes Samuel, you wouldn’t rule out actual interstellar travel.
The Times
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