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Director Rashid Johnson and
actress Sanaa
Lathan spoke to EBONY about making the film Native Son for
HBO, and the importance of modernizing Richard Wright’s classic and complicated
novel.
“We
wanted to stay true to as much of the story as we could while being aware of
telling [it] in a contemporary time and with an awareness of some of the
sensitivities and some of the criticisms of the story,” Johnson said of the
film, his directorial debut. “We didn’t change the story necessarily to
alleviate the tension of some of those criticisms, but having interpreted it
after being aware of them were things that we were really quite conscious of in
the process.”
Wright’s novel was the first best-seller by an African-American, but it was controversial for its depiction of the protagonist Bigger Thomas as an overly violent and sex-obsessed Black man from Chicago and how he responded to oppression. Fellow iconic writer James Baldwin criticized the book for perpetuating the negative stereotypes that plagued Black Americans.
Although
the novel was published in 1940, is
still culturally relevant today in light of the landscape of the Black Lives
Matter movement and how marginalized groups are still fighting against White
supremacy. Johnson and Lathan went on to discuss why the HBO feature film is
pertinent to today’s audience.
“The
book was originally written in 1939, and the telling of that story today . . . is still quite relevant,” the director
said. “There are still aspects of [it] that so much make sense today, it is
somewhat quite scary.”
“It’s
sad,” Lathan said between uncomfortable laughs.
Johnson
added, “It gave us an opportunity to think about what’s changed, but even moreso,
it gave us an opportunity to think about so many of the things that are the
same.”
Native
Son is now available on the HBO cable network and its
streaming platforms. Watch the full with Johnson and Lathan interview above.
Check
out what actors Ashton Sanders and KiKi Layne told EBONY about starring in
this adaptation of Wright’s novel here.
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