Color Purple (Arte): Why did Steven Spielberg hesitate to co-direct this series with Whoopi Goldberg?

Recalling her protagonist The Color Purple, Whoopi Goldberg said, “I wanted to watch the movie alone in a room for the first time. It drove him crazy.” When the movie was released in 1985, everyone knew Steven Spielberg, the world-famous director of ET and Indiana Jones, but hardly anyone had heard of the lead actor. Whoopi plays Celie, a young black woman who is abused by her father as a teenager, forcibly separated from her sister Nettie, and becomes a domestic slave who marries without a say in a widow who beats and beats her. The story takes place in the Deep South of the United States at the turn of the 20th century and sends back an uncompromising view of the endemic racism of the time, while also illustrating the incessant violence faced by African-American women.

DISCOVER AT A STAND-UP SHOW

It was Alice Walker, the author of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, who worked and insisted on making the New York actress to head the cast for the New York actress who was discovered at a stand-up show. Reluctant to sell the rights to his book for cinema, the author negotiated a real right to look at the adaptation. He believes it takes unknown actors to mark the evolution of characters, even the scariest ones (especially Celie’s violent husband Albert, played by semi-novice Danny Glover) and embodies their transition from dark to light and then right. a form of salvation.

STEVEN SPIELBERG IS NOT CONVINCED…

Alice Walker also agrees on the choice of director. Producer Quincy Jones grimaces when he recommends Spielberg. Moreover, this person is rather secretive, because if he has read the novel and was fascinated by history, he predicts that a black director from the United States in the early eighties with real knowledge of the South would be better off. suitable. Curiously, watching ET causes the author to change his mind. Spielberg later agrees to direct the film, believing it could have an impact on American society. He minimizes his salary, receiving only $40,000 instead of the $15 million he’s entitled to ask. As for the actors, Whoopi recalls:I went to Steven’s studio and looked around the room, there were all kinds of people, including Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson. I said to myself: “I better be really insured.She cleverly improvises a skit in which she embodies a crazy version of ET, gets arrested for drug possession, and convinces everyone that she is the actress needed to interpret Celie. The film was a worldwide success upon its release, grossing nearly $100 million and earning it 11 Oscar nominations. She won neither, but made Whoopi public.

The color is purple, at Arte on Sunday, July 2 at 21.00

F. FAST