It’s not every day that a filmmaker will rise up during an interview and recite Old Testament tales and sing out their favorite hymn. Well, hallelujah, brother Jeymes Samuel for spreading the gospel’s good news.
The director’s spectacular Jesus in the hood movie, The Book of Clarence, starring a mighty fine LaKeith Stanfield (Judas and the Black Messiah, Knives Out, Atlanta) playing a charlatan wannabe Messiah, shakes up the toga and peepy toe genre.
Samuel’s movie has its world premiere Wednesday at the BFI London Film Festival. The Legendary Pictures production is released through Tristar with congregations taking their pews from January 12, 2024.
The movie’s thrilling prologue kicks off with a rip-roaring, wheel-screeching chariot race with Mary Magdalene thrashing the lads.
The moment was of course inspired by the iconic chariot scene between Charlton Heston’s Judah Ben-Hur and Stephen Boyd’s Messala in William Wyler’s Best Picture Oscar winner Ben-Hur, but also by “the fastest person in the hood “ when he was growing up was “a girl called Chantelle,” Samuel says. “She was the fastest driver. She was a getaway driver.”
Such scenes also hark back to childhood Sundays that were spent watching TV re-runs of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments and that hoary old The Greatest Story Ever Told, which had Max Von Sydow as Jesus and Heston, lower down the bill this time, as John the Baptist. “And Richard Conte as Barabbas,” Samuel’s cries out gleefully.
And, this is the gospel truth: John Wayne did a cameo as a Roman centurion.
And let’s not forget Victor Mature in The Robe and Samson and Delilah. Mature’s kinda the model for the gladiator slave Omar Sy (The Untouchables, Jurassic World Dominion, Lupin) plays in the film.
Over Easter, Samuel says “if you’re fortunate enough,” they’d show Franco Zeffirelli’s mini-series Jesus of Nazareth with Robert Powell “the six parts of it with every dope actor on the planet that wasn’t Black.”
Those bible adjacent epics were milk and honey to him.
But they also bugged the heck outta him too, just as the Westerns did inspired him to make The Harder They Fall, which also starred Stanfield. Both The Book of Clarence and The Harder They Fall upend the idea of the stereotypical white male movie hero.
“So we’d be watching all of these movies and I’ll be marveled by them. But I was drawn to the stories that were Bible adjacent, so not necessarily the ones about the Bible, but where the Bible was running alongside them, like Ben-Hur,” he says.
He acts out a scene from Wyler’s classic where our hero is being whipped by a Roman ”and they’re like, ‘No water for him!’” Then a stranger quenches Judah Ben-Hur’s thirst and he recovers. Excitedly, Samuel continues the story, ”He goes to see this man that everyone’s talking about being beaten, carrying his crucifix: ‘I know that man. He gave me water once.’ I’ve always loved those things,” he says wistfully.
”They kind of take a bit of liberty with the Bible because the story runs alongside it. Those are the ones I was drawn to most. I know I can tell a really, really cool tale that we can all relate to,” he tells me. “A man trying to prove he’s a nobody, a man that believes he can do anything. And his beliefs get him into trouble with the neighborhood terrorists, so to speak. Then he ends up on a path of self-discovery, redemption, and awakening.I know I could tell a great story like that, but set in a biblical era, it would just be something to marvel at.”
Smiling, he adds: ”Yeah, this is Jeymes Samuel’s Ben-Hur. It being my first foray into the Bible era, I had to throw everything. I wanted to throw in chariot races, I wanted gladiator fights, I wanted to throw a nightclub scene. The hoods are in the building having a party.”
Samuel didn’t relate to the Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, and Victor Mature types. ”Which is why LaKeith isn’t modeled on those guys,” he says. His favorite actor was Charles Laughton because “he looked like a regular guy from around the corner.”
Gesturing to both of us, he says “What LaKeith is based on is us. LaKeith is a guy from the hood. The first conversation we ever had, I knew he was Clarence because Clarence is about a regular dude that lives around the way. Charlton Heston is anything but regular, and Douglas and Mature are anything but regular. They look like Hollywood heroes. But Clarence is just a regular guy from the hood and he looks like just a regular unassuming guy from the hood who, like most of us in the hood, really believes we can fly. When we shake off all the oppression and the shackles, we really believe we can fly and do magnificent things.”
“People like us,’ he says, gesturing again “are never fed the nourishment and the vitamins and the ingredients that we need to make this an all-encompassing genre.
“There’s always been a veil of nonallowance that where we as Black people aren’t allowed …it’s almost an unwritten rule we’re not allowed to go into these genres. We’re not allowed to go into the Old West where every fourth cowboy was black. I feel the same with the biblical movies. We’re not allowed to go into that era for some reason. Not only did Hollywood stop making those movies, but Black people were never allowed to really make them in the first place. So I think just the inclusion of more people of color and stuff, just kind of broadens the landscape of storytelling of those genres.”
The screen artist did not whine about it. He did something.
“Everything I stand for as a storyteller, everything I stand for as a human being is about inclusion, diversity, and freedom,” he declares.
“Inclusion, diversity, and freedom are the most important things to me as a storyteller” he explains “whether I have a guitar in my hand, or I’m opening the final draft. It’s all about inclusion, diversity, and freedom. Freedom to tell the stories that we want to tell. And I believe that freedom isn’t given, it’s taken.”
“We have to take it,” he pleads softly.
“I think a really misguided, misinformed, but influential human being a long time ago changed the words, plans, aims, and intentions into dreams. And then we started embracing words like ‘my dream project.’ Or ‘it’s a dream for me to do this.’ But no dream is attainable . You have dreams while you are awake,” he argues.
“As soon as we embrace the word dream for plans, aims, and intentions, we embrace the word failure. None of these are dreams. It’s not my dream. It wasn’t my dream to become a filmmaker. It wasn’t my dream to sell a biblical. It was my plans, my aims, my intentions. I’m going to make a Western. I’m going to make a biblical-era movie.”
Selling his point like a practiced preacher, he points out that “none of us, no human being, no man , woman or child should ever embrace the word dreams for things they want to do in real life. They’re not dreams. When you get rid of those things, then we are able to make The Harder They Fall. A $90 million movie is your debut. We’re able to make The Book of Clarence. We’re able to tell stories where we take them from the Old West to the New Testament.”
When I saw the film in LA recently there were some sisters in the room unsure whether they were allowed to laugh. “Yeah, yeah, you’re allowed to laugh because The Book of Clarence is the hood,” Samuel allows, which is just as well because I let out a few belly laughs and snorts as I watched it.
Samuel grew up on a notorious housing estate in London, up the Harrow Road “where there’s always crazy, outlandish shenanigans happening in the hood simultaneously while the police are chasing you. There are all of these things, so to kind of capture those things to us cry and laugh and sometimes at the same time, is a unique gift and advantage that you have being a storyteller from up the Harrow Road.”
Fascinating to observe the everyday humor of an inner London district underpinning a multi-million dollar movie shot in a fabulous location in the ancient region of Matera Basilicata in Italy.
For all its comical moments, thrills, and spills, there’s a lot of biblical accuracy within the fictional story that is The Book of Clarence, even though he admits to “maybe taking liberties with the origin of somethings. Like, there’s no history of Mary Magdalene riding a chariot, but we know Mary Magdalene lived in the hood. We know she was looked upon with scorn by the villagers…and Jesus washed her of her sins. So while the overall story is original, there’s a lot of historical accuracy in the film.”
“I knew my Bible growing up as much as the next person. My mom wasn’t strict about us going to church every Sunday, but she was super religious,” he tells me .
His mother has never uttered a curse word in his lifetime. “Instead of saying, ‘Oh my God,’ she’d go ‘Jesus, lover of my soul, let me to thy bosom fly,’” her son explains.
This constant quoting of the line from Charles Wesley’s famous hymn Jesus, Lover of My Soul (his favorite hymn) would make his father angry. “My dad would go, ‘Joyce, your bosoms will fly off if you keep saying that nonsense.’ He didn’t understand my mom…”
When another person would just say, ”What?” Samuel’s mother would say, ”Holy Lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon me.” So just having a mom like that would make you know Psalm 27 and Psalm 23, “The Lord is my Shepard” and “The Lord is my light and my salvation”, off by heart.
“I’m familiar with enough elements of the Bible to be able to go in there and tell a story that has at least some form of historical accuracy to it.”
“There’s a song in the film featuring Adekunle Gold from Nigeria called Jizu. “And the words go, “Jizu, protect my soul, wash my sins, and let me fly.” That’s based on my mom.”
Samuel is known in the music world as The Bullitts. He has composed and written lyrics for all of the film’s songs, some featuring the likes of Jay-Z, who was an ardent supporter of The Harder They Fall. His mom has seen The Book of Clarence and given it her seal of approval, as any loving mother surely would.
The Sony movie has an epic cast that includes RJ Cyler, James McAvoy, Anna Diop, Teyana Taylor, Alfre Woodard, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Caleb McLaughlin, Babs Olusanmokun, Eric Kofi-Abrefa, Nicholas Pinnock, Micheal Ward, Chase Dillon, Tom Glynn-Carney, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, David Oyelowo, and a scene-stealing Benedict Cumberbatch.
Samuel’s produces alongside James Lassiter, Tendo Nagenda, and Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter. Garrett Grant is the executive producer.
Now that the WGA dispute is over, Samuel has resumed working on a prequel to The Harder They Fall. “Our good friends at Netflix I know are along for the ride. So it’s something that I’m sketching out,” he says.
The Western had Easter eggs that contained clues about The Book of Clarence. Similarly, he says he’s laid “the hugest Easter eggs all through The Book of Clarence which takes us into the the movie I’m going to do immediately after. And it’s for the audience to find…and watch as much as listen.”
Ordinarily, I run away, very fast, from biblical movies, adjacent, or otherwise. However, The Book of Clarence has made a believer outta me.
Amen.