Tyler Perry is ready to surprise you

Tyler Perry is the type of filmmaker whose name can appear as the owner in front of a movie title. That is Tyler Perry Why did I get married? Tyler Perry Temptation And, of course, very successful. made one Franchise. Between two dozen feature films, Perry has built a career as a director that leaves studio executives and audiences knowing exactly what they’re getting into. Tyler Perry – the name and the brand – are synonymous with a certain type of film: a useless commercial film with a moral message. As filmmaker Tyler Perry points out in a phone conversation from his Atlanta office, jazzman blues His latest work is not this film: “People don’t expect that kind of film from me at all, but I always knew I was there.”

The film, which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, is based on Perry’s first screenplay and may never have been made without a special chance encounter with one of America’s most distinguished playwrights. Living in Atlanta in the mid-’90s, Perry spent a good deal of time sneaking around the city’s historic Alliance Theater during breaks. After seeing August Wilson perform seven guitars (or at least his other half), Perry mustered up the courage to approach Wilson at a nearby cafe. “I would tell him the plays I had written and what I wanted to do, and he would really encourage me,” recalls Perry. “I went home and jazz musician poured out of me.”

jazz musician It follows Bayou, played by newcomer Joshua Boone, a young black man in 1940s Louisiana who finds success as a jazz singer but rekindles an affair with the girlfriend of his youth, now a married woman, and turns white, which ends up confronting him with racist comments. . Leadership. From a small town in the south. The project marked Perry’s first real foray into Hollywood, and at the time, the aspiring filmmaker had big ambitions to star in a film alongside Will Smith, Halle Berry and Diana Ross (“I had big, big dreams,” he admits. ). Initially, the script became interesting because Perry met Debbie Allen, who at the time had a production contract with DreamWorks (Allen continues to be a friend), before developing in the mid-2000s at Lionsgate, his theatrical home during long time. But, says Perry, “we were never able to do that.”

After you made one The movies took off. But even as he began to enjoy the success he craved, insecurities began to surface about continuing to produce hits. Perry points out that second chances for black filmmakers didn’t come easily within the studio system. I looked at the script jazz musician And he thought, “I’ll do it one day, but now I have to prove that I’m at the box office.”

After nearly 25 years, a 330-acre studio complex, and a $1 billion valuation, Perry finally felt he had reached the point where he could make his dream project a reality. This reasoning can be read simultaneously as a testament to Perry’s unique drive and an indictment of an industry in which a black creative only felt safe enough to create a passion project when he was outside the door of his own studio. .

“It didn’t happen then, but times change,” says Allen, who choreographed it. jazz musician. “And if that happened then, they probably wouldn’t let him lead.” East [movie] It says a lot about who he really is. “

thanks in part jazz musicianPerry found himself struggling with personal, professional and other history. Set in the south of the Jim Crow era, the film deals with racism, colorism and white supremacist revisionism. Perry recently researched her family’s genealogy, including a photo of a grandmother she never had the chance to meet. “She looked like a white woman,” says Perry. “As I’m researching it now, we find that another part of my family has turned white because there’s a town in Louisiana named after him. And that’s the only way it could have happened.”

In his own family, Perry had direct experience with colorism. “Where I grew up, the fairer you were, the better and more successful you were,” she says. “My father adored my older sister, he called her ‘Roja’ because she had very fair skin. and me and mine [other] They treated my sister badly because we had dark skin”. (Perry has been open about his troubled relationship with his father, including a history of abuse.)

Although Perry wrote the first drafts jazz musician With the recent move to suppress discussions of slavery and race relations in classrooms more than 20 years ago, he says the film is potentially more relevant now than ever before. “[There is an] An attack on our history: the history of black people in America, the history of slavery, the history of Jim Crow,” he says. “There is this effort to homogenize, dilute and rewrite.” (In June 2021, the Georgia State Board of Education passed a resolution proposing to limit the teaching of race and slavery in public schools.)

Building his business in Georgia, a common battleground for voting rights and access to abortion, which is also a tax-spurred manufacturing hub, means that Perry finds himself in an almost constant existential trap of his homeland and country politics. Hollywood. -War between financial results and recognized liberal values. “I know very well that I am black in Georgia,” he says. “Even in 2022, I still have to be very careful how I walk in politics.”

In fact, although he has organized fundraisers for the likes of Barack Obama and recently pressured his social media followers to vote in a Senate runoff later won by the Reverend Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff, Perry has always been careful to stay put. far away. A clear manifestation of partisanship. “I have thousands of people working here, a lot of blacks and browns who have never had industry experience walking through these doors to work,” he says. “There’s so much I want to say and so much I want to do, but I have to think of them all.”

Then there’s the matter of your critics. Although Tyler Perry Productions has been the source of early career credits for talents like Idris Elba, Viola Davis and Kerry Washington, in the casting of its main character. jazz musicianPerry dated several daughters, to no avail. “We were talking, they were very excited and it all fell apart,” he says. “And that’s what I understand: they have management and they have teams. And management and teams will say, ‘I don’t know about Tyler Perry.’ Films.”

Perry is well aware of his status among film critics. The average Metacritic score for films directed by Perry is 38.6. This awareness is accompanied by an additional sense of responsibility to the actor. jazz musician, in which there are mostly young talents. “I just wanted to protect them as much as possible,” he says.

Growing up in Virginia, Boone observed made one He made films with his family and was one of his early fans, but notes that their tastes eventually diverged. “His work, in a way, educated me,” says Boone. “I shared with him that I was his biggest fan and became one of his harshest critics.”

Boone highlights what he initially saw as two sides of Tyler Perry: “From a business standpoint, especially as a black man in this country, I always wanted to be around him. Tyler Perry, a man I would love to meet. Tyler Perry, artist, I [was] I’m sorry if I wanted to. But when he read the script jazz musician, Boone saw an opportunity to tell an “impact story” and see how Perry really works. He now compares him to a modern day Charlie Chaplin, a creative who directs, writes, acts and produces, as well as owns his own studio, and believes Perry is not getting the credit he deserves. “From the outside in, we have a long way to go,” says Boone.

For her part, Perry seems willing to reveal parts of herself that you may have missed. “It was the first time I fell in love with directing,” he says. “Because when you do things like made one s why i got marriedI really like the finished product and what my audience gets out of it and how much they love it. But the process of getting there was always just work. “

later jazz musician, expect to dive into other surprises. There’s a nearly finished script for a WWII project and an idea for a zombie movie he’s releasing: “I’d like to act in a few different areas, only to find people don’t like it because I don’t have it. Doesn’t mean he couldn’t. ”

This story first appeared in the September 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter. Click here to subscribe.