Kasi Lemmons - Career

Career

In 1979, Lemmons made her acting debut in the television movie 11th Victim. She performed with the Boston Children’s Theater at a young age and later attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She then transferred to University of California, Los Angeles to major in history. However, she eventually left U.C.L.A. and enrolled in the film program at the New School for Social Research. As a young child, Lemmons got her first role on TV on a local soap opera called You Got a Right, a courtroom drama. She played the first and only black girl who integrated to an all-white school. She appeared in Gridlock'd, the debut feature film (1997) by her husband, actor/director Vondie Curtis-Hall.

In 1997, Kasi directed the film Eve's Bayou starring Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, Diahann Carroll, and Jurnee Smollett. Lemmons wrote a narrative that wove together family drama in the story of a ten-year old girl and her family. She created and directed the movie with an intentional use of universal significance. The movie is told by Eve, the main character who begins the movie in retrospective to the summer before when she notes, "Memory is a selection of images…some elusive, some printed indelibly on the brain the summer I killed my father, I was ten years old." Lemmons' friend gave some insight on the film, saying that it would be something really strong that grabs you at the beginning. The movie expresses certain themes and promotes an ambiance of mystery, sultry eroticism, and passion that transforms the characters throughout the movie. The film was not meant to be based on African-American film work; however, it was meant to perceive human relationships in a different way. It attracted more white audiences than black. Lemmons expressed in an interview with the Washington Post that the movie was about "friendship". The theme of following your dreams is prominent, and in the movie, the dreams are invested in another person. "It’s a story about activism and politics and community and how those things intersect. It’s a story about a man who had a voice that inspired…" The casting for Eve’s Bayou was done by Lemmons as well. She specifically wanted Don Cheadle to be in her movie. She felt that Martin Sheen would fitting for the role of E. G. Sonderling, who was the head of the radio station. "He has the perfect balance of cool and conservative that we needed for the character and he’s wonderful in the movie." She also selected Mike Epps, Cedric the Entertainer, and Taraji Henson, the female lead, as actors for the movie. She had the opportunity to cast her husband, Vondie Curtis-Hall.

In 2001 she directed Samuel L. Jackson in the film The Caveman’s Valentine. The story line of this second film is about a homeless man whose effort was to solve a murder mystery. It involves "unexplained ambiguities surrounding him that include moth seraphs that emerge from dancers and forceful rays that are emitted from the Chrysler Building, home of his imaginary arch enemy." Although Lemmons’ presence as a director was evident, this film was deemed a failure. Lemmons addresses the failure in an interview with Alexander, saying that compared to Eve's Bayou, the two movies are different and complicated they cannot be compared. She tells the Alexander that it was rebellious movie due to her success in the other movie.

In 2002 Lemmons conceived and helmed the tribute to Sidney Poitier for the 74th Annual Academy Award show. Shortly afterwards it was announced that Lemmons would direct The Battle of Cloverfield, a supernatural thriller about a small Southern town that becomes haunted by its ghosts, from her own script for producer Laura Ziskin and Columbia Pictures. Lemmons directed the movie Talk to Me, released in 2007. The movie is about a radio personality, an ex-con who became a popular talk show host and community activist. The visual tone shifts over the course of the film with the subject matter and circumstances of the film's times (during the 1960s through the 1970s and early 1980s) The film features signature American soul sounds of the 1960s and 1970s, including Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come", a song that plays in its entirety during a key period in Talk To Me. Lemmons said that "we went through different choices of the song. We wondered, 'has it been overused?'" Terence Blanchard scores the music for Talk To Me, as a compliment to the original soul music from such artists as James Brown, who is played by an actor in one scene during the film. At first directors did not see Lemmons fitting for the director the movie based on her two previous films and the fact that she was a woman. However, she won them over by sharing her view on what the movie should be like. It was not a challenge for Lemmons to make a movie that alternated between comedy and drama. The main character Petey Greene represented "a way of speaking loudly". The movie making industry was a challenge for Lemmons because she needed to show the fight to in the 1960’s to make people change. Talk to Me portrays how important the meaning of friendship is. Lemmon’s movie direction of the movie captures the riots on the streets due to the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the popular Johnny Carson show, intertwining both comedy and drama. It was truly a movie that encompasses the a part of revolutionary American history and how it changed America.

In an interview with George Alexander, Lemmons described her childhood as being involved in the arts. She participated on a television show called ZOOM. Lemmons also made a documentary about homeless people called Fall from Grace. For her movie Eve's Bayou, she transformed from an actor into a screen writer then into a director. The main character Eve, as Lemmons, imagined should embody a girl the reminded her of herself as a young girl. In the production of the movie, she mentioned that working with children is much easier since they take direction from authority well. The film received radical criticisms because it gravitated toward Black filmmaking that was obvious and flaunting and direct. Lemmons was confident that she made a film that enticed people and it became the highest-grossing independent film of 1997.

Lemmons has played Ardelia Mapp in The Silence of the Lambs and the interviewer Nina Blackburn in the mockumentary Fear of a Black Hat. She had a cameo appearance in Spike Lee's School Daze during a montage of Half-Pint's (Spike Lee) potential conquests. Lemmons won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Director in a Motion Picture for the film Talk to Me. Lemmons received a special first-time award, created just for her, from the National Board of Review and won the Director’s Achievement Award at the Ninth Annual Nortel Palm Springs Film Festival.