Tate Taylor made his first major directorial splash with The Help, which earned four Oscar nominations in 2012, including a win for Octavia Spencer for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role. The other three noms were for Best Picture, Viola Davis for Best Leading Actress and Jessica Chastain for Best Supporting Actress. Additionally The Help garnered Taylor a Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Fast forward to this month and Taylor finds his James Brown biopic, Get On Up, drawing rave reviews akin to those that generated early momentum for The Help. Again, among the lauded aspects is actor performance, most notably Chadwick Boseman’s portrayal of Brown, the legendary Godfather of Soul. Boseman did not immediately jump to take on the role of Brown. Taylor had to convince him over time to embrace the daunting challenge.
Taylor additionally sought out for Get On Up many of the same collaborators he enjoyed relationships with on The Help, including cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, ASC, BSC, production designer Mark Ricker and costume designer Sharen Davis. More about the film Get On Up
Goldblatt is a two-time Best Cinematography Oscar nominee–for The Prince of Tides in 1992 and Batman Forever in 1996. Among Ricker’s nominations is one for the Art Directors Guild’s Excellence in Production Design Award in Period Film for The Help. And Davis has a pair of Best Costume Design Oscar nominations, the first coming for Ray in 2005 and then Dreamgirls in 2007.
Taylor reflected on Get On Up and his collaborators, including one key artisan he worked with for the first time–editor Michael McCusker, a Best Editing Oscar nominee in 2006 for the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line.
SHOOT: Let’s explore some of your selections in terms of collaborators. On one hand, you gravitated again towards cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt for Get On Up after working with him on The Help. On the flip side, you decided to team for the first time with editor Michael McCusker. Tell us about your rationale for electing to work with each of them.
Taylor: In the case of Stephen, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Even more so than The Help, Get On Up was a very tough film to make in term of budget and time constraints. We had 49 days to shoot this film–spanning 96 locations and eight concerts. Stephen and I have a great way of working together and we needed that previous experience to deliver Get On Up. We work in sync and on creative impulse. We assess the situation each day and develop a plan. Anything can change at any moment. It’s exhilarating to work that way. For both The Help and Get On Up, there was no time for endless meetings. We’re shot pretty much all practical locations on both these films. The way we work, things can change on a dime. You have to partner with someone you know and who’s willing to work in this manner. Stephen was the perfect fit. There is such trust between us that we can handle working fast and furious.
That’s the same reason I brought back so many others I worked with on The Help, including production designer Mark Ricker and costume designer Sharen Davis. We all know how to work together in this exhilarating way. There’s no time for a learning curve.
As far as the editor goes, we worked with Hughes Winborne on The Help but he wasn’t available for Get On Up. So I began the process of interviewing editors. A lot of the time, I got the idea that several weren’t really comfortable with the structure and style we were going for in the film. The minute I got a hint of that–that they weren’t going for it–I moved on. Mike McCusker was different. He felt our way of working was exhilarating, would give us the chance to do something experimental and exciting.
SHOOT: Which of McCusker’s credits drew you to him to begin with.
Taylor: Walk The Line was the obvious go-to film. I revisited that film when considering him. It’s a film where drama and narrative were front and center–the rest being the wonderful flavor and sense of place; the place being a character in the film.
SHOOT: What drew you to James Brown’s story?
Taylor: After The Help I was having a hard time finding something with enough character and interaction, with a sense of importance about it. It wasn’t so much James Brown that drew me in. It was the character of James Brown. He is fascinating, dynamic. I have never been one to gravitate to biopics as an audience member. I always found them to be somewhat predictable but understandably so. James Brown, though, is an entirely different character. The Butterworths [Jez and John-Henry] wrote a fantastic script.
SHOOT: You wrote the adapted screenplay for The Help. Was there a transition for you to direct someone else’s script for Get On Up?
Taylor: A bit of a transition but I did a pass through the script and added some elements like the scene where James performs “Try Me” towards the end of the film. I was able to contribute to the Butterworths’ terrific script.
SHOOT: Mississippi has been the go-to place for you–with The Help and now Get On Up. You recreated locations in Mississippi–primarily in Jackson and Natchez–for the Get On Up storyline, including Georgia, a Boston Garden concert, the Apollo Theater in Harlem, a Paris concert. What draws you to film in your native Mississippi which is also where you now live?
Taylor: We went to Mississippi for The Help because I wanted the authenticity of the Mississippi Delta. The South was such a character in the film as it was in the novel written by Kathryn Stockett. I wanted to film in Mississippi not just from a creative standpoint but to pump money into a poor economy filled with people that the book The Help was written about. It was our way of giving back.
By virtue of our shooting The Help in Greenwood [Mississippi], that community has realized $5 million to $10 million in tourism revenue. People go there for The Help tour. That puts people in restaurants. That puts people in hotels. Plus there’s a civic pride that’s generated. We hope Get On Up does the same for the people in Mississippi.
My experience shooting The Help in Mississippi created a business model for me as a filmmaker. People in Mississippi opened their homes and businesses to us so widely. It was so genuine the way they supported us. Anytime I ran into a budgetary problem or a location problem, a citizen was there to help rescue us. We had a partnership with the people in the communities of Mississippi and I relied on that for Get On Up. We couldn’t have shot it in Louisiana which cost too much. We rented a house [in Mississippi] for Chadwick at $3,500 a month. A comparable house would have cost $15,000 a month in New Orleans. In Mississippi they don’t have their hands out; instead they have their arms out to help you. The locations were free. The people there see the forest from the trees. I want to continue to make movies there.
