“The transition came through doing music for television projects,” said Eugene Ashe, a Sony Music recording artist turned writer/director. “I was working on a couple of soundtracks, most notably the Free Willy soundtrack in the 90s and The Bronx Tale, a Robert De Niro film.”
To prepare for films and television shows, Ashe would read the scripts to understand the story. “It felt like a longer form of songwriting to me,” he said. “I was always a storyteller with my band, the Funky Poets. The songs were often tell-tales of urban life, so it was a natural transition.”
As a screenwriter, Ashe has credits for the documentary Home Again and films Homecoming and Sylvie’s Love. In the latest project, the story follows a young woman who meets an aspiring saxophonist in 1950s Harlem.
“In my film, we did the score much like an old score, with a 65-piece orchestra, with the great Fabrice Lecomte who composed the score to picture with a live orchestra, like back in the day.”
Eugene Ashe
For a movie built around the score and music, the writer/director had to weave this idea into the pitch. “It was a tough sale for certain people,” he said. “Not the people who wound up working with me. But it was tough to get made because it’s a period piece not dealing with the civil rights movement. It’s also jazz-based, which is not as popular as hip-hop, so who is the audience for it? There wasn’t a baked-in audience for jazz, so that made it difficult.”
Writing the Screenplay
Ashe is a big fan of 50s era works like The Dick Van Dyke Show, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Doris Day. “That was a period before I was born, but my parents got married in 1959 and my brother was born in that era. It looked like a cool time, even though I grew up in the 70s and 80s. That era looked like Mad Men, classy and sexy.”
Combining the look and feel of the era, Ashe started to form the story. “I was seeing Doris Day and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but I wasn’t seeing black folks, even though we provided the soundtrack and we were very much there. I thought it would be sexy to show black folks that way.”
The music comes straight from the era. “With the needle drops – songs from history – I would actually have an idea or feeling I wanted to evoke from the song. So I would listen while writing the scene.”
The film opens with Nancy Wilson’s “The Nearness of You.” Ashe said, “I would listen to it on repeat, repeat, repeat, as I was writing the scene. Just playing it in my head. There’s a feeling I get, like melancholy from a song. Even if it’s not a music focused film, I listen to music while I’m writing.”
As for the original songs, former football player Nnamdi Asomugha learned to play the saxophone for the movie. Playing the character Robert Halloway, he took the time to learn six original tunes. “He’s always up for a challenge. That’s his personality.”
“We did pre-records with the band with Mark Turner. Mark is one of the best living tenor saxophone players in the world, but Nnamdi had to learn the fingering for the solos. That’s the process. We recorded the songs a year and a half before we shot the movie, so he got to live with them and work with a coach.”
The Civil Rights Dilemma
For this particular project, most of the “No’s” Ashe received involved the lack of civil rights material in the movie. “We made this film independently and then Amazon bought it. So we didn’t have pressure once we got the money, because everyone understood what we were trying to do.”
“We weren’t trying to make something rooted in trauma, but rooted in humanity as black people. Of course you need films like Selma, but there’s so much else going on there. By not showing there was so much else going on, it’s erasing the fact that we were thriving amidst all of that.”
Ashe said this somewhat parallels today. “We’ve got Beyonce and Jay-Z, even though we’ve also got George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and everything happening to us. We still had a black president. If you don’t tell those stories too, it’s a way of erasing us.”
Many people who turned down the story said they wanted “more urgency” in order to make a period piece about African Americans. “Well, I think black love is urgent,” joked Ashe. “I tried not to focus on it while raising the money for it, but some people got it immediately.”
At the time, Nnamdi Asomugha was signed on to star and produce the piece. There was a time when he might have had to pay for the entire film, but once they signed Tessa Thompson to play Sylvie Parker, everything else fell into place. “Once we got it in the can, people got it.”
Amidst all of this, the pandemic happened. “I think people needed this in a way that I couldn’t have anticipated. It wound up being the type of movie that people wanted to watch. I think they were fatigued by the trauma—racial trauma, the pandemic, being alone, being at home. We have enough trauma in our real lives. We need something uplifting and light-hearted. It was the right place and the right time.”
Making Indie Films
“That’s how I see life,” joked Ashe about the process of making an Indie film. Essentially, it’s all putting the pieces together, in terms of writing the script, choosing a director, finding actors, then looking to gather money and hit milestones for the film.
“There’s always going to be something. You have to be indefatigable and not let those hurdles get to you. You’re always going to have something in the way of progress. You keep trying and trying a different way. Sometimes you exhaust the same way, but the thing that made the difference was Tessa coming on. It changed the energy.”
Ashe said Tessa Thompson, who had just been in Thor and on Westworld could have done anything, so signing on meant it was a great script and that he could pull it off as the writer/director. “I didn’t have anything to say I could do this other than the script, but that helped people see I could execute it.”
“I had other screenplays I was interested in making at the time, but this was the one I wanted to make more than anything. It took more than ten years to get made, but I stuck with it, kept coming back to it. I actually wrote this before Homecoming, and I got close with other scripts, but there’s a million reasons films don’t get made. Studios are littered with films they bought that will never get made. These things get made when they want to get made, with who is supposed to be in them.”
As for advice to other screenwriters, he added, “There’s so much outside of your control. You need to focus on what’s in your control, which is making the very best script you can make. When you get the chance to make the movie, make the best movie you can make. Don’t think about fame or money. Have tunnel vision because once you put it out, that’s it. It’s hard, hard work. It ain’t pretty. It’s not glamourous. That is a lie. It’s grueling sixteen hour days.” Also, thanks to Sylvie’s Love, Ashe is now thinking bigger. “I was holding back at the scale of my ideas, but now that I have my foot in the door, the scale of my ideas are larger.”
“What’s the lottery thing? You got to be in it to win it,” he joked. “Everybody I know who has stuck with it has made it at some point. Everybody who has given up has never made it. Sometimes it takes a long time. You have to really believe in the type of idea you want to see birthed into the world that doesn’t exist already, not how to make another version of Black Panther or Nomadland. Keep it original and the weirder the better.”
This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio version here.
