“It’s different when you’re black,” says Matsoukas. There are allusions as well to 1994’s Jason’s Lyric, a love story starring Allen Payne and Jada Pinkett Smith that revolves around a dysfunctional Southern family. When she graduated, her mother offered a piece of advice: “She was like, ‘Go get your master’s.’ I was already a PA and interning on videos while at NYU, so I was like, ‘Ma, you don’t need to go to school for what I want to do. Matsoukas primed the over-scheduled pop star and her faux British boxer to fake palpable, non-verbal chemistry — even though they didn’t get to meet until the director called action. Her directorial debut in film was Queen & Slim, starring Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya, and written by Lena Waithe. You wish it looked like…? Melina reprised her role as visual architect for the pop icon’s 2016 surprise album, Lemonade , directing the … “This movie is saying something really strong, and it’s on the right side of history,” Matsoukas later tells me.
Matsoukas’s unwavering gaze makes clear what finery can mean to those who have been historically denied payment for their labor. The movie was a hit, even after real community activists protested and then-Mayor Ed Koch called it racist. She earned her degree at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and completed her graduate work at the AFI Conservatory with an MFA in cinematography. There are the iconic shots of Beyoncé on a sinking New Orleans police cruiser. They are Communist believers, so they don’t believe in organized religion, but we believe very much in culture and in food — Greek food, Cuban food, soul food, Jamaican food, all on one plate.”, Left to right: Jodie Turner-Smith, Daniel Kaluuya and Matsoukas on the set of ‘Queen & Slim.’, She entered NYU as a math major, but graduated with a thesis project on music videos — a change of lanes more parallel than perpendicular. In it, Matsoukas frames and reframes and splits frames of big hair, domino games, and long cars — it brought her to the attention of North Carolinian singer Shareefa, who was signed to Ludacris’s Disturbing Tha Peace record label. And a black woman from the Bronx, a film director of mixed racial heritage who grew up dancing to hip-hop music, who helped reinvent music video, and who made it to the most revered of film studios, is remixing Hollywood’s traditional palette.
Matsoukas started out at Black Dog Film, then the now-defunct Gorilla Flix film production company, and is currently a director at Prettybird, which she has been signed to since 2011. There is hope, and there is action and freedom as this film reflects Americans back to themselves.
It was hard, and a lot of pressure, and even today … I work better when I’m nervous.”.
In a dim room, she’s leading a team of mostly men through color edits. Lil Pump Joins Trump Onstage After Being Introduced as ‘Little Pimp’, Tracy Chapman Makes Rare TV Appearance With Performance of ‘Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution’, Kyle MacLachlan Joins — and Wins — Fleetwood Mac ‘Dreams’ Challenge, Trump’s Last Enemies Before Election Day: Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Jon Bon Jovi, Eddie Vedder Discusses ‘Dark’ Times After Chris Cornell’s Death With Howard Stern, How Melina Matsoukas Went From Music-Video Visionary to ‘Queen and Slim’, Revenge of the Nerd: Why Beanie Feldstein Is Hollywood’s Most Likely to Succeed, ‘Black Panther’ Cinematographer Rachel Morrison’s Life Behind the Lens. ', For a decade and a half, Melina Matsoukas has helmed moody, swoony, sexy music videos that subvert expectations by turning an idol’s image inside-out — whether it’s re-imagining Snoop Dogg as a keytar-wielding lounge act (“Sensual Seduction”) or transforming Katy Perry into a grieving World War II widow (“Thinking of You”).
It’s the filmification of ride or die. And we could share that moment together? There are overt links in Queen & Slim to director Theodore Witcher’s feature, the moody 1997 Love Jones. “That’s always what I want — work that creates a dialogue, that creates change, that’s going to make people think, whether they agree with it or not.”, In the studio, Matsoukas lets the pause stretch until one of the guys says, “Yeah, someone is gonna check it in the cut.”.
The video, incredibly, served as a reminder to mainstream audiences that Beyoncé is a black woman.
At one point in the movie, Turner-Smith’s character, a lawyer, says to the easygoing man she just met: “Do. Blood coloring has been added to one character’s ear and to another’s leg. In a pivotal scene, black and brown activists are assembled around a corrupt NYPD precinct. It features a deliciously cocky Beyoncé — in water, on sand, in a Rolls, on the dance floor. “The opportunities I’ve been given have been from black women, primarily.
The video for the 18-karat gold “Upgrade U” is early Matsoukas at her most thematically robust. Onstage, Matsoukas presented her trophy back to him. Melina Matsoukas is an American music video, film, commercial and television director. This is how I speak to it.”, “Everything about that script, and the person behind it, made me want to do the film,” says Matsoukas. It’s a lush, vibrant vision that plays off an aesthetic she’s honed in her shorter work; she even alludes to one of “Formation’s” most powerful images, a young boy facing down a phalanx of cops.
We’ve had Trayvon Martin. Shot on location, in impoverished grays and ashy brick, the film is populated by numb extras, and, as Melle Mel rapped of the Bronx in 1982’s “The Message,” there’s broken glass everywhere. The exponential explosion of success doesn’t just factor back to her, but to the people who supported her: Queen & Slim‘s screenwriter Lena Waithe, Insecure creator Issa Rae, Beyoncé. In This Article:
He answers clearly: “No.”. Take Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” which captures the entire arc of a disastrous relationship in four and a half minutes.
“My grandfather was a black cowboy,” Matsoukas says.
“My work in videos was completely disrespected. Beyonce, Daniel Kaluuya, Melina Matsoukas. A few years after that, Universal was under fire for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing before it was even released. Your dreams get to come true.”.
“The black body is more celebrated in death than in life,” Matsoukas says. There’s the stuttering and also a ghostly red flare that blinks just left of center screen. Send us a tip using our anonymous form.
Her directorial debut in film was Queen & Slim, starring Jodie Turner … “ ‘Thanksgiving’ is our Off the Wall, and Queen & Slim is our Thriller.”, “Thanksgiving” is a 2017 episode of Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series, Master of None, and when the show reached out to Matsoukas about directing, she initially declined.
Characters utter romantic phrases, even in unromantic situations: “I’ll be brave enough for the both of us.” “One dance, and we can leave.” “Trust me.” “Thank you for this journey, no matter how it ends.” “We in this together.” The characters in Queen & Slim are running, so the love is heightened, a concentrate. Live Updates: Who Will Win Control of the Senate? They did on the first take. It was discredited. See also the purposefully awkward pageant video for Beyoncé’s 2013 “Pretty Hurts.” See Matsoukas’s 2009 work with Lily Allen — “Not Fair” — which plays with ideas of country music and corny moods and Allen’s perch as an It Girl. Clearly, Matsoukas is unbowed. Waithe calls Jason’s Lyric one of her bibles. From It Happened One Night to Casablanca to all four versions of A Star Is Born, one could come to the conclusion, if viewing feature films alone, that people of color in America seldom if ever meet-cute at the shop on the corner (despite the public’s fascination with real-life couples like Michelle and Barack Obama, Jay-Z and Beyoncé, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, etc.). The resulting 34 minutes of television put the culture on notice. Her graduate thesis was on music videos.[5].
An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.’ It is an artist’s duty. Make it desaturated. “As Nina Simone says, ‘You can’t help it.
Hers is a detached silence that means, I’ll wait for an alternate response.
Aquamarine walls. “A coming-out story” is what Matsoukas recalls Waithe saying. You get to perfect every frame. So I stayed there and wasn’t in a rush.” (Fourteen years later, Matsoukas would be honored with AFI’s Franklin J. Schaffner Alumni Medal, the first black woman to receive the award.).
And that it’s her first film?
There’s love, too. It’s my story, and I want you for this.”, When Matsoukas read the script, she was in. (Only Mark Romanek, at three, has more.) They’ve encouraged me. [3][4] Both her name and surname are Greek: Μελίνα Ματσούκα. Waithe became the first black woman to win an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, which she shared with co-writer Ansari. But to most of the people they meet, they’re scapegoats — maybe even heroes.
One way of doing that is by honoring them while they still have their breath, which we try to do with this film.”.
Matsoukas grew up in the Co-op City housing development in the Bronx.
John Hughes directed his first film, Sixteen Candles, with Universal, seven years after Robert Zemeckis made his first, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, with the studio. At a pinkish dawn, two people walk from a truck in flames.
The video’s Victorian couture harks back to Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. “I don’t feel that it was right that I would accept something like that in his presence.”.
Queen & Slim is fueled by a similar question: Can we honor black lives while they’re alive? Queen & Slim is a love story that begins in Cleveland, the city where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot to death by a police officer in 2014. With its scenes from the ’hood, long tight braids, and bodacious choreography, the work punches back at the problematic contention that global celebrities like Michael Jordan, Alicia Keys, and Janet Jackson “transcend” race. Her parents were about communism and equality and activism, and Matsoukas was a sponge. There may be no better evidence of that collaborative energy than Matsoukas’s career-defining video for Beyoncé’s “Formation.” Released on the eve of what would become a controversial Super Bowl 50 halftime performance, “Formation” illuminated the cultural sensibilities and influences at the soul of Beyoncé’s art. It’s historic. “It was very much hers, and she let me do my thing. In August 2006, at a post–MTV Music Video Awards gathering, Matsoukas met Jay-Z and Beyoncé in person — a few months later, she was directing four videos for the B’Day Anthology Video Album, released in the spring of 2007 with the deluxe edition of Beyoncé’s epic B’Day. Sign up for our newsletter.
The video — Matsoukas’ 12th collaboration with her — capped Beyoncé’s ascent from pop star to American goddess, and won them both the Grammy for Best Music Video.
Kamuzu Banda, Tim. “So,” says Matsoukas of Rae, “she brought me into that space.”, Lena Waithe’s swag is on tilt. “When that stops happening, then I’ll stop making work like this.”, Matsoukas often speaks in equations, and it’s hard for her to talk about her work without calculating how it impacts the world. “Uncle Earl,” says Matsoukas, “is who Joshua in Jason…
Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 22:01. “We’re so few and far between in this industry,” says Matsoukas.
How Melina Matsoukas Went From Music-Video Visionary to ‘Queen and Slim’ The director behind ‘Formation’ and a bold new outlaw-couple …
It was nominated for a Black Reel Award for Outstanding Direction of a Comedy Series, and a Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Achievement in a Comedy Series.
Never happens. For making this video with me.” The squeal is a moment of uplift, an embrace for being seen, but also for a collaboration that recast the narrative around Rihanna’s relationship. Melina Matsoukas (born January 14, 1981) is an American music video, film, commercial and television director.
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