![]() But to see him be joyful and to hear that he was loved… I think it’s really beautiful. You know, I always thought of him as being such an isolated, sad person. I can’t believe I have not actually had a conversation with him because I talked to him all the time. He was like, “I’m gonna give you a show,” for all those little boys and girls who are at home like he was, watching artists and dreaming. He gave so much joy to people by being himself. I’m going to give you a show.”Īnd that’s what he did. I hear her saying, “I appreciate you audience. When I look at Luther sketching costumes, him hiring a designer and seamstress to make them and paying for it out of pocket… When I hear him saying to his audience, “We will not play with your ticket money,” I hear Beyoncé. But I want to focus on the fact that he was the composer and a songwriter and a leader-he wasn’t an artist that they plucked out and put in front of a microphone and said, “Sing this.” What I appreciated from making this film was Luther’s intelligence, his kindness, his joy, and his friendship, so we put a lot of him being silly in. What are some of the things you learned about Luther in this process? “Oh, we gotta go back to those album covers.” Then that becomes a reminder for when I’m working with a graphics person and we can share things really easily.Įven the process of labeling helps your mind start to organize and think, “Okay, these are all the components. When I look at the directory of topics, I don’t forget. What Dropbox does is it allows you to take a morass of information and separate it out into something much more manageable. Then folders of pictures, images, lyrics, lists he would make, sketches he drew, and some of his handwritten notes. What kind of folder systems did you create to organize all those images as you were structuring the story? I just imagined him on errands with a parent because you want to know, what was he drawing from? Who helped form him? I’m looking to hopefully show you without saying, “Of course he’s this, because these are all the things that helped make him.” ![]() You see the people grocery shopping, and they’re laughing. And if you notice, it’s from a child’s vantage point. Then I’m thinking, “Okay, how do I layer on what he was seeing as a child?” That’s why we start with the Apollo and the girls doing double dutch in Harlem. It’s really just watching as much of that archive - even stuff I knew I wouldn’t use. What are all the things about songwriting? What were the early days like? What do we have? And for Luther, they were the things that people don’t focus on so much: He’s a songwriter, he’s a composer, he’s a leader, he’s an artist. The first thing I do is I figure out themes. Because it’s even more important to try and get into their head and voice, and not have other people shape their story in a way that isn’t authentic. ![]() You know, there’s a different approach when the person isn’t here. How do you organize all those files to tell Luther’s story as seamlessly and personally as you do? But if we don’t have that repository, you don’t get to see the little gems because the only way you find those is tediously going through everything. She weeds out the obviously-not-good stuff. Our assistant editor is the person who watches every single second of everything. Everyone in our team is in different places, so it’s really important for us all to be able to access the information simultaneously. There’s a big team and everybody’s important. Well, we definitely put it on the Dropbox. When you have so much material, what do you with it? You had 80 hours of performance clips, 150 hours of archival footage, and 2,200 stills. Porter spoke to us about her process and how her team whittled down hours of material to create a loving portrait. It’s not actually the visuals.”īut once that groundwork is done, the final product sings. “Starting to break things down and organize them is the building block. “My process is to show, not tell - so I need a lot of material to show the things that I think are actually true,” Porter explains. Porter and her team sifted through hundreds of hours of video, and many gigs worth of documents, sketches, photos, and ephemera in Dropbox to get that effect, she says. It was how personal Porter’s storytelling was, as if Luther were guiding the entire process. What struck me the most weren’t the things about Luther that I didn’t know - like how he arranged David Bowie’s “Young Americans” album or that he self-funded his own career through jingles. Kelly Clarkson visits SiriusXM at SiriusXM Studios on Jin New York City Luther Vandross poses for a portrait in 1995 in Los Angeles, California.The Oscar Race Is Far from Over, as ‘The Zone of Interest’ Starts to Surge
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