GEMMA DUNN
Writer-director Tayarisha Poe and star Lovie Simone tell about new feature film, Selah And The Spades
WHEN Tayarisha Poe was selected for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in early 2017, her life as she knew it changed. Until that point, the West Philadelphia native – whose tenacity also saw her accepted on to the Sundance Directors Lab the same year – had been trying to find her feet in the “real world” since graduating.
Named as one of 25 New Faces by Filmmaker magazine in 2015, she describes her debut feature film as “Clueless meets The Godfather”.
Selah And The Spades – which premiered at Sundance last year to enthusiastic responses – invites viewers in to the closed world of elite Pennsylvania boarding school Haldwell, where the student body is run by five supremely organised factions.
A 17-year-old senior Selah Summers (played by newcomer Lovie Simone) is the queen bee of the most dominant group, the Spades, ruling over her high school’s drug trade.
Selah, who will soon be leaving Haldwell, is looking for someone to whom she can pass the baton of power, to “ensure her legacy”.
She thinks she’s found the perfect candidate in new student Paloma (Celeste O’connor), whom Selah imagines that she can “teach”, or mould in her own image.
But this causes friction with her right hand man Maxxie (Moonlight’s Jharrel Jerome).
The dynamic between the two girls shifts when Paloma begins to threaten Selah’s grasp on social power.
It’s gangster movie meets high school teenage politics, Tayarisha muses.
“From the project’s inception, the first story I wrote was about Selah watching from afar as Maxxie beats up this kid who owes money.
“It was about this girl who doesn’t get her hands dirty; she sends other people to do her dirty work,” she says. “That’s the kind of story I’ve always been drawn to.”
She follows: “I’d gone to boarding school and I felt like watching movies about high school was like watching a different world. It felt familiar, but it wasn’t quite capturing the feeling for me of being a teenager and living away from home in this like privileged microcosm of society.
“That was a specific high school experience that I wanted to do my part for.”
She cites Rian Johnson’s neo-noir mystery film, Brick, as an inspiration. “It’s not a boarding school film, but just in terms of stories that take teenagers seriously, while also acknowledging that being a teenager is weird,” Tayarisha elaborates, keen to point out that, while many of the social aspects are true to her own experience, her film is wholly fictionalised.
“A lot of teenagers feel written off because they’re young. It’s the age-old thing of, ‘You’re not listening to me because I’m a kid, but I’m an adult’.
“You find this biological impulse to be independent and declare yourself an adult ready to start your own family and live your own life, but society rules that you are not yet an adult – particularly in the United States,” she argues. “Well, I take teenagers seriously!
“Have you seen the movie Clueless? There’s this line that Tai, the new student says when she comes to the school, she’s like, ‘Wow, you guys talk like grown-ups!”’ she recites, laughing.
“These days the internet allows teenagers to learn a lot more about other people; they have access to the entire world – for better or worse. “But I trust more teenagers to lead the world now, than I do adults,” she admits. “Teenagers shouldn’t have to think about the world burning, they shouldn’t have to take the lead in situations, and they shouldn’t have to be our moral compass. We should be able to lead them. That says more about us.”
One such young person who has moved Tayarisha is New Yorker Lovie. Her 21-year-old lead, she says, is tiny in size with a young face: “So to see her take up so much space in the frame and to draw all attention to her when she steps on the screen makes my heart stop!”
Describing how she felt when she read the script, Lovie (who originally auditioned for the part of Paloma) exclaims: “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this whole world is surrounded by these teenage black kids – it seemed so magical!
“I’ve never seen that; it feels like a sacred space, so I really wanted to get into the world of Haldwell.”
As for encompassing Selah, “It really just happened moment by moment,” shares the Greenleaf star.
“If I can just go piece by piece and have a collection of moments that define her, then I can be cool with that.”
As for the audience reaction: “I’ve gotten that people don’t really like Selah, but they love her,” Lovie reveals. “She’s one of those characters. Like, ‘Dang, I feel for you, but why do you have to be this way?’
“A lot of people, I noticed, want to be in the Spades,
which I am very happy to hear!”
Lovie says she can relate to the pressure placed on teenagers, that Tayarisha speaks of.
“It’s definitely a time where I feel every generation is looking at you, as a teenager,” she says. “You have people looking up to you and people still telling you what to do.”
Recalling Selah’s opening scene – a powerful monologue which explores just how intoxicating power can be for a teenage girl who acutely feels the threat of being denied it – the actor notes: “As a black woman, I definitely relate to that. There’s a lot of people telling you how you need to be in order to be successful, or bright.
“Selah was telling people, ‘Listen, I am not for you. I’m never going to be for your consumption, so you’re just gonna have to chill and live your life over there’. I love that about her, because she is not going to compromise that.”
Has shooting the film shifted her own perspective?
“I feel the same, but I feel aware,” she acknowledges. “Playing Selah definitely opened my eyes up to my controlling tendencies and I was definitely able to loosen my grip a little bit more in my life.
“Having that happen to me was very beneficial – and it wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t play this crazy character who I thought I was so far away from.”
●●Selah And The Spades is available to stream now on Amazon Prime.