No./7 The story that Rebecca Hall had to tell
The actor explains how her family history led to her spending 15 years on her directorial debut, Passing
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, Rebecca Hall was given a copy of Passing, Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel about two light-skinned Black women, one of whom was passing for white and married to a racist white man. It was a “revelation” for the actor, who had been getting to grips with her own family’s history; the actor’s father was the late, English theatre director Sir Peter Hall, and her mother was Marie Ewing, a Detroit-born biracial opera singer. “There was a certain amount of mystery about her background,” Hall tells Empire. “My mum increasingly told me about incidents of very ugly racism towards her father and that was shocking for me, being raised as this privileged white kid.”
As she got older and began living in the US, Hall felt a responsibility to speak up about the continuing struggle for African-americans. She began vocalising her heritage in white spaces that earned uncomfortable responses (“That says more about [them] than me,” she says), but after reading Larsen’s New York-set novel, she finally had the context to understand her family’s past.
“It’s no small irony to me that the systems of white supremacy and racism that forced my grandfather to pass, I benefit from as a whitepresenting person,” Hall explains. “That’s a really complicated inheritance and I wasn’t really grappling with all of that until I read that book.”
Hall put pen to paper, adapting the story into a script “as a way to stick with the book longer”. But after several years of putting it away and picking it up again, a film began to crystallise in her mind. “I could see that it should be black and white, I could see that it should be 4:3 even though I didn’t know what 4:3 was — just that skinny film they had in the olden days!” she laughs. “But the more I sat with the screenplay, the more I understood how to make the movie.”
A monochrome period drama with queer themes is no easy sell for a director, let alone a first-timer, even after securing Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga to play the leading roles. “Around the time that I had a lot of the cast in place, people would say to me: ‘It’s great. Can you just make it in colour? Then we’ll give you all the money,’’’ Hall recalls. “I knew that it would not be the film that I needed it to be so I stuck to my guns.”
And that film is her pure, uncompromised vision. “It’s subtle, it’s ambiguous, it doesn’t tell you what to think, but it keeps you thinking and that’s the kind of filmmaker that I want to be.” Pass it on.