WALTER MOSLEY
THE KITCHEN CO-DIRECTOR KIBWE TAVARES ON HOW THE GREAT NOVELIST TURNED UP THE HEAT
WHEN YOU GET to the Special Thanks section of the credits for The Kitchen, the striking, powerful sci-fi that marks the directorial debut of both Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares, you’re confronted with a ton of names, enough to wage a small war. “There have been quite a few angels on this film,” Tavares tells Empire. We wanted to make sure that everyone got recognised in some form.”
Among those thanked are Nia Dacosta, Jack Thorne, Peter Ramsey, Ludwig Göransson, and Shaka King. But for Tavares, it was important not to forget where his movie began. And The Kitchen started in the lab — the Sundance Labs, where it was developed as part of that programme. Tavares tips his hat in the direction of actors Anthony Welsh and Eric Kofi-abrefa, neither of whom are actually in his movie. “Both those actors were in the original workshop we shot in Daniel’s barber shop,” he says. “They’d been there from the start, and then Anthony came to the Sundance Labs and developed the project further with us.” The film’s start at the Sundance Labs also led to the unexpected presence of Walter Mosley (pictured left), the great American novelist behind the Easy Rawlins series of books. “He was one of our advisors at the Sundance Labs,” he says. “There are some big key things that came from our conversations. He started talking about a movement called Move, in Philadelphia in the ’80s. They were a group of Rastafarians living in this house, and it was eventually bombed by the government. That’s where some of the ideas of the Kitchen being contained in one space came from. And when I went back to the Directors Lab, he was also there and those conversations shaped what the film was.” Invaluable help in the kitchen? Let’s call him the sous chef.